Thunder City (26 page)

The episode had left a deep impression on Borneo, who at the time had been recovering in bed from his police interrogation in the matter of the assault upon the barber Gilberto Orosco. A man could rape a continent and win admiration, provided his name ended in a consonant or at least an acceptable vowel, but an Italian, like a Negro, could not take a billiard cue even to one of his own without jail and suffering even unto death. Better, then, to exert influence anonymously, through the popular anointed, and thereby gradually acquire the funds necessary to exert true power.

The process, however, seemed glacial. He was nearing the end of his second decade of enlightenment, and his dominion was small enough that he could survey it in its entirety by standing upon a chair on the terrace of the restaurant where he conducted most of his business. As much as it amused him to ridicule Big Jim Dolan for pandering to the unwashed and illiterate voters whose caprices determined the fate of his party, Borneo did not delude himself; the man was his superior in all the ways that counted. The Irish Pope was comfortable everywhere he went in the city, except of course the Italian neighborhoods, but even there his safety was assured by his celebrity. Borneo had only to journey west of Gratiot Avenue to feel his power shuck from his body; on Belle Isle, in Corktown, among the stately homes along Jefferson, and in any of the smart shops and varnished saloons that lined Woodward he was just another dago, forced to step into the gutter to make way for flying wedges of Detroit College students too caught up in their self-worship to watch where they were blundering. Resistance would only change their brainless banter to roars of indignation, followed by kicks and blows. Apart from his interest in the glory of old Rome, he took no particular pride in his nationality, which was a fractious thing even among those who did, the various cities and provinces of home having been at one another’s throat since the fall of Constantinople. The oafs who gathered on the Campus Martius on Columbus Day, draped in green-white-and-red sashes and hooting above the bass drums and tubas about the contributions Italians had made to America since that Genoese opportunist had dropped anchor off Porto Rico in 1492, left him cold. Not by sermons and pageantry had the Spanish (and then the French and then the English and finally the Irish) gained sway over those who had preceded them to these shores, but by raw force, whether it was pressed by muskets or cavalry or a truncheon in the hands of a mick fireman “maintaining the peace” on election day. (The Dutch, of course, had used money, which as Borneo had already observed was the most fearsome weapon in the human arsenal.) In any case it was difficult enough for any man, let alone a dusky Mediterranean, to grope his way along the corridors of power without having to bring his whole tribe.

He had the vision, the beginnings of an organization, and the start-up funds to brave that corridor. All he lacked was a vehicle to speed the journey. It had amused him to apply that term literally and lend funds to young Crownover, fully expecting the impetuous Ford to fail spectacularly, as he had twice before, and leave the heir to the great carriage company in Borneo’s debt. It pained him to admit that he had underestimated Ford. Although the business of the Selden patent was encouraging, his own small victory over the American justice system in the Orosco affair, which he, an insignificant street tough, had won through an embarrassingly transparent device, had left him with little faith in the ability or even the determination of the law to enforce itself. Ford was fast approaching the millions necessary to become an authentic force, one with the Morgans and Carnegies and Astors and Vanderbilts and Rockefellers, immune to conscience and statute. Borneo had not yet surrendered hope, but neither was he oblivious to the call of fresh opportunity.

