Elizabeth Street - Laurie Fabiano [81]
“Yes, detective,” smirked Lucrezia.
Giovanna ignored her. “You know, Lieutenant Petrosino told me two Russian Jews used the name Black Hand to scare money out of a real estate dealer.”
Lucrezia recognized Giovanna’s intellectual interest in all this and asked, “Giovanna, tell me, what do you hope will come of all this?”
“I don’t know, Lucrezia. I’m beginning to realize that they might not find the brutti lowlifes who did it. But it doesn’t matter. How can I sit back and do nothing?”
“I suppose I’ll continue to have no help in the next few months delivering babies?”
“If you need me, you get me.”
Lucrezia muttered, “I’ll take that as a no.”
Giovanna and Lucrezia squeezed into a courtroom bench. The chambers were packed with expectant onlookers and reporters. Lieutenant Petrosino had told Giovanna about the case of Signore Spinella, a tailor who confessed to his priest that he was receiving Black Hand letters. The priest, against Spinella’s wishes, went to the police. The detectives watched Spinella’s store and, soon enough, they saw a man enter who they were sure was a crook. When the man left, they questioned the frightened tailor, who finally admitted that indeed this man was blackmailing him.
Now the blackmailer was on trial, and Giovanna, after persuading Lucrezia to accompany her, came to see American justice at work.
The tailor was a slight man, and his nervousness on the witness stand was evident. The poor man had to be prodded again and again by the prosecutor to tell his story. Finally, the prosecutor asked, “Is the man who threatened you in this room?”
The tailor was silent and anxiously glanced around the courtroom.
The prosecutor posed the question again even more dramatically. “Is this the man who threatened you?” he shouted, pointing to the defendant.
But the tailor wasn’t looking at the defendant. Instead he saw a man leaning against the wall slowly draw his finger across his throat.
“No, I don’t see him here,” blurted the tailor.
Gasps filled the courtroom.
“Isn’t this the man who threatened you?” shouted the prosecutor, now thumping on the defendant’s shoulder.
“No, that’s not him,” mumbled the tailor.
The man leaning against the wall quickly left while the judge gaveled the room silent. In desperation, the frustrated prosecutor asked again and again, until the judge pronounced the case dismissed.
Giovanna was stunned. She looked at the tailor disdainfully, but when she saw him rejoined by his weeping wife and children, she sighed knowingly. She could see the disgust on Lucrezia’s face but couldn’t read it. At times like this, Giovanna suspected that Lucrezia’s contempt for the uneducated, poor immigrants surfaced. Or was she frustrated with a system that couldn’t protect them? Giovanna herself could not answer the question.
Petrosino’s cough rattled his chest and the office walls.
Giovanna wiped the perspiration from her own forehead with a handkerchief she had woven and embroidered with the initials G.C., because if she used either of her married names she felt like she was betraying someone. The heat in the room was oppressive.
“You must see a doctor, Lieutenant,” counseled Giovanna. “Sometimes summer brings the worst lung illnesses.”
“My wife agrees,” answered Petrosino, drinking water.
Following her experience in court, Giovanna lost some of her enthusiasm for finding the blackmailers, but she still met regularly with Petrosino, from whom she continued to learn more about this secret society that was in actuality neither secret nor a society. She now knew that the role of Sicily’s Mafia or the Camorra of Naples was limited to aiding and abetting the criminals in their travels