Bloodline: A Novel Read online

  His apartment was up five flights in a brownstone building whose street-level door was kept locked. The apartment was big but sparsely furnished, and clothes were strewn everywhere.

  “You need a wife,” she said, looking around.

  “Or a maid.”

  “Now get out of those clothes.”

  “Usually I’m the one that says that,” Nilo answered. As Sofia blushed, Nilo smiled and took off his jacket and trousers, standing in the middle of the room in his white dress shirt and underwear. In the bathroom, Sofia scrubbed the bloodstains from his suit, then hung it up on a hook behind the door.

  Outside, Nilo was still in his shirt and underwear, sitting on the sofa, drinking a glass of wine.

  “Won’t your folks worry about you?” he asked.

  “No one cares about me,” she said. “What about that sandwich you promised me?”

  He pointed toward the kitchen. “Help yourself. Everything’s in the icebox.”

  “Maybe I’ll just have a glass of wine instead.”

  “Sure. It’s over there.”

  She poured herself a glass from a large jug and sat next to him on the couch. After an awkward silence, she said, “So, how do you like your job?”

  “What do you know about my job?”

  “Nothing, just talk.”

  “What kind of talk?”

  “That you’re Maranzano’s favorite gangster,” she answered.

  Nilo laughed. “It’s true. I came to this country to be a good American. And all America had for me was ditchdigging and being called a dumb wop. The only one who cared for me was Don Salvatore. I was a boy and he made me a man. So, okay, now I’m a gangster. I kill people. I steal things. Every day I try to figure out new ways to break the law.” She looked over, but his face was stolid, humorless. “And someday I will run everything.”

  “If they don’t shoot you first.”

  “Everything has risks. You took a risk in coming here tonight,” Nilo said.

  “I’m not afraid of you.”

  He put down his wineglass. “You ought to be.” He leaned forward and kissed her, then slipped his hand under her blouse and cupped her breast. His fingers were soft, his skin smooth, unlike her father’s hands, which were coarse and rough. He breathed in her ear, “I want to make love to you. I always wanted to make love to you.” He guided her hands to touch his body, then pulled her to her feet and led her into the barely lit bedroom.

  Sofia was afraid but told herself there was no turning back. Nilo would not let her undress herself but insisted on taking her clothing off. When she was naked and embarrassed by her nudity, he looked at her for a long time. “You’re very beautiful,” he said, then took off his own clothing.

  “You are, too,” she said.

  His lovemaking was as brief, coarse, and brutish as her father’s. Despite that, when he rolled off her, she put her head on his shoulder and said, “That was wonderful.”

  “I never get any complaints,” he said.

  “I love you, Nilo.”

  “I’ve got no time for love.”

  “Do you think … maybe … you and me…”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Maybe we could be … together?” she said haltingly.

  “You weren’t a virgin,” he said. “When I get serious, it’s going to be with a virgin.”

  “Why?”

  “Because she’s going to be just mine and nobody else’s. Who was it? Tommy? No. Tommy’s too dopey. I bet it was Charlie Luciano. He’s a pimp and he’s always trying out new women. Charlie, right?”

  She put a hand over her face as if to shut out his voice.

  “Was he as good as me?” Nilo asked. When she did not answer, he said, “What about Tina? Is she getting it, too? I bet you two are always talking about getting it, aren’t you? Who gets it the most? Why don’t you bring her up sometime and I’ll give it to both of you.”

  “Oh, Nilo. It’s not like that,” she said softly.

  “It’s always like that,” he said. “Except, maybe, I guess when you want to get married or something. But my wife’s got to be a virgin. Nobody else’s leftovers is gonna get knocked up and trick me into a wedding.”

  Sofia rose from the bed and began slowly to put on her clothes.

  * * *

  TINA HAD BEEN LIVING and studying in Uta Schatte’s house for two months. With no other students in residence, the blond German woman was able to give her undivided attention to Tina, and she managed to fill Tina’s days with music and work.

