The Paragon Hotel Read online

  So quickly I nearly missed it, Nicolo’s hands closed around Mr. Mangiapane’s throat. Mum screamed. My elbow buzzed as the blood cascaded back. Ezio shouted creative profanity. Nicolo’s brows distorted, unrecognizable, spine rippling as he bent our landlord backward over his own bar. It was like watching a snake lunge at a gopher. Savage. Terrible.

  Magnificent, I thought, chest swelling.

  “Say it again to me,” Nicolo hissed. “So I’m clear. You’re selling Alicia tonight? To one of your filthy johns?”

  Our landlord couldn’t answer. Or breathe.

  “Topolina,” Nicolo addressed me, “is that what this figlio di puttana* just said?”

  “Yes. Nicolo, stop, you—”

  It may have been the three days in lockup. Too many bruises. Too many growls of filthy dago from the worst cops. But Nicolo didn’t listen to me.

  He bared his teeth and howled.

  Eventually, Ezio and Mum and I managed to peel him off Mangiapane. But not before our landlord’s hysterical yells and the crack of bones splintering brought half a dozen or more Harlemites hurtling through the door. The tableau at the end of the debacle was Mangiapane in a whimpering heap, Mum attempting to mop his leaks with dish towels, Ezio cursing, and an audience of locals muttering dark portents. Nicolo was the only soul looking at me, of course. He stood there panting. His shirt collar rent, his knuckles reopened. One streak of grey light cut over his brow like a sword poised to strike. Everyone fell still as New Year’s morning. For a community well used to violence, it was a strange, uncertain hush. It took me a moment to understand why.

  Because I was staring straight into the lightning strike, and it was staring at me, and I was looking at love, and everyone else was looking at death. If there had been doubt before, now they all thought he was the murderer of the two Corleonesi. Nicolo swept his gaze over the room. For the first time in his life, he wasn’t a magnetic misfit. He had knifed two cagnolazzi in cold blood, bribed or bullied his way out of the station house, and nearly murdered my landlord in his own saloon.

  A twenty-block radius of Harlem tonight would be talking about Nicolo before the pasta was on the table.

  * * *

  —

  We hurried through darkening streets, my tiny sack seized in Nicolo’s fist, suppertime vegetal steam from the packed tenements drifting around us like savory fog. My friend muttered continually, which wasn’t at all like him.

  “What happened at the station house?” I badly wanted to know.

  “How long has that waste of skin been after you to turn whore?” he returned with grim fury.

  “It’s a Raines hotel, Nicolo, are you serious? Since I sprouted titties.”

  “I’ll kill him.” His white teeth flashed.

  “What would the point be? Anyway, you almost did!”

  “I don’t know why you stopped me.”

  “Because you aren’t a killer!”

  “And you aren’t a puttana.”

  “Exactly what else do you think I’m fit for, Nicolo? An heiress, maybe?”

  We’d arrived at his door on 106th Street, and Nicolo trotted up the stairs. “Smart of you to pack your bag. You suspected something? That’s my girl. You’ll stay here with us.”

  “No, I’m going—Nicolo, wait!”

  Listening to me, it seemed, was a lost art where Nicolo was concerned.

  The Benenati kitchen burned like a petite sun, its long wooden worktable straining under eggplants, mushrooms, carrots, cheeses, fish staring with mouths agape. Mrs. Benenati, a small woman with steel wool curls, stood at the end of the altar dropping sacrificial eggs into a volcano of flour.

  “Alicia! Bene, you found her. Come and say hello to me, my lovely girl.” Looking up at us as I kissed her cheek, the little matron gasped in fright. “Nicolo! What’s happened now?”

  “I had a talk with Mr. Mangiapane.” The obsidian glitter that had shone so darkly at the Step Right returned, but my friend blinked it away. “When’s dinner, Mamma? Christmas?”

  “Hush, you rascal, all your aunties and uncles are coming and we’ll have a midnight supper celebration when your papa gets back. What’s the matter with old Mangiapane? And what’s it to do with you?”

  “He threatened Alicia, I told him his place.”

