“Everything okay, Dottore?” Rose said.
“Nothing that can’t be cured.”
He whispered to Carlito. “You okay, big boy?”
The boy smiled in a cheeky way. “Okay.” He pointed at his plate. “Bay-con an’ egg!”
Delaney sat him back in his chair. Rose touched his plate.
“What’s this?” she said, pointing at the plate.
“Play!” he said.
“Play-tuh.”
“Play-t.”
“And this?”
“Fook.”
Rose laughed out loud, and Delaney grinned.
“No fook. That’s a bad word. Faww-rrrrrr-kuh.”
“Fork.”
“And this?”
“Mesa!”
“No, no, in English!”
He paused, then blurted: “Table!”
He was naming the world, one glorious word at a time, but enough was enough. Time to eat. Carlito scooped up the scrambled eggs, dropping some of them off the fork, which he held firmly in his left hand. Rose came from the stove with Delaney’s plate. The Italian station had a female soprano on the air now, but in his own skull he heard Jolson singing, in some lost year at the Winter Garden. When there are gray skies, I don’t mind gray skies, you make them blue, Sonny Boy . . . And Molly scoffing at the sentimental rubbish, and then laughing when Delaney stood on a Broadway corner and sang the words, and promised her, in Jolie’s voice, You ain’t seen nuthin’ yet . . .
He ate quickly, sipped the jolting dark coffee, kidded with the boy and with Rose. But the headache nagged. He would need an aspirin. There was one appointment he wished he could avoid. One that put fear in his guts and an ache in his head. Then he heard Monique come in, and she poked her head into the kitchen and smiled.
“Morning all,” she said. “Looks like, uh, a busy day. They’re already waiting outside, and it’s thirteen degrees in the sun.”
“Better bring them in, Monique.” Then he raised an open palm. “Give me a bit of time first.”
He hugged the boy a final time and thanked Rose and then went to his consulting room. He made some notes: Call Zimmerman. Call Knocko. Call Danny Shapiro at the station house. He took an aspirin, telling himself: Leave instructions, in case I’m killed. Then he sat there, guts churning again. What if Frankie Botts was a real animal, as Rose had called him? And then thought: After the war, I promised myself I’d never live again in fear. But now it’s not just about me. It’s the boy too . . . it’s Rose.
He took a piece of stationery from his desk drawer and unscrewed his fountain pen. At the top he wrote the month, day, and year. Nineteen thirty-four. He addressed a note: To Whom It May Concern. He stated clearly that the bulk of his estate, his money, would go to the boy and his mother, Grace Delaney Santos. Monique and Rose would each receive ten percent. Mr. Carmody of the Longshoreman’s Union would serve as executor. He wrote down the combination to the wall safe. Then he signed the note and sealed it in an envelope, which he marked Just In Case. Monique would know where to put it.
He took a deep breath, exhaled, and opened the door to the waiting area.
“Who’s first?”
He was ready to vanish into their pain and not his own. The headache disappeared.
At ten-thirty, with no patients waiting and the room disinfected, Rose and Carlito came in. She was carrying a tray with a sandwich of prosciutto and mozzarella, and a glass of water. She seemed to know that there would be no more patients for a while. Carlito went to Delaney’s leather bag.
“Ga’paw’s bag,” he said.
Rose placed the tray on Delaney’s desk and said, “Eat something. You look terrible.”
“No, I feel —”
“No back talk. Eat.”
Carlito leaned an elbow on his thigh, and Delaney began to eat. Suddenly he was ravenously hungry. He gave the boy a crackling crust and he munched away.
“Pan bueno.”
Rose said: “In English.”
“Bread good.”
Was that his first adjective?
“The radio says good weather’s on the way,” Rose said. “Maybe two more days.”
“I hope so. The sidewalk’s like glass.”
“Two more days, you use the bicycle.”
“Pray for it, Rose.”
“I don’t pray, but it’s gotta come. You gotta get sun. You don’t have any color. You’re gonna get sick. You, the dottore!” Then suddenly: “Carlito, don’t eat your gran’father’s sandwich.”
