Pete Hamill - North River

Delaney trembled. Could’ve died. Could have been dead right now. His left hand hurt, but he flexed it and was sure nothing had been broken. The skin of his middle knuckle was torn, but nothing else. He finished unlocking the bicycle and placed his bag in the basket. The skinny red-haired kid came over.

“I’m Liam Hanratty,” he said. “My grandfather was Packy. You know, that trained you a long time ago? He told me about you. Now I know he wasn’t bullshitting.”

“Looks like he taught you pretty good himself,” Delaney said. “I saw that hook.”

“He said you had a terrific double hook. Body, then head.”

Delaney shrugged, then shook hands gently with the young man.

“Where’d they take those guys?” Delaney said.

“Where else? The North River, I guess.”

He laughed.

“Teach them somethin’,” he said. “Don’t fuck wit’ the neighborhood.”

Delaney left before the police arrived.

Danny Shapiro arrived after dinner, while Carlito slept in his room. Rose gave the detective a plate of ravioli and a beer. They sat at the kitchen table.

“We rounded up as many guys as we could find,” Shapiro said. “Corso’s old mob. Frankie’s mob. We locked them in separate jails. But this could go on awhile.”

Rose said, “I don’t know when it ends.”

“When they start marryin’ each other,” Shapiro said.

“Ha! Never.”

“Maybe that’s best,” Shapiro said. “They ever get together, we’re all in trouble.”

“Maybe they should all see Romeo and Juliet sometime,” Delaney said.

“Yeah, they get together too, Romeo and his Juliet,” Shapiro said. “Except they’re dead.”

Shapiro laughed with Delaney. Rose only smiled. She had mastered the Daily News, Delaney thought, but Shakespeare would take a little longer. Shapiro finished his ravioli, wiping the plate clean. He sipped his beer.

“Well, what should we do?” Delaney said. “Right here.”

“Stay in the house. Keep the doors locked.”

“Impossible,” Rose said. “That boy has to walk, I have to buy food.”

“And I’ve got house calls every afternoon.”

“Just for a few days,” Shapiro said. “Give them time to cool off. Racket guys need peace and quiet to do business. They’ll calm down. But it might get worse before it gets better.”

He got up to leave.

“The food was great, Rose,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said.

They walked to the door. Shapiro looked at Delaney.

“Did you know this was coming?”

“Put it this way, Danny. I wasn’t surprised.”

Shapiro looked down.

“What happened to your left hand, Doc?” he said.

“Nothing much.”

“That ain’t what I heard,” Shapiro said, and smiled.

“Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“If I did, half the city would be in the can.”

He tapped Delaney on the left shoulder and then he was gone. Rose locked the gate and the inside door. Then she folded her arms and stared at Delaney.

“Okay, tell me,” she said. “What happen to your left hand?”

“Let me brush my teeth first.”

He told her in the dark, and she laughed and then went silent. He could hear her breathing harder.

“I told you it wasn’t over,” she said.

Then she started kissing him. His face and his neck and his skinned left hand.

In the morning, they learned from the newspapers and the radio that Shapiro was right. It got worse. Two fully clothed bodies were fished from the North River and identified as members of the Frankie Botts mob. There was no sign of their hats. Around midnight a group of masked men kicked in the locked door of Club 65, heaved gasoline bombs into the empty interior, and left. The firemen came and poured water into the empty store and left it a wet smoking mess. The families that lived in the apartments above the bar all got to the street safely and would live with the stench of smoke for a few weeks. No deaths. Just a strategic bombing. A show.

There were six more killings, scattered from Mulberry Street to Times Square, where a Corso man died in a movie house with an ice pick in his ear. But there was no sign of hoodlums in the neighborhood. Delaney went on working. He saw patients every morning. He made house calls. He stared at the olive tree. He painted bad paintings alongside Carlito. He made love to Rose at night. The papers said that the funeral of Frankie Botts would take place on Monday morning at Our Lady of Pompeii R.C. Church. There was even a photograph of Frankie’s mother leaving a funeral parlor on Second Avenue, frail, dressed in black, her face stern, a few stray hoodlums in the background, and two uniformed cops. On Saturday morning, Rose and the boy went shopping. Monique was uneasy.

“I don’t like her taking the boy out there,” Monique said, gesturing toward the street.

“He needs larger sneakers, and socks too,” he said. “She knows all the cheap places up on Fourteenth Street.”

“Still…”

“Rose says gangsters don’t get up this early.”

“Well, she should know.”

He ignored the edge in her voice.

“Any mail from Spain?” he said.

“No, just bills. I’ll have them ready later.”

He turned to the door of his office.

“Send in the first patient.”

And so he spent the morning dealing with other people’s pain and fear. A woman with a spreading rash. An old longshoreman whose feet were red and swollen with diabetes. A young mother who was runny with gonorrhea and shame, both driven into her by a drunken husband. A man in his forties, shuddering and half-mad from the DTs, accompanied by a frightened teenaged daughter. A woman whose sputum and cough revealed the consumption. Two vets who needed quinine, and one who was losing feeling in a leg that had been lacerated at Château-Thierry. A black eye. A swollen jaw. A runny ear that gave off a vile odor. Pain. Fear. The need for relief or hope. None of them mentioned the gang war. In his office, Delaney fiddled with his pen.

He wrote a single word on his pad.

Rose.

That Saturday night, he was sipping tea after dinner, thinking of taking Carlito back to Coney Island, to ride with him on the mechanical horses in Steeplechase. Or among the turrets and minarets of Luna Park. Rose was upstairs with the boy. The phone rang. And rang. He picked it up. It was Jackie Norris, from the Harbor Police.

“Hey, Doc,” he said. “Can you come over here to Brooklyn tomorrow? The Kings County morgue.”

“Why?”

“I think we found something.”

They dropped off Carlito with Angela, and Rose said she would pick him up as soon as she finished at St. Brendan’s. Her face was apprehensive, because Delaney had told her in the night where he was going and why he could not take the boy. She said nothing, but her face told him that she was imagining many scenarios. Angela seemed delighted, and the boy was smiling and carrying his teddy bear. Delaney and Rose each told the boy that they would return soon and kissed his cheek. Then turned to Angela. She smiled at them in a knowing way. The harpies might not know. Mr. and Mrs. Cottrell might not know. Angela knew what they did in the night.

They said good-bye, and Delaney walked Rose part of the way to St. Brendan’s. Few words were spoken.

“If it’s her,” Rose said at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Eighth, “what are you going to do?”

“Bury her,” he said. “What else can I do?”

“And your daughter? She comes for the funeral?”

“Maybe.” He hugged Rose. “First I have to see if it’s Molly.”

Rose walked quickly toward St. Brendan’s. Delaney watched her for a few minutes. She turned and waved but did not smile. He waved back, and then headed for the subway.