The Best American Mystery Stories 2007

Jim Fusilli Chellini’s Solution

From Death Do Us Part

Chellini was MUCH younger than he seemed. A Sicilian wife, bubbly six-year-old twin daughters, and perpetually aching feet conspired to deprive him of the swagger customary to men from the Puglia region of Italy. So too did a rotund frame, legs that were slightly bowed, and a floppy gray mustache he grew shortly after his discharge from the U.S. Army Air Force in ’46. At the time, just seven years ago, the mustache was a deep brown.

Chellini did his best to meet life with a shrug, as would befit a man from a sunny southern province, though life in postwar America was maybe a bit hectic for his tastes, what with his sharp-tongued Lydia, their mischievous daughters, and his job as a waiter in an Italian restaurant near the National Broadcasting Company in Rockefeller Center. Despite the hubbub, he himself kept quiet and sought what he would call uneventfulness. He had no ambitions, save a desire for abundant happiness for his daughters and for Lydia to love him as she once did.

Chellini had a pet bulldog, Ambrose, with whom he shared a slow, labored gait. Each night, after a clattering dinner during which Ava and Rita amused each other and Lydia reminded him of the dreary life he provided, Chellini would wander the cobblestone streets of his mile-square New Jersey town in search of serenity and equilibrium. With Ambrose at his side, he would drift into his own agreeable fantasies, which consisted of little more than sitting under an olive tree in Bovino, straw between his teeth, a manageable herd of goats feeding nearby, white almond blossoms blooming at the lip of the field, and his little family enjoying the stone house in which he was raised.

Chellini would often lose track of time during his nightly sojourns and return home as Lydia slept, her back to his side of their bed. While Ambrose slurped his water, Chellini would tiptoe toward his daughters’ bed in the living room and kiss them on the palm of the hand, which he would then close to a fist so they would have a token of his devotion as soon as they awoke. Then he would retire to his room and hope for streams of moonlight and tranquil dreams of Lydia as the bright-eyed girl from Ragusa who had shyly accepted his invitation to dance.

One night not long ago, Chellini found he had returned to the Italian quarter much sooner than he had intended, and he passed Tartuffo’s, the cigar store where a group of neighborhood men congregated. On such a pleasant, summerlike evening, the crowd of hardscrabble brown-skinned thugs of one sort or another sat outside the store and played penny-a-point gin and smoked cheroots. Unlike Chellini, most of these dubious men had immigrated to the United States after the war; some had served in Mussolini’s army and others remained at home and willingly suffered the indignity of the German occupation.

Chellini preferred to avoid them, as they were not merely argumentative but bitter. He considered them lazy malcontents who pronounced big schemes but took no action when action was needed, thus allowing the Nazis to steal their homes, their women, and their pride.

A voice reached Chellini on the other side of the narrow street.

“Chellini, dove andate?”

Of course, it was the man he respected least who had addressed him.

“Chellini, I’m speaking to you,” said Emilio Marzano, whose accent revealed him to be from the Liguria region, though he sought to portray a Sicilian tough. “What do you think? I want to talk to your dog?”

The other men laughed with a dark, superior tone.

Under the street lamp’s dull violet light, Chellini stopped, tipped his fedora, and continued walking, Ambrose chugging along at his side.

The men whispered to each other as if sharing a secret. Tartuffo, the impossibly fat store owner and chief of the local numbers racket, flicked his thumb dismissively at Chellini, shaking his mammoth head.

“Hey, war hero,” Marzano said with an air of derision. “Wait.”

Marzano climbed out of his chair and, though he was built as if cut from the same stubby, thickset mold as Chellini, he tried to affect a strut. On Marzano’s skull was a brown cap festooned with colorful buttons of various trade unions and social organizations with which he was associated. He ran a carting business, and what needed removal ended up in his rattling truck for a trip to the city dump. This was said to include Mrs. Feduza’s rabid dog, Benny, and the thieving iceman, Stucchi.

“Chellini, what’s with you? You can’t be a friend?”

As Ambrose sniffed disapprovingly at Marzano’s soiled shoes, Chellini shrugged.

“Listen to me. It’s about Lydia. Your wife.”

Chellini scratched the underside of his chin. Lydia, he knew, bought her many movie magazines at the candy store, and her Chesterfields. With a nature as outgoing as Chellini’s was not, she was bound to be known by Tartuffo. Marzano, and the others.

Marzano shifted to give his associates a better view. “I have to say it’s not pleasant.”

