Bloodline (29 page)

Tony said, “Humor me on this one, Captain. It’s good for the people to see a ranking Italian officer around. The kids like the uniform, and maybe someday we’ll start to see a lot of them thinking about going into law enforcement.”

“If they’re not all in jail already for stealing tomatoes from each other.”

“And the old Italians, they don’t speak English and they’re confused and scared in this city, but they hear things, and it’s good for them to know, too, that there’s somebody out there who can talk to them in their own language.”

“Like you?”

Tony shrugged. “Someday when I uncover a big plot to assassinate all the Irishmen in the department, you’ll thank your lucky stars.”

“You’ll be leading the pack of brigands pounding on the doors of the precinct,” Cochran said. “Get out of here. Be gone with you and your whole nefarious tribe.”

After almost two years, the Italian Squad had turned out to be not so bad as Tony had feared it would be. Credit for most of that rested with Cochran, a small, compulsively tidy man who affected the attitude of an Irish racist know-nothing, but who was, in truth, a dedicated cop who wanted, like Tony, to put the bad guys in jail. His anti-Italian bantering with Tony was just that—bantering—and he understood very clearly the need to get good information from the streets.

They had discussed that the day Tony got his lieutenant’s bars and first reported for his new position.

“From what I hear, you’re not terribly happy about being here,” Cochran had told Tony.

“That’s basically true, Captain,” Tony had said.

“Mind telling me why?”

“Because I think this whole idea of an Italian Squad is a kind of racism that stamps my people as subhuman. When the Plug Uglies were running around, and the Potato Peelers and all the rest of those Irish gangs, nobody ever thought of having an ‘Irish Squad’ to deal with them. So I think having an Italian Squad is an insult to my people.”

“I agree,” Cochran said.

“Excuse me?”

“I agree with you. But our problem is this: the brass has decided they’re going to have an Italian Squad, so we’re stuck with it. Maybe it’s best that they put two smart young men like us in charge of it. That way, we can do our jobs, clean this all up, disband the Italian Squad, and I can go on to become chief of police and you can retire and go start a Mafia gang of your own.”

Tony looked up sharply at the comment, but Cochran was grinning. “Hey, Tony,” he had said. “Have a sense of humor. It helps when the crap gets too deep.”

It had been good advice and Tony had tried to take it. He had also found Cochran honest and fair and just as frustrated as Tony was when they had made a really solid arrest of some gangster, only to see him freed because the political fix was put in with the prosecutors and judges.

So it was that Tony Falcone was walking slowly down First Avenue, through the heart of Italian Harlem, on a bright Thursday in July. The next day would start the three-day-long festival of Holy Rosary Church, the gaudiest celebration of the year in Uptown Manhattan, and it was his job to make sure nothing went wrong.

Harlem was separated from Little Italy by little more than eight miles of streets. Down there, where Tony lived and had raised his family, all the Italians and Sicilians, no matter where in the old country they came from, were pretty much mixed together with no one hometown or region predominating in any area. But at the northern tip of Manhattan, in Italian Harlem, it was different. There, each neighborhood, sometimes each street, was settled by immigrants from some individual town or village or region back in the old country.

That meant there were whole blocks peopled primarily by Sicilians from Castellammare del Golfo or Villalba or Palermo, and by Italians from Rome or Naples or Calabria. For recent arrivals in America, it provided an easy way of fitting in to the New World. But it also brought over intact many of the rivalries, feuds, and vendettas between factions.

Shakespeare got famous writing
Romeo and Juliet
about Italians,
Tony thought.
But up here, that story happens every day. If you want to know about feuds, ask an Italian. We invented them.

Cochran and he had decided that keeping a tight rein on these feuds was the second most important job of the Italian Squad, outranked in importance only by the goal of curbing the Mafia.

Usually, Tony thought, the squad did not do too good a job on either. Especially now, because of what was happening in Italy. Normally, immigration to the United States was a gradual thing, with people arriving in manageable numbers and with good, ambitious reasons for searching out America.

