Toughs Page 42

  When Loretto saw Mike, they talked about the '30s as if they were yesterday. Dutch killed Bo in '35, put him in a cement kimono, as he used to call it, and dropped him in the East River because he thought he was conspiring with Luciano. Luciano had Dutch killed a month later because Dutch was threatening to assassinate Thomas Dewey, even after the Combine had ruled against it. Madden left town in '35 when he realized no Irishman could stay on top in New York, not with Luciano running things. He retired to someplace in Arkansas, where he lived to be an old man, into his seventies. In '39, Big Frenchy died. Mike never got the whole story on that, but he'd heard it was natural causes. Luciano got deported after the war, though Mike said he was still running things until he died of a heart attack in Naples. Richie Cabo, he'd heard, died of cancer in his sixties. Every visit, they'd talk about the old days, Mike doing most of the talking, Loretto listening and adding something now and then. Most of all, they talked about Vince. In their conversations, they brought him back to life: what he looked like, how he acted, the things he'd said—all that energy, all that power, his good looks and charm, his ferceness and his rages. The only thing they didn't talk about was the night he was killed. That they left alone.

  "Loretto!" Gina opened the screen door, gave Loretto a look, and closed it again when one of the grandchildren crashed into her legs. With the children and the years, she had gained more and more weight, till now, put her in a black dress and she'd look exactly like her mother, like Mama Baronti, long gone and still missed by everyone who'd known her. When the children asked about the scar on her chin, which had grown less noticeable as her face grew heavier, she told them she had tripped and fallen down a concrete stoop in the city.

  Loretto took off his hat and ran his fingers through what was left of his hair. He retrieved the Times from the lounge, glanced again at the article on gossip columnists, and recalled the piece Winchell had published predicting Vince's murder only hours before it had actually happened. He'd called him "Master Coll," and he'd written about the meeting at the Forest Hotel. He'd gotten in hot water for that and had to go before a grand jury. They wanted to know where he got his information, and then the Combine didn't like it either, and for a while it appeared Winchell wouldn't be long for this world—but he'd weaseled out of it somehow. Loretto shook his head at that, at a weasel like Walter Winchell living a long and prosperous life and Vince dead at twenty-three. Then the thought of Winchell's article predicting Vince's murder led, as so many things so often did, back to the image of Vince crumpled up in that phone booth, his bloody face against the glass, his hair streaked with blood; and that memory led to the memory of Jimmy Brennan screaming into Vince's hand as Loretto's knife sliced open his belly; and when Loretto blinked those images away, others surfaced to replace them: Gaspar and Dominic, the two of them looking up at him out of a hole in the ground; Tuffy and Frank hooded and burning in the electric chair; Freddie spilled over the couch with a bullet in the back of his head; Patsy with half his face blown away, sprawled on top of Maria, her back blood-soaked around a maze of bullet wounds; the whole bloody swirl of pictures and memories rising up and overpowering him, knocking him back into a stunned silence.

  Overhead, the clouds were fat and white. They tumbled in slow motion across a blue sky. He watched them and the thought came to him, as it had many times before, that the clouds and the sky were watching him rather than the other way around, as if something he didn't know and couldn't understand was watching, watching everyone, watching and waiting. It was a feeling more than a thought, and it brought him back to the night he'd seen that comet streak across the sky when he was in Albany—which was another image that never faded, the brightness of that blue streak, the way it lit up the night sky.

  "Loretto! Mannagg'!" Gina yelled to him through the screen door, and this time he nodded and joined her.

  Inside, the whole brood was waiting, all his sons and daughters and most of their children. The adults and the older children sat at two tables pulled together across the length of the dining room. The younger children had their own space in the kitchen. Loretto took his seat at the head of the dining room table, and the house went quiet, everyone waiting for him to start the meal. Trays of lasagna, plates of meats, and bowls of sauce waited. Every Sunday, Gina and the women made the meal while, in a new twist, the men helped put out the dishes and care for the children.

  Loretto looked over his family. On bad days, he'd sometimes see the face of the Vengelli boy in one of his grandchildren or the face of Vince or Freddie in one of his sons. But this was not a bad day. This day, he saw his family gathered in his home. He started the Sunday meal as he always did, as was their tradition. With all the children and grandchildren waiting to dig in to their food, he lifted his wineglass. "Eat," he said. "Eat and be grateful."

  AUTHORS AFTERWORD

  Toughs is a novel built around the following series of historical events.

  July 28, 1931. The gun battle on 107th Street in New York, where several children were shot. One of the children, a five-year-old, died from his wounds. Twenty-three-year-old Vince Coll was the assumed shooter. The city's newspapers tagged him "Mad Dog Coll."

  September 10, 1931. The murder of Salvatore Maranzano.

  October 3, 1931. The arrest of Vince Coll and his gang in New York City.

  December 16–December 28, 1931. The trial of Vince Coll on murder charges stemming from the July 28 shootout.

  December 18, 1931. The murder of Jack "Legs" Diamond.

  January 15, 1932. A meeting of gangsters from all over the country to deal with Vincent Coll. The meeting was convened by Owen Madden and held at the Forest Hotel in New York.

  January 31, 1932. The murder and wounding of several Coll associates in a Bronx apartment.

  Febuary 8, 1932. The murder of Vince Coll.

  Though based on these events and the characters involved in them, Toughs is a work of fiction. The particulars of the events, including the people involved, are entirely imagined. I have used history as a touchstone for the novel. Gangsters don't leave accurate records of their lives, and, regardless, attempting to present an accurate picture of anyone's life is the work of a journalist or a biographer. As a novelist, I've satisfed myself with presenting these historical figures as the people I imagined them to be in the context of the story I created. I've changed the names of many of the secondary and minor players in the Vince Coll story and kept the names of the most famous figures.

  The difficult-to-find Mad Dog Coll: An Irish Gangster, by Breandán Delap, is to my knowledge the only biography of Vince Coll, and I relied on it heavily in the writing of T oughs. I would like to express my appreciation to the author. I also researched newspapers and magazines from the era, and of course I scoured the always useful though wildly unreliable Internet.

  As always, I'd like to thank my family and my writing community: friends, fellow writers, students, teachers, and readers.