Il Bestione (The Golden Door Duet Book 2) Page 4

  At eighteen, if they’d shown themselves useful, if they were capable of the work, they could take it on. If not, they could leave.

  Those who wanted the work, he didn’t demand they move out on their own. As long as they wanted the basement they could stay. But these were young men who bucked rules and chafed under supervision, and they wanted lives of their own. They all moved out, somewhere around eighteen to twenty-two.

  Paolo was glad of it. He wanted young men who knew the value of respect but also had the strength to forge their way. And their leaving made room for new boys to come in.

  Before he was twenty-two, he’d laid claim to this building, and all the other assets in what had been Fausto’s domain.

  In this space, the boys learned dice and card games so they could work the rooms when they were older. They learned to use knives and to fight. They learned how to be tough in the world and loyal to each other. If they didn’t know how to read, write, and do simple arithmetic when they came to the Little Italy Community Society, they learned those ‘three Rs’ here, at least the basics.

  At any given time, a couple dozen boys and half that many young men lived in the basement. All of them orphan or castoffs, with no family to support them but the one they made here. Though Paolo’s hatred of Fausto went deep and followed him into the grave, he had to admit that this basement had saved him.

  Maybe he’d had other chances to be saved, but he’d squandered them until only this one had been left.

  At any rate, he was proud to continue the service and expand it to help girls as well—and not to force anyone into his service in exchange for that saving.

  For Paolo, the choice was paramount. No one who worked for him was a slave.

  Boys were boys, and the basement was never completely silent, not even at this dark hour of the morning. Four teenage boys and two of the young men sat at the biggest table. A hand of cards had been dealt, and a motley assortment of treasures, bills, and coins was scattered on the table and in the center.

  Seeing Paolo, their don, come down the stairs, they all jumped up. These boys respected him; some even worshipped him. That had been the case for the boys Fausto had sheltered as well, but those bonds had been brittle. They knew who Fausto was and how quickly his cruelty could turn. They’d seen it.

  It had not been so difficult for Paolo to take over; once he’d killed Fausto, few had cared to avenge that death.

  He meant to have a truer loyalty among the people in his employ.

  Ricky Testa, the oldest of the young men living here—nearly twenty—came forward. “’Evening, don. Do you need us?”

  Paolo shook his head. “No. I can’t sleep, so I’m going to punch the bag for a while. Go back to your game.”

  The boys all sat, and Paolo went to the far corner, where some boxing and calisthenics equipment was set up. Among the gear were several rolls of wrapping and a box of mingled gloves. He found one of the pair he preferred and dug through the box for the other.

  “I can help you wrap up, don,” Ricky said behind him.

  When Paolo turned, Ricky took a quick step back. It made Paolo wonder what he looked like, if he was wearing his restlessness on his face. Rocking his head side to side to work out the kinks, he tried to relax.

  He considered the boy—no, not a boy. A man. Not terribly younger than Paolo himself.

  Paolo had been twenty and still in Sicily when he’d killed his first man, the son of Don Enrico Cuccia, who’d been attempting to rape Caterina. He’d been twenty when he and his sister and mother had fled Sicily and crossed the ocean. Twenty when he’d watched his mother’s dead body pushed overboard on that voyage. Twenty when he’d been beaten and stabbed to within a hairsbreadth of death and his sister had been raped before his swelling eyes.

  Twenty when he’d moved into this basement.

  Twenty was no boy.

  Ricky was taller than Paolo’s six feet and already built like a bull.

  Paolo had been a fighter from his earliest days. Even before his heart had been powered by rage, he’d been quick to anger and to swing his fist. But he had learned to fight—to really fight, with fists and knives, and whatever else was at hand—in this basement.

  He supposed he owed Giulio Fausto more than the painful, abasing death he’d paid.

  “How would you like to spar with me?” he asked.

  Ricky’s vague, respectful smile sagged, and he nearly took a step back. “Don?”

