Bronx Noir

In that moment I think we all realized we had just acquired the first deep secret of adulthood. We understood it was a test of what kind of men we would become.

“You know how this neighborhood is,” she said. “They’ll destroy Margaret Mary. That’s why she needs your loyalty and your unconditional love. And in a few weeks, when she returns, I want you to act like nothing happened.”

“You got it,” Lefty said. “What do we do now?”

She kept her eyes on B.O., as she handed Lefty Ernie K.’s gun belt. His revolver was back in the holster.

“Wipe this clean and reload the two bullets,” she said. “Get rid of the empty cartridges. Then deliver this horse to Hagan’s bar. Say you found him wandering in the park. I want this man humiliated.”

“We’ll do it for Margaret Mary,” B.O. said. He wiped his eyes with his shirt and put his glasses on. Then he took the gun from Lefty and reloaded. “I’ll toss the cartridges down the sewer,” he said. “Then I’ll tell my dad I found the horse in the park.”

Bridget smiled and put her finger to her lips in a gesture of silence.

“You okay, B.O.?” Lefty said.

“Fine,” he said.

“Take one last look,” Bridget said, and whirled around, a blur of red hair and freckles upon alabaster.

We helped B.O. fold Ernie K.’s uniform and tie it to Connie’s saddle. She’d even kept his underwear. Bridget dug in her purse for her clothes.

“We’ll take care of the humiliation part, Bridget,” Lefty said, but she’d already dressed and was running toward the subway.

The nuns were right: Pursuit of a worthy goal takes you mind off your problems. I felt oddly relieved, as Lefty and I walked to the phone booth near the White Castle. I grabbed the phone book and began looking up numbers. Lefty, using an accent that sounded like no ethic group I’d ever heard, called the police to report a crazy naked man threatening people near the lake in Van Cortlandt Park. We called the Fire Department, the Parks Department, the Yonkers PD, the FBI, and every newspaper we could think of. We had to go get more dimes.

In less than five minutes, a dozen emergency vehicles were searching the park. Their sirens were almost drowned out by the blare of car horns. traffic backed up at least three blocks on Broadway. They were all in a line behind Brendan O’Leary, who led Connie right square down the middle of Broadway. He actually looked even better than his happy old self. A man on a mission.

THE PRINCE OF ARTHUR AVENUE

BY PATRICK W. PICCIARELLI

Arthur Avenue

Frank Bernardo stood ramrod straight in front of the fulllength mirror in his bedroom for his daily self-inspection. It was a ritual before he left his apartment that he had not missed for as long as he could remember. The black silk suit draped perfectly on his six-foot frame; his alligator loafers shined to a deep gloss, his white-on-white shirt starched stiff as a pizza crust. He smoothed a red-and-black patterned sevenfold silk tie and pinched a perfect dimple under its Windsor knot. A silk pocket square picked up the red in his tie, and his diamond pinky ring shone like a thousand suns.

He ran his hands lightly over his full head of silver hair, careful not to muss what took him nearly ten minutes to style into place. He was fifty-eight, and any man thirty years younger would have killed to have his thick mane. His eyes still sparkled despite what they had seen during his lifetime of service to the Genovese crime family. His had been a life of discipline, honor, and loyalty; a devotion made all the more important since his wife had passed away from the ravages of cigarette smoking. They hadn’t had any children, not for lack of trying, and medical tests pinned the cause on a childhood infection of Marie’s. It mattered little, La Cosa Nostra was his family. It was all he had these days, and he liked that just fine.

Frank Bernardo was a traditionalist. Despite his wealth, he had remained in the Pelham Parkway apartment over whose threshold he had carried his wife upon returning from their honeymoon thirty-five years ago. He still shopped in the same grocery store, still traded stories about the old neighborhood with the same barber who had been cutting his hair since before it went gray. Lose tradition and you lose your humility, your sense of place. Tradition creates order, and order was what la famiglia was all about; order was what put the word “organized” in organized crime.

These days tradition was going to hell. The younger generation of hoodlums were little more than wind-up dolls. No moxy, no balls. Half the new breed would flip on the family if they got a traffic ticket. The last ten years had seen scores of made men running to the feds for deals rather than serve one day in jail. Pussies.