Death of a New American--A Novel

by Mariah Fredericks

  “You ninny,” was how she greeted her sister.

  * * *

  I was dismissed—only for the rest of the day, but the chill in Charlotte’s tone suggested that if she had her way, I would be out the door and on the street. In contravention of legal procedure, I was not informed as to the nature of my crime, but I guessed it was either the failure to shepherd Louise to the altar or setting her on the path to begin with. In short, I was a free woman for the afternoon. It didn’t make me happy. Charlotte’s displeasure reminded me what future employment with her would be like. I wandered downstairs where I heard the drag, thump, drag, thump of the cleaner and the increasingly aggressive sighs that went with it. Then a crash. Then a curse. Bernadette had done battle with the vacuum cleaner—and lost, from the sound of it.

  Going to the parlor, I saw Bernadette breathing heavily and glaring at a broken plate as she nursed a cut on her thumb. In words eloquent and profane, she assessed the situation.

  I was about to suggest a new cleaner or reverting to the old practice of sweeping and beating, when I realized something. Bernadette’s problems went beyond method.

  “You should quit.”

  Still sucking the blood from her thumb, she looked at me, astonished.

  “You’re too smart for this job. You shouldn’t be doing it.” Kneeling, I began picking up the pieces of the shattered plate. “You’re bored and it makes you destructive. Do something else.”

  I was being very blunt with a woman I might have to work with for years. And Bernadette relished insult as a soldier relishes the clarion call of the trumpet to battle. I braced myself.

  But Bernadette slowly released her grip on the cleaner and sat down on Mrs. Benchley’s hassock. “Who would hire me?” she said. “And to do what? I stopped school at ten.”

  “You’re smart, Bernadette. You’d find something. My uncle trains lots of women for new work.”

  “I’m not the same as them,” she said, appalled that I would compare her to women who had once been prostitutes.

  “You need new work, don’t you? Well, don’t you? If they can become secretaries and telephone operators, why can’t you?”

  I stood up with the broken pieces. “I’ll throw these away in the kitchen.”

  I went to the kitchen, where I found Mrs. Mueller scrubbing pots. Nodding to a collection of envelopes on the table, she said, “Pay day.” I gathered my envelope, put it in my pocket.

  The day’s newspapers were also on the table. Among them, the Herald. Michael Behan’s article. It must be printed by now. Maybe it had taken him a day longer, but he was a quick writer with a good story. I picked up the paper, expecting to see a scorching headline: BLACK HAND WHORE DIES IN CHARLES TYLER’S HOME!

  The front page, it would be on the front page. Or … perhaps not, I thought as I studied the headlines and found no mention of Charles Tyler or the Black Hand. I turned several more pages. And breathed a sigh of relief. It seemed Michael Behan was still writing his story.

  Which meant there might be time to change his mind.

  “Mrs. Mueller,” I said, “I’m going out.”

  * * *

  I didn’t know what Sandro’s regular delivery route was, or if he even had one. But Mulberry Street was the most likely place for it to start. If anyone remembered me as the girl with the eggplant, they were much too busy to notice me this time. I went back to the Banca Stabile but did not find him there. But I did find the young man he had been talking to and he told me Sandro was doing a job on Broome. Going there, I saw him loading things onto a wagon. Someone, it seemed, was moving. I wondered how many of their possessions would make it to their new home. When Sandro spotted me, he was holding a large crate. Otherwise he might have run again. As it was, his shoulders slumped as he shoved the crate onto the back of the wagon. Then he fastened the back gate and went around to the front and climbed onto the front seat.

  “Sandro.”

  He ignored me, taking up the reins and setting the wagon in motion. I put myself in his path. He pulled the horse up short and the wagon bumped to a halt. He sat facing front, refusing to look at me, his hands white-knuckled on the reins.

  “You need to get out of the way.”

  “I need to talk to you.”

  “I got nothing to tell you.”

  I put my foot on the step and climbed up. “I’ll just take the ride then.”

