Page 55 of Shadow Ticket

Meantime on the Korzo who should show up one morning at Caffé Impresa but Dippy Chazz Foditto, wearing a Borsalino, a bespoke Neapolitan suit, and Lenthéric Men’s After Shave Lotion, waving around an unlit full-length Toscano.

Being deported, in style it seems, back to his ancestral Sicily, in fact on the way down there right now after a quick detour through Naples to see about another suit fitting with Bebè himself, “That’s Gennaro Rubinacci to you. ”

Chazz has become something of an international adventurer, having at the moment just signed on to a scheme hatched and run by U.S.

ruling-class elements who are betting that the island of Sicily will be a strategic factor in the next war, and that therefore a local anti-Fascist guerrilla force, trained, armed, and ready to roll, might someday prove helpful.

“They hate Mussolini, who’s been trying to bring the island under Fascist control—sorry, Duce, no sale—which has not been lost on my principals.”

“Which is who again?” Hicks inquires.

“Rich white guys I used to see all the time in that chop house next door to the Union League that Jake Guzik worked out of, Saint something…It was ol’ Greasy Thumb who introduced us, in fact.

The deal is I do them this one li’l international intrigue job, and they drop everything they got against me which if you add up the beefs just since I saw you last is already plenty.

Plus now I’m on a federal swindle sheet with a nice-size wagonload to spend. ”

“Better watch it, Dipster, this could put you only about a sawbuck short of respectable.”

“Stepped right into it, can’t remember how long ago anymore, and now I’m stuck.

There’s no catch and release with these trawlers, they eat what they pull in.

They call it duty to my country but it’s really penance for my sins including all that double-dating you and me did back in the olden days, remember, hey, that Lois and her crazy friend,” kissing his fingertips, “couple a tomatizz, huh? strictly San Marzano.” By now they have strolled as far as the ribarnica, or fish market, where they are gazed back at by the bright though regrettably dead eyes of a full assortment of recent dwellers in the Adriatic.

“Your lucky day, Dips, if we ever double-dated I don’t recall none of that and seein I’m the only witness you get a full pardon, OK? I’m not giving you the jitters, here am I?”

“Me? Cool like the giadrul. How about you?”

“Keep lookin like you’re just about to say somethin, then you change the subject.”

“There might be one small news item, somebody should of passed it on to you, but if I do it then you’ll blame me, so maybe I better not.”

“M’waukee, everything there’s all right?” Along the payline of Hicks’s uneasiness, reel by reel, full-color fruit images have begun to click into place.

Dippy C. shrugs, Hicks shrugs him right back. “I’m supposed to guess?”

“Everybody else would’ve by now.”

“C’mon, Chazz, for a pal?”

“That’s right, muscle it outa me, hired torpedoes, it’s all y’z ever know how to do, ain’t it.

Swell,” less a snort than an articulate release of Toscano smoke.

“You asked for it,” reaching under the cracked ice for a gold-headed sea bream and speaking into it like a microphone, talk about a fish in the face, “Bulletin just being handed to me, dateline Kenosha, hot off the society page, is that sometime later this summer local songstress April Randazzo and ‘Ndrangheta kingpin Don Peppino Infernacci are expecting a blessed event, and we don’t mean no audience with the Pope, all right?” After watching Hicks just sit there idiotized awhile, DC, nervously, “Your thoughts on this, Mr. McTaggart, if any.”

Hicks lights up a local Croatian cigarette, inhales and exhales a couple times. “Sure snaps a silencer onto the conversation, don’t it.”

“Didn’t expect you’d be so calm about it—me, hey, I’d be eaten alive by jealousy.”

“Thanks, Chazz, I knew you’d understand.”

“Yeah, I’d be on the next liner back to the U.S.A., stow away if I had to, so what if it’s that whole outfit down there in Li’l Cosenza, even if you could beat the morning line on that, both o’ yiz somehow making it out of Wisconsin alive, on the run forever…Even with no baby in the picture—”

“All right, all right. See if I’ve got this straight now…”

“Kidding aside, it’s no place you want to go tap-dancin into, even by accident, I can name you a dozen reckless youths who have met with grievous fates for so much as even once maybe twitching an eyeball at some goomara of Don Peppino’s as she went gliding by.”

