The Penny Ferry - Rick Boyer (25 page)

At the South Shore Plaza shopping mall we got coffee
and studied a map of Braintree. Pearl Street, where the old Slater
and Morrill factory stood, was about a mile away. We drove over
there, and found nothing.

Joe drove while Tom and I consulted the street map
and one of my library books which had a detailed map of the robbery
scene. As we passed up and down the section of Pearl Street
indicated, we saw not even the slightest indication that it was
anything special. No historical marker, no privately erected sign,
not even a memorial water bubbler for the two watchmen killed.
Nothing.

"
I'll be damned," mused Joe as he nursed
the cruiser along in a crawl. The guy behind us leaned on his horn
and Finally passed us right in the middle of an intersection. As he
flew past he glared at Joe and shouted, then roared on and ran the
next red light.

"Where the hell are the cops when you need 'em?"
said Joe, staring out of his unmarked car.

"Pull over here," said Tom, pointing. "This
is right smack dab where it happened."

We got out and walked around. Nothing was left of the
Slater and Morrill factory. In its place was a rubble-strewn field of
weeds. About a hundred yards down the road and pretty far back I saw
the remains of the Rice and Hutchins factory: a rickety red-brick
smokestack just like the one Andy Santurnio had been found in. I
pointed it out to Joe.

"Surely that's more than coincidence, Joe."

"Don't be too sure. There are lots of old
smokestacks left behind when they pull down factories. It's because
they're too tall to wreck; they can't get the wrecking ball up high
enough, even on the biggest derricks. The only really safe way to
take them down is to build a scaffolding around them and do it piece
by piece, which is too expensive. Only way to do it cheap is to
dynamite 'em, which they should do, because they're a hazard. They
fall over and it's like a bomb."

We strolled along the fields, using my book as a
reference to key spots. The railroad track was right where it had
been in the 1920s, minus the depot shack where the money was
delivered in the morning. On the day of the robbery, the payroll had
been kept there until mid-afternoon, when the two guards, Parmenter
and Berardelli, came and took it away in two locked boxes. But they
never made it to the factory. We walked through the scene, trying to
reconstruct it, and half-closing my eyes, I could almost take myself
back to April 15, 1920.

The men in the depot shack received the money as
scheduled when the train pulled through that morning. They paid
little attention to the men lounging nearby, watching the train.
Later, on the witness stand, they recalled that these early-morning
visitors were obviously casing the job, making sure the money had
indeed arrived. Things were quiet until just before three o'clock . .
.

I squint my eyes and look across the road to the
nibble field, but now it's a red-brick factory with a belching
smokestack and people in skimmer hats in the yard. Some of the
workingmen wear cloth caps. Two men emerge from the building and walk
purposefully along the road, which is Pearl Street, then across it
toward the shack. They go in. A few minutes later they come back out,
each carrying a metal bank box. They are armed but guns aren't drawn.
They usually make the transfer by car or wagon, with a shotgun guard,
but today for some strange reason they walk.

Back across the street, then up along the road past
Rice and Hutchins, they approach the grounds of Slater and Morrill.
As they near the big red-brick factory, two men who have been leaning
idly against the wall step out and walk toward the street,
intercepting the two guards with the metal boxes. As they get within
a few feet of the guards, guns appear in their hands. There are a few
shouted orders. Quickly and without warning one of the bandits
shoots, and the chief guard, Frederick Parmenter, falls mortally
wounded, clutching at his middle. Alessandro Berardelli, his
assistant, panics. He drops his box and begins to run back across
Pearl Street, where he is cut down by pistol fire. Then one of the
gunmen raises up his pistol and fires a lone shot into the air.