  I could feel him watching as I settled onto the seat beside him. He could have pushed me off or threatened me. But he didn’t. Instead he glanced around the street to see who was watching, saw no one was especially interested, then took up the reins and moved us along. It was a bumpy ride over the cobblestones and I had to hold on.

  When we were well away from Broome, he said, “You’re Anna’s friend. The girl from the…”

  “Not whorehouse,” I said, using a word I would never have uttered in the company of the Benchleys. Or Tylers. Or even Michael Behan.

  “I wasn’t going to say that.”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “I was going to say bagnio.” He smiled. “Means the same thing, but sounds a little better. Can mean bathhouse, too. Just in case you get invited to one and you’re worried.”

  We were out of Little Italy now, drawing close to Houston. Sandro stayed on the smaller streets, and as we passed a ramshackle house, I heard pigs squealing in a nearby pen. They were the property of one Jim Brodie, who set them loose to clean the streets. Many objected to this approach to urban sanitation, but the pigs were deeply committed to their work and devoured everything in their path, be it moldy bread, cigarette ends, or—in more than one instance—a severed finger. The city’s incinerators had cut into their share of the garbage market considerably; most pigs now found their employment as people’s dinner. But these particular pigs were the descendants of Brodie’s original herd and he refused to give them up.

  It seemed wise to talk of the old days, so I said, “How are your aunts?”

  “They’re aunts. They’re fine.” He glanced at me. “I don’t think I ever said thank you for not ratting me out. About that time in the alley.”

  We pulled up to let another wagon cross our path. When he started the horse moving again, I asked, “Why did you attack your sister?”

  “Because my older brother said he would beat the … daylights out of me if I didn’t. Besides, I didn’t like Anna in those days. She was always yelling at me.”

  “But you like her now.”

  He grinned. “Not really.” I laughed. “I never see her and when I do, everything I do and say is wrong.”

  “Oh, we’re all wrong. She tells me, too.”

  “I bet she doesn’t hit you in the head.”

  “No. But I never hit her.”

  He nodded, conceding the point. We drove for several more blocks until we reached Houston. Here the traffic was busy, the crowds and buildings big enough for some measure of privacy. Sandro said, “So, what happened to her?”

  His neck was strained with the effort not to show emotion and I understood we weren’t talking about Anna. “Just what I told you.”

  “She was killed in the city?”

  “Long Island.” He shook his head, bewildered and disgusted. “You knew she was coming to the city. You were going to meet her.”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  He shook his head.

  “If you know something about her, even if it’s something bad, it could be helpful to the police.”

  “I don’t care about being helpful to the police.”

  “Oh. Well, I want to know who killed her, and it would be helpful to me.”

  He shook his head. “It’s no good knowing something if you can’t do anything about it.”

  “Maybe I could give the information to someone who could do something with it.”

  “Oh, yeah? Like Charles Tyler? He sure kept her safe.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, forget it. He’s … Mr. Protect the Peop
le, you’d think working for him, she would have been all right.”

  It was a reasonable thought, but there had been something else behind his sneer at Charles Tyler.

  “Do you know how she started working for the Tylers?” He didn’t answer. “Was it to keep her safe?”

  He shifted in his seat. “Didn’t turn out that way, did it?”

  “But you knew her before she worked for the Tylers.” He stared straight ahead. “You knew Rosalba Salvio.”

  “Maybe. Why do you care?”

  “Because I want to know Rosalba Salvio. I want to know the woman she was, what she did. Why she did it. Because she’s dead and lying unclaimed in a morgue and I think she deserves to have people at least know that she existed.”

  He stared hard at the road ahead, then said in hoarse voice, “She was real sweet with that kid.”

  “Emilio Forti?”

  He glanced at me. “How’d you know that?”

  “How did you know it?”

  Sandro exhaled. “Look, I just drove the kid there. I had nothing to do with grabbing him. Rosalba’s father’s store was up on Eleventh. She worked behind the counter. The cops were so busy sniffing around Mulberry, they didn’t think to go uptown.”

