Under a Gilded Moon(102)
“Catalfamo here was just leaving.”
Jerking away, Sal had stalked to the door and turned. “This country does not have the kings.”
Barthélemy’s upper lip had buckled into a sneer. “You guinea trash don’t know when you’re beat.”
Sal had planted his feet. “My brother, Nico. I will not leave without finding him.”
“Comme c’est triste. A shame. Mobs have a way of being no respecter of persons, including little dagos. I can’t answer for the mood of the mob this morning. I’d lay money, though, since you’ve been one of the ones on trial, Catalfamo, that they’ll recognize your face.”
Rage lit Sal from the inside as more pieces shifted into place now.
Through Sal’s mind flashed the memory of the alley: Cernoia and him sent there as envoys to talk with Hennessy. Not to threaten, exactly. And certainly not to kill. Sal had not even been armed, and Cernoia carried only a knife in case they were jumped. They’d come to remind Hennessy that the Italians of New Orleans would not allow themselves to be divided into warring families. That they demanded fair treatment.
And then the shot from behind all three of them just as Sal and Cernoia approached the chief, his back toward them. Hennessy whirling to see two Italians standing there gaping. Horrified.
Sal had bent over the chief. Seen where the shot had entered, and known the chief would not live but moments longer. Heard running footsteps out on the street. Someone calling the chief’s name. Conveniently, searching for him seconds after he’d been shot. Someone who would serve as witness to what wasn’t the truth.
Sal and Cernoia had fled toward the opposite end of the alley. But they’d been spotted as they clambered over the brick wall. And even without that, Sal had realized, the Italians of New Orleans would be blamed.
A frenzied rounding up of suspects had followed, the shouted repetition of Hennessy’s supposed final word: Dagos.
Hatred swelled in the city toward its Sicilians. Nineteen Italian men rounded up. The court trial. The lack of hard evidence. The dismissal of charges. The mob gathering to bring justice itself. The breaking into the jail. The cries: We want the dagos! Italians riddled with bullets and strung up like so many sides of beef in the market.
Eight men escaped.
And now, here in this dank Carolina cell with its icy stone floor, the story finally made sense.
“It was Barthélemy,” Sal said to Nico, though his brother was curled in a fitful sleep. “He ordered Hennessy’s murder. He knew who would be blamed. And that would give to him control of the wharves.”
Barthélemy must have seen in Sal’s face that understanding was dawning even then. Barthélemy’s eyes had become slits.
“This garlic eater,” he’d told Leblanc evenly, “has taken enough of our time.”
And breathed enough air was never voiced, but crackled there in the room.
Leblanc’s hand resting on the hilt of a pistol punctuated his boss’s command. Bursting out of Barthélemy’s office, Sal dropped down the steps four at a time, bullets whizzing over his head.
As his feet hit the boards of the wharves, he dodged shadow to shadow. The bodyguard fired again, the bullet grazing one ear.
Sal lost him at last near the Café du Monde, where he hid until nightfall in a storeroom bursting with chicory and coffee and pulverized sugar.
After dusk, as the café brightened to gold and laughter hung in the air with clouds of suspended sugar, Sal slipped through the crowd back to what they called Little Palermo. He ran up staircases, ducked into alleyways, asking anyone he could find: A little boy caught in the riots—my brother, Nico, is lost. Have you seen him?
But doors were locked, people huddled inside hiding from the mobs that still roamed the streets like rabid dogs.
Finally an old woman, hunched like a shepherd’s crook, opened her tenement door just a crack—then more fully at Sal’s description.
“An old woman, she is the most fragile in any crowd, and the most brave. What can a mob do to me? End my life when I’m already so close? Make me afraid when I’ve already seen hunger and death? I hoped I could stop them, that mob.”
She shook her head. “It was John Parker who got the mob shouting, lifting their fists, dragging our men—innocent men—through the streets. I was knocked down. They stampeded, this mob.”
“Sì, yes, and the boy?”
“I saw a boy crying, calling out, mio fratello. Trampled. His leg badly hurt. Another man—one of us—picked up the child and ran. Toward the rail yards.”
The old woman pulled Sal’s face down toward her so close their foreheads touched. “Dio ti benedica. God bless you in your search.”
Covered in coal ash, Sal searched car to car for hours. He finally found his brother huddled behind crates of rum and Madeira with Cernoia, who would stow away the next day in search of stonecutting work. Much later, Sal would hear through another Sicilian in the quarries with him that Cernoia had gone to an estate in North Carolina that was hiring Italians for its limestone exterior. An estate with a vast house that Sal had not realized until then really existed beyond memory and dreams and an espresso-stained page.
Sal’s own Pellegrini had formed—the full picture: why a man of power and wealth had never given up on his search for the nobody Salvatore Catalfamo. Because Sal had pieced together just who was behind the killing of Chief Hennessy. Whether or not anyone would believe a penniless Sicilian was a question Barthélemy apparently had never been willing to leave to chance. More powerful men than the Napoleon of New Orleans, after all, had been toppled by less.