“Kerry, there’s something else urgent I need to say. Leblanc seems to have gotten a tip on where the Bergaminis were hiding.”
She spun back toward him. “No. Did they . . . ?”
“They were found, Kerry. They’ve been arrested.”
Chapter 46
Sal gripped the bars of his cell, one hand around his brother’s shoulders, which were trembling. Nico pressed closer, as if the strength he felt in his brother could be passed through damp skin and dripping clothes. Sal reached for the thin blanket flopped on the cot. Wrapped it snugly around Nico.
“We must keep you warm.”
His mother’s words echoed in the silence of concrete and cold: I beg you, my son, protect our little Nico.
“I’m trying,” Sal said into the quiet. “I won’t give up trying.”
In a driving rain, Leblanc had arrived at the dairy barn with Wolfe. Through the cracks in the planks, Sal had seen Leblanc turn up the collar of his black coat.
“Best come on out,” Wolfe had called. “Can’t say I’d relish hurting a kid.”
Leblanc had made a show of aiming his revolver up toward the dairy barn’s loft. “Nothing but a dago. Not much of a loss.”
The steady thrum of his fear for Nico that always lived in his chest had swelled to a roar.
Now, at the jail, Sal was no longer seeing Wolfe a few feet away but a much older man. Steely eyes. Hunched behind a mahogany desk, as if its bulk reflected his personal strength.
“How do I know,” Maurice Barthélemy had demanded of him that day four years ago, “that you’re not Hennessy’s murderer? How do I know it wasn’t you our valiant chief saw in that alley where he was shot? How do I know you weren’t the dago he mentioned with his final breath?”
Sal could have told him it had, in fact, been his own face—and Frank Cernoia’s—that Hennessy saw there in the alley. But Sal had skipped to what mattered most.
“My brother, he is lost. Last night. The riot.”
The man lit a cigar. “You dagos can’t even trust each other.”
All these years later, Sal could still feel the seething that made his whole body throb. “My brother is very young.”
And afraid.
The man chewed on the end of his cigar. “Comme c’est triste, as we say in my family. How very sad.” The man’s tone dripped in sarcasm.
From behind Sal, the office door slammed then, the heavy tread of one of the man’s thugs approaching.
“Mr. Barthélemy, I was told this guy here needed removing.”
“Indeed, Leblanc. This guinea here appears to be under the impression that I, of all people, might somehow be responsible for the regrettable unrest last night in our fair city.” He swigged from his Scotch. “Can you imagine?” Barthélemy laughed hoarsely, as if the Scotch or his own words had shriveled his throat.
Sal had said no such thing. And until that moment had not even thought it. He’d only come here to a man who owned much of the wharves because he’d hoped for his help finding Nico.
And now, suddenly, here in this jail cell, blocks of thought moved in Sal’s mind, arranging themselves into a picture like the sections of the painting being pieced together at Biltmore on the library ceiling. Only instead of a bare arm extending to share the lamp of knowledge, here before Sal was the image of this man’s arm in its glossy white shirtsleeve, its cufflinks of pearl, as he motioned to his thug Leblanc.
“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.