Chapter Eight
I pulled out the clumsy stitches I’d just embroidered on the napkin, part of a set to be sold off by the East Side Ladies’ Guild in support of its many charitable interests, and started over again. I’d never been much good at needlework, but tonight my fingers were particularly uncooperative, straying like unsupervised children over the cloth as my mind endlessly rehashed my conversation with Simon. In the hours since he’d made his rather glib proposal, my guilt over turning him down had changed into roiling resentment. It was all well and good for him to declare he didn’t care what other people thought, but I knew how close he was to his mother and what her estrangement would mean to him. It was naive to think we could live a satisfying life in our own little bubble, cut off from the people who meant the most to us.
And it wasn’t just our parents’ reactions we had to think about. Except for the Wieran Club boys, most of the residents of Simon’s district with whom I’d come in contact had regarded me with, at best, a sort of puzzled curiosity and, at worst, hostility and suspicion. It was my sincere hope that, like the boys, they would all come to know and accept me over time—but until then, I’d be no asset to a man whose job depended on the trust and fellowship of his constituents. Likewise, although I expected my handful of close friends to come around, Mrs. Richards’s reaction to Simon had reminded me that I couldn’t count on my larger circle of acquaintances to overlook the difference in our stations. Although I was prepared to jettison any incorrigible snobs who refused to be won over by Simon’s charm, the winnowing process would need to be a gradual and tactful one if I wanted to preserve my oldest and dearest connections—something I’d like to do not only for personal reasons, but as a source of potential referrals as well.
It wasn’t only Simon’s dismissal of my concerns that irked me, however; I couldn’t help suspecting that he was using the sexual card to manipulate me. What was the point of refusing me even the slightest intimacy? He couldn’t really believe that I only wanted to use him to indulge my sexual curiosity. Nor did I see how exchanging a few kisses and caresses with me, without a formal commitment first, would cause him any grievous pain. His willful declaration of abstinence could just as easily be interpreted as an attempt, whether conscious or not, to force me to agree to marry him before I was ready.
It might also, it occurred to me as I stabbed absently at the napkin with my needle, have something to do with his long-simmering animosity toward my father. I was sure it galled Simon that the man who’d treated him so badly in the past still had the power to come between us. It didn’t seem outlandish to think that, in the face of this, he might use the one thing he had over me—my desire for him—as a lever to make me declare my allegiance once and for all. Whatever his reasons, he had managed to paint me as a sexual aggressor or, even worse, a sexual supplicant in our relationship—an odd and exceedingly embarrassing position to be in.
“Are you going to finish that, or just keep torturing it?” Katie asked from her chair across the sitting room, nodding at the napkin as her own gnarled hands made short work of a glove repair. We’d taken to sitting together occasionally in the evenings, something Katie never would have done while my parents were at home but which we both took tacit pleasure in. Although she’d been originally retained as a cook, and still insisted on wearing a uniform, Katie had taken over many of the general housekeeping duties after my little brother died, when my mother was paralyzed with grief. She’d also become a sort of surrogate parent, tending to my small sorrows and injuries when Mama was unavailable and making sure I completed my school work. Though she was now plump and gray with age, her eyes were as sharp as ever, and she usually knew—practically before I did—when something was troubling me.
“I’m afraid I’m all thumbs tonight,” I said, dropping the embroidery hoop into my lap.
“I saw you talking with Simon earlier on the stoop,” she said, her voice carrying the merest hint of a question. Katie would never pry; this was simply her way of inviting my confidence, should I have anything I wished to discuss.
I hesitated. Katie had grown quite fond of Simon when he was a youngster, living with his mother over the stable, and despite her frequent fretting over what my involvement with an Irish saloon-keeping politician might mean for my future, I knew she trusted the adult Simon to have my best interests at heart. If she thought he was causing me trouble, however, she’d be the first to rake him over the coals.
“I treated one of his boys for a dislocated jaw this afternoon,” I said finally. “Simon just stopped by to tell me how the boy was faring.” I said nothing more, reluctant to tell her, or anyone, about the embarrassing conversation that had taken place between us.
I heard the hall clock chime the half hour, and returned my embroidery to its basket. It was time to make my call. Proceeding to the hallway telephone closet, I asked the operator to put me through to Second Deputy Police Commissioner Bugher at his home. Despite what Antonio Fabroni had said, I still believed that the Italian Legion should be alerted to his fiancée’s disappearance, and since no one else seemed disposed to bring it to their attention, I had decided to do so myself. Commissioner Bugher, a former navy man, lived two blocks away and was friendly with my father, who had visited him at his shooting preserve in Maryland just the previous spring. As the official responsible for supervising the detective bureau, I thought it might be prudent to ask him for an introduction to Detective Petrosino, to ensure that the busy detective would find time to see me. I’d calculated that calling him after the dinner hour, when he was known to enjoy a glass of whiskey or two, might yield the best results.
To my delight, when Commissioner Bugher answered my call and heard the reason for my request, he promised to telephone the detective personally in the morning. I hung up the phone and trotted upstairs to bed, planning what I would say to Petrosino and hoping that the prospect of our meeting would keep thoughts of Simon’s unsettling remarks at bay.
