“It is?” Bennie asked, completely bewildered until Mary DiNunzio made her way though the crowd. Her hair was straying from its neat twist and her brown eyes were dancing the tarantella.
“Bennie!” DiNunzio was so excited she was almost short of breath. “Wait’ll you see. I got us a case, a wonderful case!”
“A wonderful case?” Bennie repeated, fully aware that three thousand pairs of tarantella eyes were focused on her. She couldn’t help feeling that her back was against the wall, or at least the elevator. “What kind of case?”
“The kind of a case you love! A once-in-a-lifetime case!” Mary shouted, and everybody behind her took up the cry like a Greek, er, Roman, chorus.
“Thank you!” they said, and “We appreciate your help” and “Ya gotta know the facts” and “We must bring it to light”-all manner of justice-sounding noises that made Bennie suspect she wasn’t going to earn a dime in fees.
“DiNunzio, maybe we should talk about this in the conference room?”
“Great! Great idea! The client’s in there.”
“These people aren’t the client?”
“No, this is the Circolo, from the neighborhood.”
“The Circolo.”
“Mr. Brandolini, but he’s dead. The client is really a lawyer, and he’s dying to meet you.”
“Huh?” Bennie was confused about who was dead and who was dying, but let it go. “Where’s Murphy and Carrier?”
“In the conference room, with everybody else. The Circolo called while you were out, and I told them all to come right over. Marshall’s still out at her gyno for a checkup.”
“I’ll see you inside in two minutes. I have to change out of my running clothes.”
Bennie hustled to her office, skipped her usual shower, and put clean clothes on her sweaty body and slid reddish toes into her pumps. She’d wanted to call and cancel her credit cards, but Sicily awaited her in the conference room. She sent their secretary an E-mail listing her credit cards and asking her to cancel them when she got back from the doctor. Then she hurried out of her office and down the hall, into the crowd that spilled into the reception area. She shook their hands and greeted them as she passed, and they parted for her with a reverence usually reserved for Frank Sinatra.
“Brava, Bennie Rosato! Bravissima!” someone shouted, startling Bennie as she crossed the threshold into the conference room, when the entire room burst into resounding applause. The place was packed wall to wall, crammed with cheering, hollering, applauding people, and Bennie laughed and took a spontaneous bow.
“Thank you, thank you,” she said, and pulled out the seat at the head of the long walnut table. Murphy and Carrier stood against a wall lined with happy Italians, which Bennie was beginning to understand was redundant. Mary sat beaming, catty-corner to her, next to a middle-aged man in a three-piece suit. He had thick dark hair and a brushy mustache, sharp brown eyes, and a pleasant smile. Bennie extended a hand. “I’m Bennie Rosato. Pleased to meet you, Mr…”
“Cavuto, Frank Cavuto,” he supplied, rising. “I’m a lawyer, representing the estate of Tony Brandolini.”
“Welcome.” Bennie nodded him into his seat, and the boisterous crowd deigned to settle down to business, with residual smiles-except for a tiny older woman who scowled inexplicably from the far end of the table. She looked immersed in a brown wool coat, despite the balmy day, and her salon pink-gray hair had been teased into a very feminine wren’s nest. Thick glasses magnified her round dark eyes, fixed so hard on Bennie that she had to look away. “Now, Mr. Cavuto, what brings you here?”
“I’m Frank, please, and I’ve known the DiNunzio family since the day Mary was baptized. In fact, I’m her godfather’s son.”
Bennie didn’t know that Italians really did have godfathers, and in truth didn’t know much about Italians at all, despite her surname. “So you came to us through Mary.”
Mary took over. “Frank came to see me when he probated the will of Tony Brandolini, who died last month, of cancer. Tony was a contractor, and his father, Amadeo Brandolini, was interned in 1942, as part of the internment during World War II. Mr. Brandolini was a fisherman, from the days when you could fish right off the port of Philadelphia.”
Bennie raised a palm. “Slow down, wait a minute. What do you mean by ‘interned’? Interned means confined during war. Imprisoned.”
“Yes, exactly. Well, you know that Japanese people living in this country were interned during World War II, even if they were citizens. Their property was taken, and their homes.”
“Yes.” Bennie remembered the historic
“Ours, either,” Frank added, and heads nodded around the table, except for that of the old lady with the magnified glare. She fingered a gold necklace with a tiny horn charm as she looked daggers at Bennie, like a Neapolitan Madame Defarge. She sat next to a heavyset, balding man who appeared to be her husband but, unlike her, was dressed normally and was kind-eyed behind bifocals.
Mary cleared her throat. “Well, more than ten thousand Italians, citizens and legal immigrants, were interned in this country. They were covered by the same act and declared enemy aliens, even if they’d lived here for twenty years or more. They were ordered to register and sent away to internment camps in Missouri, Texas, and other states.”
It was news to Bennie, even with her background in civil rights work, but it didn’t surprise her. The government assumed all sorts of powers in wartime and used them to their fullest extent, for good and sometimes not-so-good reasons.
“The impact on Italians was biggest on the West Coast, and on fishermen on both coasts. The FBI considered fishermen especially dangerous because they had access to the sea, submarines, and enemy vessels.” Mary glanced at her notes. “The government confiscated flashlights and shortwave radios so nobody could signal the enemy.”
“It’s all true,” interrupted an elderly man near the door to the conference room. “My father and mother were both taken to the camp, even though they were living thirty-two years in this country. Even though I was enlisted and served. They weren’t enemy aliens or what they called them,
“How’s that for irony?” called out a woman near him. She had an academic air, with reading glasses dangling on a chain. “The son was fighting for this country while the parents were considered enemies by the same government. Did you know that Joe DiMaggio’s father wasn’t even allowed to go to his own son’s restaurant in San Francisco? He was confined to a special zone.”
Mary set her stack of papers on the table. “People lost businesses and homes. Families were split up and left without anyone to support them. And some, like Amadeo Brandolini, killed themselves in the camp. Amadeo couldn’t live with the shame he felt he had brought upon his family.”
“What shame? He didn’t do anything wrong. He was a victim.”
Cavuto raised a finger. “You look at it from a modern perspective, Bennie. Maybe even a woman’s. But that wasn’t the way Amadeo saw it, according to his son. His business was taken from him. His fishing boats. His livelihood. He had failed to support his family or to protect them. It made him feel ashamed, as a man.” Cavuto cocked his head. “What kind of Italian are you, you don’t know that? You just married one?”
“I’m single,” Bennie answered, fighting the need to apologize for her condition. Being single after age thirty defined defensive. “I understand what took place. What I don’t get is what you want us to do.”
“Tony Brandolini wasn’t a wealthy man, but he had some means and he never forgot his father or forgave his government.” Cavuto bent over, reached into his thick briefcase, and retrieved a manila file folder. “Tony started to research what happened to his father’s business, but then he got cancer and was too sick to finish the job. He provided in his will that when he died, his estate should hire a lawyer to recover the damages incurred by his father. We came to hire Mary and your firm to do this.”
“You mean sue the government? Recover damages? Reparations?”
“That’s what my client wanted. He was divorced, he had no children, and he left his entire estate to this cause.” Cavuto gestured around the table. “It’s a very important issue to all of us, and that’s why we’re all here. We’ll help you any way we can.”
