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When Dominic first told Carmella everything, he made one point particularly clear: If Carl ever came after him, and the cook had to go on the run again, Carmella couldn't come with him. She'd lost her husband and her only child. She had been spared just one thing--she'd not seen them die. If Carmella went on the run with Dominic, the cowboy might not kill her, too, but she would watch the cook get killed. "I won't allow it," Dominic had told her. "If that asshole comes after me, I go alone."
"Why can't you and Danny just tell the police?" Carmella had asked him. "What happened to Jane was an accident! Can't you make the police understand that Carl is crazy, and that he's dangerous?"
It was hard to explain to someone who wasn't from Coos County. In the first place, the cowboy was the police--or what passed for the police up there. In the second place, it wasn't a crime to be crazy and dangerous--not anywhere, but especially not in northern New Hampshire. Nor was it much of a crime that Carl had buried or otherwise disposed of Jane's body without telling anyone. The point was, the cowboy didn't kill her--Danny did. And the cook had been old enough to know better than to have run away the first time, when if he'd stayed and simply told the truth, to someone--well, maybe then it might have worked out. (Or Dominic could have just gone back to Twisted River with Daniel. The cook could have bluffed it out, as Ketchum had wanted him to--as young Dan also had wanted.)
Of course, it was too late to change any of that now. It was early enough in their relationship when the cook had told Carmella all this; she'd accepted the terms. Now that she loved him more than a little, she regretted what she'd agreed to. Not going with him, if Dominic had to go, would be very hard for her. Naturally, Dominic knew he would miss Carmella--more than he'd missed Injun Jane. Maybe not as much as both he and Ketchum still missed Rosie, but the cook knew that Carmella was special. Yet the more he loved Carmella, the more dead set Dominic was against her going with him.
As Carmella lay in bed, she thought about the places she could no longer go in the North End, first because she'd gone there with the fisherman, and then--more painfully--because she associated specific areas of the neighborhood with those special things she'd done with Angelu. Now where would she no longer be able to go when Dominic (her dear Gamba) had left her? the widow Del Popolo wondered.
After Angelu drowned, Carmella took no more walks on Parmenter Street--specifically, not in the vicinity of what had been Cushman's. The elementary school, where Angelu had gone to the early grades, had been torn down. (In '55, or maybe in '56--Carmella couldn't remember.) In its place, there would one day be a library, but Carmella wouldn't ever walk by that library.
Because she'd always been a waitress at Vicino di Napoli--it had been her first job and became her only one--she was free most mornings. When the little kids at Cushman's took their school trips in the neighborhood, Carmella had always volunteered to be one of the parents who went along--just to help the teachers out. Therefore, she no longer went anywhere near the Old North Church, where she and Angelu's class of schoolchildren had been shown the steeple that was restored in 1912 by the descendants of Paul Revere. It was an Episcopal church--one Carmella wouldn't have attended, because she was Catholic--but it was famous (foremost, for its role in Paul Revere's ride). Enshrined, under glass, were the bricks from the cell where the Pilgrim fathers had been imprisoned in England.
On two counts could Carmella not walk past the Mariners House on North Square, and this was awkward for her because it was so close to Vicino di Napoli. But it was the landmark of the Boston Port and Seamen's Society, "dedicated to the service of seafarers." The schoolchildren in Angelu's class had visited the Mariners House, but Carmella had skipped that school trip--after all, she'd lost a fisherman at sea.
It was just plain silly how more innocent connections to the fisherman and Angelu haunted her, but they did. She loved the Caffe Vittoria but avoided that room with the pictures of Rocky Marciano, because both the fisherman and Angelu had admired the heavyweight champion. And she'd eaten with her husband and son at the Grotta Azzurra on Hanover Street, where Enrico Caruso used to eat, too. Now there was no more going there.
The fisherman had told her that no sailor had ever been mugged on Hanover Street, or ever would be; it was a safe walk for even the drunken-most sailors, all the way from the waterfront to the Old Howard and back. In addition to the striptease places, there were cheap bars frequented by the sailors, and the arcades around Scollay Square. (Of course this would all change; Scollay Square itself would go.) But the world Carmella had lived in with her drowned husband and drowned son was both sacred and haunted to her--the whole length of Hanover Street!