  His mother frowned. Mr. Benenati with his sharp caterpillar mustache and Mrs. Benenati with her stooped posture had always been wonderful to me. Despite my lack of . . . well, anything, really. I’d never questioned why previously. For the first time, I wondered just when Nicolo told them he wanted me. Maybe only me. I ought to have been able to swallow the idea by age fifteen. Instead I thought with vague terror of diapers and drudgery.

  Picking up a knife, I started disrobing onions. Already planning my escape route. Grateful that I had one. But first, I wanted to learn what Mrs. Benenati knew.

  “Nicolo won’t spill what happened at the station house,” I said softly as my friend vanished to clean his reopened battle scars. “One of those Corleonesi from the alley was Tommaso Palma, but I don’t know about the other. Do you?”

  A pleat appeared above Mrs. Benenati’s nose as she folded eggs and water into the flour. “He was new to the city, sweet one. But the whole Palma clan takes their orders from the Boss of Bosses—and my Giorgio has refused to cast his hard-earned money to pigs for months now. People look to him! Even when the Family arrived at our door, my son was protected and they met instead with the Angel of Death, by God’s grace. And the question of bail? Dismissed! A kind eye is watching out for us.”

  I recalled Mr. Salvatici, with his machete mouth, and disagreed.

  “These Family thugs, Alicia, they are cowards. Counterfeit, arson, gambling, trade, and now our horses. Despicable—I say before heaven that they should all drop dead where they stand.”

  She wasn’t kidding. A new scheme had been hatched by the Family, one cartmen and delivery makers found particularly uncivil. Step one: demand money. Step two: demand money or your horse will be a feast for flies. Step three: execute the horse. I recalled a year previous, Nicolo and I happening upon a Palermo man weeping over the stiffening hulk of his mare. My friend, his affection for animals considered, had leaned on the nearest brick wall and heaved his protest on the litter of cheap black cigar ends.

  “I don’t see how you stand up to them,” I answered, still fishing. “Why doesn’t Mr. Benenati pay, like everyone else?”

  She bestowed a quick smile. “Nobody, you were sprung from New York soil—the wind in the Old Country never weathered you. But the Benenatis are Neapolitan. We do not lie down and allow Sicilian garbage carts to run us over.”

  The sound of boots tattooing the stairs struck both of us dumb. I swiveled with the knife in hand, and Mrs. Benenati shouted for Nicolo. He emerged with bandages wrapped over his split fingers just as his friend Nazario wrenched the door nearly off its hinges. Our old companion’s face was as grey as the local milk stretched with chalk water.

  “Merda,” Nicolo breathed.

  Nazario’s mouth worked, but silently.

  “Tell me.”

  Nazario shook his head, blinking in horror at the uncooked feast. His curls were wild as a briar patch, and he wouldn’t look at Mrs. Benenati.

  Look at her, I thought, my heart crumbling in my chest.

  Look at her so I know that everything will be all right.

  * * *

  —

  An hour later, I fell, flung an arm at the wrought-iron outside Mr. Salvatici’s hotel on 110th Street, and missed. Improbably though, I missed the stone steps as well.

  “Whoa! Here, miss, just hold on. Breathe in, now. You’re not down for the count by a long shot.”

  The world was awash with stuttering lights. My stomach burned. I tried to blink away the faintness and found there were lean, muscled arms under my knees and rib cage. Next thing
I knew, my wrists brushed the furred velvet of a lobby chair and a glass of brandy rested against my lips.

  I’d been frightened before. Grief-struck and heartsick too.

  Never like this.

  “That’s the ticket, darlin’.”

  I forced my eyes open.

  The young colored man who’d kept me from falling sat on his haunches. He wore a maroon bellhop uniform with a cap strapped to a neatly shorn head. Maybe Nicolo’s age, with a broad, elegant nose, humorous cinnamon eyes with friendly bags beneath, and lips that curled up at their edges even when, as I’d later learn, he wasn’t smiling at all. He probably wasn’t then. While darker by far than mine, his skin was still lighter than plenty of Sicilians’. It didn’t even occur to me to flinch away.

  “You had some fright, miss, type to make you drop drawers and run for cover, I’d wager,” he teased gently. “Zachariah Lane, at your service. They call me Rye. Welcome to the Hotel Arcadia.”

