North River

FIFTEEN

HE GAZED OUT AT THE OLIVE TREE, ITS FRESH LEAVES A SILVERY green in the morning sun. He hoped that Eddie Corso was riding the Atlantic, bound for Le Havre. He knew he shouldn’t feel that way. He knew he might have headed off the murder with one call to Danny Shapiro. He couldn’t do that. Not in this neighborhood. Not in a place where the informer was the lowest form of human. Besides, his friendship with Eddie Corso was forever. It was part of the war. For Eddie, the quarrel with Frankie Botts was complete, according to the rules of his world. They were not Delaney’s rules. But he understood them. Now, he hoped, it was over. Rose knew that it was not.

“They’re sure to come looking for you,” she said. “You know that, right? And maybe for me.”

“Why? It’s over.”

“These guys, it’s never over.”

She placed fried eggs before Delaney and the boy. She prepared nothing for herself except coffee.

“Look,” she said. “They know you’ve been going to see Frankie’s mother. You know something about him, how he lives. They know you are a friend of Eddie Corso. They know you saved his life on New Year’s.” She turned her gaze to the olive tree, while the boy ate greedily. “They’re sure to figure you helped set up Frankie.” She looked directly at Delaney now. “They know I’ve been going there too, to see Frankie’s mother, to be the nurse. So to them, maybe I’m part of the setup too.”

“We’ll deal with it,” Delaney said.

“So will they,” Rose said.

She looked again at the olive tree.

“Some of those olive trees,” she said, “they live five hundred years. That one will be there after we’re all dead and gone.”

She sipped her coffee, swallowing her dread.

“Let’s deal with the next couple of weeks,” Delaney said.

In his office, he called Danny Shapiro, who was out on his own house calls. This was a busy morning for detectives. Delaney left a message. Then he called Knocko Carmody. He didn’t have to explain.

“Yeah, I read the papers,” Knocko said. “Don’t worry.”

“I’ll try.”

“How’s the steam heat comin’?” Knocko said.

“They should be finished this week.”

“Just in time for July.”

“It should be great,” Delaney said.

Knocko hung up, and Delaney knew that men would soon be watching the street again. He told Rose, and she looked unconvinced. He heard Monique come in, and talked to her too. She would keep the inside door locked and only allow regular patients in to see him. She nodded toward the kitchen.

“She better be very careful,” Monique said. “Neapolitans like shooting Sicilians, male or female.”

“Rose didn’t cause this, Monique.”

“No, but to them she’s part of it, for sure.”

On house calls after lunch, pedaling steadily on the old Arrow, he watched every passing car, every unfamiliar face. Thinking: It would be stupid to die in this cheap Mob melodrama. Stupid to be a one-day story in the Daily News, three paragraphs maybe, or maybe page one if nothing else happened that day. The tabloids wanted to keep this story alive. The Mob sold many things, including newspapers. On a newsstand, he saw the headline in the Journal: COPS FEAR GANG WAR. How many times had he read that headline since the days of Prohibition? I don’t even need to read it. I know more about it than the reporter. So did Rose, who never went to gangster movies.

Delaney’s calls took him past the Good Men Social and Athletic Club, where Eddie Corso had been shot among the funny hats and noisemakers of New Year’s Eve. There was a TO LET sign in the window. On the corner, a few men stared at him, and one of them nodded. He looked up and saw another man peering down from the rooftop. Scouts of a defending army, awaiting the counterattack.

In late afternoon, he came down tenement stairs after treating a woman named O’Toole, whose body was being eaten by cancer. She didn’t care about Frankie Botts or Eddie Corso or the Giants. She just wanted to live a little longer. “I want to see my granddaughter graduate from grammar school,” she said. “Down at Sacred Heart.” That is, she wanted to live for two more weeks. He would try his best. That’s all he ever could do.

Delaney stepped into the fading sunlight at the top of Mrs. O’Toole’s stoop, took a breath, saw a few men talking on the corner. He went down to unlock his bicycle, chained to the iron fence. He heard leathery footsteps and looked up. A movie gangster was walking hard, wearing his gray fedora and a pin-striped suit, pulling his face tightly over his teeth.

“Hey, you,” he said.

“Me?”

The man stood over him now. “Yeah, get into the car.”

Two houses down, the door of a car opened onto the sidewalk.

“Why?”

“ ’Cause I said so, that’s why,” the man said, putting a hand inside his jacket.

Delaney smiled, still squatting, thinking: All shoulder, all my weight, everything on it.

And stood up abruptly, took a step, and whipped the left hook with everything behind it, grunting as he threw it, and hit the man on the side of the jaw. He heard something crack. The man went down hard on his back, one leg bent awkwardly beneath him, the other leg shaking. His eyes were rolled up under his brow. Then a fat man came out of the parked car, holding a gun, waddling and cursing.

