By Ed Staskus
Little Italy was a fifteen minute drive from the Central Station. Frank Gwozdz drove slightly under the speed limit and didn’t try to time the lights. It took them twenty minutes. He parked at the intersection of Euclid Ave. and Ford Dr. on the border of the Negro ghetto and Case Western Reserve University. The run-down near east side was its own world. The school was its own world. Little Italy was up Mayfield Rd. It was its own world, too.
“We’ll leave the car here,” Frank said. “We can walk the rest of the way.”
“No respect for the law where we’re going?” Tyrone Walker asked.
“Let’s just say it’s better to leave the car where the school kids believe in cross walks,” Frank said.
They walked to Corbo’s Dolceria on Mayfield Rd. where it stood on the corner of Murray Hill Rd. After sitting down at one of a handful of small tables at the front window, Frank ordered a caffe normale and Tyrone ordered a coffee with cream and sugar.
“Do you want to try a cappuccino instead?” Frank asked.
“Whatever that is, no,” Tyrone said.
Frank ordered a cassata for himself and another one for Tyrone.
“Do you want it the Sicilian way or the American way?”
“What’s the difference?”
“The Sicilian way is with cannoli filling and maraschino cherries. The American way is with fresh strawberries and custard.”
“I’ll take mine the American way.”
“Suit yourself,” Frank said, ordering the Sicilian way for himself. Antoinette Corbo, who owned the bakery with her husband Joe, brought them their coffees and cassata cakes. She gave Tyrone a sidelong glance.
“Did you know the macaroni machine was invented in this neighborhood 70-some years ago?” Frank asked Tyrone.
“No, I didn’t know that. In fact, I don’t know anything about this neighborhood.”
“It’s kind of like an Italian hill town, like in the Middle Ages” Frank said. “Cleveland is down there and Cleveland Hts. is up there at the top of Mayfield Rd. Little Italy has been here in the middle of the hill nearly a hundred years. Most of the first immigrants, who were from around Naples, worked at nearby marble works. They were stone masons. Their women went into the garment trades, mostly lacework and embroidery.”
“Why are we here?” Tyrone asked.
“We’re here for you to see the neighborhood,” Frank said.
“Is this the hot bed of dynamite?”
“This is one side of the bed. The other side of the bed is the Celtic Club down in Collinwood.”
“I’ve been boning up on the files,” Tyrone said. “It seems like a bitter thing they’re up to, like a blood feud.”
“Not here, not now,” Frank said. “After we finish our drinks we can take in the sights and then walk up to the cemetery. We can talk there. The walls have ears, especially around here. Where the dead are, they don’t care.”
“What cemetery?”
“Lakeview Cemetery. You can’t see it from here, but we’re sitting right next to it. That why all the Italian stone masons came here in the first place.”
After finishing their cups of coffee Frank and Tyrone walked two blocks down the hill to the Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church. It was a Baroque-style building. The house of worship stood four-square on the incline of the street.
“The Guido’s weren’t here but a few years before they started building this church,” Frank said.
“Don’t call them Guido’s,” Tyrone said.
“I agreed to not call you a Negro,” Frank said. “That’s all the agreeing I’m going to do for one day.”
“Whatever you say,” Tyrone said under his breath.
“Where was I?”
“Christian charity,” Tyrone said.
“I didn’t agree to listen to sarcasm, either.”
“All right,” Tyrone said under his breath again. Frank was his partner but partner or not, narrow-minded or not, he was still his superior officer. There was no point in making an enemy of him his first day on the job. That could wait for later.
He followed Frank up one of the flights of concrete stairs to the double front doors of the church. There were two outsize arched windows above the doors. There were statues of saints at the top of the façade. A domed bell and clock tower anchored the eastern corner of the church. There was a parochial school in the back that was administered by nuns of Maestre Pie Filippini. Boys and girls were forbidden giving them any lip. The nuns were not above giving them a hard crack. Their parents did worse than that whenever they heard complaining and explaining from their children about their misbehavior in school.