But now Italy had a new ruler, somebody named Mussolini, and while Tony thought he looked like a clown, all dressed up in military uniforms he had done nothing to earn, Mussolini had not been clownish in dealing with the Mafia. He had sent his troopers into Sicily, ordering them to shut down all criminal organizations, and already thousands had fled that little island, trying to get to the United States ahead of Mussolini’s hangmen and firing squads.

The new arrivals, not ready for immigration, without even a clue about American life, were putting a strain on New York City and its ability to manage the newcomers. They had to learn, and quickly, that this was not a place where arguments were settled with the stiletto or the
lupara
shotgun, and that jail awaited anyone—Mafioso or not—who broke the laws.

Making sure everyone knew that was another of the reasons Tony liked to walk the streets in uniform, and today he was pretty pleased. Everybody seemed to be working smoothly on getting the festival site prepared. Tony had spent weeks in painstaking negotiations, arranging truces among the various local and regional factions. In the end, he had wound up dividing the festival sites among the groups himself. This had apparently wound up displeasing every single one of them, because Tony had received a half-dozen complaints, demanding a conference.

He had called such a meeting inside a school classroom, unused on the weekend, and the two dozen petty warlords who had attended grumbled and growled for two straight hours about the smallest of details until, finally, in frustration, Tony had silenced them by thumping on the small teacher’s desk with his clenched fist.

“Shut up,” he shouted, and pointed around the room. “You don’t like it? And you don’t like it? And you don’t like it? Fine. Next year, all of you come back here without me and you work it out so that everybody’s happy. But this year, you’re doing it my way. It will be peaceful and it will be a time for great community pride and happiness. All over the city, people who are convinced that you, we, all of us are a pack of guineas, little better than animals, those people, even those Anglos, will look at this festival and see, not a bunch of thugs battling with each other over the right to rob honest folks, but they will see the representatives of a proud people, people who represent the glory of the Roman Empire. That is what I want. Next year, do it your way. But this year, we will do it my way and we will make every one of us proud that in our veins runs the blood of the Caesars.”

It was the longest speech he had ever made in his life, and he stopped abruptly and stared around the schoolroom at the men sitting there. There were all kinds: old men with mustaches and beards and heavy wool suits, side by side with young, clean-shaven men with silk shirts and expensive shoes, united only by their distaste for each other. After Tony’s outburst, the room was painfully silent. Then one old man in the back began to applaud, softly. He continued for two seconds, five, ten seconds, and then others joined in, until finally everyone in the room was on his feet, giving Tony a standing ovation.

Tony silenced them by raising his hands. “We will work together; we will be worthy of each other’s trust,” he said softly. He left unsaid the clear promise that anyone who did not cooperate would answer to him, and then he adjourned the meeting.

He knew that if he left immediately, he would hardly be out the door before the tribal chiefs in the room would start arguing about inconsequential details, and this fragile truce would degenerate into bloody, savage argument. He could not have that, so he hung around, making sure he was the last to leave.

He had gone from that meeting to another set of negotiations, which he was equally proud of, even though his superiors would prefer to pretend that it had not occurred.

There was no sense in being naive. There would be liquor and wines on sale at the festival. Some of it would be vaguely legal, brewed or distilled in private homes for personal use, and no one cared much about that. But there would be other liquor that would come from the bootlegger mobs.

At first, Captain Cochran had looked on this as an opportunity to crack down on the hordes of illegal liquor dealers, but Tony had talked him out of it.

“Captain, you’ll have everybody mad as hornets up there.”

“Why? Liquor’s illegal, in case all you Eye-talians hadn’t noticed.”

“Yeah, we noticed,” Tony said with a grin. “We also noticed that before Prohibition started four years ago, there were fifteen thousand saloons in the city. Now there are twenty-five thousand speakeasies, filled with Irish drunks. We can’t do anything about that, but, by God, we can crack down on some religious festival honoring the Holy Mother. Shame on you, Captain. Three Hail Marys and four Our Fathers.”