And here came Knocko’s boys: six of them, big and burly, hefting bats and axe handles. Two bounced their wooden bats off the skull of the fat guy, who went down, his pistol rattling on the sidewalk. They kicked his face into bleeding meat. Another two men dragged the driver out of the car, while a third man drove an ice pick into the wheels. A skinny young red-haired man hit the driver with a hook, and he went down. Then a pale green van came around the corner. The back doors opened, and Knocko’s boys lifted the three unconscious gangsters, heaved them into the interior, and drove off. It was all over in a few brutal minutes.

Delaney trembled. Could’ve died. Could have been dead right now. His left hand hurt, but he flexed it and was sure nothing had been broken. The skin of his middle knuckle was torn, but nothing else. He finished unlocking the bicycle and placed his bag in the basket. The skinny red-haired kid came over.

“I’m Liam Hanratty,” he said. “My grandfather was Packy. You know, that trained you a long time ago? He told me about you. Now I know he wasn’t bullshitting.”

“Looks like he taught you pretty good himself,” Delaney said. “I saw that hook.”

“He said you had a terrific double hook. Body, then head.”

Delaney shrugged, then shook hands gently with the young man.

“Where’d they take those guys?” Delaney said.

“Where else? The North River, I guess.”

He laughed.

“Teach them somethin’,” he said. “Don’t fuck wit’ the neighborhood.”

Delaney left before the police arrived.

Danny Shapiro arrived after dinner, while Carlito slept in his room. Rose gave the detective a plate of ravioli and a beer. They sat at the kitchen table.

“We rounded up as many guys as we could find,” Shapiro said. “Corso’s old mob. Frankie’s mob. We locked them in separate jails. But this could go on awhile.”

Rose said, “I don’t know when it ends.”

“When they start marryin’ each other,” Shapiro said.

“Ha! Never.”

“Maybe that’s best,” Shapiro said. “They ever get together, we’re all in trouble.”

“Maybe they should all see Romeo and Juliet sometime,” Delaney said.

“Yeah, they get together too, Romeo and his Juliet,” Shapiro said. “Except they’re dead.”

Shapiro laughed with Delaney. Rose only smiled. She had mastered the Daily News, Delaney thought, but Shakespeare would take a little longer. Shapiro finished his ravioli, wiping the plate clean. He sipped his beer.

“Well, what should we do?” Delaney said. “Right here.”

“Stay in the house. Keep the doors locked.”

“Impossible,” Rose said. “That boy has to walk, I have to buy food.”

“And I’ve got house calls every afternoon.”

“Just for a few days,” Shapiro said. “Give them time to cool off. Racket guys need peace and quiet to do business. They’ll calm down. But it might get worse before it gets better.”

He got up to leave.

“The food was great, Rose,” he said.

“Thanks,” she said.

They walked to the door. Shapiro looked at Delaney.

“Did you know this was coming?”

“Put it this way, Danny. I wasn’t surprised.”

Shapiro looked down.

“What happened to your left hand, Doc?” he said.

“Nothing much.”

“That ain’t what I heard,” Shapiro said, and smiled.

“Don’t believe everything you hear.”

“If I did, half the city would be in the can.”

He tapped Delaney on the left shoulder and then he was gone. Rose locked the gate and the inside door. Then she folded her arms and stared at Delaney.

“Okay, tell me,” she said. “What happen to your left hand?”

“Let me brush my teeth first.”

He told her in the dark, and she laughed and then went silent. He could hear her breathing harder.

“I told you it wasn’t over,” she said.

Then she started kissing him. His face and his neck and his skinned left hand.

In the morning, they learned from the newspapers and the radio that Shapiro was right. It got worse. Two fully clothed bodies were fished from the North River and identified as members of the Frankie Botts mob. There was no sign of their hats. Around midnight a group of masked men kicked in the locked door of Club 65, heaved gasoline bombs into the empty interior, and left. The firemen came and poured water into the empty store and left it a wet smoking mess. The families that lived in the apartments above the bar all got to the street safely and would live with the stench of smoke for a few weeks. No deaths. Just a strategic bombing. A show.

There were six more killings, scattered from Mulberry Street to Times Square, where a Corso man died in a movie house with an ice pick in his ear. But there was no sign of hoodlums in the neighborhood. Delaney went on working. He saw patients every morning. He made house calls. He stared at the olive tree. He painted bad paintings alongside Carlito. He made love to Rose at night. The papers said that the funeral of Frankie Botts would take place on Monday morning at Our Lady of Pompeii R.C. Church. There was even a photograph of Frankie’s mother leaving a funeral parlor on Second Avenue, frail, dressed in black, her face stern, a few stray hoodlums in the background, and two uniformed cops. On Saturday morning, Rose and the boy went shopping. Monique was uneasy.

