PART 35 (7 page)

Sandro laughed. A tall, thin prisoner walked over. From the newspaper photographs Sandro recognized him as Ramon Hernandez, Chaco.

“Hey, hi, what you think, hanh?” Hernandez asked.

Sandro looked to Alvarado.

“This guy is Hernandez,” said Alvarado.

“I want to talk to my client right now,” said Sandro.

Hernandez didn't understand. Alvarado spoke to him in Spanish. Hernandez seemed hurt. He walked back into the crowd in the cell.

“Don't mind him, Counselor. He's just a dummy,” said Alvarado.

“Is he going to be a witness against us?” asked Sandro.

“I don't know. I got a book here, you know.” He handed the book to Sandro. It was a copy of the penal laws of the State of New York. “I been readin'. Can you get me a pad of paper? I don't got money to buy any paper here.”

“What's this for?”

“I want to be able to check on the law, you know. Can he be witness on my case?”

“He could be. Look, Luis, I went to the house where the cop was killed. It doesn't look good at all.”

“Mr. Luca, you got to believe me. You the only one I got in this whole country who can help me. I didn't do this thing. Please believe me.”

Sandro felt himself wavering.

“Another thing that bothers us is the possibility of fingerprints, Luis. If they have your fingerprints, that's the end. You know that?”

“I know, but you don't have to worry about that. They can't have my prints, I know that. Unless they can put them there themself. I couldn't put my prints in a place, I wasn't there.”

“Still, Luis, I have to tell you it looks pretty bad for you. Mr. Bemer and I have been discussing the possibility of your pleading guilty to save you from the electric chair.”

“Cop out? I coppin' out to nothin'. Why you want me to cop to somethin' I didn't do?”

“No one said to plead to something you didn't do. But if we're facing a sure conviction—and it looks like it from here—a plea might be best.”

“If they give me spitting on the streets, I ain't pleading. I didn't do it, Mr. Luca. If I do this thing, then I say, maybe, get me a good plea, maybe good time, somesing. I didn't do this thing. No plea.” He was studying Sandro intently.

“I must have the truth, Luis. You'll pay, not us, if we build your defense on sand and it crumbles beneath us. Don't let me make a bad decision now only for you to regret it later.”

“I won't bullchitting you. I tell you the truth. I wasn't there.”

An inmate from the prison maintenance crew wheeled a steel cart around the corner toward the cell. He stuffed waxed-paper-wrapped jelly sandwiches through the bars, counting two sandwiches for each man as he went. He also passed a paper container of tea for each into the cells.

The guard entered the cellblock. “Alvarado, Hernandez,” he called out. “You want to go outside, Counselor, while I bring the prisoners down?”

Sandro descended and walked out to the courtroom.

“Hello, David,” he said to the assistant district attorney, walking back toward a bench.

“Hello, Sandro, how are you?” Ellis rose as Sandro motioned with his hand. They walked toward the back of the courtroom and out to the corridor.

“Well, you've got a tough one here. I know you have a good man, Sam Bemer, with you, but I think this case is beyond help.”

Ellis was shorter than Sandro. He was about fifty, his black hair thinning on top. His eyes were a faded blue.

“David, I know you don't have to come through on this point—but it might help us in disposing of the matter, and it's been done in other cases. Can you sec your way clear here to fill me in on whether there are actually confessions in this case?”

“Oh, there are confessions, all right. This guy of yours confessed to the whole thing, in detail.”

“No doubt about it?”

“None at all.”

“Would you let me read the confession. I think it might be to our mutual advantage if defense counsel knew the score. It might eliminate the necessity for a trial.”

“I can't show you the confession.”

“You can't, or you won't?”

“Have it your way; I won't. I've got a case to prepare, and I'm not going around giving out the evidence.”

“I'm not asking you to give out the evidence, David. We're basically on the same side, the side of law and order, I mean, I'm court-assigned counsel, not a defendant. If these men are guilty, and you can show me where they said so to you, what's the point of a trial?” Sandro didn't believe that. He would fight the confession, if he thought for a minute that it had been beaten out of Alvarado. But he wanted to flush Ellis out.