  “Why did they hide the boy there?”

  “Her father paid the Morettis to take care of problems for him.”

  “What kind of problems?”

  He shrugged. “You know.” I didn’t. And neither did he. There were no such problems, it was just the veneer of a business transaction for an act of extortion.

  “But she and her father had nothing to do with the kidnapping itself?”

  “No, they were good people. But Alberto Salvio’s weak, frightened. Does what he’s told. Rosalba never liked me much ’cause I … took the payments from her father. But when I turned up with the kid, she gave me this look like I was—”

  He dropped his head and I heard the unspoken words: Animal. Scum. Filth.

  “But I felt bad. I would go around every once in a while, check in on them. The kid was scared out of his mind. And his family wasn’t paying up. I didn’t know what they were going to do to him.”

  “How much did Rosalba know?”

  “Well, she knew right away he wasn’t some kid straight off the boat without papers, which is what she was told. Once she found out he was the kidnapped kid everyone was talking about, it was hard to keep her calm. She kept asking me, ‘What will they do if the family can’t pay? What happens to him?’ She wanted me to tell her they wouldn’t hurt him. I couldn’t tell her that.”

  “So she went to the police.”

  He sighed heavily. “Yeah, she went to the police.”

  I made a show of picking at my skirts so I wouldn’t have to look at him as I asked, “The police think she was seeing Dante Moretti.”

  He rolled his eyes and for a moment looked very much like his sister. “Yeah—seeing. Like I’m seeing this horse’s ass right now. Sometimes, when I would go to the store, Dante would come with me, try to talk to her. He tells everybody, ‘Oh, that girl, she’s crazy about me. She’ll do anything I ask. Sometimes, she pretends to be nice, because’—but no. So when she calls the police, everyone says, Dante, I thought that girl loved you so much, what happened? You know, insulting him. So he makes up the story about her being jealous over the other girl.”

  I nodded. “And Charles Tyler gave her a job to get her out of the city.”

  “You think Sirrino didn’t figure out who turned in his boy? If he’d known I went back there all those times, you’d find me in a barrel, too.”

  “But she came back to the city. Why?” He shook his head. “For you?”

  He looked away, his neck and cheek flushed. Whatever there had been between them, he didn’t want to discuss it. We rode in silence for several blocks, the air humming between us.

  Then he said, “I had heard they sent her out west somewhere. Then one time, she was here with the mother and the little girl. I saw her going into the park…”

  “And she remembered you.” He nodded. “And came back to see you.”

  “Yeah, I guess she decided I wasn’t so bad. We did the newspaper ads so no one else would know. She told me to use Bible quotes so she’d know it was me.”

  “But if it was so dangerous…”

  He slapped the reins in frustration. “She needed to see people, talk to people who knew her. Spoke her language, you know? She was lonely. Out there with the Tylers, that wasn’t home. She—”

  He broke off. “What?”

  “Never mind. She’s dead, it doesn’t matter now.”

  “Did she like the Tylers?” I found myself asking.

  “She loved the kids. Talked about them all the time.” He smiled his crooked smile.

  “Who do you think killed her, Sandro?”

  “You know who killed her.” His mouth tightened. “Sometimes when I went to see her and Emilio, we would talk about leaving. Maybe going west. She wanted to see California. I’d get another job—”

  He broke off, probably remembering the stories they’d spun together. Their fantasies of the future. I felt desperately sad for both of them.

  “You should go to California, Sandro. Get another job.”

  “Sure, that’s easy.”

  “Your uncle has the restaurant, he could hire you.”

  “He tried. You know how long that lasted? A week. I couldn’t remember the orders. Then he had me washing dishes, but I thought, I’m not going to wash dishes my whole life. So one day I didn’t come to work and he fired me. Now he won’t even talk to me because of who I work for.