“I don’t like her taking the boy out there,” Monique said, gesturing toward the street.

“He needs larger sneakers, and socks too,” he said. “She knows all the cheap places up on Fourteenth Street.”

“Still…”

“Rose says gangsters don’t get up this early.”

“Well, she should know.”

He ignored the edge in her voice.

“Any mail from Spain?” he said.

“No, just bills. I’ll have them ready later.”

He turned to the door of his office.

“Send in the first patient.”

And so he spent the morning dealing with other people’s pain and fear. A woman with a spreading rash. An old longshoreman whose feet were red and swollen with diabetes. A young mother who was runny with gonorrhea and shame, both driven into her by a drunken husband. A man in his forties, shuddering and half-mad from the DTs, accompanied by a frightened teenaged daughter. A woman whose sputum and cough revealed the consumption. Two vets who needed quinine, and one who was losing feeling in a leg that had been lacerated at Château-Thierry. A black eye. A swollen jaw. A runny ear that gave off a vile odor. Pain. Fear. The need for relief or hope. None of them mentioned the gang war. In his office, Delaney fiddled with his pen.

He wrote a single word on his pad.

Rose.

That Saturday night, he was sipping tea after dinner, thinking of taking Carlito back to Coney Island, to ride with him on the mechanical horses in Steeplechase. Or among the turrets and minarets of Luna Park. Rose was upstairs with the boy. The phone rang. And rang. He picked it up. It was Jackie Norris, from the Harbor Police.

“Hey, Doc,” he said. “Can you come over here to Brooklyn tomorrow? The Kings County morgue.”

“Why?”

“I think we found something.”

They dropped off Carlito with Angela, and Rose said she would pick him up as soon as she finished at St. Brendan’s. Her face was apprehensive, because Delaney had told her in the night where he was going and why he could not take the boy. She said nothing, but her face told him that she was imagining many scenarios. Angela seemed delighted, and the boy was smiling and carrying his teddy bear. Delaney and Rose each told the boy that they would return soon and kissed his cheek. Then turned to Angela. She smiled at them in a knowing way. The harpies might not know. Mr. and Mrs. Cottrell might not know. Angela knew what they did in the night.

They said good-bye, and Delaney walked Rose part of the way to St. Brendan’s. Few words were spoken.

“If it’s her,” Rose said at the corner of Fourteenth Street and Eighth, “what are you going to do?”

“Bury her,” he said. “What else can I do?”

“And your daughter? She comes for the funeral?”

“Maybe.” He hugged Rose. “First I have to see if it’s Molly.”

Rose walked quickly toward St. Brendan’s. Delaney watched her for a few minutes. She turned and waved but did not smile. He waved back, and then headed for the subway.

On the train out to Brooklyn, many Sunday-morning riders pored over the Daily News. The headline shouted: 2 MORE SLAIN. But he didn’t buy a paper, even from a kid hawking them in the subway cars. He wasn’t keeping score. On this morning, he didn’t even care who won the Giants game.

Jackie Norris was waiting at the main entrance to Kings County Hospital, smoking a cigarette. His suit was rumpled, and he had the Daily News tucked under one arm. He saw Delaney and flipped his cigarette into the grass.

“Doc,” he said. And nodded.

“How’d you find her?”

“If it’s her.”

They walked inside, and Norris led the way to a long corridor, flashing his badge.

“Some black guy pulls outta Red Hook in a little putt-putt,” Norris said. “He’s headin’ for Sheepshead Bay to do a little crabbin’. You know, grab free lunch for the family. It’s a little windy, a little chop in the water, so he stays near shore.” Norris nodded at a beefy nurse with an Irish face. “Then he looks down in the rocks near the Narrows, this side of the Narrows, the New York side, and he sees, maybe eight, ten feet down — he sees a skull.”

They followed signs to the morgue.

“When he gets to Sheepshead Bay, he calls the cops,” Norris said. “They call the Harbor Police, and next thing you know, I’m here.”

They passed the corridor leading to the emergency room, and Delaney could hear a woman moaning in pain. A sound he had been hearing all of his life. They went through the door of the morgue. A fat balding clerk looked up from his desk just inside the door. He was reading the sports section of the Daily News.

“Yeah?” he said.

Norris showed his badge. “We’re here to make a possible ID. Unidentified woman fished out of the Narrows yesterday.”

The man opened a ledger book in an annoyed way and ran a plump finger down a list of entries.

“Try F-11,” he said. “And sign in here.”

They walked down aisles of cabinets containing the dead. Six closed trays above each other, like floors in a tenement. For Delaney, all morgues were the same: the same bleak lighting, the same damp concrete floors, the same odors of pine and formaldehyde. They stopped at F-11.

“This ain’t gonna be easy,” Norris said.

“I know,” Delaney said. “But I’ve got no choice, Jackie.”