“Gotcha. Reading my mind, Chazzy, and excuse me for wondering, but what’s it to you?”

“Just want to be sure you’re not mistaking this for the usual evening at the opera, some elderly basso trying to keep the leash on a soprano that’s in the mood to get out and scramble, see, instead of which you got April here, married to and pregnant by the exact type who normally she’d’ve only been out kidding around with… ”

“Tryin to tell me—”

“Got enough to worry about already without some comedian from her past shows up with romance on the brain…”

“Me?”

“You, and you’re only the picciotu, don’t expect much sympathy, old flames are a dime a dozen, West Madison of the labor market of love, sad, desperate, and cheap.”

“I’m supposed to just—”

“Wake-up time fa yiz, Hicksie, time to be up off of the linoleum and don’t look too forlorn, you’re out of a bad situation, nobody’s here to endanger a hair on your head, speakin of which yours could use some attention,” producing a pocket comb and advancing on Hicks.

“Don’t,” dodging away, “much go for folks bein all in my hair’s the thing, Dippy C., ’f that’s OK.”

Comb disappearing, empty hands spread in innocence, “Take the tip, is all, it’s over for you in M’waukee, Hicks, Chicago too, not many old pals you can count on anymore.

Not even ol’ Lino the Dump Truck, gone too respectable these days to be seen with mugs like you, sorry to say.

Believe me, I’m an expert, what’s happened is, is you’ve been deported, same as me. ”

“What now, this is somebody’s sending me to Sicily?”

“You should be so lucky. Just better not count on gettin back to the States anytime soon. Best thing for you’d be change your name and get into some other racket, like international intrigue.”

“Sounds like government work, anything like what you’re doin, fat chance.”

“Long as you don’t start believin none of the propaganda they all keep throwin at you, remember to trust your own judgment,” picking up a concertina, “…and like the great Luigi Pirandello always reminds us, ooh—”

“Co…sì è,

(Se vi pare),”

Yes and so it is, if

That’s-how, it-looks, to you…

no use say-ing,

“Whoa, oops, I’m sor-ray,”

Just ’cause you don’t see

What all them others do…

With the sky full

Of storms and thunder,

Thinkin they’re under

Some heaven of blue,

Ehi, don’t worry!

mah ol’ goombah-ray, co-wo-wo-

-sì è…se, vi, pa-re…

—

Sometime in the dawn hours of the first day of a post-American life, passing from a brief moment of hopefulness into the outer fringes of whatever it is that’s coming, Hicks has been dreaming he’s someplace back on the prairie, in an old lopsided telephone booth warped by the wind, snowed and hailed on, run into by cars and farm wagons, assaulted by hungry drifters looking for all those nickels in the box.

Onto which he drops in another, dials a number without thinking much about it till later, when he remembers it’s a TRIangle exchange number in Chicago, same as Al Capone’s mother has. After a few rings, “Who’s this, and it better be good.”

“It’s Hicks, who’s this?”

“Hicks, what the hell.”

“Ma?”

“Last time I checked. How about you?”

“Where are you?”

“Better not say much. They listen in.”

“Who?”

“The ones I work for.”

“Same ones?”

“Yep.”

“Ma, can’t you see what they are?”

“It’s not for everybody, Sunshine.”

“But if you decided to quit—”

“Keep meaning to look into that.”

“You always said it was wrong.”

“Maybe I didn’t know what I was talking about.

Maybe it’s too late. Just mind what you see and hear in the sky.

Ain’t likely to be wild geese on the wing.

If you’re lucky you’ll have some shelter ready to jump into, someplace you can believe for a while will be safer.

Please stay safe, my Carload o’ Kisses.”

“Your what?”

“I used to call you that when you were little and we kissed a lot. Carload of Kisses.”

“Don’t remember.”

“I do.”

“Long time ago,” trying to find it, maybe with just a glimpse of something blowing away into the night, something it’s already too late to chase in this windbeaten emptiness taking possession of his heart…