This appears to be a signal, because an instant later
a large touring car,.a big Buick, roars down the street and stops.
The bandits begin to jump in, but one of them hesitates and walks
back to Berardelli, lying in the street. He takes deliberate aim and
shoots the fallen man point-blank, killing him, then returns to the
car and gets in. The car, a dirty greenish-brown in color (or was it
dark-blue? The witnesses later argue), speeds off down the road, a
wicked-looking shotgun protruding from the rear window. At the
railroad crossing gate the big car stops and the bandits order the
gatekeepers to raise the drop gate immediately or they will be shot.
They do this, but not before one of them gets a good look at one of
the killer bandits and hears his voice. The car roars off, turning
left at the intersection and speeding away, the occupants flinging
special round-headed tacks (which always land point upward) behind
them.

Ingeniously, the driver of the big car reverses
direction in a two-wheeled hairpin turn half a mile down the road and
heads back toward the scene of the crime on a parallel road. This
incongruous reverse has its intended effect; the pursuing police are
totally confused and allow the big Buick to proceed unchallenged out
of town.

The robbery, planned carefully and executed like
clockwork, is successful. But two men have been gunned down in cold
blood. Neither guard had a chance to draw his sidearm; they were shot
down without reason. Parmenter didn't die right away, however; he
lived just long enough to describe to the police the man who shot
him. Other witnesses, leaning out of factory windows when they heard
the noise or watching the car speed by, saw him too. And these, along
with the gatekeeper, described a man who looked exactly like Nicola
Sacco . . . .

"What did you say, Doc?" asked Tom, who was
staring at me. I came to and realized I had been standing dead still
and staring at the rubble field and smokestack. And worse, I had been
muttering to myself too.

"
I said that of all the days to pick to miss
work and go off on an all-day errand, Nick Sacco had to pick April
fifteenth. And at the same time here's a guy standing right about
where you are now who looks just like him, pumping shots into those,
guards . . ."

Tom scraped gravel back and forth with his toe, like
a batter at the plate, and shook his head slowly. His hands were deep
in his coat pockets and he was hunched over. Joe was behind him,
standing near the road in silence.

"Oh I don't know, Doc. Jeeez. I mean, maybe he
did do it. Sure looks like it anyway. I was so sure he didn't because
all my life I was told he didn't. Like all good Italian, boys I was
taught the basics, you know: don't eat meat on Friday, go to
confession, FDR is the greatest President who ever lived, Joe
DiMaggio is the world's greatest ballplayer . . . and Sacco and
Vanzetti were innocent."

"Sounds pretty good to me," I said. "So
what's changed?"

"Lots. For instance, we eat meat on Fridays now,
right? We don't go to confession much anymore, right? And it looks
like Roosevelt made some mistakes."

"What about Joe DiMaggio?"

"You kiddin'? He's still the greatest. That's
not changed. Except there might be one just as good since—"

"Who might that be?"

"Rico Petrocelli. Who else?"

"Let's get out of here. I'm getting depressed.
Hey Joe!"

We got in the car and rolled away. Joe didn't say
much either. We stopped at the McDonald's across the street and
bought coffee. I asked the girl at the register if she knew the
significance of Pearl Street. She didn't. And she'd never heard of
Sacco and Vanzetti either. She couldn't have cared less.

"Sounds like a kinda spaghetti, dudn't it? Like
Ronzoni?"

In a few minutes we were purring along on 128 again,
heading back north. Neither Joe nor Tom wanted to make the second
stop at Dedham after what we'd encountered at Braintree, but I
insisted. The old film clips had entranced me and I wanted to see the
courthouse and the jail where the two defendants had spent seven
years while the whole world watched and waited.

The courthouse had not changed a bit; it was still
the gray, quasi-Greek classical building with a high dome and an
American flag on top. When we reached the second floor, which was the
entrance to the courtroom and judges' chambers, a security officer
approached us quickly and asked if he could help us. In a case like
this everybody knows that "Can I help you?" really means
"Get the hell out of here." But Joe flashed his badge and
we went inside. The courtroom had not changed at all except for one
detail: they had removed the medieval prisoner's cage at the far end.
Otherwise I could almost see Katzmann and Thayer, Thompson and
Ehrmann, the jury and its foreman, Harry Ripley (who was a former
police chief and who hated "dagos"), and the two defendants
locked in their cage. We cased the whole place, looking for
photographs on the walls, plaques or markers, perhaps a framed
statement or scroll. There was nothing. I asked the rather plump,
pale woman in the county clerk's office about the case. As soon as
heard the names she brought her index finger up to her pursed mouth.