Even the scavenging seagulls over the Haymarket reminded her of the Saturday people-watching she had done there, with Angelu holding her hand. Now she looked with caution at that restaurant on Fleet Street where Stella's used to be; she occasionally ate there with Dominic, on the nights Vicino di Napoli was closed. They ate at the Europeo, too--Dominic usually had the fried calamari, but never New York-style. ("Hold the red sauce--I like it just with lemon," the cook would say.) Would she no longer be able to eat in these places after her Gamba was gone? Carmella wondered.
She would certainly have to move into a smaller apartment. Would it be so hot in the apartment in the summer that she would become like one of those old ladies in the tenement building on Charter Street? They took their chairs out of their apartments so they could sit on the sidewalk, where it was cooler. Those cold-water tenements had been bedecked with streamers for the saints' feasts in the summer. Carmella suddenly recalled Angelu as a little boy sitting on the fisherman's shoulders; Hanover Street had been closed for a procession. It was the Feast of San Rocco, Carmella was remembering. Nowadays, she didn't like to watch the processions.
IN 1919, GIUSE POLCARI had been a young man. He remembered the Molasses Explosion, which killed twenty-one people in the North End--including the father of some kid Joe Polcari had known. "He was-a boiled to death in a tidal wave of hot molasses!" old Joe had said to Danny. Though the war was over, those who'd heard the explosion thought the Germans were coming--that Boston Harbor was being bombed, or something. "I saw a whole piano floating in the molasses!" old Polcari told young Dan.
In the kitchen of Vicino di Napoli was a black-and-white photograph of Nicola Sacco and
Bartolomeo Vanzetti; the two anarchist immigrants were handcuffed together. Sacco and Vanzetti were sent to the electric chair for the murder of a paymaster and a guard at a shoe company in South Braintree. Old Polcari--in his final, addle-brained days--couldn't remember all the details, but he remembered the protest marches. "Sacco and Vanzetti were framed! A stool pigeon in the Charlestown Street jail fingered them, and the State of Massachusetts gave-a the stool pigeon a free ride back to Italy," old Joe had said to Danny. There'd been a procession for Sacco and Vanzetti that started on Hanover Street in the North End and went all the way to Tremont Street, where the mounted police had broken up the crowd; there were thousands of protesters, Joe Polcari among them.
"If you or your son ever have a problem, Gamba, you tell me," Giuse Polcari said to Dominic. "I know-a some guys--they feex-a your problem for you."
Old Polcari meant the Camorra, the Neapolitan version of the Mafia--not that Dominic could truly understand the distinction. When he'd behaved wildly as a kid, Nunzi had called him her camorrista. But it was Dominic's impression that the Mafia was more or less in control of the North End, where both the Mafia and the Camorra were called the Black Hand.
When Dominic told Paul Polcari that the cowboy might be coming after him, Paul said, "If my dad were alive, he'd call his Camorra buddies, but I don't know about those guys."
"I don't know about the Mafia, either," Tony Molinari told Dominic. "If they do something for you, then you owe them."
"I don't want to involve you in my troubles," Dominic said to them. "I'm not asking the Mafia to help me, or the Camorra."
"The crazy cop won't come after Carmella, will he?" Paul Polcari asked the cook.
"I don't know--Carmella bears watching," Dominic answered.
"We'll watch her, all right," Molinari said. "If the cowboy comes here, to the restaurant--well, we've got knives, cleavers--"
"Wine bottles," Paul Polcari suggested.
"Don't even think about it," Dominic told them. "If Carl comes here looking for me, he'll be armed--he wouldn't go anywhere without that Colt forty-five on him."
"I know what my dad would say," Paul Polcari said. "He'd say, 'A Colt forty-five is-a nothing--not if you've ever tried to get-a cozy with one of those women who work as stitchers in the shirt factory. Even naked, they got-a needles on 'em!'" (Joe Polcari meant the Leopold Morse factory in the old Prince Macaroni building; his son Paul said Giuse must have banged some tough broad who worked there, or he'd tried to.)
The three cooks laughed; they made an effort to forget about the deputy sheriff up in Coos County. What else could they do but try to forget about him?
Old Polcari had had a hundred jokes like that one about the shirt-stitchers. "Do you remember the one about the woman who worked the night shift at the Boston Sausage and Provision Company?" Dominic asked Paul and Tony.
Both chefs roared. "Yeah, she worked in the skinless-meat department," Paul Polcari said.
"She had this sneaky little knife, for cutting the skin off the frankfurters!" Molinari remembered.
