Mile High (5 page)

“Perfectly all right,” Don Carmelo assured him.

“And I'll tell you this. Now that I got it all organized it sounds easy as pie, but it took one helluva lot of doin' all the same.”

“What about my three button men?”

“Oh, them. They're sprung by now. They let them out at five-thirty. Insufficient evidence.”

Paddy went to Atlantic City for the sea air and stayed there until “brilliant police work” apprehended the killers of the two policemen after a running gun battle in Prospect Park that resulted in the killing of one of the men, Gaspare Minasola, forty-nine. His companions confessed to the killing of the two officers and the child and would be brought to trial without delay. The trial was delayed, as it turned out, for twenty-two months, but the men were ultimately sentenced to two and a half years in the state prison with time off for good behavior.

Paddy was alone in his Oliver Street house one evening about a month later, listening to “County Kerry Airs” sung by Dame Elizabeth Blue on the Gramophone when Don Salvatore Purpi came to call. Out of deference to his visitor's nationality as well as his sanity Paddy turned the music machine off. He found a bottle of red wine given him by the Carmelite nuns of New Jersey and they sat down to talk.

It developed that, first of all, Don Salvatore had come representing all Sicilians in New York to thank Paddy for what he had done for them and to get an idea of just what it was going to cost for his indispensable services. Paddy shrugged it off. He didn't want anything, he said. That seemed to startle, even frighten Purpi, who began to talk rapidly about how he was an old man who had seen much of life and that he knew it was not right for anyone to be allowed to serve yet refuse money, because the world could not get on that way. If a man worked, if a man delivered just as he had said he would, then it would be unworthy of everyone concerned if that man did not receive his just due—and besides, every transaction should be separate.

Paddy took his time. “You know me, Sal. I'll take a little envelope if it'll make you and the boys feel better. It'll only go to the nuns annyhow. But—there is somethin' else. Somethin' close to me heart—”

“Name it. You have only to say it, Paddy, because we know you are a fair man.”

“Well, you'll find this as hard to believe as annything you've ever heard, but I'm a shy man when it comes to women. For one thing—I mean, it's the God's truth, ain't it?—I'm not a young man. I mean, I'm first to say that. But just the same, Sal, there's this girl I want to marry, and, well, she's younger an' all. If you know what I mean.”

“Lemme repeat. We must be sure. You say you wanna get married?”

Paddy nodded earnestly.

“I see. Good luck. God bless you. And keepa you.”

“It's not an ordinary situation, you see. I never met the girl. Although I seen her, of course. But she's never seen me and doesn't know I'm on God's earth, if you want the truth of it.”

“I see,” Don Salvatore said sagely, completely baffled.

“But she's an old-country girl, a Sicilian girl, and I thought—I mean, after all, the girls do what their fathers want, don't they?”

“It depends.”

“But if Carmelo and you was to go to the father—”

“Aaaaah!”

“I give it a lotta thought. I mean, it could be a good thing all around for a man to have his daughter marry me, if you know what I mean, an' I think you do.”

“It will be an honor, Paddy. What is the father's name?”

“You know—the Correntes. Joe Corrente. The olive-oil fella. His daughter Maria is the one.”

The
capo mafioso
, Carmelo Lumia, and his
consigliere
, Salvatore Purpi, called at the Corrente offices. The air sang with wonderful smells:
crescenz
and
parmigiano, quartirolo
and
teleggio
. As they were shown into Corrente's room he became very pale: He knew well who they were.

They were two men of respect. They showed no suggestion of either violence or power. They entered the room humbly, with deference, two elderly men who were unpretentiously dressed and very respectful. They showed their awareness of his place in the world, of his dignity and of the marks of his success. Their manner conveyed that what they wished most was to be of any large or small service to him. It filled him with dread. He leaped to his feet upon short, trembling legs and said in the dialect of northwestern Sicily, “Good day. Good day. You honor me by coming. Please seat yourselves and tell me how I may make you in any way more comfortable.” The two men sat down and faced Corrente across his desk. Don Carmelo's voice was mellifluent and admiring. “We are here to express the gratitude and admiration for the way you organized the Italian community of Brooklyn at the time of the recent sadnesses.”

