cover as she circled the building. She was just starting to feel silly for having thought she could locate Georgio so easily when she found him on the comer of Sixth and Thirteenth. Actually, she’d noticed the little girl first, not even registering who was making the music to which she danced.
The child was adorable. She was probably about four or five years old and as dainty as a fairy in her bright red dress. Her dark hair hung in curls that fell to her shoulders and bounced delightfully as her tiny bare feet formed intricate patterns on the pavement. Her enormous brown eyes glittered with happiness at the attention she had attracted. Sarah wasn’t the only passerby who had stopped to watch, entranced. Then the song ended, and the gathered crowd applauded. The girl bobbed a curtsey and looked around expectantly. In a moment, coins appeared, fished from pockets and purses and offered in tribute. The coins disappeared again as if by magic, spirited away by little fingers as nimble as the little feet had been and deposited into the pocket of her dress.
While the crowd disbursed, the girl turned and hurried back to the man who had produced the music. That was when Sarah recalled her purpose in being here. The child was emptying her pocket and giving the coins to a handsome youth who sat on a small stool with his back against the building. He held the organ between his knees, resting on a small stand. He wore a dark shirt and trousers and had a red bandanna tied rakishly at his throat. He looked so perfect that Sarah almost didn’t notice the wooden crutches tucked discreetly between his stool and the wall. Finally, she saw the pant leg pinned up at the ankle.
She’d never expected Georgio to have a child, which was why she’d been so slow to realize she’d found him. Taking advantage of this lull, she stepped over to where the man and the girl were conversing in Italian. There seemed to be some question about whether she’d given him all the coins she’d collected.
“Georgio?” Sarah tried.
He looked up from beneath the bill of his small cap. His eyes were dark and liquid, his smile big and bright and charming.
“No, although she dances very well,” Sarah added, giving the child an approving smile, in case she didn’t understand the compliment. “I wanted to ask you about your sister Emilia.”
His charming smile vanished, and the dark eyes grew wary. “She is dead,” he said very carefully.
“I know. I’m very sorry.”
“Who are you and what do you want?” he asked suspiciously. When he frowned, Sarah realized how much he looked like his mother.
“My name is Sarah Brandt, and I met Emilia at the Prodigal Son Mission.” His expression hardened from wariness into anger. Plainly, none of the Donato family had any love for the mission. “She was such a lovely girl, and she was trying very hard to become a respectable young woman,” Sarah hurried on, wishing she had some idea how Georgio felt about his sister.
Seeing that the grown-ups were going to talk a bit, the little girl sank down onto the pavement with a weary sigh and leaned back against the wall. Sarah wondered vaguely how many times she had to perform in a day. She probably had a right to be tired.
“Emilia is whore,” he said baldly. “Now she dead. Why you care? Why anybody care?”
“She was learning to sew,” Sarah tried. “She wanted to earn an honest living. She wanted to change.”
“She go to mission before, then she go back with Ugo,” Georgio said. “She never change. Just pretend. She want clothes and food and place to live. Easy life for a while. Then she go back.”
Sarah wondered if that could be true. She’d hardly known Emilia. Mrs. Wells had been convinced that Emilia had changed, however, and after her years of experience working at the mission, she wouldn’t be easily fooled. “This time she really meant it,” Sarah argued. “She was going to get a job. In fact, that’s what she was going to do the morning she was killed.”
The eyes that stared back at her were unmoved. He knew his sister better than Sarah, and he didn’t believe anything good about her. Sarah glanced at the child to remind herself that Georgio was a father himself. Maybe she could reach him that way.
“Your daughter is asleep,” she observed, half in wonder at the way children could just drop off any time and any place. She looked like a brightly clad porcelain doll sitting there.
Georgio looked down and struck out with his whole foot, catching her on the hip. Jolted awake, she yelped in pain and outrage as Sarah cried out in protest. He ignored Sarah and gave the girl a sharp command in Italian. She rose sullenly, rubbing her hip.
“Sorriso!” he commanded, and she twisted her face into the parody of a smile. He started to turn the crank and coax music from the box. The girl’s tiny feet began to move, sketching out the steps so lightly they hardly seemed to touch the ground. She twirled, making her colorful skirt float out around her brown legs. People began to stop and watch. Soon a crowd formed. Georgio relentlessly ignored Sarah. He didn’t want to hear what she had to say about his sister. A man who would kick his own child on a public street to get her to dance wouldn’t care about a sister who’d disgraced her family by selling herself. She was wasting her time here.
Another failure she didn’t want to report to Malloy, especially when he’d expressly forbidden her to do any investigation at all in this case.
Frank knew better than to go exploring the alleys of Mulberry Bend alone at night. The sun had dropped far enough in the sky to cast these rear tenement buildings into darkness, even though it was still daylight in the rest of the city. He’d gathered up a couple of the beat cops to accompany him now that he had learned where Ugo Ianuzzi made his living.
“You know which one it is?” one of the cops asked as they made their way, stepping over the trash and the tramps lying in the alley.
“No,” Frank said. Ianuzzi’s landlady hadn’t been specific. “Just that it’s in one of these buildings.”
“There must be a dozen dives back here,” the other cop complained.
“Then we’ll look in each one until we find him,” Frank replied irritably. He’d much rather be home, enjoying his mother’s cooking and his son’s company, than searching stale beer dives for a man he didn’t consider good enough to spit on.
The early hour ensured the crowds would be small in these establishments that were very distant cousins to saloons. Located in any available basement or cubbyhole, the dive consisted of a few tables and chairs and a keg of stale beer. The proprietor would have stolen the keg from a sidewalk in front of a legitimate saloon, where the flat beer from the night before was set out each morning for the breweries to pick up the kegs and refill them. The dive keeper would doctor the flat beer with chemicals to put some foam back into it and sell it for pennies to the homeless beggars who worked their trade all day just to afford the privilege. In exchange for their purchases, they would be allowed to stay in the dive all night, sleeping in a chair or on the floor in drunken oblivion. Ugo Ianuzzi had made his fortune by running such a place.
One of the officers kicked open the door of the first dive they came to. The room was the dank cellar of a ramshackle frame tenement house. The walls were covered with years of grime. The dirt floor consisted of a layer of crawling bugs feeding on the filth beneath. An ancient hag clad in garments so dirty, their original color was indistinguishable, was filling a tomato can – which passed for a glass – from the keg that sat in the center of the room on the remains of a broken chair. She and her customer, a pockmarked young man with crossed eyes and no front teeth, looked up in terror at the intrusion. Usually, a raid by the police would mean six months “on the island” for the proprietor and her customers.
“Don’t worry. We ain’t looking for you,” one of the cops said. He turned to Frank. “What’s the name?”
“Ugo Ianuzzi,” Frank said. “Where is he?”
The old woman made a pretense of refusing to cooperate, but the cops only needed to threaten her with their nightsticks to encourage cooperation. She probably wouldn’t have survived an actual blow from the locust wood clubs. She very quickly gave them directions in broken English to a place two buildings down.
“If you’re lying, we’ll be back,” one of the cops warned her.
They passed several more of the dives on their way, and Frank realized the reformers were right: the only way to clean out The Bend was to tear it down. So long as this rabbit warren of decay existed, evil would breed here like cockroaches.
When they reached the place the old woman had described, one of the cops opened the door with the heel of his boot. It slammed back against the wall, startling the early arrivals. This room was bigger than most of the dives. Ugo had commandeered a space almost twenty feet square and furnished it with a mismatched assortment of