Norris slid out the tray. The skull was closest to them, the other bones arranged into the deepest part of the tray. One femur was missing, and other bones as well. Delaney stepped to the side to look down upon the skull. It was grinning, like every other skull he had ever seen. Grinning in mockery of the living. Grinning with secret knowledge. He reached down and used his right hand to move the lower mandible. There on the right was the molar filled with gold by that dentist just off the Ringstrasse. It’s my damned Irish teeth, Molly said. They make contact with Viennese chocolate and they rot. To the right of her head were the folded remnants of her blue dress, faded and shredded by tides and time. Oh, Molly.

“It’s her,” he said. “I recognize the filling. That’s part of the dress she was wearing, the last time anyone saw her alive… Thank you, Jackie.”

“When I heard there were a few pieces of blue dress, I thought, Maybe this is her. It’s what you told me.”

“The filling, that’s the right tooth.”

“You can see we don’t have all the bones,” Norris said. “The guys will look again Monday morning, weather permittin’.” A pause. “There’s no sign of damage. No bones broke by bullets, no cracks in her head from a blackjack or anything.”

Delaney took a last look, then slid the tray back into its cabinet.

“I’ll ask the coroner to make the cause of death ‘accident,’ ” Norris said. “That way you can bury her in a Catholic cemetery if you want.”

“Thanks, Jackie,” Delaney said, ignoring the suggestion of suicide, and started walking through the clammy dampness toward the exit, with Norris behind him. He knew the routine. The bureaucracy of death. He would sign a few papers. A clerk would stamp them. Norris would add them to his files and go off to his office the next day and talk to the coroner and later stamp the entire folder Case Closed. Then life would go on. There were dozens of people every year who ended up as corpses in the harbor. Delaney did what must be done, shook hands with Norris, and then walked toward the sun of Sunday morning.

All the way back to Manhattan, images of Molly in life kept rising from memory. On that North River pier the first time he saw her, incoherent with pain and loss. Laughing at Tony Pastor’s. Walking through downtown Baltimore. Sneering at Al Jolson and baseball and the Irish songs from Tin Pan Alley. Then laughing as Delaney began to sing the songs. Walking across Union Square at dusk. Molly hugging the infant Grace in a hospital bed, her face fierce and protective. Her face and body lost in music, enraged music, and Brahms too. They had danced. He could always say that. They had danced at Tammany rackets and neighborhood weddings. They had danced in Vienna. And to an oompah band at Feltman’s on Coney Island. Always a waltz. Never anything else. A waltz always brought them to their feet, to grasp each other’s hands, and she could be carried out of her angers. Sitting on the train, he realized something else: It was the past. As distant now as all those browning photographs scattered around bars and offices and homes all over New York.

Still, he began to hum Strauss on the subway, the tune rising from him without thought, and a woman looked at him from her seat across the car and smiled. Gray-haired, missing a bicuspid. Here, in the real world. He stopped humming. She reminded him that the world was for the living. The train pulled into Fourteenth Street.

“That was nice,” she said as Delaney got up. “A waltz on a Sunday morning. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” he said, and smiled as he got off. He did not try to explain that he was thinking of a woman he once loved with all of himself, and loved no more.

At the house on Horatio Street, Rose and Carlito were waiting. She had skipped the movie to pick up the boy, and when Delaney came in she folded her arms and set her face, as if expecting a blow.

“Well?” she said.

“It was her,” he said.

She breathed out hard, then unfolded her arms and let them hang loosely.

“Well, that’s that,” she said.

Delaney looked toward the door.

“I’m going to take a little walk, Rose. Just collect my thoughts.”

“Sure,” she said, and touched his face.

“A half hour,” he said. “No more.”

“We’ll be here.”

They walked to the gate together.

“Okay, Carlos, come on,” she said. “We’ll change your clothes.”

“I want to go with Gran’pa.”

“No, he has to do something. He’ll be right back.”

“Please, Rosa.”

“You heard me. No.”

Delaney walked toward the river. He saw familiar faces and nodded hello. About a dozen kids were playing stickball beyond the High Line. The other kids were not yet back from the beach. A young woman pushed a child in a stroller. A drunken older man held on to a lamppost like a figure in a temperance poster, speaking steadily to himself. At water’s edge, Delaney walked to the pier where he’d gone so many times with Molly, long ago.

I hope you knew how much I loved you, Molly, when you chose the river over life.

He stood alone, watching the current move south to the Narrows and the sea beyond. On the next pier to the north, some kids took turns leaping into the river, riding the current to the pier beyond his own. A tugboat grunted north, a seagoing club fighter, fearless, tough.

I want to tell you something, Molly. I’m very sorry for all the things that I did and didn’t do. But you chose the river, and the rocks at its gate. I am alive. I will live. I have found the aroma of life, and it’s full of garlic and basil and oil.