Pete Hamill - North River

Delaney washed quietly in the hour before daylight. He dressed in silence, before easing down the stairs to his office. As soon as it was light, he would call his friends on the cops: Danny Shapiro and Jackie Norris. He would call Knocko Carmody. One of them would find Gyp and lean on him a little. If they can’t find him, he thought, I will.

He could smell the coffee before he saw Rose. The aroma moved under the door, through the cold morning air. Then there was a knock.

“Come in.”

Rose entered, with a single cup on a tray, steam rising in the chill, a sugar bowl, a spoon. Her bathrobe was pulled tight.

“You want some toast, Dottore?” she said softly.

“Let’s wait for the boy,” he said. He stared at his desk. “I got a call a little while ago.”

“I know,” she said. “I hear it ringing.”

“It was Gyp,” he said.

“That bastid. Excuse me. What’d he say?”

He told her, and laid out plans for defending themselves. Defending the house. Defending Rose and Monique and the boy. She listened carefully.

Then the boy was there, squinting at them. He paused, then hurried to hug Rose’s hips.

Later in the morning, he and Rose and Monique began building their fortress. Time moved quickly, although it seemed like only a few hours in a day busy with patients, here in the hall, out there in the tenements, off at the hospital. In fact, the work took four days. A locksmith arrived and added locks to the doors in front and back. An ornamental ironworker named Buscarelli took measurements for window guards, and they were in place two days later. Jimmy Spil-lane, wiry and dour, arrived with a short mustached carpenter named Mickey Mendoza, and Rose showed them into the basement with the boy tagging along. They went floor by floor, looking for places to install steam pipes and radiators. When they were finished, and Delaney left a patient to say good-bye, Mendoza said, in wonder:

“This kid speaks Spanish!”

“That’s right,” Delaney said.

“Sicilian too,” Rose said.

“Where’d he learn Spanish like that? I’m from Puerto Rico and —”

“Mexico. He was there with his mother. He’s a fast learner.”

“I’m very impressed,” Mendoza said, rubbing the boy’s head as he moved to the door. “Hasta pronto, joven.”

“Hasta pronto,” the boy said. “Que le vaya bien!”

“I’ll be goddamned,” Mendoza said, and smiled as he and Jimmy Spillane went out. Spillane said glumly that they’d have an estimate the following morning. He said almost nothing else. When they were gone, Rose looked at Delaney.

“Why’s this guy Spillane so unhappy?” she said.

Delaney sighed. “His mother came here one morning, maybe six years ago. I sent her to St. Vincent’s. She died there.”

Rose nodded but said nothing.

“Excuse me, but I have to work,” Delaney said. He leaned down and hugged Carlito. “Be good, joven.”

By afternoon there were new rules. The boy could no longer come to the area where the sick assembled. He couldn’t come while they were there. He couldn’t come when they were gone until after the place had been scoured of germs and microbes. Or at least most of them. The boy had to be kept safe from many things.

“I’ll get someone to come in every day,” Delaney said to Rose. “You’ll never have time. Someone who can scrub the place down with disinfectant.”

“I can do it.”

“No, you can’t. Help me find someone.”

By the end of the week, Rose had found a black woman named Bessie. She was bone thin, and asked Delaney to examine her for tuberculosis before she started working around the boy. “My brother Roy, he got it,” she explained. “You never know.” Delaney examined her. She didn’t have it. She began to arrive every afternoon for an hour, when the patients were gone. She wore gloves and a surgical mask, and was paid two dollars a week. The boy looked at her with curiosity, a woman with ebony skin, and resisted his banishment from the bottom hall, but Rose enforced the new rules.

“You can’t get sick,” she said to the boy. “You got too much to learn.”

It wasn’t only sickness that Delaney feared. Patients arrived without appointment. The door must be open. It could be open to some gunsel too. A punk like Gyp might fire shots at everyone. Or act on his implied threat and snatch the boy. On that first morning, Delaney explained to Rose and Monique about the phone call, and made his own calls to Danny Shapiro at the precinct, to Angela, to Knocko Carmody. They would watch the streets, listen for rumors, issue warnings. Shapiro was a tough young wiry detective, and said: “They won’t get close enough to that kid to tell the color of his eyes.”

And Rose blurted out fiercely: “They try to snatch Carlito, they gotta go through me.”

Delaney said that wouldn’t be necessary, but he was not truly sure. Once every hour or so, fear opened and closed in his stomach like a fist. He warded it off by focusing on the fear rising from his patients, but when the last patient was gone, the last house call made, he imagined gunmen in the shadows. Or the knife artist named Gyp.

“There’s someone across the street in a car,” Monique said on the second morning.

Delaney went upstairs to his bedroom window and peered out through the curtains. He smiled and came downstairs.

“It’s two of Knocko’s boys,” he said. “Keeping an eye out.”

“That didn’t take long,” she said.

“Make sure they get some coffee.”

Later, Delaney rummaged deep into a bedroom closet and found the old Louisville Slugger that Big Jim had given to him in 1894, when he turned eight. Dried black tape was loose on the handle. He hefted the bat, feeling its weight, sensing its memory of doubles and ground-outs, and then leaned it against the wall between the bed and the night table. After rounds, he stopped by Billy McNiff’s and bought two more bats, each engraved with the signature of Mel Ott.

“A little cold for baseball,” McNiff said.

“Spring is coming, Billy.”

“That kid play ball?”

“He will.”

“How old is he anyway?”

“Old enough.”

On the way home, he began thinking of cutting a separate stairway into the back kitchen. To keep the boy away from patients and anyone else who might come in the door. He could not close the kitchen to Carlito, because the boy loved its Sicilian aura of plenitude, its position as a kind of warm center of the chilly house, and its entry into the garden. Delaney thought: I’ll call Knocko to send over a carpenter to make an estimate. At home, Delaney placed one new bat beside Monique’s desk and gave the second to Rose. She gripped the handle awkwardly, then smiled at Delaney.

“I don’t know nothin’ about baseball,” she said.

“I’ll teach you if you want. But this isn’t for playing ball.”

“It’s for breaking a head, right?”

“Right.”

She smiled in an odd way, then swung the bat sharply through the air, upper teeth clamped over her lower lip. He showed her how to hold the bat, and she swung again. This time something cold came into her eyes.

If Eddie Corso indirectly had created the sense of siege on Horatio Street, the bounty of Eddie Corso was providing solutions. Delaney thought with a chuckle: Maybe I can cut into the cornice on the roof and set up archers. To peer across the empty lot toward Jane Street. Aiming arrows. To pierce the hide of anyone they see with a mortar. Or a lance. Maybe we can take over the roof of the empty Logan house, the high ground. Maybe we can arrange snares that fall on a signal. Or string barbed wire all the way to the North River. Maybe…

The weather warmed on Thursday and the snow was gone on Friday. When Delaney went on house calls now, he noticed men standing in small groups at all corners of the block and on one of the rooftops across the street. The faces were not always the same. But he could pick out Knocko’s boys, with their derby hats, and Danny Shapiro wandering from the precinct, and a few of the regulars from Angela’s. All of them protecting their own, which, Delaney thought, in this case happens to be me. And the boy. And Monique. And Rose. I can never move now.