Elizabeth Street - Laurie Fabiano [80]
“After King Umberto was assassinated, I tracked down the anarchist in Paterson who pulled the trigger.”
“You are a hero, Lieutenant!” exclaimed Giovanna, sincerely impressed.
“Unfortunately,” said Petrosino puffing up, “the second part of the story does not go so well. You see, at the same time I was doing my undercover work to get this killer, I discovered a plot by the anarchists to kill the American president. I went to my old friend Vice President Roosevelt. He was the police commissioner when I started on the force, and I warned him, but they didn’t take the threat seriously.”
Giovanna stared blankly at the lieutenant, and he realized she didn’t know what he was talking about.
“The American president, McKinley, was assassinated in 1901, signora.”
“Oh, I was still in Italy, Lieutenant.”
Petrosino saw that Giovanna was embarrassed and went back to the issue at hand. “So, beyond ugly faces, there were none that looked like your two Blackhanders?”
“Not completely. If I take the eyes of one and put them on the cheeks of another…”
“Signora, see here on the card, it says, ‘remarks.’ This card says, ‘tattoos on both arms.’ Look for the word ‘mole’ in English. It’s written like this.” Petrosino wrote the letters in lead pencil. “You might not see the moles so well in the photograph, but it could be in the notes.”
“M-o-l-e. Va bene. Lieutenant, you said that when the crime is done, sometimes the swindlers leave town. So, if I find the names of these crooks and they’ve left, can you still get them in another city?”
“It’s complicated, signora. In America you can change your name every day with no penalty.”
“So it is hopeless.”
“No, signora, not at all. Difficult, yes. Hopeless, no. So,” sighed Petrosino, taking the stack of photographs from her and handing her another, “I’m afraid you must look at more ugly faces.”
Lucrezia read and translated into Italian as dramatically as the text was written. “‘The skull and crossbones flag of piracy is gone from the seas. But in our cities flourishes the Black Hand, a symbol every bit as significant of greed and cruelty—even more an emblem of cowardice and treachery. The scoundrels who lurk behind the terror of the Black Hand wax fat and daily grow more arrogant in their contempt for American law and order.’”
“What are you reading from?” Giovanna asked Lucrezia.
“It’s Everybody’s Magazine. I got it from my husband and thought you’d be interested. You haven’t told me much about your dealings with Petrosino.”
“There’s not much to tell. Read more.”
Lucrezia leafed through the article. “Here’s the part about the name that I was telling you about. ‘Back in the Inquisition days in Spain, there was La Mano Nera, a secret society that fought the government and the church. It passed, and the secret societies of southern Italy were its heirs. Twenty years ago, a false report was raised in Spain that La Mano Nera had been revived. The story lingered in the brain of a New York Herald reporter and one fine day he attempted to rejuvenate waning interest in a puzzling Italian murder case by speculating as to the coming to life of the Black Hand among immigrants in America. The other newspapers seized on the idea eagerly and kept it going.’”
“Petrosino said there is no organization, that it is a bunch of thugs.”
“Well, apparently this writer agrees with him. ‘The terror of the Black Hand now is tremendously increased by its mystery. The mystery will never be revealed, because there is nothing tangible to reveal. The police have not been battling with a complicated and secretly united murdering graft machine, but with individual produces of the opportunities for criminal education afforded by southern Italy for hundreds of years.’”
“Let me see that,” said Giovanna, taking the article from Lucrezia. A copy of a Black Hand letter was reproduced on the page and, because it was written in Italian, she read it herself.
“These people got a much longer letter than we did! Listen, ‘This is the