The Sicilian sun was warm and good. The young girl had smooth olive skin and big tits. With moist fingers she peeled the grapes and fed them to him. He savored the tart flesh.
Suddenly the grapes were stones. The pain drove him awake.
Tony seized the bottle of grappa on the floor next to his bed and filled his mouth with the coarse brandy, then clutched his jaw in agony. He swallowed, took another drink, guiding it away from the left side of his mouth.
He poured tepid water from pitcher to basin and tried to shave. The only place he could stand the feel of the blade was under his chin. He would let his beard grow.
The nick on his throat didn’t bother him, though it was most unlike him, for he was a perfectionist. He knew that only a little pressure and the artery would feel the blade. Death would come in minutes. And for his suicide, he would burn in hell.
He laughed. “What makes you think you won’t burn anyway?” he asked the image of his father in the mirror.
Dressed, he brushed his suit with the damp cloth and reached for the hand organ near the wall. He hesitated. No. Not today. Today he needed to move fast, unencumbered.
One final swallow of grappa. He was going among the micks. That meant he’d have to subsist on watery beer or tasteless whiskey. He would have to be wary because he didn’t look like them and he didn’t talk like them. They would consider him the enemy.
The Harp on Bleecker Street was the fifth mick bar he’d been to. This hole in the wall was near the precinct, where he knew the cops came for the free lunch served with the drinks. He stood at the end of the bar listening.
Next to him was a mick with breath as foul as the dead goat beard on his ugly face. He was running at the mouth about his friend Mulroony and the windfall he’d found in a vacant lot, a nugget of gold. A gold tooth, no less.
Everyone clustered round the goat, some actually drooling.
The goat pushed through the group to relieve himself out back, then returned and lurched along the bar drinking the dregs from glasses. He bumped against Tony, who did not move away. The goat gave him a bleary, pale-blue stare.
“Tim Noonan’s the name. You can call me Wingy.”
“Tell me about Mulroony and I’ll buy you a beer.”
A shrewd glint came into Wingy’s clouded eyes. “I’m fair thirsty. A thirst only whiskey can quench.”
“Beer.”
Wingy sighed. “Beer ’tis, then.”
Tony raised a hand.
Jimmy Callahan took Tony’s measure. Not many Eytalian’s found their way into The Harp. This one’s skin was a funny red, though he was dressed clean and neat. But why wasn’t he with his own kind? What did he want?
Tony didn’t like the scrutiny. “Beer for him, whiskey for me.”
“Now is that fair?” Wingy whined. “I ask you, Jimmy, is that fair?”
The drinks served and paid for, Jimmy Callahan stood off to the side watching as he rolled himself a Bull Durham.
Jimmy didn’t trust dagos. He’d never met one worth a fiddler’s fart.
Wingy slurped beer, Tony sipped whiskey. “If you tell me slow,” Tony said, “I’ll finish my whiskey. If you tell me fast, I’ll leave it for you.”
“What you want to know?” Wingy spoke quickly, but biting each word.
“Mulroony.”
“Mulroony the priest, or Mulroony the cop?”
“The cop.”
“Lost his ma recently. Very tragic.” Wingy crossed himself. “Hail Mary, Mother of God-”
“The longer I wait, the less you get.” Tony took a hearty sip of the whiskey.
Wingy’s face screwed up as if to blubber. “You don’t want to do that, mister. My friend Aloysius Rafferty, the famous bricklayer and stevedore-he seen Mulroony tearing after a bunch of young punks right before he found that dead whore in the empty lot a couple of weeks ago.”
“Where can I find Mulroony?”
Wingy nodded many times. “Him and his wife live with his ma, God rest her soul. She ran a rooming house somewhere on the Bowery.”
From the variety of signs on walls and in windows along the Bowery, there were far too many rooming houses. He would have to sweat to find Mulroony.
The saloons beckoned. Which one didn’t matter. He opened a door and stepped inside to shouting and laughter. An Irish place, by their lumpy potato heads and the stink of cabbage and pig feet.
Irishmen loved to drink and talk and talk and drink and drink. They were braggarts. He preferred to drink alone, left to his own thoughts.
It was dark and dank, the smell of beer and hard-boiled eggs potent. The men sitting around tables or standing at the bar stopped talking to stare at him.
He didn’t waste his time by asking for grappa. “You have red wine?”
“This is McSorley’s. Beer and ale.” The tone was unpleasant. “We don’t serve wine.”
“Or dagos!” a customer yelled.
Then, as others repeated the phrase, a firehouse gong went off behind the bar.
The organ grinder flicked his thumbnail on the edge of his top front teeth, spat on the sawdust floor, and left to loud jeers.
He didn’t want to deal with another mick saloon. He renewed his quest. Two blocks north his luck changed. On the wall, inviting him, was the sign:
He knocked and pushed open the ground-level front door. This put him in a tiny vestibule. To his left, a small parlor, to his right, another small room that held a long table and ten chairs. The table was set for dinner. A narrow, tilting staircase led up.
“Yes?” A full-figured woman with a rolling pin in her hand came from behind the staircase. Strands of red hair crept from under her kerchief and she had spots of flour on her florid face.
“I need a room.”
She looked him over. “All full up.”
“I hear your husband is a patrolman. Maybe I could speak to him.”
“Ain’t home.”
He tipped his hat. “Sorry to bother.”
Tony walked into the alley to the right of the house. The abrupt scratching shuffle of claws told him he’d disturbed a pack of rats. At the back, keeping a cautious eye peeled, he found an open window. An unoccupied bedroom, by the looks of it. Good, that’s how he’d get in if he had to.
He left the alley and crossed the street to a cigar shop.
The bastard Mulroony was probably sitting in a saloon drinking, showing off Tony’s gold tooth instead of going home.
With one of his twisted cigars between his teeth, Tony stepped out onto the street again and fired it up as he crossed the road.
The organ grinder was a patient man. He would wait. The Bowery was a busy place at night. Carousers and pickpockets. He settled in, back against the bricks.
Every workman who staggered past him he gave the eye. Two men, sailors by the bags slung over their shoulders, stopped at the Mulroony house, peered at the sign, and went in. No one came out, so the woman had lied. She had rooms. But not for Italians.
The tap of a club on bricks was unmistakable. Now the whistling of some awful Irish tune located a policeman on his rounds just a block away.
Tony eased back into the alley. The rats again. This time he saw the bright eyes staring at him from not ten feet away. Glints of white teeth showed in the dim light. Five or six filthy rats, on their guard and enraged,
