Читать книгу Silver Stars - Майкл Грант - Страница 16

The smaller gangster slides in beside Rainy. Something about him reminds her of the SS colonel. There’s something not fully human about him, as if one parent had been a lizard or a snake.

“You have a number for me?” Rainy asks, keeping her voice level on a sea of rising and falling waves of emotion.

“Number? You trying to be funny?”

“I assumed you were here to give me a way to contact Mr. Camporeale.”

“Way to contact? You’re the contact, girly.”

“It’s sergeant, not girly,” she says, and the instant the words are out of her mouth she thinks it’s a mistake. The little man’s reptilian expression turns feral for a moment, the look of an animal ready to pounce. But he leans back, reins in his hostility, and says, “All right then, Sergeant. We’re all good Americans, aren’t we, Louie?”

“I bought a war bond for my kid,” Louie offers over his shoulder. “Twenty dollars!”

“Don Vito don’t want to talk to some FBI or some army officer either, don’t trust ’em. He’ll talk to you.”

“Then I would be pleased to talk to him,” Rainy says stiffly, feeling very uncomfortable, as if she’s disobeying an order. She isn’t exactly, her orders had contemplated the possibility of a face-to-face meeting, but she’s already thinking ahead to having to report all this to Colonel Corelli.

Professor of Oriental Languages Corelli.

Amateur.

They drive far longer than is strictly necessary, sometimes creeping at walking speed around a block only to go racing away up Broadway at full speed. Louie keeps a close eye on his rearview mirrors.

“We’re clean,” Louie says at last, and moments later they pull to a stop in the oily darkness beneath an elevated train track. They are in the Bowery, an elongated rectangle of streets around Delancey and Forsyth in Lower Manhattan, just north of Chinatown. It is a neighborhood of secondhand shops, employment agencies, cheap hotels, and narrow all-hours diners catering to the crowds of sailors and soldiers who wander unsteadily from tavern to tavern.

The nearest lit-up establishment is a second-story pool hall above a closed-for-the-night grocer.

Louie climbs out and opens Rainy’s door. Then he glances in the direction of a loud shout floating down from the pool hall and says, “This may not be the most suitable place for a young lady of quality.”

“She’s a kike, she ain’t quality,” the smaller one says.

“I’ve been in worse places,” Rainy says, images of the Tunisian desert appearing in her memory. She ignores the casual anti-Semitism.

They walk up a long, steep, narrow flight of stairs, at one point having to turn sideways to let a trio of Marines come down. Before she sees the pool hall she hears it, a rich concerto played by cues hitting balls, and balls snapping into others, and glasses tinkling with ice, and shouts of frustration and triumph, loud guffaws, and somewhat more distant the musical ding-ding-ding! of pinball machines. All of that, and someone is spinning records, because Rainy hears the risqué Andrews Sisters song “Strip Polka” playing.

There’s a burlesque theater where the gang loves to go

To see Queenie, the cutie of the burlesque show.

And the thrill of the evening is when out Queenie skips

And the band plays the polka while she strips.

There’s no door at the top of the stairs, so they emerge directly onto the gaming floor, onto wood stained almost black by generations of benign neglect, and wallpaper that fairly drips with congealed smoke. There are a dozen tables in three rows of four, green felt bright beneath bare bulbs, and three pinball machines against the far wall, ding-ding-dinging away. There’s a bar at the back and a record player perched on one end of the bar along with a tall stack of seventy-eights.

A lanky, sad-looking sailor in a stained white uniform sits at a stool thumbing through the records. All the pool tables are in use, sailors, soldiers, working men in dungarees or overalls, and interspersed here and there like flowers in a sea of weeds, are women—women of the type one would expect to find in a pool hall late at night. They aren’t all beautiful, but they are all young, or pass for young, and they are all dressed down to the very lowest limits of propriety.

“Like I was sayin’,” Louie says with an abashed half-grin, “maybe not the place for a young lady such as yourself, miss. Sergeant, I mean.”

“I promise not to faint,” Rainy says, which tickles the gangster’s fancy and he gives up a huge guffaw.

“Take it off, take it off,” cries a voice from the rear.

“Take it off, take it off,” soon it’s all you can hear.

But she’s always a lady even in pantomime,

So she stops and always just in time.

