Smiling Handshakes and Knives Behind the Back
The day after the restaurant incident, the story dominated the front pages. Coming so soon after the gambling-den shootout, a second gunfight only sharpened public interest.
The papers pinned the violence on strife among Italian gangs, but the articles alone never told me what I actually wanted to know — which faction was fighting which, and why.
At first I assumed it was Mafia versus Camorra, Naples against Sicily. The victims, though, told a different story. The men Salvatore had killed in that restaurant were Sicilians themselves.
Leo, reading the paper on the sofa, wrinkled his nose and spoke up.
"Everybody's pretty rattled. They jump every time they open a paper these days. Uncle Nora even called. Wanted to know if you were all right."
Uncle Ted out in East Harlem had gone so far as to ring the LES precinct for a status report. The better people knew me, the faster they connected Italian gang bloodshed to the Union.
As if the thought had just struck him, Leo asked, "Hey — that shop girl of yours is getting married, right?"
"Yeah. She's marrying out and heading to Philadelphia."
"Guess we better put a hiring notice up at the flea market. Or pull someone from Free Your Body?"
The woman who had managed the shop after Ida was a Free Your Body transplant. The problem was simple: hire someone new, or borrow from elsewhere, and they still wouldn't be as easy to work with as Ida. You open everything up, they get married and walk out, and suddenly you're in a bind. Sales had already slipped since Ida left. No one else could work a customer the way she did.
"I'm heading down to the first floor for a bit."
I took the secret passage down. Coming in through the back of the shop, I found a familiar face browsing the lingerie — Hazel, who had been killing time with nothing to do in the basement workshop.
"What are you doing here?"
"A girl's got to wear underwear. I am a woman, you know."
"Ah. Right. You are."
"Is that really the reaction you want to go with?"
Hazel snorted. The shop clerk stood nearby, smiling awkwardly.
"Cheryl, when are you leaving for Philadelphia?"
"Next Thursday. The wedding's Saturday, so I need time to get ready."
"Shouldn't you be going earlier, then? A girl's only got one wedding."
"Eh — who says it has to be only one?"
"…"
The clerk, who had been giggling, took one look at our faces and straightened up.
"I can get everything done in a single day if I push it."
There was no need for that kind of effort, but she insisted it was only proper and nodded to herself.
Then Hazel's gaze locked onto me, sharp and intent — the look of a fox that had just spotted prey. I called her into the back office to ask what she had in mind.
"Aren't you working the basement shop? Want me to hand you some firearm blueprints at least?"
"Not interested for a while."
It had been more than half a year since the Gunsmith died. His shadow still hadn't lifted. Spending hours alone at a workbench would only make it worse.
"So — you want a job in our shop?"
"If you'll have me. Beats scrambling for someone at the last minute, doesn't it?"
"In what way, exactly? Be specific."
Hazel pointed shamelessly at her own face — mask on, scarf wrapped around her neck and all.
"Fine. Start shadowing her today. A bride-to-be deserves to leave early."
"Wow. Look at you, Boss. I'm staff now, so keep treating me this sweet from here on out."
"When you get married, I'll send you off a whole month early."
"…I'm holding you to that."
Hazel gave me an unsettling look, then scurried out of the shop — no, out of the building entirely. Where was she going?
I explained the situation to the clerk. She must have been fretting about it herself; her smile lit up the room.
"So how long do I work?"
"Through tomorrow. I'll pay you for all of next week as well."
"Oh my — thank you!"
I left her with that and went back upstairs, then told Leo that I had, unexpectedly, just hired Hazel for Intima. His reaction was pure enthusiasm.
"While you're at it, just date her. Wait — you already live together, don't you?"
"What the hell are you talking about. That's because of Roa."
"Roa's got a deep heart. She's probably worried her big brother will never land a woman in his life."
No, Leo. It's because Hazel owns the building.
"I wish I had a little sister like Roa. Hell, I'd have a girl by n— never mind. Anyway, Hazel's pretty, she talks a good game — she's perfect. And no secrets to hide."
"Well. That's true enough."
"She's pretty?"
"The secrets, you bastard. Oh — go see Brandon on the first floor and find out how much we cleared selling off those stocks."
"Okay."
Leo snickered as he got up. Not long after he disappeared, someone knocked on the office door with an ominous air.
"Boss. Ida."
Ida came in and asked, "I hear you hired Hazel."
So that was why she had bolted outside. She must have run straight to Ida to report.
"She said she'll be working the shop from now on, and asked me to pass along anything she needs to know."
"Cheryl's getting married and leaving. Anyway — train her well. Sales have dropped hard since you stepped down."
Ida nodded. "Don't worry. Hazel will do fine. Maybe not as well as me, but."
She turned away with a peculiar little smile. Had she come all this way just to say that?
Hand on the doorknob, Ida glanced back as if something had just occurred to her.
"The detectives seem to have brought news. Raymond should be by shortly."
Not long after she left, Raymond arrived at the office exactly as promised. Clay pipe clenched in his teeth, he sat down, spread out his papers, and began laying out what he had on the recent LES shootings.
"Two outfits are going at it. The interesting part is — they're on the same side."
"Sicilian, you mean."
"That's right. More precisely, it's a dogfight between two men. One of them is Frankie Yale, head of the Sicilian Union."
The other was Salvatore D'Aquila.