“Since all the Italians back in the day here were stone masons, like you said, how come this church is built of brick?” Tyrone asked.
“The foundation is stone,” Frank said.
“I guess that’s good enough,” Tyrone said.
“Are you a church goer?” Frank asked as they stepped inside.
“Yes, I am, Baptist, not Roman. How about you?”
“Not anymore of any kind.”
They went inside. The church was empty. It was quiet as a moonbeam. The sanctuary was brightly colored, but the nave was musty. It felt like a tomb. The police detectives looked around. When Frank spoke, he spoke low and slow.
“This is where the Italians get baptized, get married, and get buried,” he said. “We are always here for the funerals, to make sure whoever is in the casket is the man we won’t miss in this life, making sure he’s really dead, and check out what other hoodlums are in the crowd.”
“Do you take pictures of them?”
“No, we show some respect when we’re here. Besides, we know who’s who.”
“It sounds like routine enough work.”
“It’s not the kind of work you’re going to be doing anytime soon, not with your face.”
“My badge is the same color as everybody else’s,” Tyrone said.
“The men we’re talking about don’t have any respect for badges, no matter what color they are. They have even less respect for black men carrying badges.”
Returning to Mayfield Rd. they went back across the street again. Frank slipped back into Corbo’s and came out with a cold bottle of San Pellegrino. He looked down at the church. “They have a weekend here called the Feast of the Assumption every summer. It’s a kind of fundraiser. They hoist the Virgin Mary up on a platform, march her around, and everybody pins dollar bills on her. There are so many people in the crowd nobody can move.”
They went up the hill. They stopped when they got to the New Mayfield Repertory Cinema. “Opening Soon – Classic and Foreign Films” an a-frame sign on the sidewalk announced. “It’s some bookworm who lost his job teaching English out in the suburbs,” Frank said pointing at the sign. “He got a year’s pay in the downsize and is re-opening this place. He thinks between the arty college crowd down on Euclid Ave. and the grab bag hippies up on Coventry Rd. he can turn a hobby into a business.”
It was dawning on Tyrone that Frank was less a bigot and more pig-headed than not. He wasn’t a babe in the woods by any means, but for a big city policeman he was somehow more small town than big city. He was like white men in Alabama who couldn’t help themselves, although Frank didn’t seem to have intolerant opinions so much as he resorted to blinkered shorthand. White men in Alabama had many intolerant opinions, most of them gotten without having to get the facts.
A glass encased poster for the opening movie said “La Strada.” It was an Italian movie with Anthony Quin and Richard Basehart in it. Anthony Quinn looked musclebound. Richard Basehart was wearing angel wings and walking a tightrope. The love interest was somebody by the name of Giulietta Masina. She wore a bowler hat and had a clown’s dot on the tip of her nose. She didn’t look like any leading lady Tyrone had ever seen. The director was somebody by the name of Federico Fellini. Tyrone had never heard of him. He had never seen any movies like “La Strada” down south.
“The funny thing about it is, he had to first talk to Blackie about getting the theater,” Frank said.
“Who’s that?” Tyrone asked.
“That’s Jim Licavoli, one of the Mob bosses here, probably going to be the next top guy. They had lunch together and he finally gave the bookworm his blessing to lease the Mayfield, even though Blackie doesn’t have any ownership in it. His word is more law here than ours. It used to be a vaudeville theater that closed six or seven years ago. The way Blackie sees it, strippers are OK but foreign movies might be immoral.”
“Why do you call him Blackie? His name came up in a file, but it said he’s called Jack White.”
“He’s almost as dark as you, which is why we call him Blackie. He calls himself Jack White, God knows why. We never call him by that name.”
“How do you know they had lunch together?”