They cross the length of the room toward the bar, and there is something in Louie’s size, and in the eyes and manner of the other thug, that causes even inebriated longshoremen and ladies of the night to step gingerly out of the way.

There’s a door beside the bar. The driver knocks once, hears a single gruff syllable, and opens the door wide for Rainy to step in.

It’s an office, a square room with a curtained window that probably leads to a fire escape. There’s an impressive oak desk with a vacant swing office chair behind it. One wall is covered in thumb-tacked travel posters with curled edges: Naples, Sicily, Rome, but also Miami and New Orleans.

The wall to Rainy’s right is fitted with shelves, mostly empty, but some bearing stacks of newspapers and magazines. There are three books, one of which, Rainy is sure, must be the Christian Bible. An impressive engraved silver crucifix hangs from the leading edge of the top shelf.

There are two men already in the room, one small and old and gray, with a face that looks like a piece of driftwood, improbably craggy with a sagging mouth, and wearing no expression.

The other is a large, portly man in a decent brown suit. He has a round, cheerful face and the red nose of a dedicated drinker. He steps forward smiling, hand out.

“So you’re Schulterman’s kid. Well, glad to meet you, honey, your old man must be proud as hell—excuse my French—proud as a peacock.”

“Thank you, and it’s good to meet you, Mr. . . .”

“Camporeale,” he says. “It’s hard for folks to pronounce unless they grew up speaking Italian. We go with Campo, mostly, but you can call me Don Vito. That’s easier, right?”

Instinctively, Rainy lies. “Don Vito it is, then, because I don’t speak any Italian. I have no head for languages.”

She’s hoping her father has not bragged too often about his multilingual daughter. But almost certainly he would not have brought her name into his work, and in any case he works only indirectly for Camporeale.

“And what do they call you, aside from Sergeant, I mean?”

“Rainy will do fine,” she says, forcing a smile. Time to be friendly: she is surrounded by gunsels.

“Rainy. I like that. Must be a story there, huh?”

“No doubt, but my parents have not shared the details.”

He laughs knowingly. “Come, sit, what are you drinking?”

“I’ll have a club soda,” she says.

“Ah, a killjoy,” Don Vito says in mock irritation. “Get her a soda. Put a straw in it. Plenty of ice. Throw in a cherry, it’ll be like a, what do they call ’em? A Shirley Temple. She’s just a kid, after all. What are you, eighteen, nineteen?”

Rainy sits in a hastily supplied wooden chair, and Don Vito settles in behind his desk. He leans forward, forearms on his desk blotter. “So. What can a humble immigrant do for the United States Army?”

“Well, sir . . . Don Vito . . . I’m only a lowly sergeant, and this is a conversation you should have with someone who has some rank.”

He winks, a move which, owing to his chubby cheeks, closes both eyes for a second. When his eyes open again the cheerfulness is gone, replaced by shrewd appraisal. A second earlier and Rainy might have mistaken him for a door-to-door salesman. But a much different animal is looking at her now from dark, porcine eyes.

“I’m allergic to people with rank. Regular beat cop? That’s no problem, I buy ’em free drinks and let ’em play some pinball. Cops with rank? You never know if they’ll be reasonable or not. Same thing in the army, I’m guessing.”

He lets the silence stretch and at last Rainy speaks. “I have no opinion on my superior officers.”

Don Vito and Louie, now leaning against the door, both erupt in loud laughter. The gray man does not laugh.

“That was funny, Tony, you should laugh,” Don Vito says to the gray man, who still does not laugh. Then he says something in Italian—although in a dialect that to Rainy’s ear is subtly different from the standard Roman Italian she’s learned.

Still, she can translate it. Don Vito has said, “The Jew bitch thinks she’s smart.”

This, finally, earns a dusty wheeze that might be a laugh from gray Tony.

“Listen, Rainy, right? Rainy. Yeah. Okay, Rainy, for obvious reasons I’d rather talk to people I know. People I trust. And I trust you because I know you love your father and would never want to do anything that could hurt him.”

The threat is clear, and Rainy nods in acknowledgment. It occurs to her that playing word games with NCOs and officers who are, after all, generally reasonable and constrained by the uniform code of military justice, is very different from sparring with a man who earned his nickname by castrating the men he kills. The threat is not empty, and this is not a friendly chat.