“Samich.”
They both laughed. Then Rose turned to Delaney.
“What are you worry about?” she said.
“The usual.”
“Well, stop,” she said. Then to the boy: “Come on, boy.”
She took the tray and the plate with its crumbs and started for the door. She left the water.
“Rose?”
“Yeah?”
“That was the best damned sandwich I’ve had since I came home from the war.”
She blushed slightly, then waved a dismissing hand at him.
“Baloney.”
“No,” Delaney said, and smiled. “Prosciut’.”
“Puh-shoot,” the boy said.
Around noon, when the last morning patient was gone, Delaney was still for a while and thought about Frankie Botts and how stupid it would be to die. Then he took a breath, exhaled slowly, lifted the envelope, and stepped into Monique’s area. He handed it to her. “Just in case?” she said. He nodded. She told him that Rose had gone shopping with the boy, where various people would be watching.
“I have to go see a guy on Bleecker Street. Tell Rose I’ll skip lunch.”
“How long’ll you be?”
“Two hours, most.”
She looked at the schedule of house calls and the stack of bills. Delaney saw from the clock that it was twelve twenty-five.
“But if I’m not back by three, call Danny Shapiro, the detective, and Knocko Carmody. Tell them I went to Club 65. They’ll know what to do.”
She jotted a note on a pad. Then her eyes narrowed. “What’s this all about?”
“I can’t tell you till I get back.”
He was donning his hat, scarf, and coat. She lifted the envelope again.
“Just in case? I don’t like this even a little bit.”
“Just in case I get hit by a car,” he said, and forced a smile. “Just in case a flowerpot falls off a roof. Just in case a woman aims a gun at her husband and hits me. This is New York, Monique.”
She started to say something, but he was gone, clanging the gate behind him.
He walked south and east, shivering on the corners when he stopped to let traffic pass. If it was thirteen degrees this morning, it must be twenty by now. The glaze of ice was melting in the noon sun, and as he walked more quickly, the movement warmed him. He was walking the long way, refusing train, trolley, or taxi, and he knew the true reason was fear. He was delaying his arrival at Club 65, like a patient facing surgery. Alone, he could feel his own trembling uncertainty. At Club 65 they might, after all, kill him. And he would be cursed as a goddamned fool.
On his walk the Depression was everywhere. Even on Broadway. Huge TO LET signs were taped inside the windows of abandoned stores. At every corner men in army greatcoats sold apples. When they first started to appear, three years earlier, all with VETERAN signs displayed in their racks, there were many photographs of them in the Daily News. Not anymore. Now they were almost as common as lampposts. He gave one hollow-eyed man a quarter and left the apples. “This,” he explained, “is from Sergeant Corso.” The man grunted something and stood there against the wall, out of the wind. Down the street, Delaney saw a woman, sagging with abandonment, trudging with two children, her gloveless hand outstretched. Her hair was wild and dirty. Her shoes flopped and she wore no socks. He gave her a dollar, and she looked astonished and burst into tears.
He turned east at West Third Street and saw more than a dozen grizzled men in
a lot huddled around a fire in a battered garbage can, one of them roasting a potato on a stick. Maybe a baked or roasted potato would sop up the acids in his churning stomach. The lot was piled with anonymous rubble, strewn garbage, splintered timber, a dead dog picked apart by rats. The far wall was scorched by an old fire. One man took a swig from a wine bottle and passed it on. A half-block away he saw a line of men waiting for entrance to a government building. Most wore dirty overcoats, shirts with curling collars, neckties, old fedoras, as if trying to retain a lost respectability. Scattered among them were men with caps, union buttons, heavy boots. None talked, silenced by humiliation. A few read the meager listing of want ads in the Times or the Herald-Tribune or the World. Come home and paint this, Grace. Come home. And then he realized something large: He didn’t really want her to come home. He wanted to be with the boy. He wanted to do what he was about to do, and live. And then he would make certain that the boy would live too.
