A small crowd pressed around the table, shaking hands, paying their respects, introducing the old man to this one or that one. The attention all centered on Franzini; his niece sat lovely and demure, a set smile on her face, rarely saying a word. But as I edged closer, I saw there were dozens of small white envelopes interspersed among the roses. As I watched, a couple more were tossed onto the table.
I was puzzling over that phenomenon when Louie spotted me on the edge of the crowd. He immediately jumped to his feet and came over.
"Hiya, Nick! How are you? Good to see ya!"
"Hi, Louie." He took my elbow and ushered me into the barroom. "Let's have a drink. I get claustrophobic sitting there with all those people closing in around me."
I ordered a brandy and soda. Louie drank the same thing he'd had in Beirut, red wine.
We leaned against the back wall to keep from being trampled on. "Some party, huh?" he grinned. "I'll bet we've got a hundred fifty people here, and at least a hundred of them are already drunk."
He was right about that. I neatly sidestepped a tall, tuxedo-clad figure as he staggered past us, glass in hand, one lock of hair down over his forehead. "Mariateresa," he was calling rather plaintively. "Has anyone seen Mariateresa?"
Louie laughed and shook his head. "In a couple of hours, it really ought to be great."
"It sure looks different than I remember it" I looked around the once-familiar room now reverberating with sound. When I had known it years before, it had been a place for a quiet beer and an even quieter chess game.
"I didn't know this was one of your places," I said.
Louie laughed, naturally. "It isn't. We own some seventeen restaurants on the lower west side and another dozen or so, say, are 'affiliates, but Tony's isn't one of them."
"Then why hold Philomina's party here instead of one of your own?"
He clapped me on the shoulder and laughed again. "It's easy, Nick. See all these guys here? Now, some of them are all right, good solid businessmen, friends of the family, that sort of thing."
I nodded and he went on. "On the other hand, there are also a lot of guys here you might call — uh — hoods. Understand?"
I nodded again. I couldn't deny him that. Dozens of rough looking types were talking, drinking, singing, shouting, or just standing morosely in corners. They looked like they had been recruited from Central Casting for a latter-day Al Capone movie. And from the bulging jackets I had observed, there were more guns in the place than the Russians had been able to muster against the British at Balaklava.
"What's that got to do with holding a party here instead of one of your own places?"
"Simple. We don't want to give one of our own places a bad name. If the cops wanted to, you know, they could raid this place tonight and pick up a lot of what they call 'undesirable characters. They wouldn't be guilty of anything, of course, and they'd eventually have to let them go. It would just be harassment, but it would make nice headlines in the papers. It would be bad for business."
A tipsy little redhead with freckles across the bridge of her nose had been working her way across the crowded room with two black-browed bullies in tow. She came to a stop in front of Louie, threw one arm around his neck, and gave him a big kiss.
"Hi, Louie, you cute li'l ol' thing. Who's your handsome friend here?" She was cute, even if she was one of those fashionable girls who have the body of a fourteen-year-old boy — and she had an exciting awareness of her own sexuality. She was looking at me hungrily. Her two companions glowered, but I returned her look. Her eyes were saying she didn't care what the rest of the world thought and mine were saying, okay, if that's what you want.
Louie made the introductions. Her name was Rusty Pollard and she was a lay teacher at St. Teresa's. One of the gorillas with her was named Jack Baity, the other, Rocco something-or-other. Baity made some crude remarks about lay teachers, but Rusty and I were having too good a time discovering each other.
She was an outrageous flirt.
"What's a big hunk of guy like you doing here with all these little squat Italians?" she asked, one hand cocked on a slim, outthrust hip, her head thrown back.
I looked at her in mock dismay. "Little squat Italians? Keep that up and you'll end up in tomorrow's pizza pie."
She dismissed the possibility with an airy wave of her hand. "Ah, they're harmless."
I looked Rusty over carefully. "What's a nice girl like you doing here with all these little squat Italians?"
Rusty laughed. "You'd better not let Mr. Franzini hear you refer to Philomina as a little squat Italian or you'll end up on someone's pizza pie."
I shrugged, offered her a cigarette and lit it for her. "You didn't answer my question."
She gestured at the table where Franzini sat with his niece. "Maybe one of these days I can collect some of those little white envelopes myself."
I saw that now they were stacked neatly in front of Philomina instead of being scattered around the sheaves of roses. "What the hell are they?" I asked. "Cards?"
"Your name is Nick Canzoneri and you don't know what those are?" she asked.
"Of course," I hedged, "but you tell me Miss non-little-squat-Italian Pollard. I just want to see if you know."
She laughed. "The games people play. Every one of those little envelopes contains a check from one of Mr. Franzini's associates. Even the little guys have dug up what they could. It's all for Philomina's birthday. She's probably got seven or eight thousand dollars there."
"And you'd like the same thing?"
"Maybe one of these days one of these squat little Italians is going to offer me something besides a weekend in Atlantic City, and when he does I'm going to grab him. And when I do, I'm eventually going to end up sitting at a table full of roses going through a lot of little white envelopes."
"About that weekend in Atlantic…" I started to say, but across the room, Popeye Franzini was glowering at me and waving an imperious arm in a gesture that brooked no hesitation.
I half bowed toward Rusty. "Sorry, honey. Caesar beckons. Maybe I'll catch up with you later."
Her lips puckered in a pout. "Rat!" But her eyes were still challenging.
I pushed across the crowded floor and paid my respects to Franzini and Philomina.
The flush of wine was on his face and his speech was thick. "Hav'n' a good time?"
"Yes, sir."
"Good, good." He put one arm around Philomina's shoulders. "I wan' you to take my lit girl home." He squeezed her shoulders and she seemed to shrink just a bit, her eyes downcast, not looking at either one of us. "She don't feel s'good, but th' party's jus' startin'. So you take her home, huh?"
He turned to Philomina. "Right, honey?"
She looked up at me. "I'd appreciate it, Mr. Canzoneri."
I bowed. "Of course."
"Thank you." She rose demurely. "Thank you, Uncle Joe. It's been just wonderful, but I do feel dizzy." She leaned over and kissed the old toad on the cheek. I felt like gagging.
"Right! Right!" he roared. He pinned me with bleary eyes. "Take good care my li'l girl."
I nodded. "Yes, sir." Philomina and I maneuvered through the crowd toward the door. She murmured a few good nights here and there, but no one seemed to pay her much attention, even though it was ostensibly her party.
We finally squeezed through and got out the door on Bedford Street. The fresh air tasted good. Philomina and I each took a deep breath, then smiled at each other. She was wearing an off-the-shoulder evening dress of pure white except for a bright slash of flame red running diagonally across the front. Her gloves and stole matched the red slash. Striking.