Joe drove while Tom and I consulted the street map and one of my library books which had a detailed map of the robbery scene. As we passed up and down the section of Pearl Street indicated, we saw not even the slightest indication that it was anything special. No historical marker, no privately erected sign, not even a memorial water bubbler for the two watchmen killed. Nothing.
'I'll be damned,' mused Joe as he nursed the cruiser along in a crawl. The guy behind us leaned on his horn and Finally passed us right in the middle of an intersection. As he flew past he glared at Joe and shouted, then roared on and ran the next red light.
'Where the hell are the cops when you need 'em?' said Joe, staring out of his unmarked car.
'Pull over here,' said Tom, pointing. 'This is right smack dab where it happened.'
We got out and walked around. Nothing was left of the Slater and Morrill factory. In its place was a rubble- strewn field of weeds. About a hundred yards down the road and pretty far back I saw the remains of the Rice and Hutchins factory: a rickety red-brick smokestack just like the one Andy Santurnio had been found in. I pointed it out to Joe.
'Surely that's more than coincidence, Joe.'
'Don't be too sure. There are lots of old smokestacks left behind when they pull down factories. It's because they're too tall to wreck; they can't get the wrecking ball up high enough, even on the biggest derricks. The only really safe way to take them down is to build a scaffolding around them and do it piece by piece, which is too expensive. Only way to do it cheap is to dynamite 'em, which they should do, because they're a hazard. They fall over and it's like a bomb.'
We strolled along the fields, using my book as a reference to key spots. The railroad track was right where it had been in the 1920s, minus the depot shack where the money was delivered in the morning. On the day of the robbery, the payroll had been kept there until mid-afternoon, when the two guards, Parmenter and Berardelli, came and took it away in two locked boxes. But they never
made it to the factory. We walked through the scene, trying to reconstruct it, and half-closing my eyes, I could almost take myself back to April 15, 1920.
The men in the depot shack received the money as scheduled when the train pulled through that morning. They paid little attention to the men lounging nearby, watching the train. Later, on the witness stand, they recalled that these early-morning visitors were obviously casing the job, making sure the money had indeed arrived. Things were quiet until just before three o'clock…
I squint my eyes and look across the road to the nibble field, but now it's a red-brick factory with a belching smokestack and people in skimmer hats in the yard. Some of the workingmen wear cloth caps. Two men emerge from the building and walk purposefully along the road, which is Pearl Street, then across it toward the shack. They go in. A few minutes later they come back out, each carrying a metal bank box. They are armed but guns aren't drawn. They usually make the transfer by car or wagon, with a shotgun guard, but today for some strange reason they walk.
Back across the street, then up along the road past Rice and Hutchins, they approach the grounds of Slater and Morrill. As they near the big red-brick factory, two men who have been leaning idly against the wall step out and walk toward the street, intercepting the two guards with the metal boxes. As they get within a few feet of the guards, guns appear in their hands. There are a few shouted orders. Quickly and without warning one of the bandits shoots, and the chief guard, Frederick Parmenter, falls mortally wounded, clutching at his middle. Alessandro Berardelli, his assistant, panics. He drops his box and begins to run back across Pearl Street, where he is cut down by pistol fire. Then one of the gunmen raises up his pistol and fires a lone shot into the air.
This appears to be a signal, because an instant later a large touring car,. a big Buick, roars down the street and stops. The bandits begin to jump in, but one of them hesitates and walks back to Berardelli, lying in the street. He takes deliberate aim and shoots the fallen man point-blank, killing him, then returns to the car and gets in. The car, a dirty greenish-brown in color (or was it dark-blue? The witnesses later argue), speeds off down the road, a wicked-looking shotgun protruding from the rear window. At the railroad crossing gate the big car stops and the bandits order the gatekeepers to raise the drop gate immediately or they will be shot. They do this, but not before one of them gets a good look at one of the killer bandits and hears his voice. The car roars off, turning left at the intersection and speeding away, the occupants flinging special round-headed tacks (which always land point upward) behind them.