Chellini began to walk away, Ambrose in his wake.

Said Marzano, a snicker in his voice, “Don’t you want to know his name?”

The following morning, after dropping his daughters at St. Francis, Chellini returned to the Italian quarter and sat in Columbus Park rather than taking the tubes to his job. As pigeons pecked at the dog biscuit he’d crumpled for their pleasure, he stared at the tattered brownstone in which he lived, and he considered a strategy.

To his mind, there was no doubt Marzano was telling the truth. Chellini knew a few small-minded sharpies in the Sixty-fourth Fighter Wing, and they took a wicked pleasure from others’ misfortunes — far more than from a practical joke. These minor-league mafiosi sitting on their own kitchen chairs outside Tartuffo’s seemed no different than those wise guys, and surely they were no better, even if they were Italian.

At a few minutes short of ten o’clock, the man who would turn out to be Hans Koppel arrived, and he kicked up the steps with a confidence that suggested he had been there before. A moment later, perhaps two, Lydia, still in the snug housedress she wore during their typically rancorous breakfast, pulled the shades on the third-floor window that faced the vest-pocket park. When she reappeared after thirty minutes had passed, she was wearing a slip Chellini didn’t recognize, the kind that barely contained her ample breasts. Lydia’s curly black hair was thoroughly disheveled, and Chellini thought he detected, beneath the veneer of caution, a hint of nefarious satisfaction that perhaps spoke of revenge.

As the pigeons happily fed, Chellini concluded that action was required — action of a kind that would provide a thorough solution to his unexpected dilemma. By the time his rival had departed the brownstone, Chellini had devised a plan.

Leaving the park, Chellini fell in behind Koppel, a thin man with blond, slicked-back hair who wore wire-rimmed glasses, an expertly cut brown double-breasted suit, and an apple red silk tie. Before flagging a bus to return him to the Port Authority in Manhattan, Koppel stopped briefly in a storefront with a State Farm sticker in the window and a ding bell on the door frame. Chellini watched as he was greeted warmly by a similarly dressed man, the proprietor, Aichberger, no doubt, who gave Koppel an accordion folder stout with papers. Their conversation ended with the proprietor’s joke, and both men laughed as the blond secretary in kelly green tittered and blushed.

When Koppel took his seat on the New York-bound bus. Chellini was several rows behind him. When Koppel rode the subway uptown, Chellini was in the same car.

When Koppel left the IRT station, Chellini listened as he paused for a brief conversation with an elderly couple, conducted entirely in German. Crossing Eighty-sixth Street, Koppel greeted, in German also, the milky-eyed counterman at the Ideal Diner and took for lunch two eggs sunny-side up, a bauernwurst, and red cabbage, which he washed down with a Schlitz and a black coffee while Chellini waited, hidden by the hood of a ’49 Buick Super, baby blue.

Now, as Koppel paid his tab, Chellini nodded knowingly and departed, calculating his return to the tubes at Herald Square so as to guarantee that he would arrive home as always, via the same route and unlocking the door at the same time, lifting Ava and Rita as they leaped into his arms, screaming, “Papa, Papa,” one louder than the next.

Lydia said, “What? No tips?”

Three seconds in the door, and Chellini had already made his first mistake. The roll of bills and the loose coins he dropped into the cookie jar were no greater than they had been this morning, and in fact were short the cost of the bus, the hot dog, and orangeade Chellini consumed at Nedicks on Thirty-fourth, and a few pennies spent here and there.

The twins’ cheery stampede relieved Chellini of constructing a lie.

“I know you don’t gamble, Chellini,” Lydia said in Italian, hands on her generous hips, bare feet clutching the linoleum. “You couldn’t tolerate the excitement.”

“Papa, Papa,” yelled the gleeful twins.

Chellini went off to examine the drawings they’d made at school.

“That’s right,” Lydia squealed. “Go, go, why don’t you? Why should you talk to me? I’m only your wife. Mother of those two… Those two! Go, Chellini. Just go.”

The breaded pork chops she dropped before him that evening were especially leatherlike, and the Chianti was moments away from completing its conversion to vinegar. Fortunately, the bread was fresh and still had its two heels, so both girls were satisfied.

Lydia, not so.

“Chellini, I want to go to the Avalon on Friday night,” she announced.

Chellini had put on a fresh undershirt and had applied a balm to the wounds from the strafing he’d suffered over the Adriatic.

“Kirk Douglas, Lana Turner, Gloria Grahame, Gilbert Roland. Dick Powell. The Bad and the Beautiful. Chellini.”

