Toughs Read online

  Toughs

  Also by Ed Falco

  NOVELS:

  The Family Corleone

  Saint John of the Five Boroughs

  Wolf Point

  Winter in Florida

  A Dream with Demons

  STORIES:

  Burning Man

  Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha:

  New and Selected Stories

  Acid

  Plato at Scratch Daniels

  In the Park of Culture

  PLAYS:

  The Center

  Possum Dreams

  The Pact

  Radon

  Sabbath Night in the Church of the Piranha

  Toughs

  Ed Falco

  Copyright

  Unbridled Books

  This is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places and incidents are either the

  product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

  to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events,

  or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Unbridled Books

  Copyright © 2014 by Edward Falco

  First paperback edition, 2014

  Unbridled Books trade paperback ISBN 978-1-60953-111-9

  All rights reserved. This book, or parts thereof,

  may not be reproduced in any form

  without permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Falco, Edward, author.

  Toughs / Edward Falco.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-1-60953-111-9 (paperback)

  1. Gangsters--Fiction. 2. Criminals--Fiction. 3. New York (N.Y.)--20th

  century--Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3556.A367T68 2014

  813'.54--dc23

  2014003503

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Book Design by SH • CV

  First Printing

  For Judy

  Summer

  · 1931 ·

  Tuesday July 28, 1931

  6:28 p.m.

  A New York City summer evening and Loretto Jones looked sharp in a dark blue and white pinstriped double breasted suit as he waited on the corner of East 107th Street, between 2nd and 3rd: Loretto, the house where the Blessed Virgin was born and where she ascended into heaven, a name pinned on him by the nuns at Mount Loretto Orphanage on Staten Island where he had been abandoned sometime before dawn twenty-one years earlier to the day, July 28, 1910. Sister Mary Catherine Randolph liked to say she'd found him newborn, wrinkled and red as a peach, wrapped in swaddling and left in a cardboard box inside the door to the chapel, where Sister Aloise in long black habit tripped over him and yelped in the predawn light.

  Loretto on 107th Street had already sweat through his undershirt, staining the armpits of a white dress shirt he'd bought at Saks for eight bucks the day before, an expensive birthday present to himself. He loosened his tie, unbuttoned the collar, and pulled down the brim of his fedora to keep the sun out of his eyes. He was waiting for Dominic Caporinno to pick him up in his battered 1926 Packard, Dom's pride and his heartache, a once fine automobile with leather interior and dark green carpeting that had been used hard ferrying whiskey out of Canada and now ran or didn't according to its own whims. It was almost 6:30. The temperature midafternoon was 94, making it the hottest day of the year.

  Loretto leaned against a lamppost as kids swarmed over the streets escaping the heat of cold-water flats. In this Italian neighborhood of red brick and dull khaki run-down five-story tenements laced with a black stitch work of fire escape railings and ladders, children shouted and called to each other in English while their mothers and fathers, their aunts and uncles and grandparents sitting on stoops, congregating in doorways, leaning out of windows or over fire escapes, spoke among themselves in Italian. Up the block, a few of the older kids had just opened a johnny pump. One boy waved a black monkey wrench in triumph while another straddled the pump from behind and used a soup can to send a spray of glistening water across the street and onto the plate glass window of Ettore's Drogheria. Shirtless boys ran through the spray and a teenage girl pulled away from a younger girl trying to drag her into the bubbling white cascade of water.

  Though Loretto had grown up among Italians, could speak the language a little himself and make out the gist of a conversation, his own ethnic heritage was indeterminate. By the time he was thirteen, the Jews, the Italians, the Irish, and the Poles had all claimed him. His skin was neither the olive dark hue typical of Italians nor the fair pale of the Irish. In his dark blue eyes every ethnic population saw its most handsome relatives and ancestors. At five eleven he wasn't too tall or too short for any ethnicity, though the Irish argued he was too tall to be Italian.