  “You know in Italy, they have signs: Come to America, there’s work in America, they want you there. But they don’t want us. From the day I got here, people let me know I was a problem. Coming home from school, we went through an Irish neighborhood. The mothers shut their windows as we passed, didn’t want our filth getting in their nice homes. I’d get to the end of the block, their kids punch me in the head for good measure. In church on Sunday, they put you in the basement. People tell you you smell. You’re dirty. Maybe your English isn’t good, the teacher decides you’re stupid. Well, she’s the teacher, she must be right, you sure feel stupid most of the time. So you leave school. You try shining shoes. Which means you got to pay for your corner—and shine every policeman’s shoes for free—or you get a broken head. You start digging ditches. You get cut out of that job when the German foreman brings in his pals. Get a job hauling boxes for a friend of your uncle’s, the friend says, Sorry, I got a cousin coming over, he needs the job.

  “Then one day, your brother says, Hey, stupid, come work for a guy I know. It’s easy. Even you can do it. Deliver groceries to these addresses. When they open the door, look inside. If it’s a nice house, with nice things, let us know.”

  That was how Moretti has the names and addresses of people doing well enough to extort or rob, I realized.

  “And you do it. And this guy your brother knows, he says, Thanks, good job. Pays you more than you thought he would, says he’s got more work. You move a family’s things to a new house; maybe some silver gets lost. But you tell yourself your boss probably helped them find the apartment, so it’s probably a thank-you.”

  Staring straight ahead, he almost whispered, “Then one day, they hand you a heavy bag and the next thing you know, you’re hauling a little kid screaming for his mother into a cellar. And you realize you just moved up from stealing rugs and hassling shopkeepers to a whole new game. And if that family doesn’t pay … you know what your next job is going to be.”

  He held the reins tight and the horse stopped. “You should get off. Tell Anna I say hello. Tell her … I don’t know, tell her I’m sorry.”

  Then he turned the wagon around the corner and soon he was swallowed up in the traffic of cars, pedestrians, and other wagons. With Anna not here to be furious with him, I took it as my job. Why had he ever done that first job when nothing his brother ever told him to do turned o
ut well? Why hadn’t he and Sofia run? They could have taken the child, told the police where to find him.…

  Except they had no money. No family to run to outside the city. They had made choices—or had them made for them—and now they were stuck. You are here, but you don’t belong. You are in between. Not here, not there. Nobody. I thought of her little room with its sealed window. No wonder she had come to the city at such risk, just to see someone who knew her, really knew her, to speak her language, feel like herself. And no wonder she had flirted with William. Just for a moment to feel the free of the past, just a pretty girl with a life of possibility. Not a dirty Italian or an accomplice of the Black Hand or a dark-skinned agent of death. Just a nice woman who loved children and had dreams of seeing California. Not a very exciting story, perhaps. No one would want to read about it.…

  Slightly dazed, I looked up at the street sign to see where we had ended. Thirtieth Street. Close to Herald Square. Called Herald Square because the New York Herald office stood at the center.

  Picking up my skirts, I started to run.

  18

  The New York Herald had come to life as a four-page sheet, smaller than some papers but promising to serve readers of all levels of society and stay clear of “faction.” In the vision of its creator, its value lay in its “industry, good taste, brevity, variety, point, piquancy, and cheapness.” It took a breezy approach to its coverage of the wealthy and did not hesitate to chronicle the lurid. One critic had dubbed it “The Whore’s Daily Guide and Handy Compendium.”

  Fittingly, its offices on Thirty-fifth Street and Sixth Avenue were colorful, almost garish. Styled to resemble a Venetian palazzo, the building was a long, two-story structure with roman arches all around, two clocks peering like eyes at the shoppers and passing trolleys. It stood on a triangle of land in the center of the square. The newspaper’s publisher was fond of hoot owls, and several perched at different spots in the building. Over the entrance, Minerva stood proudly, an owl on her arm, to symbolize the infinite wisdom of the newspaper itself.