Ferdy is a guy about my height and build, except he’s got straight black hair and brown eyes, and my hair is a little curly and my eyes are not brown really, they’re amber — that’s what Marie says, and she ought to know, dad. I been going with Marie since we was both thirteen, and that makes it close to three years now, so she knows the color of my eyes, all right.
“This the straight dope?” Ferdy asked. Ferdy used to be on H, but we broke him of it ’cause there’s no room in our bunch for a hophead. We broke him by locking him in a cellar for about two weeks. His own mother didn’t even know where he was. We used to go down there and give him food every day, but that was all. He could cry his butt off, and we wouldn’t so much as give him a stick of M. Nothing till he kicked the heroin monkey. And he kicked it, dad. He kicked it clear out the window. It was painful to watch the poor guy, but it was for his own good, so we let him claw and scream all he wanted to, but he didn’t get out of that cellar. Pot is okay, ’cause it don’t give you the habit, but anybody wants to hang around me, he don’t have no needle marks in his arm. He can bust a joint anytime he likes, but show me a spoon, and show me a guy’s bowing to the White God, and I break his butt for him, that’s the truth, that shows you the kind of guy I am.
“Harry’s up there,” I told Ferdy.
“How you like that?” Beef said. Beef must weigh about two thousand pounds in his bare feet. He don’t talk English so good because he just come over from the old country, and he ain’t yet learned the ropes. But he’s a big one, and a good man to have in the bunch, especially when there’s times you can’t use hardware, like when the bulls is on a purity drive or something. We get those every now and then, but they don’t mean nothing, especially if you know how to sit them out, and we got lots of patience on our street.
“What took you guys so long?” I said.
“A only just reaches us,” Ferdy said.
“A’s turnin’ into a real slowball,” I said. “Look at them goddamn rooftops. How we gonna watch this now?”
The boys looked up and seen the crowd.
“We shove in,” Beef said.
“Shove this,” I told him. “There’s grownups up there. You start shoving with all them bulls in the street, and they’ll shove you into the Tombs.”
“What about Tessie?” Ferdy said.
“What about her?”
“Her pad’s right across the way. We stomp in there, dad, and we got ringside seats.”
“Her folks,” I said sourly.
“They both out earning bread,” Ferdy said.
“You sure?”
“Dad, Tessie and me’s like that,” Ferdy said, crossing two fingers.
So we lit out for Tessie’s pad.
3
She didn’t answer the door ’till we told her who we was.
Even then, she wasn’t too keen on the idea. She played cat and mouse with Ferdy, and he’s honeying her up, come on doll, open the door, and all that kind of crap until I tell her to open it or I’ll bust the goddamn thing right off the hinges. She begins to whimper she ain’t dressed then so I told her to throw something on because if that door ain’t open in three flat I’m going to bust it open.
She opened the door then, and she was wearing a sweater and skirt, and I said, “You’re a fast dresser, huh?” and she nodded, and I wanted to paste her in the mouth for lying to me in the first place. If there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s anybody who lies.
We go over to the windows and throw them open, and Tessie says, “What’s all the noise about?” and Ferdy tells her Harry’s in the apartment across the way and maybe we’ll see some lead soon. Tessie gets the jitters. She’s a pretty enough broad, only I don’t go for her because Marie and I are that way, but you can bet Marie wouldn’t get all excited and shaking because there might be some gunplay. Tessie wants to clear out, but Ferdy throws her down on the couch and she sits there shaking as if she’s got pneumonia or something. Beef goes over and locks the door, and then we all pile onto the window sills.
It’s pretty good because we can see the apartment where Harry’s holed up, right across the alleyway and only one floor down. And we can also see the street on the other side where the bulls are mulling around. I can make out Donlevy’s strut from up there, and I feel like dropping a flower pot on his head, but I figure I’ll bide my time because maybe Harry’s got something better for that lousy bull.
It’s pretty quiet in the street now. The bulls are just about decided on their strategy, and the crowd is hushed up, waiting for something to happen. We don’t see any life coming from the apartment where Harry’s cooped, but that don’t mean nothing.
“What they doing?” Beef says, and I shrug.
Then, all of a sudden, we hear the loudspeaker down below.
“All right, Manzetti. Are you coming out?”
A big silence fell on the street. It was quiet before, but this is something you can almost reach out and touch.
“Manzetti?” the loudspeaker called. “Can you hear us? We want you to come out. We’re giving you thirty seconds to come out.”
“They kidding?” I said. “Thirty seconds? Who they think he is? Jesse Owens?”
“He ain’t going out anyway, and they know it,” Ferdy said.
Then, just as if Harry was trying to prove Ferdy’s point, he opens up from the window below us. It looks like he’s got a carbine, but it’s hard to tell because all we can see is the barrel. We can’t see his head or nothing, just the barrel, and just these shots that come spilling like orange paint out of the window.
“He got one!” Beef yells from the other window.
“Where, where?” I yelled back, and I ran over to where Beef was standing, and I shoved him aside and copped a look, and sure as hell one of the bulls is laying in the street, and the other bulls are crowding around him, and running to their cars to get the ambulance because by now they figure they’re gonna need it.
“Son of a gun!” I say, “can that Harry shoot!”
“All right,” the loudspeaker says, “We’re coming in, Manzetti.”
“Come on, you rotten bastards!” Harry yells back. “I’m waiting.”
“Three cops moving down there,” Ferdy says.
I look, but I can only see two of them, and they’re going in the front door. “Two,” I say.
“No, Donlevy’s cuttin’ through the alley.”
I ran over to Ferdy’s window, and sure enough Donlevy is playing the gumshoe, sneaking through the alley and pulling down the fire-escape ladder and starting to climb up.
“He’s a dead duck,” I said.
“Don’t be so sure,” Aiello answered, and there’s this gleam in his eyes as if he’s enjoying all this with a secret charge. “They may try to talk Harry away from the fire escape.”
“Yeah,” I said slow. “That’s right, ain’t it?”
“I want to get out of here,” Tessie said. “He might shoot up here.”