Thunder City (13 page)

Vincenzo had approached Borneo on his new pine leg at Borneo’s table in the restaurant on Charlevoix to extend the invitation. With tears in his eyes he had shaken Borneo’s hand and delivered a pretty speech in which he hoped by honoring years of loyal service to his late father to heal the breach between them. He had drunk a glass of wine to confirm the peace and hobbled off to seek out his brothers and finish plotting the assassination of the murderous pig who had killed their brother Carlo.

Borneo, who did not own a vehicle, had hired a Crownover brougham for his part in the procession—a choice made in the interest of solidarity with young Harlan, in whom he had invested five thousand dollars. The wood was enameled black and the upholstery was red velvet, against which the elegance of his midnight worsted was concealed from a public who could not see inside. He did not fear exposure to assassins, there being specific rules of conduct among Sicilians prohibiting murder at family occasions such as weddings, baptisms, first communions, and funerals. Since the time of his arrest, he had sought to be less visible than Uncle Joe and his kind, marching on foot as they did at the head of the Columbus Day parade and riding about the city in open phaetons, waving to admirers, and bellowing traditional greetings and good wishes at acquaintances on the street. He was not and would never be as popular as the fat don, and his association with James Aloysius Dolan had demonstrated to him that fame and a conspicuous visibility were regarded as exclusive privileges of sporting figures and public servants, who were jealous men and never forgot a moment spent in someone else’s shade. Borneo was determined to cultivate a reputation for humility, but not to the extent that he attracted attention to his sackcloth; a delicate performance that required concentration and a keen sense of balance. His name had not appeared in a newspaper and he had not been photographed since his apprehension in the Orosco affair.

When he helped his wife Graziella, attired in a simple black dress with modest matching hat and half-veil, into the brougham and boarded behind her, the facing seat was already occupied. The early passenger was a small man of indeterminate age, in a rumpled gray suit with crumbs in the folds and a homburg hat rather too large for him, so that only his outward-turned ears and long thick nose seemed to prevent it from slipping all the way down to rest on his narrow shoulders. With his nail-bitten hands resting on the scuffed and splitting leather briefcase in his lap, Maurice Lapel resembled a thousand other local attorneys and businessmen whose parents and grandparents had come over from Germany with the first wave of Jewish immigrants seventy years before. Upon closer inspection, his quiet courtesy, listening attitude, and in particular his black eyes that appeared to absorb light without reflecting any back, bore out his reputation—known to only a few—as one of the finest legal minds of the age. He had offered his services to Borneo at the time of the Carlo Sorrato murder investigation, and was the man who had presented Graziella and the ticket stubs bearing the date of Carlo’s death to the police, who accepted Borneo’s alibi and released him. Borneo’s first act upon obtaining his freedom was to hire Lapel away from the two-room law firm where he was employed and place him on permanent retainer as the Unione Siciliana’s chief consultant in matters of law. In the two years since his appointment, fifteen members of the Unione had been arrested for crimes ranging from malicious destruction of property to murder in the first degree. None had been bound over for trial.

“You should have worn black,” was Borneo’s greeting upon taking his seat beside his wife. “The Sorratos will say you lack respect.”

“They won’t notice me. No one does.” Lapel worked very hard to eliminate a lifetime in the downtown Jewish corridor from his speech. He spoke in short sentences with almost no intonation, and thus marked himself forever as a member of a foreign culture. “We can talk?” He did not look at Graziella.

Borneo nodded. His wife’s English was limited to routine exchanges with customers at Blackwell’s department store, where she had worked until their marriage. They spoke Italian exclusively at home and he was reasonably assured that she had forgotten most of what she’d known.

“Vincenzo Sorrato is offering a thousand dollars for your head,” Lapel said. “I heard them talking in the barbershop.”

“What language were they using?”

“Italian. Sicilian dialect.”

“It must be true. Sicilians think only Sicilians understand Sicilian.”

“I’ve never found reason to put them straight. What do you intend to do?”

“To keep my head.” Borneo waited.