• • •
Alas, this hope went unrealized, and I arrived bleary and lead-headed at the breakfast table the next morning after another nearly sleepless night. Katie, on the other hand, was uncharacteristically fidgety, flitting around me like a fly around a bulb with her cap askew.
“That’s plenty,” I said, holding up a restraining hand when she attempted to spoon a third helping of creamed eggs onto my plate. You’d never know, from the heaping contents of the pan, that I was the only Summerford currently in residence. “I hope you’re planning to eat some of this yourself. I’d hate to see it go to waste.”
“I already had my breakfast,” she informed me, dumping another dollop onto my plate. “I want to get an early start to the station.”
With my parents away and our maid on loan to the Fiskes during their absence, I had urged Katie to take the weekend off to visit her sister in New Jersey. She had protested, of course, but I’d gradually whittled away her resistance, assuring her that I could manage for two days on my own and reminding her that I could always call on Maurice or Oliver in the event of an emergency. For the final push, I’d read her my parents’ most recent letter, which instructed me to ensure that Katie took a few days’ well-deserved holiday, even if it meant locking her out of the house.
It was the letter, I think, that convinced her. The previous winter, Katie and I had watched with our hearts in our throats as my mother came slowly back to life, her long season of grief finally thawing under the warmth of Lucille Fiske’s attentions. It had seemed nothing short of a miracle, in the months afterward, to hear her laugh and sing and joke again. As I read Mama’s letter aloud, with its lively account of her adventures in the catacombs and teasing references to my father’s run-ins with the Mediterranean temperament, I saw Katie’s eyes fill with tears and immediately intuited the cause. “You see, Katie?” I’d said gently, putting the letter down. “Mama and I can both manage without you now, for a little while at least.”
Al
though she’d never admit it, I knew she was looking forward to getting out of the steaming city and spending some time in the countryside with her favorite sister. But I also knew that, being an infrequent traveler, the thought of journeying by train unnerved her. I glanced at the hands of the dining room clock, which indicated it was not yet eight o’clock. “I thought your train left at eleven.”
“That’s right, it does, and I’m not going to risk missing it,” she retorted, her tone daring me to argue.
“Fine. I’ll buzz Maurice and have him drive you to the station.”
“You’ll do no such thing,” she said with a wheeze, her soft cheeks flushing. “I can take the streetcar to the station, same as everybody else.”
This strange reaction only fueled my recent suspicions that Katie, after all these years, had suddenly developed something more than collegial respect for our old chauffeur. “I’m sure Maurice would be happy to take you. He must be bored to tears, with my parents away and the motorcar under wraps.”
“That man has more than enough to do, helping Oliver look after the horses and keeping the motorcar in working order, without having to worry about me. Now drink your tea before it gets cold.”
I did as instructed, hiding a smile behind my cup.
While Katie fussed over the silver on the sideboard, wrapping everything in flannel as if preparing it for a ten-year hibernation, I opened the Herald and quickly perused the day’s news. One of the nicest things about my parents’ absence was having first crack at the newspaper. According to the front page headlines, Nikola Tesla was promising to demonstrate his new apparatus for signaling the Martians in the very near future, while the stock market had, for the moment at least, calmed down. More polio cases had been reported in the Brooklyn Italian colony, but the city’s continuing street disinfection and home inspection campaigns had apparently averted the explosion of cases predicted on account of the street cleaners’ strike.
Satisfied that nothing life-changing had occurred in the last twenty-four hours, I quickly scanned the back pages, where a small caption caught my eye: “Jilted Italian Murders in Revenge.” An Italian man out west, the dispatch reported, had rigged a mine explosion to kill the brother of a woman who’d rejected his proposal of marriage, believing the brother was responsible for her refusal. According to the reporter, the incident illustrated “the medieval treachery of which the southern Italian is capable, and how little his manners or ideals have progressed in the last five hundred years.” I laid the paper down. Remembering the many hardworking—and, to all appearances, law-abiding—Italians I had passed on the streets of Harlem, I found this last statement rather extreme. It was hard not to conclude, however, from this and other reports I’d read, that the Italian culture had molded a people little inclined to restrain their passions.
I was still thinking of the dispatch an hour later as I stood on the street in front of the Elm Street office of the Italian Legion. I’d been surprised to learn, upon arriving at police headquarters, that the Italian division was housed in an entirely separate building. I peered again at the number over the doorway in front of me, finding it hard to believe that this drab building, with its dirty windows and ground floor pawn shop, could be it. Joseph Petrosino was, after all, the closest thing we had to a living legend in the city. The man had worked his way up from street cleaner to first Italian detective sergeant on the force, earning the respect of such luminaries as Theodore Roosevelt and Enrico Caruso along the way. He was famous both for his extraordinary bravery and for his eagerness to make up with his fists for what he considered our overly liberal criminal laws; indeed, it was said that he had dislodged more teeth than a professional dentist.
