Thunder City (5 page)

“He declined the offer I made him.”

“Of course he did. The man is not a fool, despite his transparent attempts to appear as simple as his constituents. Now will you abandon your scheme?”

“Did you abandon your spring suspension when your superiors told you it wouldn’t work?”

“It isn’t the same thing.”

“That’s the idea, Father.”

Needles jabbed at his abdomen. “From now on you will not leave your job except in case of emergency. A doctor’s signature will be required before you are allowed back on these premises.”

It is no small thing for a man to see his own eyes glaring back at him. For a moment he thought his son would quit, and for a rarity he was not sure whether he dreaded the gesture or hoped for it. He did recognize the instant when Harlan acquiesced. It was less an indication of surrender than it was an indirect kind of defiance. In his youth, Abner had worn the same expression often enough to know it when it was shown him. “All right,” said his son.

As victories went, it was as sour as his stomach. He pressed for more. “I didn’t ask if you approved. Say you understand.”

“I understand.”

“Arrange to have those boards sent back to Nicaragua today.”

“Yes, sir.”

Abner left. On his way to the elevator he smelled not the smells nor heard the sounds nor saw the sights of the factory he had built. He thought only of warm milk in a glass and fifteen minutes alone in the cloistered silence of his office. It was as much of a retirement as he would ever feel secure enough to take.

D
RAWN ALONG ETHNIC LINES
, a map of Detroit in the small years of the twentieth century would have resembled a butcher’s chart; one of those largely unnecessary wall decorations presuming to divide an overstuffed cow into chops, steaks, ribs, and sweetbreads, each section tinted its own color and promising a set of pleasures and disadvantages unique to itself.

In the center, bisected by Joseph Campau Avenue, lay Hamtramck, populated almost exclusively by second- and third-generation Poles. Of all the local neighborhoods designated by the national origin of their residents, Hamtramck alone was a fully incorporated city with its own mayor and police force, a distinction conferred upon it because of the seniority of its citizens and their invited status. In 1838, commissions agents met these hardworking, ox-shouldered refugees from Czarist Russia at the gangplanks in New York, Boston, and Baltimore, and carted them inland to grade and lay track for the Detroit and Pontiac Railway. Later they smelted iron for the stove industry and tilled the fields for the D. M. Ferry seed farms. They saved their wages, bought and built houses, and closed ranks against all the groups that followed, none of whom came by invitation. Tint Hamtramck rusty red for a living earned as hard as iron.

Corktown occupied the near west side, named for those immigrants from County Cork who led the exodus from Ireland in the time of the blight. Unlike the Poles and Germans, they knew English, and so assimilated quickly, albeit in numbers that horrified an earlier generation of Americans and drew inordinate attention to their preferred vices. They laid brick, ran streetcars, fought for prizes, wore police uniforms, and elected themselves into positions of power, establishing feudal fiefdoms copied from the examples of their former absentee English landlords. Color Corktown green, because that’s what they would prefer.

East of central belonged to the Germans, now giving grudging ground, block by block, before the Italians. In residence as long as the Irish, they shared political influence with them, but did not patronize their pubs as the Irish did their beer gardens. The Germans were by and large educated and cultural, drinking their lager and eating their sauerbraten while reading Goethe and listening to Wagner on the phonograph. At the same moment Bismarck destroyed Napoleon III’s army at Sedan, the French families who had traded Detroit away from the Indians were withdrawing from St. Antoine, Beaubien, and Lafayette to make room for the vendors of music boxes and German silver. The victory was complete; the Gallic tongue was no longer heard except when someone mangled the names of the original streets. Paint the near east side the dusty old gold of the Prussian double-headed eagle.

Bounded by Macomb, Monroe, Randolph, and Beaubien streets, Greektown sang and danced to the frenetic strings of the eastern Mediterranean. Brown-necked men in cloth caps and thick moustaches played checkers in the coffeehouses and washed down moussaka and sticky baklava with ouzo and retsina in restaurants larded with the smell of hot grease from lambs roasting. Cheeses and slaughtered ducks hung in the windows of shops where dried apricots and bottles of olive oil were sold. It was said that while the Poles worked and the Germans learned and the Irish stole, the Greeks ate. Shade in Greektown the deep blue of the Aegean Sea.

