The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  Cesare’s in the passenger seat of a car, parked on the corner of Professor and Literary. The ride’s an Ogren phaeton, though Petro doesn’t know that; he just knows that it’s nice. For about one second, Petro hesitates. You could say he starts to wonder if he’s about to do the right thing; you could say he thinks about Father Tarnawsky, about his mother and brother, about his dead father, what he might say. About his grandparents, somewhere back in the Austrian Empire, in Ruthenia, in whatever name you stumble to call it, because that word, Ukraine, that identity, Ukrainian, is still forming. You could say all that, but you’d be wrong. Because it only takes a second for Petro to decide. Then all self-doubt is gone, and he walks up to the car with a certain strut, as if he doesn’t look or talk like he’s the son of a factory worked killed in an industrial accident, whose brother is still an altar boy, whose mother still has problems with English. As if he already thinks he’s better than the man he’s about to talk to, even though that man is sitting in a car worth more than his family’s ever seen.

  “Hey, Cesare,” Petro says. “I think you should take me on.”

  It doesn’t throw Cesare that Petro knows his name. A lot of people around Tremont know it, now, and he’s proud of that. It’s a sign that he controls the territory. That the single bullet he took in the leg, the couple bullets he gave back, were worth the trouble.

  “Yeah?” Cesare says. “Who the hell are you?”

  Petro’s voice doesn’t waver. He says: “I’m the one who’s going to make your boys a million dollars.”

  Cesare gets a good laugh out of that, as good as a guy like that can get, anyway. It comes out in a chain—heh heh heh heh heh—while his eyes crinkle. The cigarette jutting from his mouth dangles, almost falls out. He leans back in his seat, puts a hand to his brow, a gesture older than his years. Then squints back out at Petro, looks him up and down.

  “You’re not fooling anyone in those clothes,” he says.

  “Think you can do something about that?” Petro says.

  He looks away, drags on his cigarette. Throws it in Petro’s direction to see if he jumps. He doesn’t.

  “Just wait a minute,” he says. “It ain’t up to me.” Two men are coming out of a bakery down Professor, both wearing jackets and fedoras, the kinds Petro sees downtown. One of them’s rubbing his hands together inside a yellow handkerchief. For the car, he says, when the other gives him a funny look. I’m trying to keep it nice. He stops when Cesare nods at him. Looks at Petro.

  “Who’s the peasant?” he says. “Friend of yours?”

  “No, no,” Cesare says. “Kid says he wants a job.”

  Kid. Petro gets angry at that. I think I’m older than you are, he wants to say. No, more than that. He wants to punch Cesare in the face, or better yet, smack him, as if Cesare were his son, a little boy. Maybe mess up the car a little. But he fights it down, because right then, this feels like the only shot he’s going to get.

  “He also says he’s going to make us a million dollars,” Cesare says.

  “Yeah?” the man says. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mister Millionaire.” He looks Petro over once, an expression on his face like he’s doing a lot of math in his head. Then he opens the door to the backseat for him. “Get in.”

