The Gold Coast (73 page)

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Authors: Nelson DeMille

BOOK: The Gold Coast
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Anyway, we had coffee, and we chatted about this and that, but not about yesterday’s difficulties with the law. The three priests were old-school Italians, naturally, and didn’t use their first names, so there was none of that Father Chuck and Father Buzzy nonsense. On the other hand, they all seemed to have difficult first and last names, and with their accents, it sounded as if they were all named Father Chicken Cacciatore. I called them all Father.
So the head guy was talking about how the bishop (the real bishop of the diocese) wanted to close up Santa Lucia unless it could become self-sufficient, which seemed unlikely since there were hardly enough Italian Catholics left in the parish to support it. The priest explained delicately that the Hispanic Catholics in the parish, mostly from Central America, thought that ten cents in the collection basket covered the overhead. The priest turned to me and said, “The old people of this parish can’t go to another church. They want to be close to their church, they wish to have their funeral Mass here. And of course, we have those former parishioners, such as Mrs. Bellarosa, who return to Santa Lucia and who would be heartbroken if we had to close.”
Okay, Father, bottom line.
He cleared his throat. “It costs about fifty thousand dollars a year to maintain and to heat the church and rectory, and to put food on the table here.”
I didn’t reach for my wallet or anything, but while the priest was telling me this for the don’s benefit, the don had scribbled out a check and put it on the coffee table facedown.
So, after a few more minutes, we made our farewells and embraces and got our God-bless-yous, and we left.
Out on the street, Bellarosa said to me, “Nobody can shake you down like a Catholic priest.
Madonn
’, they hit me for fifty large. But whaddaya gonna do? Ya know?”
“Just say no.”
“
No?
How ya gonna say no?”
“You shake your head and say, ‘No.’”
“Ah, you can’t do that. They know you got the money and they do a guilt thing on you.’’ He chuckled, then added, “You know, I was christened at Santa Lucia, my father and mother was christened here, I was married here, Anna had the kids christened here, Frankie got married here, my old man was buried here, my mother—”
“I get the picture. I’ve got a church like that, too. I give five bucks a week, ten at Easter and Christmas.”
“It’s different here.”
Instead of getting back into the car, Bellarosa turned and looked back at the sad old church and surveyed the mean streets around us. He said, “I used to play stoopball on those rectory steps there. You ever play stoopball?”
“I’ve heard of it.”
“Yeah. The slum kids played it. What did you play? Golf?’’ He smiled.
“I played the stock market.”
“Yeah?’’ He laughed. “Well, we played stoopball right there. Me and my friends . . .’’ He stayed quiet for a few seconds, then said, “Father Chiaro—that was the old pastor you just talked to—he used to charge out of the rectory and run us off. But if he got hold of you, he’d drag you by the ears into the rectory and put you to work on some shit job. You see those doorknobs in there? They’re brass, but they don’t look it now. I used to have to polish those fucking knobs until they looked like gold.”
“He’s still got you by the ears, Frank.”
He laughed. “Yeah. What a sovanabeech.”
“A what?”
He smiled. “That’s the way my grandfather used to say it.
Sovanabeech.
Son of a bitch.”
“I see.’’ Well, I tried to picture fat little Frank Bellarosa on these streets, playing ball, making zip guns, kneeling in the confessional, getting his finger wet, kneeling in the confessional, and so on. And I could picture it, and I’m a nostalgic guy myself, so I’m partial to people who are sentimental about their childhood. I guess that’s a sign of middle age, right? But with Bellarosa, there was more to it, I think. I believe he knew then that he was going home for the last time, and that he had to take care of Santa Lucia so that the priests there would take care of him when the time came. There had been a few stories in the newspapers over the last ten years or so about problems with certain priests and churches providing burial services for people in Frank’s line of work. I guess this frightened Frank Bellarosa, who had assumed all along that he was dealing with a church that was under direct orders from God to forgive everyone. But now people were trying to change the rules, and Bellarosa, not one to take unnecessary chances and knowing he couldn’t take it with him, prepaid for his burial service at Santa Lucia. That’s what I think.
Bellarosa put his hands in his pockets and looked down the intersecting street. “In those days you could walk down this street here late at night and nobody bothered you, but a lot of the old ladies would yell at me from the windows, ‘Frankie, get home before your mother kills you.’ You think anybody says that on this street anymore?”
“I doubt it.”
“Yeah, me too. You wanna see where I lived when I was a kid?”
“Yes, I would.”
Instead of getting into the car, we walked from Santa Lucia in the heat, the way Frank Bellarosa must have done many years before. Lenny and Vinnie tailed behind us in the Cadillac. The area around the church was mostly black, and people glanced at us, but they’d probably witnessed similar scenes, and they knew this was a prodigal son with a gun, so they went about their business while Frank went about his.
We stopped in front of a burned-out five-story brick tenement, and Bellarosa said, “I lived on the top floor there. It was a hundred degrees in the summer, but nice and warm in the winter with those big steam radiators that banged. I shared a room with two brothers.”
I didn’t respond.
He went on, “Then my uncle took me out of here and sent me to La Salle, and the dorms looked like a Park Avenue penthouse to me. I started to understand that there was a world outside of Williamsburg. You know?’’ He was quiet again, then said, “But I got to tell you, looking back on this place in the 1950s, I was happy here.”
“We all were.”
“Yeah.’’ We got back into the car and drove some blocks to a better street, and he showed me the five-story brownstone where he and Anna had spent much of their married life. He said, “I still own the building. I made apartments on each floor and I got a bunch of old people in there. I got an old aunt in there. They pay what they can to the church. You know? The church takes care of the whole thing. It’s a good building.”
I asked, “Are you trying to get into heaven?”