“Thank you. I was happy to work on that. Judge Gant came to me and he said it would be a good thing because of what happened last month in New Orleans when the Matrangas and the Provenzanos had the disagreement. Over the docks.” He knew he must sound as though he were babbling, but he didn't mind because these two men undoubtedly thought all people talked like that.

“Then you know Judge Gant. Do you know Patrick J. West?”

“I have met him. At the ball each year. I certainly know who he is. A very important man.”

“Judge Gant is a boss, of course,” Don Carmelo reminded gently. “But Patrick J. West is a very big boss.”

“I know that,” Corrente said. “I am sure of that.”

“And he is a friend,” Purpi said with emphasis. “He is a friend of the friends.”

Corrente began to sweat lightly. He was a short round man with a pencil-line mustache, something terribly
démodé
, over a soft, uncertain, pink mouth. He had to clear his throat to answer, lest he squeak. “But surely it isn't possible that there is anything
I
can do for Patrick J. West?”

“Yes, there is,” Don Carmelo said.

“There is?”

“I bring honor to you, signore. Patrick J. West wishes to marry your daughter.”

“My daughter?”

“Yes.”

“Which daughter? I have nine daughters.”

“The daughter who is called Maria.”

“Maria?”
Corrente looked at them as though they had either gotten the girl's name wrong or made a terrible mistake. He seemed stunned, incredulous. Slowly he felt his strength returning to himself now that he understood, as a businessman, the nature of their visit.

“The daughter who dances the balleto,” Don Salvatore said.

Corrente wanted to laugh. Happily. With composure and pleasure. He felt positively arrogant with the new power. There was, after all, a sweetness in truth and justice in life. He wanted to laugh until he sobbed and hiccupped. Since his wife had died thirteen years before, his daughter Maria had been the scourge of his life, as she would be of any man's. He could not believe his good fortune. He would be rid of the home-grown harridan in a manner that no one, not even a priest, could find fault with, and by doing so the Fratellanza would have fallen into his debt. And his new, elderly son-in-law was such a power in this city that he wanted to sing when he thought of all the hotels that would be forced to buy his cheeses. He almost felt affection for Maria for making all this possible. Aieee! And now—to
business
!

“My little girl—you would say one of the most beautiful girls you have ever seen. I have shoveled money into her education. She has studied in Rome and in Paris.”

“You lose a daughter, yes,” Don Salvatore said. “But do you not also gain?”

“How? How, signori?” he pleaded to be told. “What compensates for the loss of such a daughter? A daughter who was to have begun a brilliant career in November on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera?”

“Have you been paying a small tax to the little brothers on the docks when you land your imports?”

“Always.”

“Splendid, then,” Don Carmelo said. “As a wedding present to the father of the bride we are going to give you one year free of those little taxes.”

“But you make me appear ungrateful! What am I sacrificing after all, only—”

“Fifteen months,” Don Carmelo said with finality.

“I thank you. But never mind my little business. What of the young man she loves and whom—if she marries—” He bit his tongue for telling such a lie. Maria had never acknowledged the existence of any man. If it were possible to accuse a girl of rape, then her mirror would accuse her.

“Two days after the wedding,” Don Carmelo said, “you will be named a Commendatore of the Order of Saint Maurice and Saint Lazarus by the grateful Kingdom of Italy.”

“Also every Italian-language newspaper in this country will run that news on its front page.”

“It would honor Patrick J. West if I could be knighted before the wedding,” Mr. Corrente suggested.

“Good. That will be done.”

That night Giuseppe Corrente did not knock timidly on his daughter Maria's door, the only private chamber in a house filled with women. He kicked it open. She glared at him. He kicked it shut behind him.

“Are you drunk or something?” she shrilled. “What are you doing in my private, personal room? Have you lost your senses?”

“Maria, have you heard of the Wolf? Carmelo, the Wolf, Lumia?”