Lapel unbuckled his briefcase and drew out a cardboard folder, from which he removed a stiff sheet of paper with holes punched in the left margin. “Handle it carefully. It needs to be back in East Park today.” East Park was the site of Detroit Police Headquarters.

Borneo took the sheet and turned it toward the window. It contained photographs taken from the front and side of a man with a thick mantel of bone overhanging eyes with bloated lids and ropes of scar tissue on both cheeks. His nose was pushed flat to his face; it did not exist in profile. The man’s name was George Zelos. He had been tried twice in the beating death of a quarry foreman named Constantine Butsikitis, released after his second hung jury, and had served six months in the Wayne County Jail for aggravated assault in connection with a fight at the same quarry. Note was made that the U.S. State Department was reviewing his immigration status for possible deportation. He was twenty-seven years old.

Borneo handed back the sheet. “What happened to his face?”

“He fell thirty feet into the bottom of the quarry. He was pronounced dead at the scene and woke up in the morgue wagon. His troubles with his fellow employees began when he went back to work.” The attorney returned the sheet to the folder and put it away in his briefcase.

“Can a Greek be trusted?”

“I think so. I’ve promised to represent him at his deportation hearing if he cooperates. He’s under a king’s order of execution back home. Something to do with revolutionary activities against the crown.”

“What do you suggest?”

Lapel said nothing, communicating much.

Borneo shook his head. “Vincenzo is smarter than Carlo was; it’s often that way with second sons. Zelos will never get near him with that face.”

“Vincenzo knows all the men we would use under ordinary circumstances. That’s why I chose the Greek.”

“You should have chosen one with a more pleasing countenance.”

“It’s all I had to work with. To bring someone in from out of town would take too much time. You could be dead within a week.”

Borneo turned to his wife and asked her in Italian if she were not too hot in so much black. She smiled and replied that as the color was kind to her she would suffer a good deal more before changing. Then she returned her attention to the preparations taking place outside her window.

Borneo shifted back to English. “I think we should make use of Zelos’s face rather than look for a way around it. I did not see Vincenzo’s daughter at the funeral. Did she come up with him from Toledo?”

“He brought his entire family. Theresa is four, too young to behave herself during a long Mass. When he lived here, Vincenzo used to place his children in the care of the sisters at St. Anne’s.”

“I doubt he’s’ had time to make different arrangements. Ask Zelos to bring Theresa Sorrato to her father’s hotel after the burial. Make certain he knows that she is not to be harmed.”

“The sisters will not give her up to that face.”

“Of course you will accompany him. I wouldn’t have had you make donations to the Catholic Fund there in person these past two years if I did not want them to know you at sight.”

“I’d wondered about that.” Lapel’s black eyes gave back nothing. “Shall I have Zelos give Vincenzo your regards?”

“No. We will not insult the man’s intelligence.”

The carriage began moving. From far ahead drifted the strains of the brass band, distorted by wind and distance into a swelling and fading drone. The horses’ hooves clip-clopped, slow as a grandfather’s clock.

“What happened on Gratiot?” Borneo asked.

“That one took some finding out. The police can be admirably obtuse when a mistake has been made. It seems an acting precinct commander named Hearndon asked for a free crack at one of the women. Ordinarily we’re flexible about that kind of thing, even though the arrangements we made with Dolan don’t include gratuities to the locals. However, the man was drunk and abusive. The door was shut in his face. He smashed a carriage lamp before he left and came back with a flying squad an hour later. It could have been worse. Councilman O’Dell had just left.”

“Don’t sprinkle sugar on it. Was the commander punished?”

“He was temporary. The department reassigned him to the Second the next day in his old position as lieutenant at the special request of Mayor Maybury.”

“Not good enough.”

“All the charges were dropped the next morning. The arrests themselves were erased from the blotter. It was a snag in the system. Dolan depends a great deal on the support of the police. His intervention could cost him a lot in the off-year elections.”

“I’m curious to know how well that support will hold up when Vito Grapellini delivers a hundred pounds of rotten beef to the police picnic.”

“You don’t want to go to war with Dolan. You’re not that strong. The neighborhood needs six weeks to realize Uncle Joe’s dead and the Unione is their only friend. Even then you have to be discreet. Dolan’s still on the way up. As powerful as he is, he isn’t as powerful as he will be.”