  “I’ve seen you fight in the ring, Ricky.” One of Paolo’s first big moves was to add bare-knuckle fighting to their gambling enterprises. The boys in the basement had been betting on each other in fights already. He’d simply expanded that impulse into a business.

  Ricky was good in the ring. Young and raw, but powerful.

  Paolo was good in the ring, too.

  Though he’d never put himself on a card—he was the boss, and above that—he’d taken on some of his contenders and proved he was no soft-muscled fop pulling strings.

  “I don’t … I wouldn’t want …” Ricky faltered.

  Sensing the cause of his discomfort, Paolo asked, “Are you afraid I’ll hurt you, or you’ll hurt me?” Paolo wasn’t sure which way it would go himself. But he knew he needed a fight, right now.

  “Both.”

  “Then it sounds like a fair fight.”

  “Do it, Ricky,” one of the other boys said. They’d all abandoned their poker game and were clustered behind him. With those three words, a little chorus of encouragement rose up. Ricky looked back and considered those boys, egging him on.

  “Yes,” Paolo said, adding his voice. “Do it, Ricky.”

  “Okay, don.” Ricky pulled his shirt off and tossed it aside. “Just a spar, yeah?”

  “Certo. Just a spar.”

  Since it was a spar, they wrapped their hands and donned gloves. Beppe Carrara fastened the gloves for them both, then served as timekeeper.

  Once they were ready, most of the other boys had been roused by the commotion, and the basement was full of sleepy but raucous enthusiasm.

  Beppe clanged two metal plates together for a bell, and the spar began.

  Paolo struck first; it wasn’t in his nature to prance and dance. Perhaps good fight wisdom was to take the measure of a man first, but that wasn’t his way. He wanted his opponent to know what his fist felt like before he knew anything else. He didn’t want to study, he wanted to be the lesson. Especially with an opponent bigger than him.

  He struck, a right jab, and connected fully with Ricky’s nose. His head rocked back, and blood began to run in floods from both nostrils.

  With a shake of his head that sent blood flying, Ricky hunkered in and charged.

  Paolo saw the hook coming and bobbed; Ricky’s fist glanced off his cheek, and he felt skin pull and tear.

  The boy wasn’t pulling his punches.

  Good.

  IV

  Paolo was at his desk the next morning, studying papers pertaining to his interest in Long Island.

  He meant to be a better man than the dons he’d killed, and he meant that intention in every conceivable way. More honorable, more savvy, more ambitions, more successful. The work he’d taken over was dark on its face, thriving in the shadows and exploiting the excesses of vice, but he meant to be more than that. He meant someday to be a man so powerful that no man would wipe his hand after Paolo shook it—that, indeed, those men who couldn’t stand to touch him now would bow before him eventually.

  For that to happen, he needed his business to move into the light—not all of it; he’d be stupid to turn his back on the profits of men’s weaknesses, but enough to establish himself as a legitimate businessman. He needed to move beyond the Five Points and ‘Poverty Hollow.’

  Long Island was his first move toward making that a reality. He would have preferred not to come so close to his sister’s new life, but Long Island had the harbor access he needed. Manhattan was too busy, and there was already ridiculous competition at the harbor f
rom legitimate and underworld organizations alike. But Long Island was practically a blank slate. It offered a great deal of opportunity for importing and exporting goods without the expense of enormous bribes—and the area was ripe for development. All signs suggested Long Island was about to thrive, and small pockets had already proved fertile, but it had not yet reach its peak.

  Paolo wanted to shape Long Island to his way. All of it. He wanted control of commerce at the harbor and development of the land. The papers spread out before him showed him what he’d need to do to make it happen.

  It would not be easy. But then, not a single day in Paolo’s life had been easy.

  A knock on the door brought his head up. His secretary, Teresa, was militant about whom she allowed past her desk without his express okay, and that list was quite short, so he wasn’t surprised to see Aldo standing in the doorway.

  Aldo was nearly forty but didn’t quite look his age, except for the thinness of his dark hair. He had that unique agelessness that corpulent men often had—his skin smooth with fat, but his face a bit bunched, too, so that he looked neither old nor young.