"D'Aquila?"
"You've heard of him?"
Of course I had — from the mafia genealogies of my past life.
"Salvatore D'Aquila is the man who succeeded Giuseppe Morello, isn't he?"
Raymond looked at me, deflated.
"What, you already knew that too?"
Only that, would have been the accurate way to put it. Movies, dramas, books — the information was always fragmentary. I had treated them as separate factions on different branches of the tree, but Yale and D'Aquila were tightly entangled.
The truth was, American mafia genealogy was a filthy mess. Succession was not inheritance; it was a history of blood, of killing and taking. Bosses who muscled their way in one day were assassinated the next with numbing regularity.
Either way, Giuseppe Morello was generally counted as the first generation of Sicilian mafia in America — the Capo di tutti capi of the Sicilian gangs, the boss of bosses. From East Harlem and the Bronx he had built a criminal empire on counterfeit currency. When the bills were discovered and Morello arrested, a savage power struggle erupted. Salvatore D'Aquila reorganized the scattered outfits and became Capo di tutti capi in his place.
"That's as far as my knowledge goes."
Raymond's expression brightened again.
"D'Aquila's from Palermo, Sicily. He holds the Bronx, East Harlem, and Little Italy in a tight fist."
Standing on the opposite track was Frankie Yale.
"Put their relationship in a single line and it's this: they shake hands with a smile and sharpen knives behind each other's backs. Either one is ready to put a knife in the other the moment the chance comes."
D'Aquila controlled the Sicilian network centered on Manhattan. Frankie Yale had built his power in Brooklyn as head of the Sicilian Union.
"But the Sicilian Union is their own affair — and D'Aquila, from what I hear, doesn't recognize it."
The quiet until now had simply been the time both sides needed to put their gangs in order. It had been barely two years since D'Aquila seized power in the vacuum left by Morello. Frankie Yale had only become head of the Brooklyn Sicilian Union about a year ago.
"And then, just like that, they collide. I dug into it. There's only one reason."
What came next was a shock.
"The cause was the Union gang."
"How the hell does that work?"
Months earlier, Frankie Yale had hit our units in the LES. D'Aquila read that as a challenge aimed at him. There was more.
"Two Italian union bosses at the Fulton Fish Market got assassinated, remember? One of them — Donato Russo — was D'Aquila's man. Plenty of reason to suspect Yale."
I had started something, Yale had stuck his oar in, and a serious distortion of information had followed. Salvatore D'Aquila, one of the great pillars of the Sicilian underworld, had traced this whole mess not to the phantom Union but to Yale.
So the Sicilian civil war now burning was an all-out conflict lit by misunderstanding. And in the middle of it, I was the ghost shaking the board.
"Good."
"What's good about it?"
Them beating each other to a pulp? Everything was good about it.
At the ragged end of 1918, I could afford to meet a turbulent new year at my leisure.
After the armistice, time moved fast. January 1919.
The first news to arrive was the death of the twenty-sixth President of the United States.
Former President Theodore Roosevelt passed away in his sleep this morning at his home, Sagamore Hill, in Oyster Bay, New York. He was sixty years of age.
The unexpected death of the former President has sent a shock across the nation. In a statement issued from the White House, President Wilson mourned that "America has lost one of its most unique and vigorous citizens."
Roosevelt lived a life of service to the nation. The youngest man ever to assume the presidency, he became the twenty-sixth President at the age of forty-two in September 1901, following the assassination of President William McKinley. Reelected by a landslide in 1904, he remained in the White House until 1909.
As President, Roosevelt constrained the power of great corporations through his "Square Deal" policies, vastly expanded the national park system, and drove the construction of the Panama Canal. In foreign affairs he took a hard line, and for his role in ending the Russo-Japanese War he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1906.
In the Great War, Theodore Roosevelt had sent all of his sons into the fight. The youngest of the four, Quentin Roosevelt, had been killed in France the previous July; the former President himself had even served as a wartime nurse. His popularity in America ran so deep that news of his death filled nearly every newspaper in the country. Manhattan, too, was swept by a tide of mourning.
And in this same stretch of days, the states of the Union began racing to ratify the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution. On January 2, Michigan became the sixteenth state to pass the measure; from the day after Roosevelt's death, the pace only quickened.
January 7: Ohio and Oklahoma. The 8th and 9th: Idaho, Maine, West Virginia. The 13th: Tennessee and Washington. The 14th: Arkansas, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas. The 15th: Alabama, Colorado, Iowa, New Hampshire, Oregon.
And on the long-awaited 16th—
The next day Minnesota and Wisconsin followed, pushing the tally past the required thirty-six states. And at last—
The core of the Eighteenth Amendment is as follows.
Section 1. After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.
Section 2. The Congress and the several States shall have concurrent power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.
Section 3. This article shall be inoperative unless it shall have been ratified as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of the several States, as provided in the Constitution, within seven years from the date of the submission hereof to the States by the Congress.
Prohibition had passed — but under Section 1, a one-year grace period remained. What was left was to draft the specific enabling statutes that would define just how far the ban on alcohol would reach.
People understood the simple fact: a year from now, you would not be able to buy a drink. And then—
"Uncle Derek, how much liquor do we have in the warehouses?"
"Three hundred thousand bottles."
In a second-floor office of the twin buildings, the core managers of SCL put their heads together.