“Yeah, but not this week.’’ He laughed, then added, “Everything’s got an angle, Counselor.”
We drove around the old Italian section of Williamsburg, which had never been very large, and what was left of Italian Williamsburg seemed rather forlorn, but there were stops to be made, and the trip was not all nostalgia, but partly business. As I said, it must be difficult to run a crime empire when you can’t use the telephone, or even the mail for that matter. And this fact obviously necessitated a lot of driving and quick stops to call on people. Frank was the three-minute Mafia manager.
After Williamsburg, we drove into more lively Italian neighborhoods in Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge, and Coney Island, where we made more stops and saw more people, mostly in restaurants and in the back of retail stores and in social clubs. I was quite honestly amazed at the number of branch offices and affiliates of Bellarosa, Inc.—or would one say franchises and chain outlets? More amazing, there didn’t seem to be any written list of these stops. Bellarosa would just say a few words to Lenny and Vinnie, such as, “Let’s see Pasquale at the fish place,’’ and they’d drive somewhere. I could hardly believe that their pea-size brains could retain so many locations, but I guess they had good incentives to do their job.
We left Brooklyn and went into Ozone Park, Queens, which is also an Italian neighborhood. Frank had some relatives there, and we stopped at their row house and played boccie ball in an alleyway with a bunch of his old goombahs who wore baggy pants and three-day whiskers. Then we all drank homemade red wine on a back porch, and it was awful, awful stuff, tannic and sour. But one of the old men put ice in my wine and mixed it with cream soda, of all things. Then he sliced peaches into my glass. Frank had his wine the same way. It was sort of like Italian sangria, I guess, or wine coolers, and I had an idea to market the concoction and sell it to trendy places like Buddy’s Hole where the clientele could drink it with their grass clippings. Ozone Park Goombah Spritzers. No? Yes?
Anyway, we moved on into the late afternoon, making a few more stops at modest-looking frame houses in other Queens neighborhoods.
Frank Bellarosa had entertained the movers and shakers of his world, the chiefs and the “made men,’’ at the Plaza Hotel. Now he was going out into the streets to talk to his constituents, like a politician running for office. But unlike a candidate, I never heard him make any promises, and unlike a Mafia don, I never heard him make a threat. He was just “showing his face around,’’ which seemed to be an expression with these people that I kept hearing. Showing your face around must have a lot of subtle connotations, and must be important if Bellarosa was doing it.
The man had a natural instinct for power, I’ll say that for him. He comprehended on some level that real power is not based on terror, or even on loyalty to an abstract idea or organization. Real power was based on personal loyalty, especially the loyalty of the masses to the person of don Bellarosa, as I witnessed with the sausage vendor and with everyone else we’d stopped to see. Truly the man was an intuitive and charismatic leader—the last of the great dons.
And as evil as he was, I nearly felt sorry for him, surrounded now by enemies within and without. But I had also felt sorry for proud Lucifer in
Paradise Lost
when he was brought down by God and heaven’s host of goody-goody androgynous angels. There must be a serious flaw in my character.
We headed back to Manhattan after dark. New York is truly a city of ethnic diversity, but I don’t have much occasion or desire to hang around with the ethnics. However, I have to admit that I was intrigued by the Italian subculture that I had caught a glimpse of that day. It was a world that seemed both alive and dying at the same time, and I remarked to Bellarosa in the car back to Manhattan, “I thought all that Italian stuff was a thing of the past.”
He seemed to understand what I meant and replied, “It is in the past. It was past when my old man took me around on Saturdays to sit with the goombahs and sip wine and talk. It’s always in the past.”
The old immigrant cultures, I reflected, still exerted a powerful influence on their people and on American society. But truly they were losing their identity as they became homogenized, and ironically they were losing their power as they filled the vacuum created by the so-called decline of the Wasp. But more important, back there in the shadows, somewhere in the outer boroughs, were the new immigrants, the future that neither Frank Bellarosa nor I understood or wished to contemplate.
As the car approached the skyline of Manhattan, Bellarosa said to me, “You have a good time today?”
“It was interesting.”
“Yeah. Sometimes I have to just get out and see these people. You know? To see that everybody’s still out there. I’ve been losing touch, kind of holed up at Alhambra. You can’t do that. You go out there and if somebody wants to take a pop at you, then at least you went down out on the street, and not holed up someplace waiting for them to corner you. You know?”
“Yes, I do. But do you need a lawyer along while you’re tempting fate?”
“No. I need a friend.”
I had several sarcastic replies right on the tip of my tongue, but I said nothing, which said it all.
He added, “I’m gonna make you into an honorary Italian like Jack Weinstein. You like that?”
“Sure, as long as that doesn’t make me an honorary target.”
He sort of laughed, but I think he was finding less humor in the subject of his assassination. He did say, however, “I talked to some people. You got nothing to worry about. You’re still a civilian.”
Great news. And I trusted these people, right? Well at least they probably all belonged to the rifle club and were good marksmen. I surely hoped so.

 

 

Thirty-eight
It was January, and the days were short and cold. It was about four
P
.
M
., and already the sunlight was fading, but I didn’t need or want much light.
The wrought-iron gates of Alhambra had been sold by the developer and replaced with steel security gates that were fastened together with a chain but not tightly enough to prevent me from slipping through.
I walked past the gatehouse, which was now being used as the builder’s sales office, but it was Sunday and the small house was dark. I walked up the long drive, bundled in my wool parka. The cobblestones, too, had been sold, and the drive was frozen mud, slippery in places, so I took my time. The flowers that bordered the drive were all gone, of course, but the poplars still stood, bare now, gray and spindly.

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