All this he considered as he stood by the window in his dining room, peering through the diaphanous lace of his wife’s curtains at his neighborhood in full cry of the early-evening rush to home and supper. The flow of pushcart peddlers wheeling home their inventory, salesgirls with felt hats and handbags, and round-shouldered men carrying lunch buckets, some of them balancing these burdens with shiny aluminum-covered pails containing beer from the corner taproom, was as changeless and reliable as a punch clock, but almost always had a warp in it at the corner, which had become the post of choice for every type of unemployable to pitch his party line. Sometimes he was a scruffy-headed Marxist in wire-rimmed glasses and a filthy and tattered sweater, host to any number of lively vermin, reading the
Communist Manifesto
in the bored singsong voice of a streetcar conductor. Other times he was a minister with some unidentified church, gaunt and shrill in the wrinkled white suit and Panama hat of a tropical missionary, asking the workers as they passed if they were aware their daughters were under the scrutiny of white slavers like naked geese strung heads-down in the window of a market. On occasion, what appeared to be the same stout woman in a dirty frock with the same ageless and barefoot children wiping their noses on her skirts held that ground, snatching the odd sleeve and asking if anyone had seen her husband. There were others, more transient, with missions less apparent, who came but once or twice, but always left, like the others, when the traffic thinned to a trickle, with or without a handful of sweaty coins to show for their vigil. Some of the recidivists lived in the neighborhood; these Borneo knew by name. The rest were drawn from outside by the rapidly expanding Italian population. The minister, he was aware, slept in a boxcar in the railroad yard when he failed to collect enough to pay for a room, and he suspected the woman with the children made the rounds of all the other ethnic communities the rest of the time. By and large these individuals were looked upon as minor annoyances and ignored by the policeman who walked that beat, except at election time when healthy arraignment activity was desired by the party in office. The diehards were released after a few days with a warning and were back on the corner within a week. Out-of-towners who looked even slightly shabby were beaten with stiff rubber hoses, transported by police van to the city limits, and advised not to return on pain of three months’ hard labor on charges of vagrancy. No distinction was made between the authentic hoboes who had ridden in on the rods and those with ticket stubs in their pockets to show that they had entered respectably enough in a day coach. A factory town did not warm to strangers with time in the middle of the day to pester its hardworking citizenry.

Today’s pest was a pleasant diversion from the normal run. A modestly attractive young woman, rather too thin for Borneo’s taste, stood on the corner wearing an old-fashioned sunbonnet and long full dress of pioneer gingham, handing out leaflets. Most of those who accepted them did so out of native politeness or because it was easier to take them than it was to avoid her. The majority boiled past without acknowledging her existence or altered their course to steer wide around her, and this was what caused the warp in the flow of foot traffic. It was a rare pedestrian—one in ten, Borneo judged—who paused long enough actually to read the leaflet. One or two spoke to her briefly, as if asking a question. The woman responded without breaking rhythm, snatching the sheets one by one from the stack under her left arm and thrusting them at the passersby. This had happened a number of times before Borneo realized that all those who stopped were women, and that the ratio of one in ten corresponded roughly to the number of homeward-bound laborers who happened to be female. He became very curious to know what was printed on those leaflets.

This thought had just formed when someone knocked on the apartment door. He turned from the window and frowned at the face of the china clock upon the finished pine sideboard, the gift of a cabinetmaker whose daughter had recently married a young barber in a five-chair shop after Borneo had sent men to break the shins of a divorced Armenian to whom she had been engaged briefly. The time was ten minutes after six. In five minutes he would be sitting down to dinner with his wife. He could not think of anyone he knew who would violate the supper hour for any reason short of emergency.

He heard Graziella’s low voice in conversation with a male whose own tones were pitched slightly higher; a young man, then, asking if Mr. Borneo was at home. She replied in the affirmative—dissembling was an art she refused to practice, whatever her feelings about the interruption of the domestic rhythms she held dear—and a moment later Harlan Crownover walked into the dining room.

The stocky young man wore a suit and necktie, and the crested condition of his hair suggested that he had surrendered a hat but was sufficiently unaccustomed to the accessory to think to make the necessary adjustment.

“I’m sorry to bother you at home,” he said in lieu of greeting. “I missed you at the restaurant and they told me at the butcher shop where you live.”

“I must speak to Signor Grapellini about that. I never conduct business at home.”

“He didn’t want to tell me, but I convinced him you’d be pleased.” He reached inside his suit coat and slid out a thick envelope. When Borneo made no move to accept it, he turned up the flap and fanned out the corners of some of the bills inside. “Five thousand dollars was the amount I borrowed.”

“I will be in the shop tomorrow morning, and in the restaurant all afternoon. You could have waited and given it to me then.”

“I prefer to repay my debts right away.”