Chellini shrugged. Perhaps now was not the time to tell his wife that the actor Powell sauntered over from NBC to eat at one of his tables at least twice a week. Powell tipped like he’d just won the sweepstakes. The fist-sized meatballs and bland sausages made him smile.

“Chellini. I am twenty-four years old, and I was not born to slave in this kitchen. I need to live, Chellini. To live!”

Her voice made the glasses ring, and when she shouted the veins in her neck threatened to burst.

Meanwhile, Rita frowned severely, comically, and mocked her mother’s diatribe by bobbing her head and silently flapping her jaw. Ava put her hands over her eyes to prevent an outburst of laughter.

“Chellini, if you don’t give to me a life, I am going to show you something you won’t forget!”

Lydia had a skillet in her hand. Burned clumps of breading clung to its surface.

“Chellini. Speak to me!”

Chellini shrugged. He had nothing to say. New knowledge had put him in a weak position.

Resigned, Lydia resumed her chores, sprinkling soap powder onto the rushing water. Chellini pushed back his plate and threw down the last of the tart wine.

As if on cue, Ambrose rose up, shook himself awake, and waddled off to retrieve his leash.

Waiting in the shadows under the viaduct, Chellini watched as Marzano leaped from behind the driver’s wheel to unlock and open the garage doors, then climbed back up to manipulate his empty truck until it was snug inside the bay.

As Chellini approached. Ambrose toddling too, he wondered if the blood of the missing Stucchi had once stained the concrete floor.

Marzano was more than surprised to find a visitor in the darkness. “Mother of God!” he shouted in Italian. “Chellini, you put a fright in me!”

Ambrose growled from his belly.

“And that dog of yours! What a disposition! Miserable!”

Marzano turned his back on Chellini as he secured the lock and yanked on the knob for good measure.

Not exactly Fort Knox, Chellini thought.

Adjusting his cap and hitching up his floppy slacks. Marzano shoved his hands in his pockets and started his walk south to the Italian quarter some six blocks away.

Chellini stood still, as did Ambrose.

Marzano stopped. “You want to talk. Chellini?”

Chellini looked at the rubbish beneath his feet.

Marzano tilted his head as he returned. “Has this to do with Lydia?”

Chellini nodded.

Marzano wiped his brown lips with the back of his grimy hand. “Well?”

Chellini said, “Grupo Azione Patrioti.”

Marzano frowned. “Grupo Azione Patrioti,” he repeated. “The GAP?”

As he nodded, Chellini saw that Marzano had begun to understand.

“You’re saying to me this motherless bastard is a Nazi?” Marzano asked, as he stepped into the black space Chellini and Ambrose now occupied. The smell of urine and gasoline surrounded them.

Chellini shrugged.

If the light had permitted, Chellini would have seen that Marzano’s neck and ears were now bright red. His heart was racing inside his chest.

“The Nazis,” he said, “they raped my sister.”

Chellini thought this unlikely, though it was a tale Marzano repeated often in the neighborhood. His sister had no doubt taken a Nazi lover, if only for the food and security he could provide. Regrettably, many confused young women had, and not only in San Remo. Marzano’s birthplace and former home.

“They made a mockery of us,” he continued, jabbing himself in the chest with a stiff finger, which he then pointed toward the sky.

Ambrose was sniffing the dirt, exhuming messages from countless dogs who had preceded him to this spot.

Marzano put his right hand over his heart. “I pledged myself to the GAP,” he said, adding, “even though I was too young to participate.”

Also not true. Marzano was at least thirty-five years old, perhaps forty. The GAP, a unit of the marginally organized partisan movement in Italy, had recruited teenage boys when necessary to resist the Nazi occupation. Marzano would have been well into his twenties when the Nazis arrived.

“And now this godless pig is here! Taking our women again! And who knows how many?”

Chellini shrugged, though now the gesture suggested Marzano had summarized the situation with admirable insight.

“Leave everything to me,” Marzano said, tapping Chellini on the shoulder. “It will be a pleasure. Hell, I do it for free.”

Chellini nodded, bin as Marzano began to walk away, he called to him.

Again, Marzano stopped and peered into the darkness.

Chellini said, “Avrete bisogno di una lama splendida.”

Marzano stroked his chin. “A superb knife, eh?” He smiled knowingly. “Revenge with a twist, Chellini. Clever man!”