“I'm sorry, Sandro. I can't.”

They walked back into the courtroom.

“Luis Alvarado,” called the clerk. Alvarado, escorted by a guard, stepped forward. “Are you Luis Alvarado?”

“Yes.”

“And are Alessandro Luca and Samuel J. Bemer, represented here by Alessandro Luca, your lawyers?”

“Yes.”

“You are charged with murder in the first degree and in that, on the third of July, 1967, you did willfully, feloniously, and of malice aforethought shoot and kill one Fortune Lauria with a pistol. How do you plead to that charge?”

Alvarado looked to Sandro. “You my only man, Mr. Luca.” Sandro shrugged. “Not guilty,” he whispered.

“Not guilty,” Alvarado repeated aloud.

“You are further charged with the crime of burglary in the third degree in that on or about the third of July, 1967, with intent to commit therein the crime of larceny, you broke and entered the dwelling house of one Robert Soto at One fifty-three Stanton Street, County of New York. How do you plead?”

“Not guilty.”

CHAPTER VI

Sandro walked through the narrow streets of Little Italy, only a few blocks west of where Lauria was killed. Mott Street, Mulberry Street, where for a century Italian has been as much the native tongue as English, perhaps more. It was hedged on the south by an area where, for the same length of time, Chinese has been more the native tongue than English. Traces of Spanish spiced Little Italy now, as Puerto Ricans reflected the insertion of a new bottom rung on the New York social ladder.

As he walked, Sandro saw the provisions stores with cheeses and
prosciutti
hanging in the window, the
pasticcerias
with their trays of
cannoli
and
pasticciotti
and the strong aroma of espresso and anise wafting out. After he finished his business, he thought, he might go see Mama, whom dynamite could not dislodge from the old neighborhood, and have some beautiful food.

Sandro walked down two steps and opened the front door of the Two Steps Down Inn. As he entered, several men, sitting at a table near the front door, studied him. They were rough-looking men, and they looked at Sandro roughly. Their eyes slowly returned to their conversation, conscious of Sandro but not looking at him. In the rear, at a side table, half-hidden by a divider screen, he saw Sal Angeletti sitting, facing the front door. At Sal's back was the rear wall. This was the seat Don Vincenzo always occupied when he was alive. It was now Sal's as heir to Don Vincenzo's power.

Sal looked up as Sandro entered, squinted, looked doubtful a moment, finally smiled and waved to him. Sandro waved back, making his way toward the rear. The eyes of one of the men at the front, a huge, hulking man, slid from Sandro to Sal. He was satisfied that the intruder was no threat, and the conversation at his table relaxed again.

“Sandro, hello,” said Sal as Sandro approached. There were two other men sitting at the table with him. One looked like a businessman, definitely not someone who was part of Sal's power structure. The other was one of Sal's “boys,” perhaps the “good fellow” to whom the businessman went for help in some unorthodox difficulty. “I'll be finished here in a minute, okay, Sandro? Joey, get a drink for the counselor,” Sal called to the waiter, who moved gingerly toward Sandro to show him to a table.

In another age, an age more pioneering, demanding, rawer, when nothing was fed into a computer, and when bugs were only insects and had not invaded the electronic world, when Little Italy was bursting with the energy of men bold enough to come to a strange land where they would be considered “wops,” something akin to monkeys, who spoke the “divil's” tongue and who never took charity, the Two Steps Down Inn was the hangout for the toughs, the hotheads, the ones later to be known by romantic, melodramatic titles.

Nowadays, old-timers meet there, but now they meet to drink wine and eat steak sandwiches and talk, and watch television depict how it was not, and to listen to stories of the past, and to remember. It borders on the ludicrous to look at these old-timers, walking slowly with age, grayed and stooped and benign, taking pills, and to think that these are the men whose names are bandied about by the news media and in the Congress, that these are the men of the fabled Mafia. That old man who limps with gout and who can't hear and has trouble digesting a steak sandwich is a man known in some officially compiled dossier as a vicious killer. The tall man whose hands shake, who looks like anybody's grandfather, if your grandfather's hands shake, is supposed to be a kingpin racketeer. To anyone who had not heard of the infamous reputations of some of the customers of the Two Steps Down Inn, the restaurant would seem a reunion of the Italian Club, Class of '05, happy, harmless old men, reminiscing, chatting, not really interested in pillaging New York this week. Of course, there were younger men in the restaurant, but they were not infamous, not notorious—not yet. And perhaps they never would be. Some of these Young Turks were impatient and hungry, lacking in respect for the elders of the family, and as a result they were filling the jails quickly.