  From wake-up time until bedtime, Tina sang scales, endless scales in every key. She practiced her piano-playing. When her voice was tired and her fingers were sore, she listened to recordings of great opera singers. And then she sang and played some more.

  Hour after hour, day after day. And it was working. Tina knew it was working. Her voice felt more powerful and she knew she had better control of it. She had still sung nothing but scales and exercises, but she understood that when it was time for the arias her voice would be ready.

  Frau Schatte would see to that. Frau Schatte saw to everything.

  Despite the intensity of the work, the two months flew by at whirlwind speed, and then it was a special Sunday, and for the first time in sixty days, Tina had gone home to visit her family for dinner.

  Her parents and Mario and Tommy had greeted her as if she had just returned from a lifetime spent in another land, and for a little while, it was warm and loving, the way it had always been when she was around her family. But after just a little while, it began to pall on her. She seemed to feel that she should be back at Frau Schatte’s, practicing her scales, practicing her piano.

  The conversation was of the neighborhood, of old friends, of aunts and cousins and nieces, and Tina began to realize that she was not of this neighborhood anymore. She lived elsewhere, not just in body, but in spirit too. Nevertheless, she had tried to smile and joke and take part in the conversation, but as soon as it was seemly, she took her leave, explaining that she had to get back, since her lessons continued, even on Sundays.

  Frau Schatte had been in the parlor; she might even have been waiting for Tina, and when Tina came in, the older woman asked how her visit had gone, and Tina had slipped to her knees next to Frau Schatte’s chair and began to cry.

  The blond woman patted her gently on the head. Tina had offered no explanation and the woman had not asked for one. But, knowingly, she said, “I’ve seen it before. You are becoming a woman, Tina, and you are making your way in your own world. Not a world that your family created for you, but one you are creating for yourself. And when you go into that world, you will go alone.”

  Tina had lifted her tear-streaked face.

  “You will go with me, won’t you?” she sobbed.

  “For a while. For as long as I can.”

  Tina had gone to her room to wash up, and later, Frau Schatte had knocked on the door and announced, “You have worked hard enough. Tonight we will go out together and we will experience life.”

  She laid out Tina’s clothes, her finest dressiest dress, and then the three women—Flora, the maid, had come as well—got into a carriage and rode in style to Delahanty’s, down on MacDougal Street.

  Tina was nervous. Delahanty’s was a speakeasy, and even though it was against the law, it seemed to be operating wide open, in full view of the street, and she wondered how it would look if she, the daughter of a policeman, was arrested and wound up in jail. But her nervousness passed as they walked inside. Tina knew they had made a great entrance. From the moment they walked in, all conversation had stopped, until the waiter had seated them at a table. Only then did people resume talking.

  On a small stage at one end of the room, someone was reciting poetry that he had written. Then somebody else began reading from an original story. They were fine, sensitive-looking American boys. And all the time that they read, a bunch of loudmouths standing at the bar and looking like dockworkers had catcalled and hectored them.


  After a while, a couple of the rowdies came over to their table and talked and laughed with Frau Schatte, and she explained to Tina that they were painters and expected to be boors.

  “It is a part of their artistry,” she said.

  The men objected strenuously, drunkenly, and invited themselves to stay to plead their case, and after a while Frau Schatte went away with one of them, asking beforehand if Tina thought that she could find her way home alone.

  A little later, Flora got up onto the little stage and began to half-speak, half-chant something that could have been a hymn or a pagan prayer or a poem. After each stanza, she sipped from a glassful of whiskey and opened another button on the bodice of her high-necked dress.

  When she reached the end of her performance, her dress was opened almost to the waist and Tina could see the swelling sides of her large chocolate bosom.

  Flora came back and sat down, smiling at Tina.

  “Don’t be embarrassed,” she said in her delicate accent. “This is Greenwich Village. It is expected.” Only minutes later, she got up to dance with one of the painters, and then, when Tina went to the ladies’ room, Flora disappeared. Tina was all alone and a little bit scared, but that soon passed. The last painter continued to fill her glass with cheap gin, and people were singing and laughing and dancing, and she had given up worrying about where she was.