Negroes teemed in the area east of Randolph and south of Congress. Their fathers and grandfathers had settled there at the northern end of the Underground Railroad, freed from the southern plantations first by radical abolitionists, then by government decree. They swept the streets, cleaned the houses of the well-to-do Irish and Germans, sweated in the stove foundries, and portered the Michigan Central and the Grand Trunk railroads. At night the men cast dice in the back rooms of the saloons and occasionally squared off with knives over disputed points. Elsewhere in the city, they took off their hats and spoke low and politely, with their gazes on the ground at their feet. East of Randolph and south of Congress, they walked down the center of the sidewalk, smoked cigars and drank dago red and ate pigs’ knuckles and danced to piano-roll rag and bet their tips on Jack Johnson. The area was as separate and as self-contained as Hamtramck, without the paperwork. Make it black.

Between Gratiot and the river sprawled Italy in all its variety, segregated into blocks representing each of the regions of that boot-shaped peninsula and the boccie ball of Sicily, poised at the toe to careen off the coasts of Africa and Spain. Here was Abruzzi, with Naples next to it, with Firenze two blocks down; Calabria and Venice and the rest, dug up separately and transported a third of the way across the globe and replanted side by side, with all their local traditions and enmities intact. Their sons and daughters married within the block, they spoke the dialects of their villages at home, their toothless grandfathers and barrel-shaped aunts never ventured outside the neighborhood except to attend church or be buried. They were janitors and building superintendents, they laid cobblestones, smeared tar on the roofs of buildings downtown, and straddled the girders of infant skyscrapers prickling the flat cityscape with long black lunch pails in their laps. On Columbus Day they marched in the big parade and bet on horses named Nina and Santa Maria in the chalkboard back rooms of barbershops and drank Chianti from basketed jugs in restaurants hung with pictures of Garibaldi and Italian prizefighters with Irish names. In the sopping heat of summer they slept on fire escapes on bare mattresses while Caruso sang on phonographs heard through window screens, drowned out from time to time by loud arguments and shattering china. Sometimes by a gunshot. Then a coffin would be borne down the street before moaning horns and a death-beat bass drum played by men sweating in black wool suits and celluloid collars, trailed by widows in black scarves. Drape Little Italy in the red, white, and green of the Italian flag.

In the heart of the Sicilian neighborhood, seated at his favorite table in a tiny restaurant splattered with tomato sauce, with fishing boats in the Gulf of Castellamare painted on the plaster walls, Salvatore Bornea ate a small plate of linguini in a light cream sauce, chasing each forkful with a sip of mineral water. Bornea was a student of the radical health theories of John Kellogg and C. W. Post of Battle Creek, Michigan, and eschewed his fellow countrymen’s taste for starchy fats and red wine in deference to his trim waist. This consternated those Sicilians who expected their
padrones
to exhibit the swollen vests and puffed-out cheeks of the prosperous dons who ran things back home. The older residents did not come to his table, preferring the well-upholstered company of “Uncle Joe” Sorrato, who mediated disagreements among families and between landlords and borders. But Uncle Joe was dying at seventy-eight of a stroke brought on by too many clams fried in butter and too many gallons of forty-nine-cent wine. They would come around.

Salvatore Bornea, who was better known as Sal Borneo among the younger residents who did jobs for him and came to him for his patronage, had first seen the light of day in Siracusa, Sicily. To that he was willing to admit; but whether the year was 1870, 1871, or 1872, he declined to confirm. He had come to America in March 1884, bearing a birth certificate proving that he had attained the age of fourteen in February of that year, empowering him to enter the country without a legal guardian. When, however, he was arrested by the Detroit police in 1890 for assault with intent to commit great bodily harm less than murder, he produced a birth certificate dated September 11, 1872. He was prosecuted as a minor, and upon pleading guilty to a reduced charge of simple assault, spent ninety days mopping floors and emptying chamber pots in the Detroit House of Corrections. In truth, he was uncertain about the month and year of his birth. He had seen a notation of December in a family Bible when he was small, but was led by a conversation he had once overheard between relatives in an adjoining room that the date was a perjury intended to cover up a pregnancy too short for even the common explanation of a premature appearance. The 1870 certificate belonged to a cousin, also named Salvatore, who had died at the age of three months. The document was a forgery. Six years in the New World had been sufficient to acquaint him with the skilled people necessary to allow him to ply his trade.