As Sandro sat alone in the cool, dimly lighted restaurant, watching Sal and the two others leaning toward one another in quiet conversation, seeing again the table of Sal's boys near the front entrance, he thought of Don Vincenzo Tagliagambe. Don Vincenzo had not allowed Sandro into this restaurant often when he was alive, but Sandro could remember vividly Don Vincenzo sitting in that chair of authority where Sal was now sitting—somehow the title
Don
fit Vincenzo Tagliagambe better than it did Sal—and he could almost see himself early one evening years before, bursting furiously through the door. Two of Don Vincenzo's boys, at the front table, rose to the ready the instant Sandro made his sudden move.

“Hello, Sandro,” Don Vincenzo had said loudly from the back of the room. The moving toward Sandro were stayed by their master's voice. Sandro moved quickly to the back. Don Vincenzo sat at his table calmly eating his supper alone.

“Sit down, and don't talk loud,” Don Vincenzo suggested. “I been expecting you.”

“Jesus Christ, Uncle Jim,” Sandro said, sitting down next to him. “Do you know what two of those meatheads you have working for you did this morning?”

“You mean about your girl friend?” Don Vincenzo spoke in a very precise English, so well controlled that it was not to be classified as broken English, merely colored, warmed with an accent.

“That's exactly what I mean. Taking
my
girl out of
my
apartment and to a gynecologist! You told them to do it, didn't you?”

“Of course. You don't think they usually go taking girls to doctors. We're not running no Red Cross here. Joey, bring a plate for the young man.”

“I'm not hungry.”

“Have a drink, then.”

“Goddamn it, Uncle Jim …”

“Not loud. Don't yell in here.” Don Vincenzo looked toward the front where the boys were sitting, watching. “They wouldn't understand why a strange young kid can come in here and start being fresh to me.” Don Vincenzo smiled warmly. “They don't know you're my son.” There were still many in the neighborhood who knew Sandro as the child of Don Vincenzo's early widowed sister, despite all of Jimmy Pearl's efforts to keep the connection from possibly damaging his nephew. But what Don Vincenzo said his people didn't know, they hastened to become ignorant about.

“Then what the hell are you trying to do to your
son
? The girl called me from the apartment, crying, upset. You shouldn't have done that. It wasn't necessary.”

“How do you know? You going to be a lawyer or a doctor? I only had her go to the doctor, to see she was clean, that's all. You want her living with you, okay. That's your business. But I'm not going to let her give you something that'll ruin your life.”

“But she's not some bimbo off the street,” Sandro complained. “She's a real nice girl, the Park Avenue type you want me to meet, and here you have two of these meatheads, one on each side, take her to the doctor.”

“Hey, he's a high-class doctor, Park Avenue. I didn't send her to no quack.”

“But you just don't take nice girls to doctors to have them checked like a used car.”

“I don't? I already did.”

“I know, that's why I'm here. She's crying and all upset, wondering what kind of person I am to do such a thing. She thinks I did it.”

“You tell her your father did it. She don't have to know who I am. Tell her it's all right, just a doctor, a real doctor, give her examination. What's the difficulty? She's clean, and now you know it, and you don't got to worry no more. What's so wrong with that?”

Sando shook his head as much in exasperation as in frustration. “I'm old enough to have something to say about my own life, Uncle Jim.”

Don Vincenzo smiled. “You're a good boy, Sandro. When you get angry, you're beautiful. You're gonna be dynamite. But you're not so smart yet in street ways, Sandro. I been around, and I know the street, and I know a lot of fancy people who are degenerate bastards. They lie, they cheat; they come in here and want us to bust somebody's head. Why couldn't they have some disease, too? You think them fancy-looking girls can't have disease?