“We were nearby and heard the whole thing, although it was more a waste of time than anything else. The Jew had curly hair and was sincere as Shirley Temple. He wouldn’t stop talking about how much he loved movies. We thought he was a faggot. I think Blackie gave him his blessing just to get rid of him.”
“You go to the movies?” Tyrone asked.
“Not since I was in the academy,” Frank said. “’The Music Man’ might have been the last movie I saw.”
“What do you do to relax?”
“Fight with my wife,” Frank said.
“She can’t be all that bad.”
“She comes the closest.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Yeah, it’s too bad.”
They continued walking up Mayfield Rd. When they got to E. 126 St. they turned left. At a dead-end past half a dozen houses they walked through a line of trees into the cemetery. Frank led the way, zig zagging his way to the James Garfield Monument.
“It’s a tragedy what happened to him,” Frank said.
“It’s a tragedy any time somebody gets shot, president or no president,” Tyrone said.
“No, I mean it’s too bad about how he died. He had the best doctors in the country, but they didn’t believe in disinfecting their hands and instruments back then. They said only Europeans did that. So, he didn’t die of the gunshot wound. He died of infection. It took him almost three months to die. He had only been president four months.”
They stopped to look at John D. Rockefeller’s grave, but Tyrone didn’t want to stay. “He was the richest man in the world, selling his black gold, but he wouldn’t give the black man a chance. His kids did better later on, but not John D. He was a mean son-of-a-bitch.”
They crossed the cemetery’s Hillside Rd. before coming to the Haserot Angel.
“What is that?” Tyrone asked looking at it. It was a life-sized bronze angel sitting on a marble gravestone. She held an extinguished torch upside down. Her wings were outstretched. She seemed to be crying black tears.
“They call it ‘The Angel of Death Victorious’ because of the torch that is out,” Frank said. “Some people call it the weeping angel because it looks like she’s crying. It was put up about fifty years ago by a local man who made his fortune in canned goods.” The name ‘Haserot’ was chiseled into the base of the gravestone. “The man who sculpted it is buried in this same boneyard. Lots of people say this place is haunted, especially this spot right here.”
They heard a cough behind the statue of the angel. There was a bad smell in the air. Frank put a finger to his lips and signaled Tyrone to step back. Tyrone slipped his service weapon into his hand with the barrel pointing to the ground. Frank stepped to the side of the monument. The angel stayed where it was, looking deadpan.
“All right, come out of there, with your hands where we can see them.”
What staggered out from behind the marble angel was a small swarthy man who reeked of booze. There was a pint bottle of it peeking out from his back pocket. It was emptier than fuller. He slapped dirt off his hands and shrugged loose grass off his shoulders. One of his shoes was untied. His shirt was checked and his eyes were fly belly blue. His zipper sagged at the crotch of his pants. All of him smelled worse the closer he got to them. He smelled like the Middle Ages.
“That’s close enough,” Frank said. “What are you doing here?”
“Visiting old friends,” the man said.
“Let me introduce you to Joey Bag of Donuts, one of the bomb makers for the Italians,” Frank said to Tyrone, pointing to the man. “Does Danny Greene know you’re here? He might show up with a pick and shovel.”
“It takes an earlier bird than that dumb-ass paddy to get the better of a worm like me,” Joey said, pursing his lips and purring.
Excerpted from the crime novel “Bomb City.”
Ed Staskus posts monthly on 147 Stanley Street http://www.147stanleystreet.com, Made in Cleveland http://www.clevelandohiodaybook.com, Atlantic Canada http://www.redroadpei.com, and Lithuanian Journal http://www.lithuanianjournal.com.
“Bomb City” by Ed Staskus
“A police procedural when the Rust Belt was a mean street.” Sam Winchell, Beyond Books
Cleveland, Ohio 1975. The John Scalish Crime Family and Danny Greene’s Irish Mob are at war. Car bombs are the weapon of choice. Two police detectives are assigned to find the bomb makers. It gets personal.
A Crying of Lot 49 Publication
147 Stanley Street 