Pete Hamill - North River

“And I don’t speak Italian.”

“I thought maybe you could bring that hoodlum that takes care of the kid. So she could translate, know what I mean?”

“I’ll ask,” Delaney said.

“Don’t worry,” Botts said. “You’ll be safe.” A pause. Then: “I hear you got the G-men on your ass.”

“They came by,” Delaney said.

“Looking for Eddie Corso too?”

“His name never came up. If it did, I couldn’t tell them anything anyway, because I don’t know where he is.”

Botts sighed. Then: “Tomorrow at two-thirty? Before you start your house calls.”

“You know my hours pretty good, Mr. Botts.”

“I know a lot of things.”

Botts hung up, and Delaney sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the carpet. It could be a setup, he thought, a way to get me out of this neighborhood, and the men who guard me, and then do what he wants to do. But that made little sense. Botts was no fool. He knows the Feds are watching me. He knows I’ll probably tell everyone where I’m going. Monique. My friends. The cops.

No, Botts might be telling me the truth. His mother is sick. And every gangster Delaney had ever known was sick in the head about his mother. Irish gangsters most of all. But the Jews too, and the Italians. They all insisted they had accepted a bitter cup in order to make life better for Mama. Maybe that’s all it is. Again.

IN THE MORNING, IN HIS BEDROOM, FRESH FROM A SHOWER, A bathrobe loose across his shoulders, Delaney glanced at the newspapers. There was a huge taxi strike, with twenty-five thousand hackies out on the street. La Guardia, speaking as a New Yorker and an American and not as a Republican, said in a speech that everybody must support President Roosevelt. The Giants were working their way east and north, playing exhibition games. John Dillinger was spotted in Santa Fe and in Oregon on the same weekend, but did not rob any banks. There was no news from Spain. And no sound from the top floor.

He removed the robe and sat on the edge of the bed. He felt stronger, younger, after only a week on the bicycle. I’ll have to work even harder now, pedal more furiously, or the Italian food will smother my Celtic bones. His eyes fell on the books beside the bed, and the third volume from the top was a selection of the work of Dante Alighieri. He slipped it out. The frontispiece was a small black-and-white version of the portrait at the Met that looked like Frankie Botts. He started dressing for the day, and wondered what would happen in the afternoon on Grand Street.

That afternoon they walked to Grand and Mott from the subway, and Rose was sullen most of the way. Carlito was now in the care of Monique, and Rose wasn’t pleased to be drafted into Delaney’s service. She wore her old shoes and walked quickly, as if wanting to rush back to Horatio Street. The streets here were crowded, the last of the pushcarts parked beside the curbs. In the newspapers, La Guardia was saying that he would get all the pushcarts off the streets because they were unsanitary, but suggesting that they were part of the stereotype of Italians and thus had to go. Most were still on the streets, but because of the strike, the taxis were not. Rose moved through the neighborhood as if it was at once familiar and alien.

“I don’t like doing this,” Rose said when they were a block away.

“It’s not for him,” Delaney said. “It’s for his mother.”

“You know she’s Sicilian, right?”

“I thought Frankie was a Neapolitan.”

“No, it was a — how do you say it? Mix marriage?”

Delaney wanted to laugh but didn’t. “That’s why Frankie must have asked for you.”

She shrugged and looked ahead in a dark wary way. “Maybe.”

She paused to examine the window of Di Palo’s cheese store. Little signs were pinned into the cheeses: ragusana, romano, mozzarella. Her lips moved, as if saying the names, but no words emerged.

“I could make some great stuff out of that window,” she said, repressing a smile.

“We’ll stop on the way home.”

Delaney looked at the bells on the doorframe in front of the vestibule. One was marked B, nothing more, and he pressed it. A buzzer rang, and as he pushed on the door something clicked and the door opened. Ah, the rewards of crime. Only gangsters could afford electrically controlled locks in the tenements of New York. Delaney led the way up the narrow stairs, with low-wattage lights above them. Each step and landing was covered with brownish linoleum. The banister smelled of lemon juice. Cooking odors filled the air, along with the aromas of cheese from the store, all mixed with music from the Italian radio stations. Frankie Botts was alone on the third-floor landing.

“Up here,” he said, leaning over the banister. “Right here.”

On the landing, Botts had assumed a pose of command, hands jammed in the pockets of a dark suit, a lightbulb above him emphasizing his shadowed eyes and high cheekbones. Delaney thought: Christ, he looks like a painting by Caravaggio. A single light and the deepest darkness. The sense of menace was palpable. He shook hands with Botts, but Rose stood with her arms folded across her breasts. She was wearing a dark blue sweater, and her eyes were examining the place, never looking directly at Frankie Botts. Down the steps was the safety of the streets. Up one final flight was the roof. In some houses in New York, the roof was for hurling people into the yards.

They passed into the kitchen, and Frankie closed the door behind them and turned two locks. There were no bodyguards in sight. The kitchen was like a thousand others: stove, refrigerator, table, chairs, a sink. The bare table had the texture of bone from many scrubbings. A framed lithograph of the Bay of Naples was on one wall, a young man in an army uniform on another. That was Carmine, killed in Château-Thierry, the same photograph that was hanging in Club 65. The one whose death had so hurt Frankie’s mother. She was obviously a woman who would not surrender her hurt.

“Where’s the patient?”

“In here,” Botts said.

He led the way through the flat, passing more photographs of Carmine, and several of a young woman and a young Italian man, made in a studio in some city in the old country. Delaney was sure the woman was Frankie’s mother, with her vehement Sicilian eyes, and the man with her was surely Frankie’s father. His face was amused. The apartment was immaculately clean.

“Right here,” Frankie said.

He opened a door to a back bedroom. The shade was drawn. An old woman in blue pajamas was lying under the covers of a bed with a dark carved wooden headboard. She still resembled the young woman in the framed photograph. Her hair now was almost white, pulled back in a bun, but it was the same woman. She had handsome lined features, and was breathing in a shallow way. Her eyes were closed. A votive candle flickered on a bureau, but there was no other light. The top of the bureau was cluttered with more framed photographs, one showing the entire family with a New York river in the background, and separate ones of Frankie in a baseball uniform and Carmine in a summer shirt and long pants. In one, Frankie stood with his kid brother, both smiling, Frankie taller and more muscular. Delaney had seen many bureaus like this one. He laid his bag on the floor.

“Momma?” Frankie said.

Her eyes came open, the irises a washy blue, and she blinked at the strange faces of Delaney and Rose. She seemed as wary as Rose was. Frankie went around to the side of the bed and turned on a lamp.

“Momma, this is the doctor,” Botts said in Italian. “He’s here to see you.”

She answered, “I don’t want to go to the hospital.”