  There had always been Negroes in Harlem. But around 1905, some of the streets started dancing in tap steps. Singing the blues. By 1911, the year now in question, the shindig was well and truly in swing. Blacks poured into Harlem from Missouri, Alabama, Texas, Kentucky. True homes in Central Harlem disintegrated—apartments were divided into honeycomb hives, families of six former sharecroppers stuffed into bunk beds. They spilled out, naturally, everyplace. They tipped department-store hats from Lord & Taylor at their sweethearts, got into fisticuffs on rum-swilling Saturday nights. The usual.

  The one in front of me was the most magnetic person other than Nicolo I’d ever encountered.

  “I have to see Mr. Salvatici,” I begged. “Can you tell him Nobody is here?”

  “Pardon?” Rye’s smile widened in a question.

  “Sorry, Alice James.” I started to cry, curling into myself. “Or Nobody. Just . . . he can decide.”

  Rye disappeared. My eyes swam at the orderly bank of lemon oil–polished mailboxes and the wall of keys. A clerk behind the reception desk glared, stroking his chin as if he smelled something amiss. The aroma of slashed entrails enveloped me again and I retched helplessly at the carpet.

  I lost consciousness, this time with commitment. When I woke, I rested on a tapestry-printed couch in the finest hotel room I’d ever seen—slipper-soft carpet, a sideboard weighted with glassware, paintings featuring dogs that would have considered the Step Right beneath pissing on.

  Mr. Salvatici loomed into view. His shirtsleeves were buttoned without collar or cuffs, as if he’d been interrupted bathing. Damp sable hair fell over eerily pale blue eyes ringed with darker steel. He held up a tiny brown bottle.

  “Miss James, I have smelling salts.”

  The stark reek of ammonia deluged my sinuses.

  Please, God, take this day away. If only it were yesterday, and the invitations for tomorrow all canceled.

  “That’s better.” Mr. Salvatici turned to draw up a chair. “My dear young lady, whatever has happened, I’ll do all I can to assist.”

  “They went after Giorgio Benenati again,” I heard a voice like mine saying. “His nemicos* won. He’s dead.”

  I didn’t say, His neck was slashed so deep that when Nicolo pulled him out of the barrel, it flopped, and the only thing attaching his head was a flap of skin.

  I absolutely didn’t say, They took a razor and cut off his nose.

  They took his lips.

  His tongue.

  His eyelids.

  What good were they to anyone save Mr. Benenati?

  The two Benenatis and I had followed Nazario to a crack in the world wedged between a poultry warehouse with torn chicken-wire windows and a bleak row of peeling billboards. A weeping charwoman gestured helplessly at a barrel with a leg sticking out. Gore oozed from the cracks between the staves. While Nicolo pulled, his mother screamed, and soon she was surrounded by identical women with dirtied aprons and patched head scarves, all reaching for her like lost souls.

  Mr. Salvatici said nothing after I finished. He brought me his jacket when I started to shiver, and I learned he smelled of the cigarettes he smoked and of a subtler, cleaner perfume like starch.

  Or money.

  “Come with me, Miss James,” he directed, rising.

  “Why?” I huddled farther into the coat.

  His eyes narrowed to match the slit of his lips. There was, strangely, no sternness in it. I could have been watching a lizard sunning itself on a rock.

  “Because I want to see that you can.”

  He offered his arm. We left his hotel room and took a pretty birdcage elevator upward, floors clicking past like so many missed chances. When we stopped, to my surprise, we weren’t in a hallway but in a small, eerily unmarked room. My escort unlocked the door of this and we stepped out onto the roof.

  All Harlem lay spread out before the Hotel Arcadia. To the north, the tall buildings grew stoop-shouldered like old men. To the southwest lay the Park, hugely vacant. In the meadows between tenement buildings, I could see the flickering of maybe a dozen All Hallows’ Eve bonfires. The kids would be roasting chestnuts and jacket potatoes as their parents offered hopeful prayers to the constellations above.