  He had been one of Don Fausto’s men—not right at his side, but someone with responsibility and insight. He’d stood with Paolo before anyone else had, and had helped him make the message with Fausto’s death he’d wanted to make. And then, though he’d been the most senior of Fausto’s men still living and the most knowledgeable about the business, he’d made no move to overstep Paolo. To Aldo’s mind, Paolo, young though he was, had been strong and bold enough to kill a don most men feared, thus the twenty-one-year-old had earned that place and that power.

  He’d immediately offered himself to Paolo as second, to advise him as he came to understand the role he’d claimed.

  Aldo Tessaro was the only soul in the world Paolo completely trusted. Though there were not quite enough years between their ages for Aldo to be old enough to be his father, he had become a father figure of sorts—not an authority, but a valued consigliere.

  Standing in the doorway to Paolo’s office, Aldo’s expression was part smile, part frown. He was somehow able to be amiable and serious at once, capable of dealing a threat and enjoying a laugh with the same composure and comfort. Not the perverse malice of Fausto, but an equally sincere enjoyment of the world and understanding of its evils.

  Paolo did not share that skill. He rarely enjoyed anything.

  “What happened to your face? Trouble? Or mischief?”

  The question pulled Paolo’s hand to his face, where he touched the cheek that was bruised and cut. It had bled quite a bit, but it was closed well enough now—still tender, however.

  As he answered, Paolo nodded at a chair before his desk. “Couldn’t sleep. I went downstairs and sparred with one of the boys.”

  That elicited a chuckle from Aldo as he came to sit down. “That explains Ricky’s face, too, then, I guess. From the look of it, you won.”

  He had. In fact, he’d gone a bit overboard and forgotten for a moment that they were only sparring. Ricky probably looked significantly worse than a black eye this morning.

  No doubt that had to do, at least in part, with their differing positions. Ricky was bigger and stronger than Paolo, but Paolo was his don. Though Ricky hadn’t pulled his punches, when Paolo sank too far into his head and forgot what they were doing, Ricky would never have done more than protect himself.

  Paolo wasn’t so arrogant to think he’d beaten Ricky simply because he was a better fighter.

  “He’s a tough kid,” Paolo told Aldo. “Good fighter. He’s nineteen—we should put him in the ring.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll talk to him.”

  “Did you hear from Goldman yet?”

  Dr. Goldman was the first person in this cursed city who’d shown Paolo kindness. Paolo, crazed with rage and hate, powerlessness and homesickness, loss and despair, had repaid him by stealing from him.

  At the time, he’d felt he was taking what was owed. He’d blamed the doctor for taking Caterina from him, for putting her in the hands of Dario Laterza, who’d become the savior Paolo had failed to be. He’d blamed the doctor for the injuries he’d healed, for the weakness he’d strengthened, for the need he’d assuaged. Paolo had blamed the doctor for showing him how weak he’d been, how much help he’d needed, how much a beggar he was.

  He’d blamed Dr. Goldman for all the promises New York had made and then broken before he’d had passed a full day on its filthy streets.

  Now, years later, Paolo could see that. He knew the doctor was a good man and had not deserved such hostility and ill treatment. Dr. Goldman had saved his life.

  Paolo, however, was not a man who could apologize. There was too much blackness in his heart to leave room for remorse. What he did instead was see to it that the doctor’s practice was sufficiently funded. He sent his men to him for care. He sent those who’d needed correction to his care as well, and he paid a premium for those services.

  But he hadn’t been in the same room with the doctor since he’d lived at his practice. He would bleed to death in the street before he ever sought help from Dr. Goldman again.

  “Yeah. Montanari is stitched up, and he’s keeping him at the clinic for a couple days to get his blood back up and make sure there’s no infection. He sent a bill, and I paid it. He also sent this.” Aldo tucked a hand into his suitcoat and pulled out a sealed letter. Paolo could see his name on the envelope, in the doctor’s handwriting.