  And just like that, they’re in the car, speeding on the long arched bridge over the Cuyahoga, from the west side to the east side. For thirty seconds, the river valley’s what a religious man might consider a vision of hell: all flame and black smoke, the water made of bright rust, giant machines screaming along tracks, while the shadows of men try to work, try to survive. But it’s not hell; it’s just industry. They know they’ve ruined the Cuyahoga. But the rust in the water means the mills are going, and those mills built this town, built parts of this country; built both the phaeton and the bridge that the phaeton gets to soar over right now. The downtown they move through after that isn’t yet what it’ll become. Tower City, the Terminal Tower and all the gold and marble to go with it, are still just talk. They haven’t built Severance Hall yet, either. But Public Square is already something to see. The green is a big nod to New England, a reminder that Connecticut had once laid claim to this part of Ohio, drew lines from its northern and southern corners and stretched them across the map to the shore of Lake Erie to take what they thought could be theirs; the Yankees imparted just enough of that old New England hierarchy to turn Cleveland into a little version of itself, with a few old Protestant Brahmin sitting on the money, pulling the strings, while the rest of us whirl around them. You can see it in the architecture, the office buildings with florid stonework, arched windows, as grand and committed to its intentions—to make money, and lots of it, to become powerful, very powerful—as any place in New York. Public Square’s the kind of place where politicians hold giant rallies. Where there are parades on major holidays, and people line Superior Avenue fifteen feet thick while the floats go by with city representatives in paper hats waving from them over the din of a dozen marching bands, the flash of a dozen color guards. Amid all that commerce is the Old Stone Church, on fire twice already in the past sixty-five years and now blackened by the soot from the factories. But it’s still there; the Presbyterians still show up every Sunday to worship. By 1930, the square’s grander still, when the Van Sweringen brothers open Terminal Tower and the train station beneath it, and everyone’s blinded by the metal and stone, the bronzework on the elevator doors—just as the markets decide to crash all around them and ruin the brothers, ruin anyone who doesn’t see the market coming to feast on them. Petro Garko is Peter Henry Hightower by then. But that’s still a ways off.

  The phaeton flies by the square in seconds, turns north and gets onto Euclid Avenue. Farther east is Millionaires’ Row, or what will become it when the millionaires are there to build the places. Down here, in the city, there’s already the Arcade, that icon of glass and metal that turns business into religion; it’s a church of commerce in there, as if the people who built it in 1890 knew what was coming, knew the marketeers needed a place to pay some respects to their gods, too. The car slows down as it passes, pulls over. Cesare and the man with the yellow handkerchief get out, leave the door open for Petro to get out and close the door behind them. The car drives off and they walk into an alleyway. Petro’s trying hard not to break his stride. It’s the sort of place where he’s used to people trying to jump him, but he’s not scared, and he doesn’t want them to think he is.

  “Didn’t hear what your name was,” he says to the man with the yellow handkerchief.

  “Is that right?” he says. Doesn’t give him the dignity of looking at him. “Here’s an idea for you. Start figuring out how to keep your mouth shut. Don’t open it until you got something to say.”

  They come to the end of the alley, where there’s a steel door that looks like it goes to a boiler room, an incinerator. The man with the yellow handkerchief knocks and it opens, much faster and with much less sound than Petro expected. A guy’s there with suspenders and a pistol. Gives Cesare and the yellow handkerchief a nod. Looks at Petro and doesn’t move.

  “He’s with us,” the man with the yellow handkerchief says, with a hint of shame. “Or at least he wants to be.” Then down the stairs they go.

  It’s not the boiler room or the incinerator, but it’s hot enough to be. The cigarette smoke attacks them at the door, makes Petro’s eyes water; then it parts like a curtain, and he can see dim electric lights, suspended by wires from the ceiling, put up fast and sloppy, as if they’re not planning on keeping them there very long. The voices of what seems like a hundred people, two hundred, almost all men, laughing, joking, threatening. A lot of trash talk. The clatter of roulette balls, the slip, slap, and shuffle of cards. Then Petro’s eyes clear and he can see the tables, how small and packed they are. Glasses full of liquor are squatting everywhere. At the end of the room, there’s not so much a bar as a counter, something that two guys could pick up an
d haul away. The place is designed to be dismantled, quick, as soon as they know the police are coming. It’s so easy to imagine: There’s a shout from the top of the stairs—the cops are here—and everyone scrambles out the back door while the guys who run this joint run from table to table, folding in the legs and then tucking them under their arms. Then they flip the counter over, throw the bottles in a bag, and take off. The police come down and the smoke is still in the air, the lights swinging a little; the officers can smell the booze that spilled on the floor, but there’s no other evidence that anything illegal happened. It’s not the Harvard Club, which by the mid-1930s’ll be five times as big, moving from address to address out on Harvard Avenue in Newburgh Heights, with roulette and poker, craps tables and slot machines, its own fleet of limos to pick up the clients downtown. That place’ll survive raid after raid; not even Mister Eliot Ness’ll be able to close it down. This place isn’t like that. They don’t have a name for it yet. But Petro can tell it’s the kind of place they’ll be writing about in the papers for years, right next to the stories about the Coast Guard intercepting a boat full of liquor trying to waltz in from Canada. But so many more boats get through, the Coast Guard can’t catch them all, because the booze they carry—like the stuff they’re selling in this place—isn’t something a guy on the South Side made in his bathroom, and the people in this room aren’t his neighbors, either. Petro can see it in the angles of their suspenders. He looks at that back door again, wonders if it doesn’t lead right up to the Arcade, so that, when the cops come, the clientele can run for that back door, through a long hallway under the sidewalk, then get to the end and stop, straighten their clothes and hair, and open a door to that glorious building’s polished wood and gleaming metal. Stroll into the thoroughfare as easy as you please under the ceiling of shimmering glass high above, as though they’ve been there all along, buying jewelry, meeting someone for the afternoon; and it works because, when they’re not breaking the law, it’s what they’re doing anyway. Everyone who works in the Arcade knows who they are. Nobody’s surprised to see them there. If they notice that the escapees smell a little more like cigarettes than usual, or seem a little out of breath, they don’t comment. They know better than to ask; they know that the only business they should mind is their own, if they’re interested in making a living—maybe living at all—in this town.