“What has that got to do with me?”

“He came to see me today.”

“I don't care who came to see you today. Get out! Everything will be covered with a male stink in here.”

“A man the Fratellanza needs very much, a man they regard very, very highly, a man for whom they would be happy to torture and kill—this man wants you.”

“
Wants
me?” Her long, beautiful hand squeezed her full, firm breast.

“Your body.”

She screamed involuntarily.

“But he wants to marry you. His name, his place, his fortune—all yours. He wants to marry you
in a church
.”

She fainted.

He didn't touch her as she lay on the floor. He sat on the edge of her bed and mopped his underarms with any cloths, such as handkerchiefs, curtains, the pillow slip, hoping his male stink was at its apogee. She stirred at his feet. She picked herself up, tottered to the full-length mirror and touched herself longingly in eight or ten places, perhaps wondering if she could store them in safety and visit them alone. She wheeled on her father. “Why should I be sacrificed to save you?”

“Oh, no, no. You have it wrong. They didn't come to threaten
me
. If Don Carmelo sends men with knives or throwing acid, they will go directly to
you
.”

“Papa! Papa, darling! What did you tell them?”

“I told them you would respond as a Sicilian woman.”

Patrick J. West took Maria Corrente as his bride on December 1, 1887. It was a sudden wedding. Mr. Corrente urged that there be a minimum of delay. It was a quiet wedding, performed at St. Jemma's by Bishop James Fagin Ryan, assisted by Father Passanante, the bride's own confessor. All newspapers reported the event decorously on the society pages. No mention was made of the age of the bride or the groom. Among the wonderful array of wedding presents they received were seven hundred bath towels and sixty-seven color paintings of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Although a honeymoon at Niagara Falls had been announced, the couple proceeded directly from the reception for a few friends at the Patrick J. West Democratic Club to their house in Oliver Street. The bride had fainted several times during the wedding ceremony and at the reception, and in her malaise had tossed the seven-tiered wedding cake at her sisters instead of the bridal bouquet. Only her family and the Mafia knew that the bride met her husband for the first time at the head of the aisle in the church when Mr. Corrente gave her away. The bride spoke only in Sicilian. Her father, always at her side, interpreted for her by saying, “My daughter tells you that she is a Sicilian woman, Your Grace, and that she speaks in the dialect of her country because this is the most meaningful day of her life.” She seemed reluctant to cut the wedding cake at the side of her groom for the benefit of the photographer from
Il Progresso
until Don Carmelo Lumia spoke to her briefly, perhaps explaining what the picture would mean to her father. She became very pale but she agreed with alacrity, although she fainted during the pretty rite.

When bride and groom reached home alone she still had not spoken to him, and other than marrying him, had not acknowledged him from the moment they had met. His anger was mounting like the white smoke of the papal election signal, and in a very short time her disdain caused him to lose his head—or, to be fair, it was the combination of her disdain and his lust—and he clubbed her with his hard, baggy fists, then took her sexually wholly by force. She fought and clawed under him and screamed all through the act. It was his masculine opinion that after this clear show of domination she would come to her senses, because although he was not entirely an experienced man with delicately reared women, he had commanded many a battalion of whores, and he had a firm, if unilateral, belief in what women responded to.

When she became conscious again he went to her side and attempted to soothe her by rubbing her wrists with Irish whiskey, but she fought him off as though he had come to rape her once more, snatching the bottle and striking him with it and slashing his right cheek severely with her nails. The same degrading combination of lust and anger got him so aroused that he raped her again, throwing her to the floor, whisking back her once-immaculate wedding gown to her chin, her new drawers in shreds from the first great encounter, and flinging himself through the air upon her body as though he were a small boy and she were a sled. She rolled to one side, screaming piercingly. He landed with heavy force on the floor and almost knocked himself unconscious, but the inequity of it all kept him alert, and his great hairy hand clamped upon her ankle and drew her slowly under him, pinning her with his elbows, his knees, then his hips with their gross passenger.