The assault episode was an embarrassment. A barber named Gilberto Orosco, who owned three chairs and employed two additional barbers and a manicurist, had received a letter; not delivered by Borneo nor written by him, but the text of which he could guess: “You have more money than we have. You can afford to give $1,000 to the young man who comes to ask you for it.” When Borneo went to the man’s shop, Orosco threatened him with a razor. He agreed to leave, making a joke of it, saying that if he had come there to have his blood spilled he would ask for a shave. For three days he did not return to the shop, although he did go to the shoe store across the street each day before closing, to try on shoes facing the window and observe that Orosco was always the last to leave his establishment, drawing the shades himself and locking up, then turning left to stroll home to his house around the corner. On the fourth day, Borneo stepped out of the doorway of the apartment house on the corner and cracked open the barber’s skull with a two-foot length of billiard cue. He had the misfortune of having been seen, and of all things by a magistrate with the Wayne County Court, a position which put him outside the category of citizens who could be intimidated into withdrawing their police report. He witnessed the assault upon leaving his tailor’s, supplied an accurate description to the officers in the local precinct, and within a quarter of an hour, Borneo was taken from his room and put in handcuffs. Orosco lived, and was sufficiently sobered by the event to say nothing of the extortion demand, and so intent to commit murder was not included in the charge. Borneo had certainly intended to commit murder, and he had not intended to be seen. He regretted both mistakes. The frightened barber paid the thousand dollars, and Uncle Joe Sorrato, who had sent the demand, was pleased with the young man’s refusal to identify his employer during nine hours of interrogation that left him with three broken ribs and a punctured eardrum; upon his release he received five dollars in silver for his silence.

Borneo became Uncle Joe’s enemy then. He was planning to visit the old don with something better than a billiard cue when Sorrato suffered the first of the series of strokes that would chain him to his bed. This was better satisfaction than Borneo could have hoped for. He declared a truce—with Uncle Joe.

The old man listed himself in the Detroit directory as a greengrocer. He had not operated a fruit-and-vegetable cart in fifteen years, but no Italian merchant in the city could sell produce without his permission. Those who had tried, and had ignored the warnings, had their carts upended by toughs and their pears and cantaloupes squashed and kicked apart, had paraffin bombs hurled through their shop windows and buckets of excrement dumped over their inventory. Some of the reluctant merchants were stomped and kicked along with their wares, or were in their shops when the bombs exploded and flung flaming liquid in every direction. One who had made himself particularly clear about where he stood on the subject of blackmail had been forced to watch with a knife at his throat while his daughter was raped on the floor between his display cases. All of these incidents were investigated by the police, who inspected the scenes, asked questions of the victims and their neighbors, and reported that the crimes were the result of centuries-old vendettas going back to the Old Country, and hence outside the jurisdiction of the local constabulary. The officers were by and large Polish and Irish. Some of the residents shrugged and said the police were paid off, just like back home. Others argued that it was worse than that; they just didn’t care. They said that the people who had told them the streets of America were paved with gold hadn’t lied, their information was just outdated. The gold had all been torn up and banked long ago by the people who came before them, and they, the newcomers, were expected to replace it with cobblestones and asphalt for a dollar a week.

Sal Borneo was unmoved by these complaints. It was the crudity of Giuseppe Sorrato’s methods that offended him. Left unchecked, such arrogant savagery must eventually fill too many columns in the English-language newspapers, ignite the gentry, and through its indignation overcome the authorities’ inertia, sparking wholesale raids and ruining the protection business for everyone. Only a generation earlier, mobs armed with truncheons and torches had ripped through San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, smashing saloons, setting fire to brothels, dumping craps tables and roulette wheels into the harbor—closing the frontier as surely as screwing shut a tap, and all because one too many sailors got his brains bashed in and his body dropped through a trap with all his pockets turned inside out.