Pete Hamill - North River

“Then,” Corso said, brightening. “Then I go down the south of France. Get the sun. Get laid once a week. Look at the sea.”

“Send me your address,” Delaney said. “Under another name, please.”

Corso laughed.

Delaney and the boy strolled to the boardwalk and looked at the sea and the hundreds of thousands of people on blankets, drinking beer and Coke and wine, heating up food, devouring sandwiches. He tried to imagine Eddie Corso on the Riviera and smiled. He and the boy took off their shoes and held them tight, rolled up their trousers, and moved down wooden stairs and through the spaces between sandy blankets, the sand itself very hot, and into the surf. The boy ran out, then retreated as a fresh wave broke, then ran again. He saw some boys splashing girls, and turned and splashed with his left hand at Delaney, who splashed back. A black Lab shook off an immense amount of water, soaking Delaney and the squealing boy, then crashed again into the surf after a tossed ball. Delaney wished he could stay there forever.

On Thursday morning, he took Carlito on the old Arrow bicycle and pedaled off for the bread and newspapers. At Reilly’s he saw the tabloids shouting from the newsstand.

MOB BOSS

RUB OUT

He didn’t need to read them to know who had been killed. But he bought all the papers and took them home with the bread. Rose had already heard the news on the radio. How one Frank Botticelli was in a car with two others when they were cut off by a bread truck on West Eighteenth Street and the car was riddled by machine-gun fire. More than one hundred shots were fired. All three were dead.

“How come I don’t feel bad?” she said, her arms folded tightly across her breasts.

“It must be sad for the mother,” Delaney said.

“Maybe it’s a relief.”

He hugged her.

HE GAZED OUT AT THE OLIVE TREE, ITS FRESH LEAVES A SILVERY green in the morning sun. He hoped that Eddie Corso was riding the Atlantic, bound for Le Havre. He knew he shouldn’t feel that way. He knew he might have headed off the murder with one call to Danny Shapiro. He couldn’t do that. Not in this neighborhood. Not in a place where the informer was the lowest form of human. Besides, his friendship with Eddie Corso was forever. It was part of the war. For Eddie, the quarrel with Frankie Botts was complete, according to the rules of his world. They were not Delaney’s rules. But he understood them. Now, he hoped, it was over. Rose knew that it was not.

“They’re sure to come looking for you,” she said. “You know that, right? And maybe for me.”

“Why? It’s over.”

“These guys, it’s never over.”

She placed fried eggs before Delaney and the boy. She prepared nothing for herself except coffee.

“Look,” she said. “They know you’ve been going to see Frankie’s mother. You know something about him, how he lives. They know you are a friend of Eddie Corso. They know you saved his life on New Year’s.” She turned her gaze to the olive tree, while the boy ate greedily. “They’re sure to figure you helped set up Frankie.” She looked directly at Delaney now. “They know I’ve been going there too, to see Frankie’s mother, to be the nurse. So to them, maybe I’m part of the setup too.”

“We’ll deal with it,” Delaney said.

“So will they,” Rose said.

She looked again at the olive tree.

“Some of those olive trees,” she said, “they live five hundred years. That one will be there after we’re all dead and gone.”

She sipped her coffee, swallowing her dread.

“Let’s deal with the next couple of weeks,” Delaney said.

In his office, he called Danny Shapiro, who was out on his own house calls. This was a busy morning for detectives. Delaney left a message. Then he called Knocko Carmody. He didn’t have to explain.

“Yeah, I read the papers,” Knocko said. “Don’t worry.”

“I’ll try.”

“How’s the steam heat comin’?” Knocko said.

“They should be finished this week.”

“Just in time for July.”

“It should be great,” Delaney said.

Knocko hung up, and Delaney knew that men would soon be watching the street again. He told Rose, and she looked unconvinced. He heard Monique come in, and talked to her too. She would keep the inside door locked and only allow regular patients in to see him. She nodded toward the kitchen.

“She better be very careful,” Monique said. “Neapolitans like shooting Sicilians, male or female.”

“Rose didn’t cause this, Monique.”

“No, but to them she’s part of it, for sure.”

On house calls after lunch, pedaling steadily on the old Arrow, he watched every passing car, every unfamiliar face. Thinking: It would be stupid to die in this cheap Mob melodrama. Stupid to be a one-day story in the Daily News, three paragraphs maybe, or maybe page one if nothing else happened that day. The tabloids wanted to keep this story alive. The Mob sold many things, including newspapers. On a newsstand, he saw the headline in the Journal : COPS FEAR GANG WAR. How many times had he read that headline since the days of Prohibition? I don’t even need to read it. I know more about it than the reporter. So did Rose, who never went to gangster movies.

Delaney’s calls took him past the Good Men Social and Athletic Club, where Eddie Corso had been shot among the funny hats and noisemakers of New Year’s Eve. There was a TO LET sign in the window. On the corner, a few men stared at him, and one of them nodded. He looked up and saw another man peering down from the rooftop. Scouts of a defending army, awaiting the counterattack.

In late afternoon, he came down tenement stairs after treating a woman named O’Toole, whose body was being eaten by cancer. She didn’t care about Frankie Botts or Eddie Corso or the Giants. She just wanted to live a little longer. “I want to see my granddaughter graduate from grammar school,” she said. “Down at Sacred Heart.” That is, she wanted to live for two more weeks. He would try his best. That’s all he ever could do.

Delaney stepped into the fading sunlight at the top of Mrs. O’Toole’s stoop, took a breath, saw a few men talking on the corner. He went down to unlock his bicycle, chained to the iron fence. He heard leathery footsteps and looked up. A movie gangster was walking hard, wearing his gray fedora and a pin-striped suit, pulling his face tightly over his teeth.

“Hey, you,” he said.

“Me?”

The man stood over him now. “Yeah, get into the car.”

Two houses down, the door of a car opened onto the sidewalk.

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I said so, that’s why,” the man said, putting a hand inside his jacket.

Delaney smiled, still squatting, thinking: All shoulder, all my weight, everything on it.

And stood up abruptly, took a step, and whipped the left hook with everything behind it, grunting as he threw it, and hit the man on the side of the jaw. He heard something crack. The man went down hard on his back, one leg bent awkwardly beneath him, the other leg shaking. His eyes were rolled up under his brow. Then a fat man came out of the parked car, holding a gun, waddling and cursing.

And here came Knocko’s boys: six of them, big and burly, hefting bats and axe handles. Two bounced their wooden bats off the skull of the fat guy, who went down, his pistol rattling on the sidewalk. They kicked his face into bleeding meat. Another two men dragged the driver out of the car, while a third man drove an ice pick into the wheels. A skinny young red-haired man hit the driver with a hook, and he went down. Then a pale green van came around the corner. The back doors opened, and Knocko’s boys lifted the three unconscious gangsters, heaved them into the interior, and drove off. It was all over in a few brutal minutes.