Ingeniously, the driver of the big car reverses direction in a two-wheeled hairpin turn half a mile down the road and heads back toward the scene of the crime on a parallel road. This incongruous reverse has its intended effect; the pursuing police are totally confused and allow the big Buick to proceed unchallenged out of town.
The robbery, planned carefully and executed like clockwork, is successful. But two men have been gunned down in cold blood. Neither guard had a chance to draw his sidearm; they were shot down without reason. Parmenter didn't die right away, however; he lived just long enough to describe to the police the man who shot him. Other witnesses, leaning out of factory windows when they heard the noise or watching the car speed by, saw him too. And these, along with the gatekeeper, described a man who looked exactly like Nicola Sacco… .
'What did you say, Doc?' asked Tom, who was staring at me. I came to and realized I had been standing dead still and staring at the rubble field and smokestack. And worse, I had been muttering to myself too.
'I said that of all the days to pick to miss work and go off on an all-day errand, Nick Sacco had to pick April fifteenth. And at the same time here's a guy standing right about where you are now who looks just like him, pumping shots into those, guards…'
Tom scraped gravel back and forth with his toe, like a batter at the plate, and shook his head slowly. His hands were deep in his coat pockets and he was hunched over. Joe was behind him, standing near the road in silence.
'Oh I don't know, Doc. Jeeez. I mean, maybe he did do it. Sure looks like it anyway. I was so sure he didn't because all my life I was told he didn't. Like all good Italian, boys I was taught the basics, you know: don't eat meat on Friday, go to confession, FDR is the greatest President who ever lived, Joe DiMaggio is the world's greatest ballplayer… and Sacco and Vanzetti were innocent.'
'Sounds pretty good to me,' I said. 'So what's changed?'
'Lots. For instance, we eat meat on Fridays now, right? We don't go to confession much anymore, right? And it looks like Roosevelt made some mistakes.'
'What about Joe DiMaggio?'
'You kiddin'? He's still the greatest. That's not changed. Except there might be one just as good since-'
'Who might that be?'
'Rico Petrocelli. Who else?'
'Let's get out of here. I'm getting depressed. Hey Joe!'
We got in the car and rolled away. Joe didn't say much either. We stopped at the McDonald's across the street and bought coffee. I asked the girl at the register if she knew the significance of Pearl Street. She didn't. And she'd never heard of Sacco and Vanzetti either. She couldn't have cared less.
'Sounds like a kinda spaghetti, dudn't it? Like Ronzoni?'
In a few minutes we were purring along on 128 again, heading back north. Neither Joe nor Tom wanted to make the second stop at Dedham after what we'd encountered at Braintree, but I insisted. The old film clips had entranced me and I wanted to see the courthouse and the jail where the two defendants had spent seven years while the whole world watched and waited.
The courthouse had not changed a bit; it was still the gray, quasi-Greek classical building with a high dome and an American flag on top. When we reached the second floor, which was the entrance to the courtroom and judges' chambers, a security officer approached us quickly and asked if he could help us. In a case like this everybody knows that 'Can I help you?' really means 'Get the hell out of here.' But Joe flashed his badge and we went inside. The courtroom had not changed at all except for one detail: they had removed the medieval prisoner's cage at the far end. Otherwise I could almost see Katzmann and Thayer, Thompson and Ehrmann, the jury and its foreman, Harry Ripley (who was a former police chief and who hated 'dagos'), and the two defendants locked in their cage. We cased the whole place, looking for photographs on the walls, plaques or markers, perhaps a framed statement or scroll. There was nothing. I asked the rather plump, pale woman in the county clerk's office about the case. As soon as heard the names she brought her index finger up to her pursed mouth.
'Shhhhh!' She giggled. 'We don't talk about that!'
We left and walked around the courthouse. Twice. Aside from a historical plaque set in a boulder telling