The following morning, Chellini took the tubes to Christopher Street in Greenwich Village and zigzagged until he arrived at Canal Street, avoiding Little Italy in case someone might recognize him as the bombardier who had returned to Puglia to dispatch the Germans.

The barber who shaved off his mustache was a Chinaman, and Chellini could not understand a single word he said. But the man knew his craft and Chellini left satisfied, a mysterious Oriental astringent causing the naked skin above his lip to tingle.

At an army surplus shop off Baxter Street, he bought a bayonet that had belonged to one of Mussolini’s fascist troops. A restaurant supply store on the Bowery willingly sharpened it to a razor’s edge for a modest fee that did not include a dizzying conversation with a Polish Jew who tried to sell Chellini an enormous refrigerator. Defeated by silence, the insistent salesman then pressed Chellini on the origins of the brown cap the Italian had placed on the counter and the meaning of its array of colorful buttons.

Escaping without comment, Chellini tossed his old hat under a beat-up Oldsmobile on Delancey Street, and the nonsensical buttons he’d purchased at Herald Square the day before went down a subway grate to rest among gum wrappers, beer bottle tops, and what seemed to be thousands of cigarette butts.

The IRT and a crosstown bus delivered Chellini to the restaurant a few minutes later than usual, but his missing mustache seemed to provide an excuse, especially when some gentle ribbing from his colleagues ensued, and so his accordion-playing boss said nothing. With the bayonet hidden in his locker, Chellini went to work and soon his section was crowded with visitors from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and even California, none of whom seemed to know that what they happily consumed bore no resemblance to what was served in any region of Italy.

Close to the end of his shift, the actor Powell arrived. He complimented Chellini on his altered appearance. In a voice familiar to millions of moviegoers and, these days, fans of radio’s Richard Diamond, Private Detective, Powell told Chellini he looked like a new, younger man.

Powell’s customary generous tip more than covered the cost of the shave, the bayonet, the sharpening, and the additional transportation.

“Papa, Pa—”

Ava and Rita stopped as if suddenly frozen. They glared at their father’s face. Never before had they seen him without his mustache.

Lydia, meanwhile, looked at Chellini and was impressed. He seemed almost handsome, and certainly younger. But she would not admit it.

“Big experiment,” she muttered in Italian.

Ambrose opened one eye and, unmoved, immediately shut it.

Chellini dropped the money in the cookie jar and went to his knees so his daughters could examine his new face. They did so with warm, curious fingers.

A moment later, Chellini stood. “Going out,” he said, as he went toward the bedroom.

Lydia’s voice followed him as he reached into his tool chest, stored at the rear of his clothes closet.

“Such an outburst, Chellini! A new face and now you are a talking man! But Chellini, the door is the other way if you’re going to go.”

Now he had in his jacket a screwdriver, a bayonet, and a few slips of paper, and he was grateful his daughters didn’t ask if they could accompany him. They were busy discussing his appearance. Rita seemed in favor, Ava opposed.

“Go, Chellini. Go before you change your mind!” added Lydia.

And Chellini went.

Chellini rarely recalled his years in the Army Air Force, though he served in the war with a valor he saw as customary among the men of the Sixty-fourth stationed in San Severo. His bombs struck harbors, submarine pens, bridges and trains and fuel dumps — entirely a team effort, of course — and a strafing by a Messerschmitt Bf 109 had ripped open his shoulder. But his wounds were minimal, and he did not consider himself a hero. Their copilot was killed on that fateful run: a convivial boy from Iowa named Leonard McMillan with whom Chellini had taken coffee before the mission began. Chellini considered the redheaded McMillan a hero: he suffered the night sweats and was terrified at takeoff, and yet he fought with courage and ferocity for his country and family back home.

Once the men and women in Puglia learned that Chellini, one of their own, was serving to protect them and give them back their homeland, the legend of the Hero of San Severo was born. The army heard of it, and while Chellini recovered from his wounds, his mother was brought from Bovino to his bedside, where she served him chicken with turnip tops, his boyhood favorite. A photo, provided by Army Public Relations, appeared in the Journal-American and soon the gaunt Chellini, swaddled in bandages, was famous stateside too, if only among natives of Italy who lived in or near New York City.

Now, as he approached Marzano’s garage. Chellini recalled that Lydia had put the newspaper clipping in her hope chest. It had been given to her by Father Gregorio, who introduced them at the dance at St. Francis. Removing the Phillips head screwdriver from his pocket, Chellini wondered if the yellowing newspaper clipping was still there, tucked among her linens and the white lace of her secondhand wedding dress.