  Mr. Salvatici placed my hands on the railing. He then went to open a wire-walled dovecote, and I heard muted cooing. A flock of birds burst forth from the enclosure. Mr. Salvatici apparently had a surprising hobby. The gangster tenderly lifted a straggler and returned to the edge where I stood. Other birds swooped up along the ironwork, testing the night with their wings. I’d probably seen Mr. Salvatici’s flock wheeling above me dozens of times. Never imagining they belonged to anyone, or that our lives would intersect.

  “What happened after the police came?” he asked.

  When I stroked the pigeon’s trembling head, he passed the docile creature to me, and I cradled it. Its feathers were a pale cream color, mottled with fawn. How he’d known that holding the fragile bird would make me feel more powerful, I couldn’t fathom. But I did.

  “Nicolo sat there holding Mr. Benenati’s body. I finally coaxed him away, but he wouldn’t look at me.”

  “And then?”

  “I was frightened. A mob was forming.” The pigeon trilled, a mournful sound. “Men talking of stilettos and Old Country grudges and justice for the poor. And other men watching them—rough ones, with brass knuckles.”

  “Cagnolazzi?”

  “Yes.”

  “You know who they will report any unrest to.”

  “To the Clutch Hand. Were you the one who sprang Nicolo from jail?”

  “Of course.”

  “Oh, Mr. Salvatici, I can’t stand this anymore.”

  An uneven roaring like a faraway shore met our ears. I tucked the bird against me and leaned over the rail. Turning the corner several blocks south of us, a distant firefly cluster of bobbing lights flared. They could have resembled the hot shower of a holiday sparkler or the beads worked onto a dress I could never afford. But I knew what they were.

  Angry men. Either Family, rioting for show, or we slaves, madly rattling our chains.

  “Do you want to know what I love about keeping pigeons?” Mr. Salvatici inquired. “Look down there at the rampant disorder. Violence that tends to no purpose. Poverty of the cruelest sort adjacent to waste undreamed of at the Palace of Versailles. But none of it touches my birds. They are sheltered, coddled, cared for the best I can. Which is very well indeed, because I was born to grow things. The Clutch Hand is a bottomless glutton, Miss James. What do you know of the man?”

  It was the test I’d understood was coming. I took a slow breath.

  “When he goes out, no one looks at him because his face is like a skull’s. His eyes are the blackest of pits. He only needs to clutch his right hand and the devil comes running to serve him. But most of that is rubbish.”

  “Why do you say so?”

 
; “Because I listen. At the Step Right. His eyes are black, yes, and his clothes are well tailored, and he’s pale, with a ragged mustache. A brown shawl hides why he’s really called the Clutch Hand. His right arm is half the length it should be, and in place of five fingers, there’s a claw.”

  “Anything else?”

  “His real name is Giuseppe Morello.” My voice rose. “And he deserves to bleed to death in a gutter.”

  Mr. Salvatici’s lips angled up like a folding knife. “Will you help me to achieve that?”

  I could hear scattered shouts, the tinkle of glass breaking. They were headed past the hotel. When I turned away from Mr. Salvatici, I spied a familiar figure at their head. He was the size of a lost tin soldier.

  Nicolo.

  “You bet your life I will,” I replied.

  ◆ Ten ◆

  NOW

  Oregon, which bears the negro no ill will and regrets the wrong that has been done to him, is fortunate because it has only an infinitesimally small negro population. We are spared thus one of the problems which many other states have to solve.

  —FRANK JENKINS, Roseburg News-Review, Roseburg, Oregon, May 23, 1930

  We stand before the Elms’s ticket booth. Blossom, Miss Christina, and me outside, the red-whiskered agent on his stool behind the counter. Sending streams of chewing tobacco into an empty can of instant Red-E Coffee. The savage blue of the sky has faded to a somber azure.

  Davy is still not with us, and the atmosphere thunders with his absence.

  “Did you try the Chute the Chutes?” the ticketing man asks, face bland as a cow’s.

  “Listen to me, you inert lump of a human,” Blossom snarls. She’s been swallowing tears, and by God I believe she’s reached full capacity. “As per your earlier delightfully salient suggestion, we have indeed searched the Chute the Chutes, every cranny of every precious car poised to slide down that waterfall, to no avail. Our child is still missing.”