  During the middle of the night, she was surprised to wake up in a dirty bed with a stranger next to her, horrified to realize that she was no longer a virgin. She hurriedly dressed and sneaked out before he could awaken and say anything. She ran all the way home to Frau Schatte’s. Neither of the other women had returned, and she went to bed, crying for the passing of her innocence.

  • As Joe the Boss Masseria continued to squeeze the small gangs for a bigger and bigger cut of their take, rumblings began to be heard and Luciano warned the old man to be careful. Masseria chuckled and told Luciano he was losing his nerve. Until …

  • On the morning of August 9, 1922, Masseria left his fortified and guarded apartment at 65 Second Avenue. Out on the street, two men opened fire on him. Masseria dodged into a man’s hat shop. The gunners followed, blasting away. They hit mirrors, windows, and even put two bullets through Masseria’s straw hat. Masseria cowered on the floor as another half-dozen shots were fired at him. They all missed and he walked away. Two hours later, Luciano told him the assassination had been ordered by Umberto Valenti, head of a small rival gang.

  • A young whore named Polly Adler, using money advanced to her by Luciano, opened a brothel at Fifty-fifth Street and Madison Avenue. Luciano told her to use only the prettiest showgirls as prostitutes. His own personal stable of whores would soon number five thousand women, hustling every night for prices that ranged from one hundred dollars a night to two dollars for a half hour. He took 50 percent of their gross.

  • Ford’s Model T sold more than every other car combined. It cost $319.

  • On a cold winter night in 1922, Luciano arranged a conference between Masseria and Umberto Valenti. They ate spaghetti in a restaurant on East Twelfth Street and shook hands in a peace pact, which Valenti said wasn’t really necessary since he had nothing to do with the earlier attempt on Masseria’s life. Outside, the three men walked down the street to hail a cab for Valenti. When Masseria stopped to light a cigar, Vito Genovese and Joe Adonis stepped from an alley and began pumping bullets into Valenti. As he fell, Luciano put a final bullet into his head. By the end of the next week, Luciano had taken over Valenti’s operations, including a small but growing narcotics business.

  • Between Christmas and New Year’s, 1922, waitress Mabel Fay left New York to find fame and fortune in Hollywood. Tommy Falcone never heard from her again.

  • Construction began on the Holland Tunnel, linking Manhattan and New Jersey. One of the first vehicles to drive through was a truck carrying bootleg beer.

  • The hot new slang phrase was “You slaughter me.”

  • On June 5, 1923, Luciano was arrested for selling two ounces of morphine to a federal informer. Frank Costello, the mob’s bribe-master, went immediately to work. Soon after, Luciano told the feds where they could find a large stash of illegal narcotics, and all charges were dropped.

  • The best-selling nonfiction book of 1923 was Emily Post’s Etiquette: The Blue Book of Social Usage.

  • In Washington, a young Justice Department lawyer named John Hoover was named to head the scandal-ridden Bureau of Investigation. One of his first major decisions was to begin calling himself J. Edgar Hoover.

  CHAPTER 5

  Summer 1924

  Although, as deputy commander of the police department’s Italian Squad, Tony Falcone was entitled to wear civilian clothes, once a month he wore his lieutenant’s dress uniform to work, making it a point to walk the streets of the city’s Italian neighborhoods. The idea was to let himself be seen.

  When Tony first broached the idea, his boss, Captain Milo Cochran, loudly labeled Tony’s pedestrian jaunts as just the waste of a working day.

  “So? So these guineas are going to see an Italian cop. That’s gonna make them stop shooting each other over a stolen tomato?”

  “No, Captain,” Tony explained patiently. “I don’t expect it’ll have much effect on the stolen-tomato murder rate. But what it will do is show these people that we’re their police department, too. That it’s not all—pardon the expression—thickheaded Irish cops who wouldn’t recognize an idea if it sneaked into their whiskey glass.”

  “We’re the police department of the city of New York. We represent everyone,” Cochran said with mock unction.