  Loretto glanced down the avenue, over the throngs of kids running the streets. He was looking for Dom and his beloved Packard but noticed instead a pale green sedan cruising slowly toward him, hugging the center line as if looking for something or someone on the left side of the street. Loretto scanned the sidewalk and spotted Richie Cabo and two of his torpedoes outside his club, a few feet from where Frank Scaletta, a neighborhood kid, had set up a lemonade stand and was selling drinks for a penny to a bunch of little girls crowded around him. Approaching Frankie, a girl of about ten or twelve in an ill-fitting yellow sundress maneuvered a black baby carriage along the crowded sidewalk. Loretto took a step back and positioned himself behind the lamppost. Across the street, Richie Cabo's men went back into the club, apparently having forgotten something. Cabo worked for Dutch Schultz now. He drove around in a bulletproof Pierce Arrow. Once his men were out of sight, he looked up and down the street, and Loretto saw in his eyes the moment when he spotted the sedan rolling toward him. His short, heavy body locked up still as a monument while he watched the faded green sedan roll to a stop in front of his club. A heartbeat later, under a downpour of gunfre, he dove into a doorway and rolled out of sight.

  In the confusion of the instant when the shooting started, the shouting kids, the cacophony of voices, came to a halt. The only sounds were the rush of water from the johnny pump and the loud clatter of gunfire as the commotion drew all eyes toward the green sedan and Richie Cabo's club, where the crudely made wooden lemonade stand splintered and collapsed to the sidewalk. A pitcher of water and bright yellow lemons shattered and spilled to the curb. Once the neighborhood grasped what was happening, the screaming and shouting from windows and the street and fire escapes and doorways almost drowned out the shooting. The girl in the yellow dress pushing the baby carriage howled and pulled a bloody infant out of the pram as she herself was shot and knocked sideways. Still, she held the infant and ran for a doorway, calling to her aunt. A boy of seven or eight lay bleeding on the sidewalk, his head on the blue slate curb. An even younger boy, maybe four or five years old, lay on his belly in the street. A woman ran to the older boy and cradled him in her arms. The younger boy in the street lay by himself trailing a wide stain of blood.

  When the gunfire stopped and the green sedan started up the avenue again, still rolling slowly, only a few miles per hour, Loretto followed along on the sidewalk, trotting and then sprinting as he got a look at the driver. He recognized Frank Guarracie's pinched face and understood that it had to be Vince in the back seat doing the shooting. He couldn't see Vince's face. The guy had a fedora pulled down almost to his nose, and he was a head taller than anyone else in the car—But if Frank was driving, who else could it be but Vince? The mug alongside Frank in the front seat was probably Patsy DiNapoli. His clothes were rumpled, he wasn't wearing a tie, and his hat sat on his head like a shapeless lump—and that kind of slovenliness was typical of Patsy. He couldn't get a good look at the two mugs in the back seat with Vince, but he'd guess Tuffy an
d Mike. They'd both been running with Vince since they were kids.

  Loretto stopped when Frank turned and saw him. Everyone else in the car was looking the other way, at the two boys on the street and the howling girl who had come out of a storefront holding the blood-soaked baby in her arms once the gunfire stopped and the sedan pulled away. Only Frank, bareheaded, driving slowly as a sightseer, looked the other way, across the street, and saw Loretto peering back at him. In Frank's eyes Loretto read a momentary confusion. A second later, Frank turned away, his narrow face once again an impenetrable mask of nonchalance, as if the gates of hell might swing open and unleash a monster and he would be neither surprised nor bothered.