He smelled the aromas from the kitchen. He seldom ate meat, but he could not resist his wife’s veal. She got up very early Saturday to be sure and select the freshest cuts at the Farmers’ Market.

“There is a matter of interest,” he said.

“There is six thousand in this envelope. Is a twenty percent return satisfactory?”

He was silent for a moment

“Yes.”

When Borneo still did not take it, Crownover laid the envelope on the sideboard. “Do you give receipts?”

“It’s unnecessary. No paperwork changed hands when we arranged the loan.”

“This ends our association.” The furrow in the young man’s forehead was less certain than his tone.

“I’m happy you found it profitable.” There was another awkward silence. Borneo, who seldom felt the need to offer empty conversation, decided to fill it. “I suppose you are in the automobile business now.”

“I am.”

“What’s to become of Crownover Coaches?”

“The company will make more money than it ever has, as an adjunct to the Ford Motor Company. In five years—less, perhaps—we will have manufactured our last horse-drawn vehicle.”

“I wonder what we will do with all those horses.”

“Race them, I suppose. That should make you feel secure.”

“I’m secure as long as humans insist upon remaining human. I hope your new venture brings you wealth and great happiness.”

Harlan, Borneo saw, was not yet Abner II. Evidence that their encounter did not develop as expected appeared on his face for a bare instant before his expression smoothed over. “Thank you.” He waited. “You don’t want to count the bills?”

“Did you not count them yourself?”

“Twice.”

Borneo smiled. “Good-bye, Mr. Crownover.”

“Good-bye.”

When the meal was over and Graziella cleared away the dishes, Borneo announced that he was going for a walk. Although it was his long-established habit to spend the evening reading in the parlor, his wife did not question him. Her plump, pretty face was as free of lines and pouches as the day she had agreed to spend her life with him; he credited this to her charming lack of curiosity. The only disappointment she had ever caused him was the absence of a male child. He never dwelt upon this, however. The mystery of who should carry on when he was gone could only make him falter in his determination to acquire something beyond a partnership in a butcher shop and the fear and respect of a few hundred immigrants who lived only to maintain a roof above their heads so they could live.

Darkness had come to Little Italy, broken by the corner lamps and the yellow glow from the windows of buildings and the absurd aloof illumination of the city system stretching above the rooftops like ineffectual Eiffel Towers. There was a sweet, tarry smell that was absent during the daytime, or more accurately lost in the olfactory jumble of ripe fruit, cheap pipe tobacco, cheaper cigars, frying meat, stale undershirts, fresh fish, wet laundry, and horseshit. As a good family man—for he loved his wife and daughter and was discreet about his mistress—he was not often abroad after sundown. Nevertheless he preferred this time to the confusion of the day, the urgency to accomplish as much as possible in a race against the sun. Night accepted one as it found one. Night expected nothing.

The woman in the bonnet was long gone. He had anticipated nothing else. In truth he had no desire to make contact with her. He was alone on the street with the sounds of domestic chatter falling out of open windows, the bubbling tinkle of a piano that wanted tuning, the nasal strain of some anonymous tenor drifting from a phonograph. (Rollo Fischetti’s machine, he guessed; courtesy of a horse named Caesar’s Rubicon. Borneo had taken a beating in that particular race and had learned his lesson, to place layoff bets whenever a horse with a locally popular name came to the post.)

As he had predicted, the sidewalk around the corner from the one where the woman had stood handing out leaflets was a plain of discarded paper, solid white, as if it had been hit with a fall of snow. He picked up one of the leaves and held it under the corner light. It was a song sheet, ruled and dotted with musical notes. The legend at the bottom read, “Distributed by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and the Anti-Saloon League of America.” The melody appeared simple, but not as simple as the printed lyrics:

Stand up for pro-hib-i-tion,

Ye patriots of the land;

All ye who love your coun-try,

Against saloons should stand.

Be bold against this traffic,

Your country’s greatest foe;

Let word and deed and bal-lot

Proclaim, “saloons must go.”