"Shhhhh!" She giggled. "We don't talk
about that!"

We left and walked around the courthouse. Twice.
Aside from a historical plaque set in a boulder telling about some
early schoolhouse, there was nothing. Not any kind of plaque or
marker— even one hostile to the defendants. There was nothing. And
that seemed strange, considering the fuss New Englanders make over
history. They're forever holding parades for people who've been dead
a hundred years. But here, where the world's attention had been
riveted during the summer of 1927, there was not a thing to mark the
occasion or any mention made of it.

We went on to the jail. Things had not changed much
there either. Again Joe flashed the badge and we went through the
lobby and into the cell blocks. We were shown the cells that Sacco
and Vanzetti occupied during their long incarceration. We saw the
courtyard where they exercised. It was in this very courtyard that
Celestino Madeiros caught Sacco's attention one day. He whispered:

'
Wick! I know who pulled the South Braintree job!"

Sacco ignored him and returned to his cell. Why?
Ehrmann said it was because he feared that Madeiros was a plant, a
spy put there by the government to get a confession out of him. They
had tried that the year before. But there could be another reason
Sacco had ignored him: because he, Sacco, had pulled the job.

The courtyard was ringed with barbed wire and a new,
shiny type of concertina wire that was drawn from a flat strip of
metal with prongs extruded from its edges. It looked like old
ripped-apart tin cans. It looked about as attractive as a swarm of
maggots. Then I recalled two things from the reading I'd done. One
was the reminiscence of a guard who one day overheard Sacco and
Vanzetti arguing about who had the best singing voice. To resolve the
dispute, each convict sang to the other. The song they sang was "Let
Me Call You Sweetheart." The other thing wasn't so cute; it was
the recurring periods when one or both of the prisoners had to be
taken to Bridgewater State Mental Hospital for treatment and
observation. It seemed that the length of the confinement, and the
men's inability to accept or believe what was happening to them,
drove them crazy now and then. It was supposedly especially hard on
Sacco, who missed his wife, son, and infant daughter dreadfully. Of
course, the other side of the coin was the argument that the men were
faking to buy time and public sympathy.

Is it a vase, or is it two faces? Is it the top of
the basement stairs or the bottom of the attic stairs?

"Let's get the hell out of here," said Joe
with a groan. "I've had enough for one day."

We walked back inside and down the corridor and
overheard one of the guards yelling at an inmate.

"I am held here wrongly, mon," said a deep
booming voice. "I am held on suspicion, nothing more. And
because I came here in a leaky-sponge boat, does that take away all
my rights? You hear me talkin', mon?"

The guard slammed the door with a clang and passed us
in the hall. "Fuckin' jig," he muttered under his breath so
we could all hear, especially the man behind bars. He was huge and
rich chocolate-brown, with green eyes. He gripped the bars, and the
big muscles of his jaws bunched and leapt at the sides of his face.
He rocked sideways, back and forth, back and forth, as he gripped the
steel in front of him. He swayed to and fro on his feet, like an
elephant eating hay.

"What's the huge black guy in for?" Joe
asked the superintendent.

"Vagrancy and resisting arrest. Don't think
it'll stick though. He'll probably walk in a week. Why, you want
him?"

"Naw. just curious. He one of the Caribbean boat
people?"

"Uh-huh. Jamaican. Nothing but trouble, the
whole bunch of 'em, and they're coming farther north every day now.
Oughta kick 'em right back out. Oh, but he'll walk; you wait and
see."

On the way out of the cell block something— I'm
not sure what it was— made me retrace my steps to the cell that
held the giant Jamaican. He looked at me.