  By the time the sedan turned left on 7th Avenue and disappeared from sight, the wounded kids were surrounded by adults attending to them. The air was thick with the stink of cordite. The commotion of voices was deafening. Loretto found himself, as if he had been transported there magically, kneeling alongside a boy who was screeching in pain, issuing a high-pitched wailing that was a mix of terror and indignation as he tried to grab his leg and was restrained by a stout woman who was probably not related to him, given how calmly she was going about her business. Loretto helped the woman remove the boy's shoes and pants before he took off his own shirt and tried to rip it into strips for bandages. When he couldn't get a tear started, he pulled a stiletto from his pocket, snapped it open, and stabbed the white fabric. At the sight of the knife, the woman paused and then yanked the strips away from him. She took his hand roughly, pressed it to the bloody hole in the boy's leg, and shifted her body so that she was practically sitting on the howling child's chest as she wrapped and tied the bandages. When she was done she spit a few sentences at Loretto in Italian. He made out attraverso and vivra and took her to be saying that the bullet had gone clean through the child's leg and that he'd live, which Loretto had been able to see for himself.

  "Good," Loretto said, meaning he was glad the child would live.

  The woman glanced at him with a look of motherly disdain, as if he were a hopeless child, and then waved her hand over her head and shouted, "Lui è qui!" at the sight of a scrawny young woman approaching them slowly as if wading through snow. "Su' madre," the stout woman whispered and then lifted the weeping child in her arms and carried him to his mother, who watched speechless, her face white, her arms quivering. Others had joined them at this point, including a crowd of children. They followed the woman carrying the child to his mother and left Loretto alone with the sound of sirens wailing closer and then the first of a dozen green and white squad cars blocking both ends of the avenue and every intersection.

  Loretto picked up his jacket and tie from the street. He noticed that the tie was bloodstained, and he crumpled it up and stuck it in the jacket pocket. Then he saw that the jacket was also speckled with blood. He folded the ruined jacket over his arm. Across the street Richie Cabo and his boys were watching him. He met Cabo's eyes and then looked himself over and realized he was covered in blood—his undershirt, his slacks, his hands and arms and shoes. He hadn't realized how badly the child had been bleeding, though he did remember blood squirting out of the hole in the kid's leg when he first pressed his bare hands to the wound.

  Cabo and his men stepped out into the street and started for Loretto but were intercepted by a pair of uniforms who separated each of the men, moved them apart, and began asking questions. As cops hustled him back to a storefront, Cabo's eyes lingered on Loretto. Another copper, follow ing Richie Cabo's gaze, approached Loretto warily, his hand resting on the butt of his gun.

  "And what would you be doing here?" The officer was burly and tall with a red face and a mop of dark hair pushing out from under a blue saucer cap. The armpits of his blue jacket were stained black with sweat.

  "Non parl' inglese," Loretto answered and then followed with several sentences of gibberish in rapid-fire Italian.

  "Stop the malarkey, Loretto," the cop said. "I remember you from when you were running away from the nuns. I'm asking again: What would you be doing here?"

  "I live here," Loretto said. He pointed up the avenue. "Over there a few blocks."

  "Would you have a driver's license on you?"

  Loretto took his license from his wallet and handed it over.

  The cop checked the address, looked up the block, and handed it back to him. "Can you tell me what you saw, then?" He laid a hand on Loretto's shoulder, suddenly friendly.

  "Didn't see nothin'. I heard the shootin' and then . . ." Loretto pointed to the blood on the street where he had helped with the wounded child.

  The cop looked to the blood and then back to Loretto. "And did you have anything to do with this?"

  "Nah," Loretto said. "What would I have to do with a thing like this?"

  "Is that so? Well, Richie Cabo seems interested."

  "In me? I don't know what about."

  The cop put his hands on his hips and stood his ground. Behind him a pair of ambulances were moving slowly along the street.

  "Look," Loretto said. He gestured to his bloody clothes. "Can I go? I'd like to get washed up."

  "How'd you get so much blood all over you?"

  "Helped bandage one of the kids."

  The officer glanced at the remaining tatters of Loretto's shirt in the street. "All right," he said. "Go on. Get out of here."

  Loretto asked, "Are they going to be all right? The kids?"