Following a few twists of the wrist, Chellini stepped inside the darkened bay. Calculating where the truck’s headlights would shine, he affixed the bayonet to the wall — also an easy task since a protruding nail allowed him to hang it at eye level. The scent of motor oil and the rumble of traffic on the viaduct enveloping him. Chellini then buried in a crowded trash can the receipts from the army surplus and restaurant supply stores. Returning to the twilight, he put the lock plate back in its place and he departed, dusting his hands. Despite his aching feet, he walked at a pace that would have taxed Ambrose had he accompanied Chellini on his task.

They found Hans Koppel with his throat slashed — “ear to ear,” according to a grisly story on page five of the morning edition of the Daily News — in his apartment on Eighty-ninth Street, between First and York avenues. The German’s blood had oozed through the floorboards and saturated the ceiling of the apartment below. The New York City police were notified after Koppel’s downstairs neighbor found vivid red stains on the white fur of her Turkish Angora cat, Geli.

That very same evening, the tabloid carried the headline “Italian Resistance Fighter Nabbed,” and made note of an anonymous tip received by police. The receipts were located at Marzano’s garage, and the countermen at the army surplus and restaurant supply stores remembered a squat, clean-shaven Italian man with a brown cap festooned with buttons.

Marzano’s fingerprints were found on the bayonet, which he foolishly kept at his apartment. Koppel’s blood had splattered onto his already soiled shoes.

Marzano told the cops he had no regrets. He killed the German, the Daily News reported, to restore the honor of all Italian women. Marzano declared that he had been a passionate partisan in San Remo, where the Nazis raped and defiled women, and his taste for revenge did not end with the armistice.

This seemed to explain, at least to the satisfaction of the Daily News, why Marzano carved the letters “GAP” into Koppel’s forehead.

Toward the end of its article, the newspaper speculated that there would be a faction among New York City’s Italian community that would declare Marzano a hero for his bold determination, and suggested Hans Koppel was active in the movement to revive the Bund in the neighborhood where the Brownshirts had once paraded.

The Hero of Yorkville, Chellini mused. Emilio Marzano.

The man had served his purpose. Let him be a champion, as long as he remains behind bars.

Later that night, as magenta clouds streaked the starless sky. Chellini, with Ambrose in tow, concluded his walk by passing the cigar store. As he peered across the street at the rabble playing cards, sipping jug wine, and avoiding conversation about Marzano, the man all of them now would claim never to have met, Chellini allowed his tired eyes to find the fat crook Tartuffo.

After a moment’s consideration, Tartuffo bowed his enormous head.

Chellini silently accepted the gesture, and he and Ambrose moved on, man and bulldog with an almost imperceptible bounce of pride in their step.

Any illusion Lydia harbored that the murder of Koppel by Marzano had been a coincidence was dispatched by the time Chellini returned.

Though it was after eleven o’clock, espresso brewed on the stove, and fried bow ties dusted with powdered sugar sat in a dish at the center of the kitchen table. The frilly tablecloth was one Chellini had not seen in years.

“Chellini?” said Lydia, hopefully.

While Ambrose glugged his water, Chellini visited his daughters, gently closing their fingers around his kiss. For a moment, he allowed himself the pleasure attendant in the thought that he had saved his family.

By the time he returned, a tiny cup of the rich, aromatic coffee sat in front of his seat.

Chellini took his place. With a sweep of his hand, he gestured for his wife to join him.

She did so, humbly.

“Chellini.”

He took no satisfaction from her fear — in Chellini’s mind, love could not exist where trepidation reigned — but he did not immediately reply.

The circular lamp overhead flickered unevenly, and soon they both could hear its buzz.

Chellini took a sip of the espresso.

He nodded his approval and gestured for his bride to take some coffee for herself.

“Grazie, Chellini,” she said as she filled her cup, all the while keeping her eyes on his.

Chellini waited.

“Lydia,” he said finally, as he reached into his vest pocket.

He withdrew a slip of paper and he slid it toward his wife, whose solemnity dominated the little room.

She unfolded the sheet.

“Lydia,” it read, “your husband loves you.”

Chellini watched as she read the salutation and signature.

“Your friend, Dick Powell.”

Chellini reached for a cookie.

“Your Friday movie,” he said. “At what time do we go?”

Stunned, Lydia could not respond.

As she stared at the note, young Chellini dropped his hand under the table.

Ambrose happily licked the sugar from his fingertips.