  “I don’t want it.”

  Aldo, knowing enough about Paolo’s feelings regarding Goldman not to be surprised, nodded. “I’ll burn it, then.”

  Paolo nodded. “What else have we got today?”

  Leaning forward, Aldo set his hand on the desk, near the papers Paolo had been studying. “You ready to move forward?”

  “I’m ready to take the next step. I want to talk to Deller.”

  Aldo’s smile was tight and wry. “Good. You want Nello and Joey in on this?”

  Aldo had come over from Sicily as boy, before the opening of Ellis Island. He had virtually no accent when he spoke English. Paolo had worked hard to become fluent in English and had trained himself to think primarily in that language, but he knew his accent remained strong, and that, no matter his power or the threat he posed, uptown men like Martin Deller thought less of him for all the hooks and sweeps of the words he voiced. They could never forget he was a ‘dirty guinea.’

  Nello’s accent was even stronger and his words rougher. Joey was a native-born New Yorker, first generation, but he was raw.

  Paolo wanted a meeting in which Deller would be intimidated, but not by a gang of immigrant thugs. He wanted a business meeting.

  “Not yet. You and me. But we meet here. We don’t go uptown. Deller comes down.”

  Martin Deller was one of the richest men in Manhattan, with a pedigree that extended back as far as any white man’s did on this island. But he was one of the least impressive men to meet. Barely more than five feet tall, thin and pale, his scalp shining beneath a flimsy covering of fine fair hair, Paolo could kill him with his bare hands without taking a deep breath. Understanding his physical frailty, Deller never traveled anywhere without a bodyguard the size of a locomotive, with the incongruously humble name of Timmy.

  But his physical size hardly mattered, anyway. Deller was vastly wealthy—more than that, he was influential, keeping personal relationships with anyone and everyone of note uptown. If a man needed something done and could get Martin Deller to support him in the endeavor, there was nothing to stop his success.

  Deller despised immigrants and would almost rather be dead than step foot south of Washington Square Park.

  Almost.

  But no man was truly powerful when he had a vice to exploit, and Deller had more than one. Indeed, his were particularly vile.

  The first was a predilection for young boys.

  The second was even more deviant and appalling. Martin Deller, great financier and pillar of Old New York snobbe
ry, enjoyed the delicacy known as ‘long pig.’

  Human flesh.

  Martin Deller was a cannibal.

  He’d pay for almost any part, but he had a particular taste for organs—especially the human liver.

  Giulio Fausto had known of these things and done nothing more with the knowledge than produce the supply for Deller’s demands.

  Paolo, disgusted and appalled, meant to make Deller pay in another way.

  He was patient and waited until he had everything in place to make a legitimately sound business deal—and until his face had healed from his spar with Ricky.

  Barely more than a week after his trip to Long Island, Paolo summoned Deller to the Five Points. He was sitting behind the huge carved desk, in the high-backed leather chair like a throne, with Aldo seated in his usual place as well, when Teresa showed Deller in.

  Timmy was right behind him, but Paolo shook his head, and Deller turned and stopped his bodyguard from entering. They shared a silent exchange, and Timmy backed off. Teresa closed the door.

  Without standing, Paolo said, “Martin, thank you for coming. Please, sit.” He gestured at the other chair before his desk, one a bit smaller and plainer than Aldo’s.

  Deller noticed this, as he’d noticed Paolo’s use of his given name, and visibly reacted to both. But he sat.

  “What is it you need, Paolo?” he asked, brushing his pants leg as if he’d been dirtied coming into this office.

  “I have a business proposition for you.”

  Deller blinked at him. “What kind of business proposition?”

  “There is some property on Long Island. Several large parcels along the South Shore. I wish to develop them. For commercial and residential use.”

  His small, dull blue eyes grew sharp and wide. “You wish … what?”

  Paolo did not repeat himself. Deller looked to Aldo, who remained silent, his expression placid, balanced on that fascinating fence between threat and amusement.