Rainy lies. “Don Vito it is, then, because I don’t speak any Italian. I have no head for languages.”
She’s hoping her father has not bragged too often about his multilingual daughter. But almost certainly he would not have brought her name into his work, and in any case he works only indirectly for Camporeale.
“And what do they call you, aside from Sergeant, I mean?”
“Rainy will do fine,” she says, forcing a smile. Time to be friendly: she is surrounded by gunsels.
“Rainy. I like that. Must be a story there, huh?”
“No doubt, but my parents have not shared the details.”
He laughs knowingly. “Come, sit, what are you drinking?”
“I’ll have a club soda,” she says.
“Ah, a killjoy,” Don Vito says in mock irritation. “Get her a soda. Put a straw in it. Plenty of ice. Throw in a cherry, it’ll be like a, what do they call ’em? A Shirley Temple. She’s just a kid, after all. What are you, eighteen, nineteen?”
Rainy sits in a hastily supplied wooden chair, and Don Vito settles in behind his desk. He leans forward, forearms on his desk blotter. “So. What can a humble immigrant do for the United States Army?”
“Well, sir . . . Don Vito . . . I’m only a lowly sergeant, and this is a conversation you should have with someone who has some rank.”
He winks, a move which, owing to his chubby cheeks, closes both eyes for a second. When his eyes open again the cheerfulness is gone, replaced by shrewd appraisal. A second earlier and Rainy might have mistaken him for a door-to-door salesman. But a much different animal is looking at her now from dark, porcine eyes.
“I’m allergic to people with rank. Regular beat cop? That’s no problem, I buy ’em free drinks and let ’em play some pinball. Cops with rank? You never know if they’ll be reasonable or not. Same thing in the army, I’m guessing.”
He lets the silence stretch and at last Rainy speaks. “I have no opinion on my superior officers.”
Don Vito and Louie, now leaning against the door, both erupt in loud laughter. The gray man does not laugh.
“That was funny, Tony, you should laugh,” Don Vito says to the gray man, who still does not laugh. Then he says something in Italian—although in a dialect that to Rainy’s ear is subtly different from the standard Roman Italian she’s learned.
Still, she can translate it. Don Vito has said, “The Jew bitch thinks she’s smart.”
This, finally, earns a dusty wheeze that might be a laugh from gray Tony.
“Listen, Rainy, right? Rainy. Yeah. Okay, Rainy, for obvious reasons I’d rather talk to people I know. People I trust. And I trust you because I know you love your father and would never want to do anything that could hurt him.”
The threat is clear, and Rainy nods in acknowledgment. It occurs to her that playing word games with NCOs and officers who are, after all, generally reasonable and constrained by the uniform code of military justice, is very different from sparring with a man who earned his nickname by castrating the men he kills. The threat is not empty, and this is not a friendly chat.
“Here’s the thing,” Don Vito says. “I got a son, little older than you, a good boy but headstrong. You know? Impulsive. He’s smart, but he’s young.” He shrugs.
Rainy sips at her drink and takes a moment to realize that what Don Vito means by “headstrong” and “impulsive” is probably violent, predatory—the gangster son of a gangster father.
Don Vito, speaking that same odd Italian to Tony, says, “Ten bucks says Cisco’s in her pants inside of twenty-four hours.” Then to Rainy he says, “I’m translating for Tony, his English isn’t so good. He’s my counselor. Like my lawyer, but Napolitano.”
Napolitano? As in Naples? That’s mainland Italy, not Sicily. Rainy nods, blank, giving nothing away.
“So my boy, Cisco, Francisco, but hey, he’s born American, right, so Cisco. Anyway, Cisco has a little problem with some people up in Harlem. They want an eye for an eye, but we ain’t giving ’em Cisco, so that could be war—our own kinda war—and that’s bad for everyone. So it would be convenient if Cisco could spend some time in the Old Country, with my uncle. My uncle is a very wise man; he’ll get Cisco straightened out.”
“You want the army to get your son to Italy?”
“You’re very quick, you know that?”
“The army would want something in exchange.”
Don Vito made a comical face that translated meant, Of course they do. How could they not?
“I’ll need to talk to my superiors. I don’t have a list of their requests.”
He waves that off. “I know what they want. There’s a city called Salerno in Italy. It’s at the north end of a beautiful long beach, beautiful, you should see it. Just the kind of beach an army might want to land on.”
Rainy freezes and is too slow to stop the reaction from showing. Don Vito grins like a barracuda.
“I hear things,” he says. “Sicily first. Then Salerno. You want to know the dates?”
“No,” she says quickly. “The less I know, the less I can reveal.” She feels safest speaking stiffly, formally.
Vito the Sack nods with sincere approval. Of course he would favor closed mouths. “Here’s the deal. I’ll give you chapter and verse on Fascist and Kraut positions around Salerno. My family runs most of Salerno, not all, but enough that nothing moves there we don’t know about.”
“I don’t have the authority to make a commitment,” Rainy says.
“Fair enough. You go talk to your colonel or captain or whatever. You know where I am. Just one thing: you.” He points a thick finger at her. From Rainy’s angle it seems to come at her from just beneath dark and dangerous eyes. “You come back. Just you. And you personally, and your father, will guarantee my boy’s safety until he gets to my uncle’s house.”
“I’ll do my—”
“Uh-uh!” He interrupts sharply, wagging a finger for emphasis. “I don’t care about your best. Simple yes or no: is my boy with my uncle, that’s it. You got that? You get him there. Clear?”
“Signore Camporeale,” Rainy says, pronouncing his full name in a very credible Italian accent, “I follow orders. If my orders say to get your son to Italy, then I will get your son to Italy. But I don’t work for you, I work for the army.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes, sir, it is. And your son will not be getting into my pants, not in twenty-four hours or twenty-four days or twenty-four years.”
It takes a few beats before Don Vito realizes what’s happened.
“Lei parla Italiano? ”
“Si, Don Vito, un poco.”
“You deceived me.”
“I gained an advantage.”
“And now you give up that advantage?”
Rainy shakes her head. “No, Don Vito, because now you’re going to have me checked out, and you’ll soon find out that I’m often used as a translator.”
“I’ve always said Hebes were the smartest race . . . next to partenopeos. That’s people from Naples, see.”
Rainy stands up and discovers that her knees have gone a bit wobbly and her breathing is ragged. Yes, there is something about these people that is similar to what she’d felt coming from the SS colonel. It was like trying to hold a calm discussion with a hungry tiger.