We stopped in front of a burned-out five-storey brick tenement, and Bellarosa said, "I lived on the top floor there. It was a hundred degrees in the summer, but nice and warm in the winter with those big steam radiators that banged. I shared a room with two brothers."
I didn't respond.
He went on, "Then my uncle took me out of here and sent me to La Salle, and the dorms looked like a Park Avenue penthouse to me. I started to understand that there was a world outside of Williamsburg. You know?" He was quiet again, then said, "But I got to tell you, looking back on this place in the 1950s, I was happy here."
"We all were."
"Yeah." We got back into the car and drove some blocks to a better street, and he showed me the five-storey brownstone where he and Anna had spent much of their married life. He said, "I still own the building. I made apartments on each floor and I got a bunch of old people in there. I got an old aunt in there. They pay what they can to the church. You know? The church takes care of the whole thing. It's a good building."
I asked, "Are you trying to get into heaven?"
"Yeah, but not this week." He laughed, then added, "Everything's got an angle, Counsellor."
We drove around the old Italian section of Williamsburg, which had never been very large, and what was left of Italian Williamsburg seemed rather forlorn, but there were stops to be made, and the trip was not all nostalgia, but partly business. As I said, it must be difficult to run a crime empire when you can't use the telephone, or even the mail for that matter. And this fact obviously necessitated a lot of driving and quick stops to call on people. Frank was the three-minute Mafia manager.
After Williamsburg, we drove into more lively Italian neighbourhoods in Bensonhurst, Bay Ridge, and Coney Island, where we made more stops and saw more people, mostly in restaurants and in the back of retail stores and in social clubs. I was quite honestly amazed at the number of branch offices and affiliates of Bellarosa, Inc. – or would one say franchises and chain outlets? More amazing, there didn't seem to be any written lists of these stops. Bellarosa would just say a few words to Lenny and Vinnie, such as, "Let's see Pasquale at the fish place," and they'd drive somewhere. I could hardly believe that their pea-size brains could retain so many locations, but I guess they had good incentives to do their job.
We left Brooklyn and went into Ozone Park, Queens, which is also an Italian neighbourhood. Frank had some relatives there, and we stopped at their row house and played boccie ball in an alleyway with a bunch of his old goombahs who wore baggy pants and three-day whiskers. Then we all drank homemade red wine on a back porch, and it was awful, awful stuff, tannic and sour. But one of the old men put ice in my wine and mixed it with cream soda, of all things. Then he sliced peaches into my glass. Frank had his wine the same way. It was sort of like Italian sangria, I guess, or wine coolers, and I had an idea to market the concoction and sell it to trendy places like Buddy's Hole where the clientele could drink it with their grass clippings. Ozone Park Goombah Spritzers. No? Yes?
Anyway, we moved on into the late afternoon, making a few more stops at modest-looking frame houses in other Queens neighbourhoods. Frank Bellarosa had entertained the movers and shakers of his world, the chiefs and the 'made men', at the Plaza Hotel. Now he was going out into the streets to talk to his constituents, like a politician running for office. But unlike a candidate, I never heard him make any promises, and unlike a Mafia don, I never heard him make a threat. He was just "showing his face around," which seemed to be an expression with these people that I kept hearing. Showing your face around must have a lot of subtle connotations, and must be important if Bellarosa was doing it.
The man had a natural instinct for power, I'll say that for him. He comprehended on some level that real power is not based on terror, or even on loyalty to an abstract idea or organization. Real power was based on personal loyalty, especially the loyalty of the masses to the person of don Bellarosa, as I witnessed with the sausage vendor and with everyone else we'd stopped to see. Truly the man was an intuitive and charismatic leader – the last of the great dons.
And as evil as he was, I nearly felt sorry for him, surrounded now by enemies within and without. But I had also felt sorry for proud Lucifer in Paradise Lost when he was brought down by God and heaven's host of goody-goody androgynous angels. There must be a serious flaw in my character.
We headed back to Manhattan after dark. New York is truly a city of ethnic diversity, but I don't have much occasion or desire to hang around with the ethnics. However, I have to admit that I was intrigued by the Italian subculture that I had caught a glimpse of that day. It was a world that seemed both alive and dying at the same time, and I remarked to Bellarosa in the car back to Manhattan, "I thought all that Italian stuff was a thing of the past." He seemed to understand what I meant and replied, "It is in the past. It was past when my old man took me around on Saturdays to sit with the goombahs and sip wine and talk. It's always in the past."
The old immigrant cultures, I reflected, still exerted a powerful influence on their people and on American society. But truly they were losing their identity as they became homogenized, and ironically they were losing their power as they filled the vacuum created by the so-called decline of the Wasp. But more important, back there in the shadows, somewhere in the outer boroughs, were the new immigrants, the future that neither Frank Bellarosa nor I understood or wished to contemplate.
As the car approached the skyline of Manhattan, Bellarosa said to me, "You have a good time today?"
"It was interesting."
"Yeah. Sometimes I have to just get out and see these people. You know? To see that everybody's still out there. I've been losing touch, kind of holed up at Alhambra. You can't do that. You go out there and if somebody wants to take a pop at you, then at least you went down out on the street, and not holed up someplace waiting for them to corner you. You know?" "Yes, I do. But do you need a lawyer along while you're tempting fate?"
"No. I need a friend."
I had several sarcastic replies right on the tip of my tongue, but I said nothing, which said it all.
He added, "I'm gonna make you into an honorary Italian like Jack Weinstein. You like that?"
"Sure, as long as that doesn't make me an honorary target." He sort of laughed, but I think he was finding less humour in the subject of his assassination. He did say, however, "I talked to some people. You got nothing to worry about. You're still a civilian."
Great news. And I trusted these people, right? Well at least they probably all belonged to the rifle club and were good marksmen. I surely hoped so.
CHAPTER 31
We went back to the Plaza Hotel. Bellarosa gave Vinnie and Lenny the night off, and Frank and I ordered dinner in the suite.
As we ate at the table in the dining area, we made small talk, mostly about vegetables and real estate. I sliced my steak, and as I did so, I wondered what new and exciting course my life would take if I plunged my steak knife into Bellarosa's heart.
I think he was reading my thoughts because he said, "You know, Counsellor, you're probably thinking that your life is getting fucked up and you think I fucked it up for you. Wrong. You fucked yourself up and you did it before you ever laid eyes on me."
"Maybe. But you're not part of the solution."
"Sure I am. I helped you get rid of all the bullshit in your life. So now you got to go on."