The Black Madonna (16 page)

Nicky watched Jumbo pour the drinks. He saw the ring on Jumbo's pinky finger. Nicky reached out and touched it. “Still got it, huh?” he said.

Jumbo looked up. “What are you kidding? It's the only piece of gold I got left. I hocked everything, but not this. I ain't gonna forget them times, Nicky . . . Me, you, and Salvatore, that's once in a lifetime.” He turned the ring. “Salvatore's still got his. I seen it on him last time he was down here. Salvatore, big-time lawyer . . . something, huh?”

Nicky picked up his glass. He shook it so the ice rattled. “Salvatore was always smart . . . and stand-up, like his old man. Good to everybody. Remember Amadeo? My mother thought he was God.”

“And then there was Magdalena. . . .”

“Whatta you mean?”

“Nothing,” Jumbo said, “but she wasn't exactly your everyday Italian mama, was she? She always had people talking. Taking over the grocery when Sally's father died. We used to make fun of Salvatore selling vegetables. Now it's a gourmade store. Magdalena was one smart cookie.” Jumbo put a hand on Nicky's shoulder. “And look at you, homicide detective, first class . . . not bad. Only me, I'm stuck behind this goddamn bar.”

“I told you to come with me.”

Jumbo waved the comment away. “Forget about it. I could never be a cop,” Jumbo said. “I don't like running. I don't like guns. You gotta worry about being on the take. What's the point? I didn't expect to end up in Benvenuto's Bar and Restaurant, but listen, I'm not complaining. I got no carfare. I walk across the street to work. The only thing is Eddie takes my paycheck for the next forty years. I'm a fucking serf.”

Nicky laughed and finished his drink and put a twenty on the bar but Jumbo gave it back and poured him another. Nicky put the bill in the tip cup. Jumbo leaned over on both his elbows. “You know, Nicky. I'm real glad you came by because you're just the guy I want to see.”

“What? What is it?”

“I got a situation. It's personal and I don't know how to handle it.”

“What?”

“I don't wanna talk here. It's a matter of the heart. It deserves some respect.”

“You tell me where and when, Jumbo, and I'll be there.”

“It's really important to me. The most important thing ever happened to me. I still can't believe it.” Jumbo closed his eyes and screwed up his face. “I met a girl, a good girl, a nice one.”

“I thought you always liked the bad ones.”

Jumbo hit Nicky in the shoulder. “Shit, you remember all that stuff we did?”

“When I wasn't passed out, yeah. But this is great news. So what's the problem?”

“Ha, it's one problem after the other. But like I said, I wanna tell you in private. It's a very complicated thing.”

“Okay.”

“Do you think we could get together? Me, you, Salvatore? Like old times? Bat a few around?”

“Sure, no problem.” Nicky gave Jumbo his card. There was a pair of golden handcuffs embossed under his name. He had paid for the cards himself. He thought it added a touch of class to a dirty job. “I'll talk to Salvatore and we'll set it up.”

When Nicky left, Jumbo looked around the room, squinting into the dark. Then he took the twenty out of the tip cup and put it in his back pocket.

After the Savannah Club, Nicky had joined the army and then the police force. Jumbo had gone from one job to another, all of them on the fringes of legality, and Salvatore had left for college and then law school. He had married one of those long blond girls with a mouthful of long white teeth. One of those girls who looked like they rode horses. He lived in Connecticut in one of those towns on the train line. He told Nicky that his wife hated the city. She'd meet him midtown to go for dinner and a Broadway show but that was it. She described the neighborhood and Magdalena with the same word: interesting. And she avoided both like the plague.

Nicky felt like that was fine with Salvatore. He had always been possessive about Magdalena. It wasn't just a mother-son thing. After all, Magdalena wasn't really Salvatore's mother. It was as if she held him hostage, as though Salvatore was bound to her in some other way that Nicky didn't like to think about.

H
e walked up Sixth Avenue to Pavese's and stood in front of the half-block of plate-glass windows filled with cakes and breads and wheels of cheese, the store that Magdalena had put together after Amadeo died. Amadeo would have been crazy to see his store like this, Nicky thought, to see what his wife had done, the girl he had brought back from the mountains of southern Italy.

S
alvatore had always said that the old man didn't know what he had, not really. He was blind to what was under his nose. “He never saw how smart Magdalena was, how she maneuvered our lives, her and that Black Madonna she keeps in the top of the house.”

“Black Madonna? What are you talking about?” Nicky had said. They had been breaking up the apartment and Salvatore had looked away, down at the suitcase he was packing. He closed it, concentrating on lining up the top to the bottom, fastening the clips.

“Nothing,” he said. “Something she brought from the old country, a stone with an image glued to it, a Madonna with a black face.” He wouldn't say anything else and Nicky had let it drop.

P
avese's was beautiful inside. In the center were piles of fruits and vegetables. Against the walls were counters of cheese, meats, fish on mountains of ice.

Nicky knew her immediately. It was her eyes, points of gold in them, he had heard the women say, strange eyes, bright, as though a lamp were held behind them. Magdalena was still a beautiful woman, and there was still something odd about her, exotic, ethereal.

Nicky had always been secretly in love with her. They all had been, he was sure. He remembered how Jumbo's hands would shake when she touched him, but they had never confided in each other. It was too much to think about. She was Salvatore's mother, but when she came onto the stoop in her thin cotton dresses with the sleeves rolled up on her arms, Nicky had almost felt pain. He remembered her in summer when she would sit on the stoop with her knees apart and open the top buttons of her dress and wipe the sweat from her neck and the cleft of her breasts with a man's white handkerchief. She would go under the open fire hydrant in the street holding her dress high up on her legs.