The wind blew harder when he reached Bleecker Street. Up ahead he saw his destination. He shuddered in the wind.
Club 65 was a corner saloon, older than the century, with a triangular cement step at the main entrance. A side door opened into the back room, where long ago men could bring women. Once before the war, he’d even taken Molly here. Then it was called the Fenian Cove, and on Friday and Saturday nights they played the old music from Ireland. Not the Tin Pan Alley stuff of the Rialto on Fourteenth Street, with its sentimental delusions, its cheap stage-Irish jokes, but music made before anyone on the island spoke English. It was all flutes and drums and fiddles and pipes, and Molly loved it. Listen, she said, it’s Smetana. Her face amazed. And he didn’t know anything about Smetana, and she explained the way he used folk melodies from Czech villages in his music, and she was sure those villages had once been Celtic. “Just listen, James.” A year later she took him to a concert of Smetana and said: Do you remember? The Fenian Cove? He didn’t really remember clearly what was played there, but said of Smetana, Yes, I hear it, I hear Ireland.
Now he hesitated. Thinking: I don’t need to do this. I can leave it for the police. For Danny Shapiro. For Jackie Norris. Leave it. Leave it. And then walked in as abruptly as he used to dive into the North River as a boy.
The bar was bright from the light of the street and was still laid out the way it had been in the years of Fenians and rumrunners. But there were far fewer drinkers now. Propped on stools at the bar, each forming a little triangle with one leg on the floor for balance, three men whispered inaudibly, as if their volume had been reduced by the sudden presence of a stranger. Another man was at the far end of the bar, near the window, hands in his pockets, gazing at the street. They all wore the gangster uniform: pearl-gray hat, dark unbuttoned overcoat, polished black shoes. The clothes said that not one of them was about to go to work, ever. As in memory, a passageway led to the back room. Delaney stepped to the bar. The bartender was a huge suety man with thinning hair and a pug’s mashed nose. Delaney remembered Packy Hanratty’s saying of such a face, If he could fight, he wouldn’t have that nose. The bartender spread his large hands on the bar and leaned forward.
“Need directions?” he said.
“Just a beer,” Delaney said, and laid a dollar on the bar. The man eased over to the tap and pulled a lager. He placed it in front of Delaney and lifted the dollar. He rang up ten cents on the register, brought the change back to him, and stared at Delaney.
“Is Frankie Botts around?” Delaney said.
“Who?”
“Frankie Botts.”
“I don’t know no Frankie Botts.”
“Frankie Botticelli. Tell him Dr. Delaney is here. He should be expecting me.”
The bartender stared harder at Delaney, then gestured with his head to one of the three men. They’d heard everything that was said. One of them slipped off his stool and strolled into the back room. He was back quickly, looking surprised.
“Hands up,” he said.
Delaney raised his hands and was patted down.
“Back there,” the man said.
Delaney left a nickel tip and carried the beer through the passageway. A window opened into a tiny kitchen, but there was no cook and no sign of food. In the corner of the large back room, four men were playing cards. There were booths along one wall, as in the old days, and about six tables, but nobody else except the card players. Delaney walked to them, taking off his hat, holding it in his bad right hand.
“Give me a minute, Doc,” said the man who must have been Frankie Botts. “I wanna finish takin’ these bastards’ money.”
The other players looked up in an amused way, and the game continued. The back room was warmer, radiators knocking with steam heat. The side door was closed. Each player had a pack of cigarettes in front of him: two Lucky Strikes, one Chesterfield, one Old Gold. They used a common ashtray. Three of the men each had a shot glass in hand, but Frankie Botts sipped from a cup of black American coffee, a distinction that made him look more sinister.
