I went into the Angry Squire, a pleasant little bar on Seventh Avenue around the corner from the hotel, and had a leisurely lunch washed down with two mugs of that good Watney's ale. Then I called Louie at his Village apartment.
Louie was ecstatic, as usual. "Hey, Nick! What's up, man? I tried to call you up at Manny's Place, but they said you'd checked out."
"Yeah. Too plastic for me. I moved down to the Chelsea."
"Great! Great! I know the place. Hey, look, Nick. Uncle Joe wants to see us this afternoon. Okay with you?"
I wondered if I had much of a choice. "Sure, why not."
"Okay, then. About two o'clock. At Uncle Joe's office."
"Okay," I reassured him. "I'll see you then."
It was a pleasant day and I walked, taking my time. I hadn't really seen much of New York in years. It had changed a lot in some respects, in others it looked exactly as I remembered, probably exactly as it had fifty or a hundred years before.
I walked to Sixth Avenue, then headed downtown. Sixth Avenue down to Fourteenth Street still looked the same, but it had changed, and for a moment I couldn't put my finger on it. Then it hit me, and I smiled to myself. I was getting so cosmopolitan I didn't notice some things any more. Sixth Avenue from Twenty-third Street to Fourteenth was almost entirely Puerto Rican. The conversations I heard around me were, for the most part, in Spanish.
The bars were in the same places, but now they bore Spanish names; EI Grotto, El Cerrado, El Portoqueno. The old Italian delicatessens were still there as I had remembered, but now they were bodegas, with more fruit and fewer vegetables. If anything, Sixth Avenue was cleaner than it ever had been and the round-hipped, vivacious Latin girls clacking by on their high heels were a big improvement over the slow-moving eddies of elderly ladies with their shopping bags who used to fill the neighborhood.
Fourteenth Street looked more like Calle Catorce in San Juan, but there was an abrupt change from there southward to Third Street. Here, it was much as it had always been, the small-business part of the Village, hardware stores, drugstores, grocery stores, delicatessens, ten-cent stores, coffee shops. There never had been any particular ethnic identity to this stretch of the avenue and there wasn't now.
It was a polyglot crowd; neatly suited business men with attaché cases, strolling hippies with shoulder-length hair and blue jeans, chic housewives pushing black plastic baby carriages, hobbling old ladies with gnarled features and vacant eyes, kids armed with baseball gloves, a beggar on crutches. There were more mixed couples than I had remembered.
At Third Street, I turned east past MacDougal and Sullivan, then went south again on Thompson Street, a big grin of reminiscence on my face. Thompson Street never changes. All the way down to Prince Street, it is the old Italian Village: quiet tree-lined streets bordered with solid rows of brownstones, each with its series of steps running up to heavy oaken front doors, each one fronted by an iron railing designed to keep the unwary from falling onto the steep row of concrete steps leading to the cellar. For some reason, when the Village was built up in the late 1880s the cellar doors were always put in the front instead of the back.
Here, the pace is different than anywhere else in the city. The noise seems suffused, the action slower. Old men stand in clusters of two and three, never sitting on the stoop, just standing, talking their dotage away; fat-breasted housewives lean from upper windows to chat with neighbors standing on the sidewalk below.
On the fenced-in playground of St. Theresa's Junior High School, the neighborhood's young Italian bucks, long out of school, mingle with the kids in a perpetual softball game. On the sidewalks, the black-eyed, black-haired Italian girls walk sturdily, eyes straight ahead, if they are alone. If they are with a group of girls, they squirm and dawdle, talking constantly, darting their eyes up and down the street, making it ring with their laughter.
There are few businesses on Thompson Street, an occasional candy store, inevitably dark green with a faded, half-slashed awning sheltering the newspaper stand; a delicatessen or two, with huge salamis hanging in the windows; here and there a drugstore, almost always on the corner. What Thompson does have, however, is funeral parlors — three of them. You go to one if you are a friend of the Ruggieros, another if you are a friend of the Franzinis, the third one if you have no connections with either family or, if you do, don't want them known.
Also on Thompson, between Houston Street and Spring, there are five restaurants, good Italian restaurants, with neatly checkered tableclothes, a candle on each table, a small bar along one wall of the adjoining room. The people of the neighborhood often drink at the bars, but they never eat at the tables. They eat at home every night, every meal. Yet somehow the restaurants are full every evening, though they never advertise — they just seem to draw couples, each of whom has somehow discovered their own little Italian restaurant.
By the time I reached Spring Street and turned left toward West Broadway, I was so deep in the Old Italian ambiance I almost forgot that my involvement was something less than pleasant. The grand old Italian families who live south of Houston Street are not, unfortunately, mutually exclusive of the Mafia.
I arrived at Franzini Olive Oil at exactly two o'clock. Louie's cousin Philomina wore a white sweater that emphasized her breasts, and a brown suede skirt that buttoned down the front only partially so that when she moved, a good deal of well-shaped leg was showing. It was rather more than I'd expected from the conservatively-dressed Philomina of the day before, but I'm not one to complain about a very attractive girl wearing more revealing clothes.
She showed me into Popeye's office with a polite smile and an impersonal air she might have used for the window cleaner or the cleaning lady.
Louie was already there, bouncing. He'd been talking to Popeye. Now he turned, wrung my hand in a fervent handshake as if he hadn't seen me in months, and placed the other hand on my shoulder. "Hi ya, Nick! How are you? Good to see you!"
The huge old man in his wheelchair behind the black desk glared at me. Reluctantly he nodded and motioned with one hand. "Sit down." I took one straight chair, sat back, and crossed my legs. Louie took the other, spun it around, and then sat down straddling it, his arms crossed over the back.
Popeye Franzini shook his head slightly, as if Louie were a puzzle he could never figure out. Fat fingers fumbled at a cigar box on his desk and stripped the cellophane from a long black cheroot. He stuck the cigar in his mouth, lit it from the cigarette lighter on his desk and then peered at me through the smoke.
"Louie seems to think you're pretty damned good."
I shrugged. "I can handle myself. I've been around."
He stared at me a moment, evaluating a piece of merchandise. Then he apparently made up his mind. "Okay, okay," he muttered. He fumbled on both sides of his wheelchair as if looking for something, then raised his head and bellowed:
"Philomina! Philomina! Dammit! You got my briefcase?"
Louie's cousin appeared immediately, though her exquisite grace prevented her movements from seeming hurried. She placed a battered old grey attaché case in front of Popeye and glided out silently.
"You seen that goddamned Larry?" he grumbled at Louie as he flipped open the clasps. "He ain't been around all day."
Louie spread both hands, palms up. "I haven't seen him since yesterday, Uncle Joe."
"Me neither," the old man growled.
Thank God! That meant Spelman hadn't communicated with the Franzinis before coming up to roust me. I could probably thank the effects of heroin for that lapse of procedure.