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Then, out of the blue all of a sudden, after an ink salesman left her alone with a pimply office boy to answer a telephone call, the boy said, “Money.”
“I beg your pardon?”
The boy was even younger than she and barely came to her shoulder.
“You could almost print two-dollar bills on that paper. If you had plates and ink.”
“Have you seen this paper before?”
“Not that same paper. But I’ve seen the type when they come for ink. The Boss sends them packing.”
“Who?”
“Fellows making green goods.”
“‘Green goods’? What are you talking about?”
“Passing the queer.”
“Queer what?” asked Helen.
The office boy stared at her like she was the biggest nincompoop in the city.
Richie Cirillo swore he was sixteen, but he looked twelve.
Isaac Bell tried to get a handle on how old the kid really was. “Why’d you leave school?”
“They stuck me in steamer class.”
“What is ‘steamer class’?”
“For the dummies.”
Harry Warren interpreted. “The teachers put Italian kids in the slow class. Their mothers work at home, finishing garments. The kids have to help. Sewing buttons and felling seams to midnight, then up at six for school—they’re not slow, they’re sleepy.”
“I was told you’re an orphan, Richie.”
“My mother got diphtheria. My father went back to Italy. But I really am sixteen, Mr. Bell.”
“What is this disguise you came up with?” In the business districts, a youthful Van Dorn apprentice would masquerade, typically, as a newsboy. But there were no boys hawking the Sun, the Times, the Herald, or the American on Elizabeth Street, where those who were literate only read Italian. Instead of newspapers, Richie Cirillo had a sack of cloth slung over his skinny shoulder.
“I’m a runner. Like I’m delivering dresses to be finished in the tenements and bringing them back to the factory when they’re done.”
“O.K. You’ll do.”
“Wow! Thank you, Mr. Bell.”
“Keep your eyes open. One eye on the bank, the other on one of us, so you know who to run to if you get in trouble.”
6
“Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned.”
Francesca Kennedy was a dark-haired, blue-eyed Irish-Italian beauty. Her pale white face shone like a splash of sunlight through the confessional lattice that hid the priest. She knelt in a good coat with a fur collar and a modest scarf to cover her head.
“How did you sin, my child?”
“I stabbed a man to death.”
