“So why can’t you plant a truck on the street?” Michael asked. “We won’t need an order for that.”
“Mike, I’ll tell you,” Regan said, “this ain’t Greenwich, Connecticut down there, a bunch of rich assholes can’t tell spinach from crabgrass. This is Little Italy. We put a truck across the street from that blue door, we paint it like a bakery truck or a telephone company truck or a Con Ed truck or whatever we want to call it, the whole neighborhood’s gonna know in ten seconds flat there’s cops in that truck taking pictures of what’s going on across the street.”
“Mmmm,” Michael said.
“Now so far, we got a good thing going here. We got the whole place bugged, and we’ve got a camera on the front door of the tailor shop gives us movies of every cheap hood going in and out of the place. The camera picks them up going in, the bugs upstairs pick up whatever they’re saying, it’s a sweet setup. We also got a wiretap in place, we know everybody he calls, and we can dope out most of the people who call him. We’re gathering lots of information, Mike. What I’m saying is we put in a truck, the truck’ gets made, we might blow the whole surveillance. Is what I’m saying.”
“Yeah,” Michael said, and sighed heavily.
It was peculiar.
In America, if you stopped any native-born son or daughter whose ancestors had long ago immigrated from Ireland or Italy or Puerto Rico or Serbia, and you asked them what nationality they were, they did not say they were American. They said they were Irish, Italian, Puerto Rican, Serbian, Hungarian, Chinese, Japanese, Albanian, whatever the hell, but they never said they were American. Jews called themselves Jewish wherever their ancestors had come from. The only people who called themselves Americans were WASPs. You never heard a WASP say he was anything but American. Oh, yes, he might make reference every now and then to his illustrious mixed British-Scottish heritage, but he would never tell you he was British or Scottish because he simply wasn’t; he was American, by God.
Andrew and almost everyone else he knew had been born in America. He’d never met his grandparents’ parents who’d come over from Christ knew where in Italy, and the occasional ancient relatives who still spoke broken English were promptly dismissed as “greaseballs” by his mother, who insisted with every other breath — but why did she have to? — that she was “American.” He was American, too, even though if anyone asked him what he was, he answered automatically, “I’m Italian.” But this was merely a handy means of reference, this meant only that somewhere way back in a distant past of chariots and togas and arenas and laurel leaves, some relatives he’d never known had sailed for America to become citizens here. Even if he said he was Italian, he knew he was really American, and everyone else knew it, too. Anyway, that’s what they taught him in elementary school and in junior high; he was American, the same way Grandma and Grandpa and his father and his Uncle Rudy and his Aunt Concetta and his cousin Ida were American.
Sure.
It wasn’t until he got to Kent up there in woodsy waspy wealthy Connecticut that he met a different sort of American for the first time. Until then, he hadn’t known so many blue-eyed blonds even existed. Kids with names that didn’t end in vowels. Kids with last names like Armstrong and Harper and Wellington. Kids with first names like Martin and Bruce and Christopher and Howard. Well, so what? His own blond hair had turned a little muddy, true, but his eyes were still blue, weren’t they? And his first name wasn’t Angelo or Luigi, it was Andrew, wasn’t it? Which should have made him as American as all the other blue-eyed kids with names like Roger, Keith, Alexander, or Reid. But it seemed there was a catch. It seemed that his family name was Faviola — oh yeah, right, the Italian kid playing quarterback.
Somehow — and he didn’t know quite how — but somehow the American dream they’d taught him in elementary and junior high had been denied his grandparents and his parents, which was why he guessed his mother insisted so vociferously and so frequently that she was American. And now that same dream was being denied him as well. Somehow, in this place where he’d been born, in this land of the free and home of the brave, in this his country, in this his America, he had become something less than American. Somehow he had become just what he’d said he was all along — but, hey, folks, I was just explaining my roots, you know? — somehow he had become, and would always remain, merely Italian. And whereas he didn’t know who the real Americans were, he knew for damn sure he wasn’t one of them. Moreover, he knew they would never allow him to become one of them. So he said fuck it and went gambling in Las Vegas where Italians like himself were running the casinos.
Now, this was the peculiar part.
Here in Milan...
What they called Milano...
Sitting at a little outdoor bar...
What they called una barra...
Talking to a man his mother instantly would have labeled a greaseball, he felt American for the first time in his life. Here he was not an Italian. Here he was an American. The man he was talking to was Italian. He thought it odd that he’d had to come all the way here to find out he was American. He wondered if the moment he got back home again he would begin feeling not quite American.
The man was smoking what his mother called a “guinea stinker.” His name was Giustino Manfredi. He did not look as important as he really was. Wearing rumpled black trousers that seemed a trifle long for him, and a white dress shirt open at the throat and rolled up at the sleeves, and a little black vest, he reminded Andrew of Louis the tailor, except that he didn’t have white hair. Manfredi’s hair was black and straight, and parted in the middle. He kept puffing on the little thin cigar, sending up clouds of smoke that drifted out over the square.
This was ten o’clock in the morning on a beautiful sunny day during the last week of April. The little bar was virtually empty at this hour of the morning, and besides, Manfredi had chosen a table at the extreme far end of the outdoor space, under the canopy close to the bank next door, which he suggested with a laugh he would not mind robbing one day. Manfredi lived in Palermo, but he had chosen Milan as the city for their meeting, explaining in his broken English that for the moment it was extremely difficult for businessmen to conduct any sort of business in Sicily. It was not much better in Milan, for that matter, but here you could at least sit and talk about financial matters without the carabinieri rushing in with machine guns.
Both men were drinking espresso served to them by a young man who seemed more intent on impressing a buxom German girl sitting under the other end of the canopy than he was in serving a man who could order him dropped into the fucking Adriatic tomorrow morning with an anvil around his neck. Manfredi seemed not to mind. He knew he wasn’t well known in Milan, which was why he’d chosen the location to begin with. He alternately puffed on the cheap cigar or waved it grandly in the air when he spoke, a man supremely confident of himself, secure in the knowledge that what they were discussing would net him millions and millions of dollars, which in turn would allow him to continue dressing like a ragpicker and smoking cheap little cigars.