Delaney moved away from the table, sipping from his beer. Club 65 was the same kind of place where Eddie Corso had been shot on New Year’s morning. The Good Men Club was Eddie’s joint. Club 65 belonged to Frankie Botts. Neighborhood saloons that functioned as private clubs. All strangers were discouraged. There were framed photographs of prizefighters on one wall. Dempsey, of course, Mickey Walker, Tony Canzoneri, Jimmy McLarnin, others whose names he used to know, now vanished from memory. A framed cover of the Police Gazette showed Gene Tunney in his prime. One larger one was signed by Jimmy Braddock, who must have known the place well. The ballplayers were there too. Ruth and Gehrig and Crosetti. And high in the corner was Matty. From before the war, before Prohibition, before the Depression. Browning now, and dim. Christy Mathewson himself. And there were other photographs: soldiers in uniformed rows, all from the AEF, and he moved closer and peered at them. Looking for familiar faces, but seeing none. Two neighborhoods away from the North River, and the living and the dead were strangers. Every saloon south of Thirty-fourth Street used the same decorations.
Delaney turned at the sound of groans and saw that the game was over. Frankie Botts swept up the pot. He was a lean man in his early forties, elegantly dressed, hair slicked back like George Raft. His shirt was, as usual for a big-shot gangster, white on white, with linen threads in diamond patterns adding luxury to a cotton base. And as usual, he was wearing a pinkie ring. His eyes were black under trimmed brows. He remained seated while the others stood up and moved to the far side of the room, where they took a table out of earshot.
“Sit down,” Botts said.
Delaney sat down, placed his beer beside him. It was going flat.
“You got some pair of balls, coming here,” Botts said, his mouth a slit.
“Mr. Botticelli, I never did anything to you.”
“Yeah? On the street, I hear you pissed off some people. On the street, I hear you saved Eddie Corso’s miserable fuckin’ life.”
“He saved mine. Twice. In France.”
Botts stared at him. His mouth got tighter.
“I don’t want to hear no war stories.”
Delaney shrugged. “Fine with me.”
Botts moved a spoon through his coffee, sipped, then yelled across the room: “Charlie, I need a fresh coffee.”
The one named Charlie hurried into the passage to the bar. Botts stared at Delaney.
“You was in France?”
“Yes.”
“My brother Carmine was killed in France. That’s him over there.”
He turned to the wall and pointed at a photo of a handsome young man. He seemed to have been photographed by the same cameraman who had pointed his lens at the Fischetti boy now on the wall of Angela’s restaurant. He remembered Packy Hanratty’s old advice: Don’t punch with a puncher. Box him.
“Where was he killed?” Delaney said politely.
“Château-Thierry.”
“That was a horror. What outfit?”
“The Sixty-ninth
. What else? He was there three days and bang! Good-bye, Carmine. He was just nineteen. A fuckin’ waste.” He paused. “They didn’t just kill Carmine. They killed my mother too. She ain’t been right ever since.”
Delaney sighed, said: “I’m sorry for your trouble.” The Irish cliché. Then added: “Eddie Corso was shot too. Twice.”
“Yeah, but the prick lived.”
“That wasn’t Eddie’s fault. The Germans did their best.”
There was color now on the face of Frankie Botts. “Then, New Year’s Day, you save him, again.” His eyes sunk beneath his brows. They took on a metallic sheen. “And you cause nothing but trouble for me.”
“Mr. Botticelli, I’m a doctor. It’s what I do. I’d do it for you, too.”
“Bullshit.”
“Try me sometime. You know where I live. Unfortunately.”
Charlie came in with a cup of coffee and placed it in front of Botts. His voice and manner were apologetic.
“Sorry, boss. Had to make a fresh pot . . .”
Frankie Botts waved him away. Without looking at Delaney, he sipped from the hot coffee, laid down the cup. The pinkie ring flashed.
Then looking up, the eyes still lurking below the brows, his body coiled as if to strike, he said: “So whatta you want from me?”
Delaney cleared his throat. “Tell your man Gyp Pavese to move to Minnesota,” he said. “He calls my house last night, two in the morning. He repeats a threat he made the other night. He’s a clown, a knife artist, a gunsel, a prime jerk, and you must know it. But he’s doing his act in your name.”