She was standing now toward the back of the store talking with a vendor. She was smiling, handing him something, a paper, a check. Nicky watched her. She had never married again, never been seen with a man. That wasn't unusual. His mother had been young enough when his father died and no one thought about her remarrying, but Magdalena they had suspected, watched her closely, waited for her true nature to reveal itself, the truth of her heart to surface, because she wasn't like any other woman. She wasn't like them.

She worked in the store after Amadeo died, and she was there, always, for Salvatore. When Salvatore asked her how she did it, she would lift her chin and mock him. “Luck,” she said, “and magic.”

N
icky waited until she was alone. “Magdalena,” he said. He stood in front of her, took off his hat. She looked up at him, her eyes narrowed, the brows together, but just for a minute.

“Nicola . . .” She reached out to him, palms up, and he put his hands in hers. Come inside,” she said, motioning to him, clearing a path with her hands.

She led him into a room behind the store. It was a kitchen. A table in the center was piled high with papers.

“My office.” She cleared the papers from the table and put down a bowl of fruit. “Sit down,” she told Nicky. “I make you coffee.” She brought out a tray of pastries, put it down and frowned. “Maybe you want to eat something,” she said. “Tell me, what do you want?” She petted his shoulder. He was ten years old again. He was eighteen. She poured his coffee and sat down in the chair across from him. She bit into a cannoli. “Tell me. What are you doing? How are you?”

Nicky told her he was a homicide detective in the First Precinct.

“You married?”

“Divorced.”

“Stupid woman,” she said, and stirred sugar into his coffee without asking.

“How's Salvatore?”

“Un' uomo importante,”
she said. “The lawyer, I call him. His father should be here to see.”

Nicky finished his coffee. Magdalena peeled a mangosteen. The thick purple skin stained her hands. She handed him a section. It was white, slippery. The juice ran down her fingers. There was a naturalness to her. There always had been. She caught him watching her and he was embarrassed.

“I need to get ahold of him,” he said.

“Nothing's wrong?”

“No, I just want to see him. It's been too long. I was down on Spring Street with Jumbo and we thought it was time to get together.”

“The world turns upside down,” she said, “and nothing changes.” She put her fingers to her throat. There was an amulet, he saw, black, polished, an uneven shape. It was on a velvet ribbon around her neck and she stroked it absentmindedly as she talked. He thought to ask her about it but he didn't. There were so many questions around Magdalena.

She got up, went to a bulletin board that was over her desk. “He's just moved. I have the number up here somewhere . . . Ah . . .” She pulled down a slip of lined white paper. “Here,” she said. “Let me copy it for you.”

Nicky bent down and kissed her hand when she gave him the paper. “
Ciao,
Nicola,” she said before he closed the door.

N
icky met Salvatore in the Munsen diner because it was one of their old haunts. “Oh, my God, it's good to see you,” Salvatore said. He took Nicky's head in his hands and kissed him on both sides of his face. He slid into the booth and leaned over the table. “So how the hell are you?” He reached out, touched Nicky's cheek. “What's going on? Things are good?”

“Yeah, pretty good.”

“How's Gina?”

“Gone.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Don't be.”

“I told you not to marry an Italian girl. The rest of the women in the world think we're great.”

“I should have done like you but where was I gonna find her? What's her name? Susan?”

“Lindsey.”

“Mercy, Salvatore. That don't even sound like a girl's name.”

“I think she was named after her father. You'd like her. And you know what? Three kids and she looks the same as when I met her.”

“Magdalena looks the same as when we were kids.”

“Magdalena . . .” Salvatore stopped smiling and took a drag on his cigarette. “Magdalena's got some kind of deal going. I don't know if it's with God or the Devil or . . .” He reached over, covered Nicky's fist with his hand. “Forget that. What's going on?”

“I saw Jumbo last week. He's working in Benvenuto's paying off a debt to Fat Eddie Fingers.”

Salvatore shook his head. “Nicky, I love you. I love Jumbo. We go back a long time, but you know, things change. I have a whole other life. Jumbo's got to understand I can't get involved with penny-ante wise guys who shoot you in the leg if they don't get their money. When I left the Savannah Club I made up my mind that I was going to follow the rules and stay away from the local lords of Thompson Street.”

“Sally, c'mon. Jumbo's not looking for anybody to bail him out. His mother and the Five Furies took care of that just fine. It has to do with his heart. It's personal. He was wondering out loud if the three of us could get together. Hey, we're brothers, you forgot?”

Salvatore laughed. “St. Joseph's Day. My father thought I was in a knife fight. Only Magdalena knew what happened. She's the one put me up to it.”

“Funny, she never had any kids. She was so young.”

“My father didn't want it. He lost my mother in childbirth. He didn't want to lose Magdalena. But you know what, if she had wanted a baby, she would have had one. Magdalena always got just what she wanted.”

“You can't get away, Salvatore. You gotta take the good with the bad.”

“You mean I have no choice?”

“You coming or what?”

“You tell me when . . .”

Nicky stopped back down the neighborhood to see Jumbo before he went to work in the First Precinct. His eyes adjusted to the dark of the barroom and he saw Jumbo, his bulk bent over the bar sink rinsing glasses. He looked up when Nicky came in. “Hey, Nicky, feast or famine.”

“I came in to let you know I met Salvatore. He says anytime you want.”

“Really. I'm impressed. Was he worried I wanted something?”

“Nah, Salvatore's not like that.”

“You know, Nicky, I don't want to blow this all outta proportion, keeping you in suspense.”

“Go ahead.”