After King Umberto I of Italy was assassinated by an Italian anarchist from New Jersey, Petrosino was recruited by the federal Secret Service to determine whether President McKinley might be in danger as well. The papers had recounted in glowing detail how the detective infiltrated radical groups in New York and New Jersey, posing as a sympathizer to gain their trust. After learning that McKinley was, in fact, on the target list, the detective had personally alerted him and urged him to avoid large crowds. He was said to have wept openly when the president was murdered at the Buffalo Exposition a few weeks later, after failing to heed his warning.
I pulled the door open and climbed the dim stairwell to the second floor, where I heard typewriters clacking on the other side of an unmarked door directly opposite the landing. I stepped toward it and tried the knob. It was locked.
The typewriters had stopped clacking. “Who is it?” called a gruff voice from inside.
“Dr. Genevieve Summerford,” I called back, “here to see Detective Lieutenant Petrosino.”
I heard the scrape of chair legs and the pounding of feet over the floor, and then the door opened partway. A short man with an oversized, square head and facial skin the texture of rough concrete peered out at me. “I’m Petrosino.”
I gazed down at him—for he was several inches shorter than I was—surprised by his stature and the fact that he’d opened the door himself. I’d expected to have to work my way through several gatekeepers to get to him.
His gaze swept over me, sizing me up. He had a jutting brow over alert brown eyes and a full, determined-looking mouth. “You’re the one Bugher called about.”
“That’s right.”
He swung the door open and gestured me in.
The heart of the Italian Legion’s operations was a small, bare room with four battered desks that faced each other in the center. Two of the desks were occupied. The men sitting in them looked up briefly as I entered and then immediately resumed their typing. End-to-end tables along the room’s perimeter were heaped high with file folders, except for a section in one corner that held what appeared to be a pile of weapons. On the back wall, hundreds of blank-faced men stared out at me from rows of black-and-white photographs.
Petrosino gestured toward a chair in front of one of the empty desks. He perched on the edge of the desk as I sat down, hitching up his trousers in the process, which called my attention to his double-soled shoes. Apparently, the fearless detective was sensitive about his height.
“So what can I do for you, Dr. Summerford? The deputy commissioner left me a message, but he didn’t give me many details.”
“Thank you for seeing me, Detective. I know you’re very busy, so I’ll get straight to the point. I believe that someone may be preying on young Italian women who arrive in the city by boat, forcibly abducting them and compelling them into prostitution.” I handed him an envelope containing Teresa’s photograph along with both girls’ names and other pertinent details. As he was perusing the contents, I told him everything we’d learned so far.
“And you think that because these girls are Italian, Italian criminals must be behind it, and that’s why you have come to me,” he finished.
“Precisely.”
He sighed. “There are over a quarter of a million Italians in Manhattan, Doctor, and I have only twenty-five men. My wife will tell you, I’m a very busy man. We married in April and I have yet to take her on a honeymoon. Now, with the new deportation law, we are busier than ever.” He gestured to the stacks of files on the tables. “What you see here is a catalog we’re compiling of all the Italian immigrants in New York City whom we suspect have criminal records in Italy. Under the law that went into effect last week, if we can properly identify these men to the Italian authorities and get a copy of their penal certificates, we can send them back where they came from. But we can do this only if they have been in America for less than three years, which puts us in a constant race against the clock.” He smiled faintly in apology. “I tell you this so you won’t think me hard-hearted when I say that I cannot look into every crime in this city involving an Italian.”
“I certainly appreciate the pressure you’re under, Detective. But what crime could be more heinous than abducting innocent
girls and forcing them into prostitution?”
“None, I agree. But may I suggest you are putting the cart before the horse? I understand why you might be inclined to be suspicious, with all the talk of white slave traders in the newspapers. But from what you’ve told me, all you know is that one woman who appears to have been a prostitute committed suicide, while another woman failed to meet her fiancé after her arrival.”
“There are similarities between the cases.”
“Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean these women have fallen prey to traffickers. And even if they have been abducted, it was most likely not by Italians.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because there is no Italian network with the necessary capabilities.”
I frowned at him. “What ‘capabilities’ would they require?”
“It is no easy feat to kidnap women from our ports, where the authorities are keeping an eye out for them,” he explained. “For this reason, most cadets—or pimps, if you will excuse my language—would rather try to ensnare them at a dance hall or employment agency after they have taken up residence. Italian girls, however, are an exception, for they are rarely let out of their parents’ sight and so cannot be found at the usual hunting grounds. It follows that if someone were intent on securing Italian girls in large numbers, they would have to have the organization and resources not only to elude the protections in place at Ellis Island and Hoboken, but to prevent the authorities from tracing girls abducted from the ports back to their dens. To my knowledge, there is no Italian network currently operating in New York with that ability.”
“What about the criminals setting off all those bombs in Harlem? Perhaps they’re expanding into prostitution as well.”
Petrosino glanced at one of the men sitting at the other desks, who had stopped typing and was listening to our conversation. “Have you heard anything?”
A Promise of Ruin Page 10