  The cop seemed mystifed by the stupidity of the question. He walked away without answering.

  On the sidewalk, still more cops were busy erecting barricades to keep the growing crowd out of the street. Reporters were showing up, press cards sticking out of their hatbands. Loretto's bloody clothes drew stares, and he wanted to get back to his apartment and take a bath. He'd only managed a couple of steps when Dom swooped down on him, linked arms, and pulled him away.

  Across the street, in front of the club, Richie Cabo's torpedoes were watching them. The cops had just finished questioning Cabo, and he was moving slowly toward his club while he took in the crowd in the street and on the opposite sidewalk. When he reached his boys, they pointed toward Loretto, and Richie joined them in staring across the avenue.

  "V'fancul'!" Dominic said. "What the hell happened?" He hurried up the block, away from Cabo.

  "Slow down," Loretto said. "Where we going?"

  "Getting the hell out of here." Dom pulled him along the sidewalk.

  "Wait, wait. Aspett'!" Across the street, a commotion caught first Loretto's attention and then Dom's. An old woman, frail and dressed in black, stood in a red doorway with a child limp in her arms. She seemed to be speaking, though neither Dom nor Loretto could make out what she was saying. In another moment she was surrounded, the child was taken from her, and the single word morto—dead—made its way through the crowd, traveling outward from the old woman in every direction and seemingly all at once. Frankie Scaletta, the kid whose lemonade stand had been shot up, pushed his way past a pair of coppers and crossed the street hurriedly with his head down.

  Loretto caught the kid's arm. "What happened over there, Frankie?"

  The kid wiped tears from his face with a furious swipe of his hand. He looked blankly at Loretto before he recognized him and his lips twisted into a sneer. "Your pal Coll killed a bunch of little kids. What do you think happened?"

  Dominic slapped the kid across the face, took him by the collar, and pulled him close. "Who do you think you're talking to, you little snot?"

  "I ain't said nothin'," Frankie answered, and then he was crying again, the tears glistening on his cheeks.

  "Let him go." Loretto found a couple of dollar bills in his wallet and stuffed them in Frankie's pocket. "I didn't have anything to do with this. Neither did Dom."

  Frankie took several steps back until he felt he was safely out of reach. "Yeah, well, the Mick's still your friend, isn't he?" He took the bills from his pocket, threw them on the street, and sprinted away.

  Dom picked up the bills. "We're att
racting attention," he said, and again he linked arms with Loretto and guided him down the street. He was a full head shorter than Loretto and he pulled him along like a tugboat. A block later, crowds were thinning out. "The kid's right, isn't he? This was Irish."

  Loretto nodded.

  "For Christ's sake," he said, "now he's gone and done it."

  Loretto's thoughts were caught up with the stout woman who had grabbed his hand and pushed it over the kid's wound, with the cop who had questioned him, and with the old woman dressed in black with a child in her arms. In his head he heard the word morto flying out in a whisper from the old woman and through the crowd.

  "Some birthday present," Dom said.

  Loretto looked at Dom in a way that made it clear he didn't know what he meant.

  Dom added, "Some birthday present Vince gave you."

  "Sure," Loretto said once he remembered it was his birthday. They were nearing the faded red brick tenement building where he'd shared a cold-water flat with Dominic for the past year, since they'd both turned twenty. Loretto had moved out of a single cramped room behind the bakery where he'd started working at sixteen. He'd run away from Mount Loretto every chance he'd got since he'd turned twelve, and at sixteen they'd given up on him. Sister Mary Catherine found him a job at the bakery and he'd worked there a couple of years before Dominic's uncle Gaspar took him on. Dominic had moved out of Gaspar's apartment, where he'd lived since he was an infant. His mother had died of pneumonia soon after he was born. A year later his father had been beaten to death. The way the story went, he'd said something fresh to a girl on a trolley and the next day he'd been found on the street outside his home with his head bashed in.