“Oh, do whatever you want,” Cochran said. “All you peppers are just too devious for my dull Irish mind. I just don’t want Harlem awash in blood because one botchagaloop wino doesn’t like some other botchagaloop wino. You take care of it.”

Tony had taken that as permission to do the final thing he wanted, which was to get an agreement between Masseria and Maranzano. Doing that might be a little sticky, though, he thought. He did not want to meet either of the men face-to-face. It would be too easy later for lying witnesses to claim that he had taken bribes, and that would be the end of his career. Normally sending word through the grapevine would have been enough, but he could not count on such gossip reaching either man accurately, without sounding like an insult that might start the very battle he was trying to prevent.

In the end, Tony went to see the priests in whose parishes the two Mafia bosses attended Mass.

His official status as deputy commander of the Italian Squad and his personal credentials as the father of a priest himself got him a respectful hearing. His message, he said, was simple:

The police would not, during the Holy Rosary Festival, do anything out of the ordinary. Both priests, in separate meetings, asked the same immediate question:

“Does that mean no arrests?”

“I can’t promise that,” Tony had said. “But we’re not going to make a big deal out of things. We want peace and we don’t want armed mobsters all over the place. We don’t want anybody knocking off somebody else’s entertainment booth. We don’t want any innocent bystanders shot. For this weekend, we want peace. After that, we go back to normal. I go back to trying to get them all arrested, put on a ship, and sent back where they came from. But peace this weekend—that is our goal. We know that your esteemed parishioner can certainly guarantee the peaceful intentions of his followers.”

Both priests had listened to Tony’s explanation and then agreed. One said he would get word to Joe the Boss Masseria through Charlie Luciano. The other said he would tell Nilo, who would get the message to Don Maranzano.

“Nilo?”

“Nilo Sesta,” the priest had said. “He handles Mr. Maranzano’s business affairs. Do you know him? A very nice young man.”

“I’ve seen him around,” Tony said.

The festival would start the next night, and already many of the people were in a holiday mood, and it showed in their greetings. He felt a curious satisfaction in knowing that he was respected by the people on the street.

It was just another of the wondrous gifts that life had given him. He had a wife who loved him. His son Mario could have ended up in one of the gangs or, worse yet, a pug-ugly brain-damaged boxer, but had instead become a priest. Tommy had defended his country, almost with his life, and had been rewarded with morphine addiction. But he had fought his way back, had now graduated from college, and this fall he would begin his law-school studies while continuing to work as a policeman. He felt secure that both his sons had their feet on the ground, aimed in the right direction for life.

He worried occasionally about Tina. She had a beautiful voice, a rare talent, but so far there had not seemed to be any payoff in it. Instead of singing at the Metropolitan Opera House—even a role in the chorus would be a start—Tina instead seemed to be earning a precarious living singing private concerts, earning her keep while living with Uta Schatte.

“The opera’s just not hiring, Papa, and this is a good way to keep my voice in shape. And I’m also learning all kinds of new pieces. Listen.” And she shattered the stillness of the Falcones’ small apartment with a beautiful coloratura trill.

“Very nice,” Tony would grumble. “When do you sing it at the Metropolitan?”

“Papa, I’m still learning. There will be operas enough for all of us one day.”

“And in the meantime, you are happy?” Tony asked, because he thought that he saw just a hint of weariness on Justina’s exquisite, sculptured face.

“I’m fine. Uta … Frau Schatte … and I are great friends. It’s not really like she’s my boss. And every note I sing is under her supervision.”

It was hard for him not to be excited by her exuberance and to be happy for her, but he sometimes wished he had money, real money. If he had, he would insist that Justina stop this no-future singing and start going to auditions at the Metropolitan until they hired her.

If it came to it, he thought, he could probably pull a string or two to get her hired somehow at the Met. Even opera houses had police problems, and someone, somewhere in the department was owed a favor that could be called in.

It did not occur to him as odd that while his sturdy rules of conduct would never allow him to ask a favor for himself, he would not give a second thought to the propriety of asking for one for his daughter.