  The man with the yellow handkerchief puts his arm around Petro’s shoulder like they’re best friends, talks into his ear.

  “Anyone in this room look familiar to you?”

  “No,” Petro says.

  “It figures they wouldn’t,” the man says, “because the young men assembled before you represent the most recent generation of some of Cleveland’s wealthiest. Some of the money in this room got here a hundred and fifty years ago. Some of it was made yesterday. New money, old money. We don’t care which, as long as they got it, you know what I’m saying?”

  “Yeah.”

  The yellow handkerchief man frowns. His fingers are digging a little too far into Petro’s shoulder.

  “No you don’t. You don’t have the first fucking idea what I’m saying.”

  He leads him through the smoky room, through a door behind the counter. Now it’s like they really are going to a boiler room. A door closes behind him and it’s dark. Too dark to see anything.

  “Jesus,” the handkerchief man says. “Somebody light a match or something.”

  Somewhere in front of them, someone says sorry, and at the end of the hallway, where it bends to the left, an orange light fires up. They follow it until they’re in a small room with brick walls. A man in a green suit is standing there with a candle.

  “Romantic,” the handkerchief man says.

  The man in the green suit shrugs. “It’s what I had, okay?”

  There’s a boy, maybe eleven years old, in the corner of the room, crouching, cringing. He’s wearing shorts, a stained shirt, a thin jacket. A little cap. The same clothes Petro and his brother wore when they were his age. A South Side kid, Petro thinks. Has to be. Leaning against the wall nearby is a short, neat length of metal pipe, which the handkerchief man picks up and hands to Petro.

  “Okay, Mister Millionaire,” he says. “I want you to beat this kid with this pipe until he can’t sit up no more.”

  The kid doesn’t move or say anything. But he does pee himself.

  “What?” Petro says.

  “Okay. We’ll drive you right back over to the South Side.”

  “No, no, wait.”

  “What.”

  “He’s just a kid.”

  “So what. So are you. Don’t tell me you’ve never beaten anyone up before.”

  He has, a few times. When he was about this boy’s age, there were three older boys—Polish kids, he thinks—who used to harass him and Stefan whenever they saw them. Push them over and take whatever they had, some pocket change, a hat. Once, their shoes. Until the day Petro followed them home, learned where they lived. Waited around the corner the next night with a long stick and smacked one of them so hard with it that his left ear bled. The older boy fell, curled up on the sidewalk and cried. Like a little baby, Petro thought then, with some satisfaction. The other two boys backed away, their hands out, and Petro raised the stick again. I’m going for the other ear, he said. No, no, don’t, one of the unhurt boys said. Then leave me and my brother alone, got it? It was the beginning of Petro’s simmering reputation. When it boiled up high enough to reach his mother’s ear, she approved. Because there was justice in it, Petro thought, a reason for the violence. He was standing up for himself, him and his brother, his family. His people.