“We have that much in common.”

“He won’t be pleased to hear you’ve thrown in with Harlan Crownover. He gets nervous when his partners take on partners. Especially when the new partner is the son of the richest man in town.”

Borneo, who had learned never to be surprised by anything, least of all the wealth of the lawyer’s information, assumed that young Harlan had been talking.

“My personal speculations are no more threatening to Dolan than they are his business to know them.”

“He might not see it that way. He’s been buying up land in the path of the Toledo-Detroit interurban for a year. He stands to make a fortune when he sells the right-of-way. He won’t be happy when he finds out you’re funding a form of transportation that will compete with the streetcar system.”

The Sicilian laughed, showing his full set of even white teeth, as rare among his people as laughter itself was to him. Graziella, startled, smiled at her husband, only to divert her gaze to the window when she realized he was barely aware of her presence.

“The automobile stands as much chance of taking business away from streetcars as the hot-air balloon. I didn’t lend money to Abner Crownover’s son because I thought his ideas had merit.”

The lawyer, too discreet ever to begin a sentence with the word
why,
said nothing. Perhaps for this reason, he was the only man to whom his client ever explained himself.

“I’m a simple immigrant. It helps my esteem to give a young man born with all the advantages a reason to feel grateful to me.”

“If it’s indebtedness you’re after, you’d have done better to approach Edward. He’s the one who will inherit the company when the old man dies.”

“Harlan approached me. In any case you’re forgetting my theory about second sons.”

“We’re discussing Dolan. He’s big and fat, but he’s not slow. He moves plenty fast when he suspects he’s being betrayed. You’ve spent far too much time and money getting to where you are now to risk throwing it all away on a theory.”

“I’ll worry about Dolan.”

“I sometimes wish you would worry about something. I’d do no more than my share if I thought you were doing yours.”

A police officer in a bullet helmet was standing at the barricade at Bellevue Street, yawning into the back of a white-gloved hand. Borneo was amused by the agitated expression on the face of the driver of a beer wagon who was waiting for the procession to pass; were his customers that thirsty? Since the century’s turn, impatience seemed to be the fastest-growing emotion around. It was as if everyone was waiting for something, and although no one knew what it was, the common perception was that it was taking its own sweet time. There was money to be made from such an attitude, and much power.

He faced Lapel. “Do you ever go out to Belle Isle and watch the bicycle races?”

“I never have the time.”

“You should make it. There’s nothing like war or a competition to bring out the best and worst in human nature. All the contestants start out at the same time, mounted on similar machines. However, many of them do not finish. At some point, one of three things will happen to narrow the field. Two or more riders will collide, or something will go wrong with a number of bicycles, or someone will give up because of exhaustion or injury or broken will. Often all three. Of the riders who finish, most are equal in strength and skill, yet they almost never tie. Why do you think only one wins?”

“That’s not difficult to answer. The longer you go without something bad happening, the more the risk increases. You get nervous and make mistakes. The percentages are against more than one rider having the concentration and strength of purpose required to cross the finish fine ahead of the others. It gets worse the closer you are to the end.”

“Jim Dolan has pedaled a long way,” Borneo said. “The race isn’t over.”

“Politics aren’t the same as bicycles. The pressure’s different.”

“Then we may have to turn it up.”

Lapel looked down at his ragged nails. He never chewed them except when he was alone, and then he gnawed them constantly. “Your English still needs work,” he said. “I’m getting the feeling you’ve mixed up your tenses.”

“Explain.”

“You’ve turned it up already.”

H
ARLAN
C
ROWNOVER HAD BEEN
living on the top floor of a brick colonial house on Howard for sixteen months. The move had puzzled his mother and outraged his father, both of whom believed that young men and women of good family did not leave the ancestral home except to marry. He had explained at the time that he wanted privacy, but for all the good that did he thought he might as well have told them the real reason: With Abner III and Edward married and living in their own homes, the prospect of his rattling around the Queen Anne with just his parents and the servants gave him a macabre chill.