“Here’s the thing,” Don Vito says. “I got a son, little older than you, a good boy but headstrong. You know? Impulsive. He’s smart, but he’s young.” He shrugs.

Rainy sips at her drink and takes a moment to realize that what Don Vito means by “headstrong” and “impulsive” is probably violent, predatory—the gangster son of a gangster father.

Don Vito, speaking that same odd Italian to Tony, says, “Ten bucks says Cisco’s in her pants inside of twenty-four hours.” Then to Rainy he says, “I’m translating for Tony, his English isn’t so good. He’s my counselor. Like my lawyer, but Napolitano.”

Napolitano? As in Naples? That’s mainland Italy, not Sicily. Rainy nods, blank, giving nothing away.

“So my boy, Cisco, Francisco, but hey, he’s born American, right, so Cisco. Anyway, Cisco has a little problem with some people up in Harlem. They want an eye for an eye, but we ain’t giving ’em Cisco, so that could be war—our own kinda war—and that’s bad for everyone. So it would be convenient if Cisco could spend some time in the Old Country, with my uncle. My uncle is a very wise man; he’ll get Cisco straightened out.”

“You want the army to get your son to Italy?”

“You’re very quick, you know that?”

“The army would want something in exchange.”

Don Vito made a comical face that translated meant, Of course they do. How could they not?

“I’ll need to talk to my superiors. I don’t have a list of their requests.”

He waves that off. “I know what they want. There’s a city called Salerno in Italy. It’s at the north end of a beautiful long beach, beautiful, you should see it. Just the kind of beach an army might want to land on.”

Rainy freezes and is too slow to stop the reaction from showing. Don Vito grins like a barracuda.

“I hear things,” he says. “Sicily first. Then Salerno. You want to know the dates?”

“No,” she says quickly. “The less I know, the less I can reveal.” She feels safest speaking stiffly, formally.

Vito the Sack nods with sincere approval. Of course he would favor closed mouths. “Here’s the deal. I’ll give you chapter and verse on Fascist and Kraut positions around Salerno. My family runs most of Salerno, not all, but enough that nothing moves there we don’t know about.”

“I don’t have the authority to make a commitment,” Rainy says.

“Fair enough. You go talk to your colonel or captain or whatever. You know where I am. Just one thing: you.” He points a thick finger at her. From Rainy’s angle it seems to come at her from just beneath dark and dangerous eyes. “You come back. Just you. And you personally, and your father, will guarantee my boy’s safety until he gets to my uncle’s house.”

“I’ll do my—”

“Uh-uh!” He interrupts sharply, wagging a finger for emphasis. “I don’t care about your best. Simple yes or no: is my boy with my uncle, that’s it. You got that? You get him there. Clear?”

“Signore Camporeale,” Rainy says, pronouncing his full name in a very credible Italian accent, “I follow orders. If my orders say to get your son to Italy, then I will get your son to Italy. But I don’t work for you, I work for the army.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes, sir, it is. And your son will not be getting into my pants, not in twenty-four hours or twenty-four days or twenty-four years.”

It takes a few beats before Don Vito realizes what’s happened.

“Lei parla Italiano? ”

“Si, Don Vito, un poco.”

“You deceived me.”

“I gained an advantage.”

“And now you give up that advantage?”

Rainy shakes her head. “No, Don Vito, because now you’re going to have me checked out, and you’ll soon find out that I’m often used as a translator.”

“I’ve always said Hebes were the smartest race . . . next to partenopeos. That’s people from Naples, see.”

Rainy stands up and discovers that her knees have gone a bit wobbly and her breathing is ragged. Yes, there is something about these people that is similar to what she’d felt coming from the SS colonel. It was like trying to hold a calm discussion with a hungry tiger.

Don Vito stands and comes around the desk. He takes Rainy’s hand in two of his and holds her firmly but not harshly.

“You’ll do this?”

“If my commanding officer orders me to, yes.”

Rainy disentangles herself and leaves, by way of the pool hall. There’s a new song playing, the bleary, slow-tempo tune with lyrics sung over a mellow sax.

Rainy is trembling as she reaches fresh air, and the stress catches up with her. Down the street she finds an all-hours diner with a pay phone in one corner. She fumbles in her purse for a nickel and makes a call to Colonel Corelli.

Ten minutes later an unmarked army staff car picks her up a block away.