  Tony said, “Humor me on this one, Captain. It’s good for the people to see a ranking Italian officer around. The kids like the uniform, and maybe someday we’ll start to see a lot of them thinking about going into law enforcement.”

  “If they’re not all in jail already for stealing tomatoes from each other.”

  “And the old Italians, they don’t speak English and they’re confused and scared in this city, but they hear things, and it’s good for them to know, too, that there’s somebody out there who can talk to them in their own language.”

  “Like you?”

  Tony shrugged. “Someday when I uncover a big plot to assassinate all the Irishmen in the department, you’ll thank your lucky stars.”

  “You’ll be leading the pack of brigands pounding on the doors of the precinct,” Cochran said. “Get out of here. Be gone with you and your whole nefarious tribe.”

  After almost two years, the Italian Squad had turned out to be not so bad as Tony had feared it would be. Credit for most of that rested with Cochran, a small, compulsively tidy man who affected the attitude of an Irish racist know-nothing, but who was, in truth, a dedicated cop who wanted, like Tony, to put the bad guys in jail. His anti-Italian bantering with Tony was just that—bantering—and he understood very clearly the need to get good information from the streets.

  They had discussed that the day Tony got his lieutenant’s bars and first reported for his new position.

  “From what I hear, you’re not terribly happy about being here,” Cochran had told Tony.

  “That’s basically true, Captain,” Tony had said.

  “Mind telling me why?”

  “Because I think this whole idea of an Italian Squad is a kind of racism that stamps my people as subhuman. When the Plug Uglies were running around, and the Potato Peelers and all the rest of those Irish gangs, nobody ever thought of having an ‘Irish Squad’ to deal with them. So I think having an Italian Squad is an insult to my people.”

  “I agree,” Cochran said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I agree with you. But our problem is this: the brass has decided they’re going to have an Italian Squad, so we’re stuck with it. Maybe it’s best that they put two smart young men like us in charge of it. That way, we can do our jobs, clean this all up, disband the Italian Squad, and I can go on to become chief of police
and you can retire and go start a Mafia gang of your own.”

  Tony looked up sharply at the comment, but Cochran was grinning. “Hey, Tony,” he had said. “Have a sense of humor. It helps when the crap gets too deep.”

  It had been good advice and Tony had tried to take it. He had also found Cochran honest and fair and just as frustrated as Tony was when they had made a really solid arrest of some gangster, only to see him freed because the political fix was put in with the prosecutors and judges.

  So it was that Tony Falcone was walking slowly down First Avenue, through the heart of Italian Harlem, on a bright Thursday in July. The next day would start the three-day-long festival of Holy Rosary Church, the gaudiest celebration of the year in Uptown Manhattan, and it was his job to make sure nothing went wrong.

  Harlem was separated from Little Italy by little more than eight miles of streets. Down there, where Tony lived and had raised his family, all the Italians and Sicilians, no matter where in the old country they came from, were pretty much mixed together with no one hometown or region predominating in any area. But at the northern tip of Manhattan, in Italian Harlem, it was different. There, each neighborhood, sometimes each street, was settled by immigrants from some individual town or village or region back in the old country.

  That meant there were whole blocks peopled primarily by Sicilians from Castellammare del Golfo or Villalba or Palermo, and by Italians from Rome or Naples or Calabria. For recent arrivals in America, it provided an easy way of fitting in to the New World. But it also brought over intact many of the rivalries, feuds, and vendettas between factions.

  Shakespeare got famous writing Romeo and Juliet about Italians, Tony thought. But up here, that story happens every day. If you want to know about feuds, ask an Italian. We invented them.

  Cochran and he had decided that keeping a tight rein on these feuds was the second most important job of the Italian Squad, outranked in importance only by the goal of curbing the Mafia.

  Usually, Tony thought, the squad did not do too good a job on either. Especially now, because of what was happening in Italy. Normally, immigration to the United States was a gradual thing, with people arriving in manageable numbers and with good, ambitious reasons for searching out America.