  “What’d this kid do?” Petro said.

  “Fuck you care?” the handkerchief man said. “You want to make us a million dollars or not?”

  “What did I say?”

  “Then you know what to do.”

  Petro doesn’t want to do it. He takes a gamble. “This is beneath me,” he says, and the other two men can tell he means it. The man in the green suit smiles. The handkerchief man doesn’t.

  “Not yet it isn’t,” he says. “You work hard for us? You do what you say you’ll do? You won’t have to do this more than once or twice. Maybe three times.” The man narrows his eyes. He’s a good Catholic, can’t help running through the moral implications of what he’s suggesting. He amends his statement: “Well. Not yourself, anyway.”

  Petro looks down at the boy. The boy is looking at the ceiling.

  “Go ahead,” the handkerchief man says. “If you’re good at this, it won’t take more than four shots.”

  It takes three. Then the boy has fallen over on his knees, head to the ground. A huge welt rising on one cheek. Blood seeping from his mouth. And Petro looks down at him, back at the men in suits around him. He has never been angrier in his life; it’s moving through him hotter than it ever has, faster than he thought it could. He feels like the pipes around him are shaking, bursting, like the whole building’s shuddering. It’s going to come down around him. He’ll bury these men, he swears to himself. He’ll be their boss within a year, the boss of their boss. He’ll put them in the ground and then rise, up, up like a shot. He has the nerve to think that where he’s going, there’ll be no more blood.

  The handkerchief man, at last, is smiling. He puts out his hand. “Allow me to introduce myself,” he says. “Rinaldo Panetti.” Petro doesn’t want to know his name now. But he composes himself and shakes the hand.

  “It’s very good to meet you,” he says. “Now how about some new clothes?”

  You don’t need to know what happens between March and September, do you? Peter starts making good on his promise to himself. Starts getting somewhere—not where he wants to be yet, but he’s got his strategy all mapped out. His first big move plotted. But first, he’s got some people to take care of.

  It’s September 25, 1921. A warm Sunday even
ing on the South Side. Everyone’s out on the sidewalks, in the streets. Children hollering up and down the alley. Boys playing the whip, run sheep run. Riding on scooters they made from old cheese crates, the wheels pried off a couple of old pairs of roller skates. One of them’s tooting on a trumpet made from a toilet paper roll. Another of them’s still whining about the knife of his that got ruined when they tried to play baseball with it. A third sits down, pulls a harmonica from his pocket and plays; he’s got a chromatic and he’s pretty good, so nobody tells him to stop. Three girls do hopscotch. The men gather in drunk, loud little clusters, shooting craps, talking about the shit they got into and out of back in Europe, some new foreman at Otis who’s a complete pain in the ass, a man who got his nose broken in a bare-knuckles grudge fight on the West 7th Street hill an hour ago. He should go to the hospital, one of them says. He ain’t going to the hospital, says another. Then they find something they can agree to complain about together: the goddamn Communists and their little parades. Don’t they understand that everyone around here knows the difference between communism and socialism? That the most recent arrivals left Ukraine to get away from communism? It’s something the Ukrainians are proud of decades later, a pride born of horror and rage, that even the socialists among them never fall for Stalin, always see through the flimsy progressive veneer to the paranoid mass murderer behind it. How could they not, after what Stalin does to them? It skews their politics, poisons their love of democracy with distrust for the politicians themselves. They vote Democratic because it’s better than the alternative; they want to keep what unions they’ve got and are pretty sure the Republicans will take them away if they get the chance. But they’ll never shake the feeling that anytime a politician comes around, shakes your hand, it’s because he’s sizing you up. Trying to see what he can get out of you, and just how hard he can screw you before you and your buddies riot.