The sausage man was not tending his car and, in fact, shooed away a few people so he could better tend to his luncheon guests, dining alfresco in expensive suits in the heat of Times Square with the Cadillac blocking traffic. What a bizarre little scene, I thought.
We wiped our fingers on paper napkins, bid our host buon giorno, and got back into the car. Still chewing on a mouthful of sausage, Bellarosa said to Vinnie, "You tell Freddie to hit these guys up for another fifty cents a pound on the sausage and let them pass it on to their customers." He said to me, "It's a good product and everybody eats it – your Spanish, your melanzane, they love this shit. Where they gonna go for lunch around here? Sardi's? The coffee shops serve shit. So they eat on the street and watch the pussy go by. Right? That's worth another quarter. Right? You like the sandwich? You pay another two bits for it? Sure. So we hit the vendors for another fifty cents a pound and they pass it along. No problem."
"Now that we've all discussed it," I said, "should we take a vote?"
He laughed. "Vote? Yeah, we'll vote. Frank votes yes. End of vote."
"Good meeting," I said.
"Yeah."
Actually, I was impressed with Bellarosa's attention to the smaller outposts of his empire. I suppose he believed that if he watched the price of sausage, the bigger problems would take care of themselves. He was very much a hands-on man, both in his professional life and his personal life, if you know what I mean. We crossed the East River into the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn by way of the Williamsburg Bridge. After that, I was lost. Brooklyn is a mystery to me, and I hope it remains so. Unfortunately, I had a guide who pointed out everything to me, the way people do who think you care about their squalid little part of the world. Bellarosa said, "There on the roof of that building is where I got my finger wet for the first time."
I had the impression he wasn't talking about sucking his thumb. I said, "How interesting."
Anyway, we stopped at a beautiful old baroque church covered with black grime.
"This is my church," Bellarosa explained. "Santa Lucia." We got out of the car, went to the rectory, and knocked on the door, which was opened by an old priest, who went through the hugging and kissing routine. Bellarosa and I were shown into a large second-floor commons room where two more elderly priests joined us and we had coffee. These people drink a lot of coffee, in case you hadn't noticed, though it's not so much the caffeine they're after, but the shared experience, sort of a wet version of breaking bread together. And wherever Frank Bellarosa went, of course, coffee was made and served, usually with something sweet.
Anyway, we had coffee, and we chatted about this and that, but not about yesterday's difficulties with the law. The three priests were old-school Italians, naturally, and didn't use their first names, so there was none of that Father Chuck and Father Buzzy nonsense. On the other hand, they all seemed to have difficult first and last names, and with their accents, it sounded as if they were all named Father Chicken Cacciatore. I called them all Father. So the head guy was talking about how the bishop (the real bishop of the diocese) wanted to close up Santa Lucia unless it could become self-sufficient, which seemed unlikely since there were hardly enough Italian Catholics left in the parish to support it. The priest explained delicately that the Hispanic Catholics in the parish, mostly from Central America, thought that ten cents in the collection basket covered the overhead. The priest turned to me and said, "The old people of this parish can't go to another church. They want to be close to their church, they wish to have their funeral Mass here. And of course, we have those former parishioners, such as Mrs Bellarosa, who return to Santa Lucia and who would be heartbroken if we had to close."
Okay, Father, bottom line.
He cleared his throat. "It costs about fifty thousand dollars a year to maintain and to heat the church and rectory, and to put food on the table here." I didn't reach for my wallet or anything, but while the priest was telling me this for the don's benefit, the don had scribbled out a cheque and put it on the coffee table face down.
So, after a few more minutes, we made our farewells and embraces and got our God-bless-yous, and we left.
Out on the street, Bellarosa said to me, "Nobody can shake you down like a Catholic priest. Madonn', they hit me for fifty large. But whaddaya gonna do? Ya know?"
"Just say no."
"No? How ya gonna say no?"
"You shake your head and say, 'No.'"
"Ah, you can't do that. They know you got the money and they do a guilt thing on you." He chuckled, then added, "You know, I was christened at Santa Lucia, my father and mother was christened here, I was married here, Anna had the kids christened here, Frankie got married here, my old man was buried here, my mother -"
"I get the picture. I've got a church like that, too. I give five bucks a week, ten at Easter and Christmas."
"It's different here."
Instead of getting back into the car, Bellarosa turned and looked back at the sad old church and surveyed the mean streets around us. He said, "I used to play stoopball on those rectory steps there. You ever play stoopball?" "I've heard of it."
"Yeah. The slum kids played it. What did you play? Golf?" He smiled.
"I played the stock market."
"Yeah?" He laughed. "Well, we played stoopball right there. Me and my friends…" He stayed quiet for a few seconds, then said, "Father Chiaro – that was the old pastor you just talked to – he used to charge out of the rectory and run us off. But if he got hold of you, he'd drag you by the ears into the rectory and put you to work on some shit job. You see those doorknobs in there? They're brass, but they don't look it now. I used to have to polish those fucking knobs until they looked like gold."
"He's still got you by the ears, Frank."
He laughed. "Yeah. What a sovanabeech."
"A what?"
He smiled. "That's the way my grandfather used to say it. Sovanabeech. Son of a bitch."
"I see." Well, I tried to picture fat little Frank Bellarosa on these streets, playing ball, making zip guns, kneeling in the confessional, getting his finger wet, kneeling in the confessional, and so on. And I could picture it, and I'm a nostalgic guy myself, so I'm partial to people who are sentimental about their childhood. I guess that's a sign of middle age, right? But with Bellarosa, there was more to it, I think. I believe he knew then that he was going home for the last time, and that he had to take care of Santa Lucia so that the priests there would take care of him when the time came. There had been a few stories in the newspapers over the last ten years or so about problems with certain priests and churches providing burial services for people in Frank's line of work. I guess this frightened Frank Bellarosa, who had assumed all along that he was dealing with a church that was under direct orders from God to forgive everyone. But now people were trying to change the rules, and Bellarosa, not one to take unnecessary chances and knowing he couldn't take it with him, prepaid for his burial service at Santa Lucia. That's what I think.
Bellarosa put his hands in his pockets and looked down the intersecting street. "In those days you could walk down this street here late at night and nobody bothered you, but a lot of the old ladies would yell at me from the windows, 'Frankie, get home before your mother kills you.' You think anybody says that on this street anymore?"
"I doubt it."
"Yeah, me too. You wanna see where I lived when I was a kid?"
"Yes, I would."
Instead of getting into the car, we walked from Santa Lucia in the heat, the way Frank Bellarosa must have done many years before. Lenny and Vinnie tailed behind us in the Cadillac. The area around the church was mostly black, and people glanced at us, but they'd probably witnessed similar scenes, and they knew this was a prodigal son with a gun, so they went about their business while Frank went about his.