Bennie stepped off the elevator into the crowd, but it was so thick nobody noticed her. They occupied all of the waiting-room chairs and stood talking and laughing among themselves. They were of all shapes and sizes-young, very old, men and women-and many of them carried tiny synthetic flags of a merry red, white, and green. They sipped coffee from Styrofoam cups and her JAVA DIVA mug while they ate biscotti and pignoli cookies from a huge bakery-style tray on her coffee table. Apparently, Rosato amp; Associates had been transformed into an Italian wedding. The only thing missing was the accordion.
“Uh, hello,” she said as excited faces began to turn toward her. The receptionist wasn’t around, but one muscular young man, wearing a T-shirt that read SOUTH PHILLY ROCKS, broke into a grin when he spotted Bennie.
“You gotta be Bennie Rosato!” he exclaimed. He extended a hand and pumped hers so hard she was glad she was wearing a sports bra. “I’m Art DiNobile. It’s so great to meet ya, and I can’t thank ya enough for helping us out.”
“You can’t?” Bennie asked. She had no idea what he was talking about, she was half naked, and strangers were using her coffee mugs. Other than that, she was completely in control.
“Yo, everybody, this is Bennie! Bennie Rosato’s here!” the young man shouted, turning to the crowd, which reacted instantly. The decibel level skyrocketed and the throng surged forward, pressing Bennie back against the elevator. Women tried to hug her, men offered their handshake, and someone passed her a cup of coffee and a plate of pignoli cookies. South Philly Rocks released her hand long enough to catch the cookies before they slid off the flimsy paper plate. “Have some, Bennie! They’re from my father’s bakery. Also I brought a nice rum cake and some sfogliatelle. It’s the least we can do.”
“It is?” Bennie asked, completely bewildered until Mary DiNunzio made her way though the crowd. Her hair was straying from its neat twist and her brown eyes were dancing the tarantella.
“Bennie!” DiNunzio was so excited she was almost short of breath. “Wait’ll you see. I got us a case, a wonderful case!”
“A wonderful case?” Bennie repeated, fully aware that three thousand pairs of tarantella eyes were focused on her. She couldn’t help feeling that her back was against the wall, or at least the elevator. “What kind of case?”
“The kind of a case you love! A once-in-a-lifetime case!” Mary shouted, and everybody behind her took up the cry like a Greek, er, Roman, chorus.
“Thank you!” they said, and “We appreciate your help” and “Ya gotta know the facts” and “We must bring it to light”-all manner of justice-sounding noises that made Bennie suspect she wasn’t going to earn a dime in fees.
“DiNunzio, maybe we should talk about this in the conference room?”
“Great! Great idea! The client’s in there.”
“These people aren’t the client?”
“No, this is the Circolo, from the neighborhood.”
“The Circolo.” Of course. Whatever-o. “DiNunzio, who’s the client?”
“Mr. Brandolini, but he’s dead. The client is really a lawyer, and he’s dying to meet you.”
“Huh?” Bennie was confused about who was dead and who was dying, but let it go. “Where’s Murphy and Carrier?”
“In the conference room, with everybody else. The Circolo called while you were out, and I told them all to come right over. Marshall’s still out at her gyno for a checkup.”
“I’ll see you inside in two minutes. I have to change out of my running clothes.”
Bennie hustled to her office, skipped her usual shower, and put clean clothes on her sweaty body and slid reddish toes into her pumps. She’d wanted to call and cancel her credit cards, but Sicily awaited her in the conference room. She sent their secretary an E-mail listing her credit cards and asking her to cancel them when she got back from the doctor. Then she hurried out of her office and down the hall, into the crowd that spilled into the reception area. She shook their hands and greeted them as she passed, and they parted for her with a reverence usually reserved for Frank Sinatra.
“Brava, Bennie Rosato! Bravissima!” someone shouted, startling Bennie as she crossed the threshold into the conference room, when the entire room burst into resounding applause. The place was packed wall to wall, crammed with cheering, hollering, applauding people, and Bennie laughed and took a spontaneous bow.
“Thank you, thank you,” she said, and pulled out the seat at the head of the long walnut table. Murphy and Carrier stood against a wall lined with happy Italians, which Bennie was beginning to understand was redundant. Mary sat beaming, catty-corner to her, next to a middle-aged man in a three-piece suit. He had thick dark hair and a brushy mustache, sharp brown eyes, and a pleasant smile. Bennie extended a hand. “I’m Bennie Rosato. Pleased to meet you, Mr…”
“Cavuto, Frank Cavuto,” he supplied, rising. “I’m a lawyer, representing the estate of Tony Brandolini.”
“Welcome.” Bennie nodded him into his seat, and the boisterous crowd deigned to settle down to business, with residual smiles-except for a tiny older woman who scowled inexplicably from the far end of the table. She looked immersed in a brown wool coat, despite the balmy day, and her salon pink-gray hair had been teased into a very feminine wren’s nest. Thick glasses magnified her round dark eyes, fixed so hard on Bennie that she had to look away. “Now, Mr. Cavuto, what brings you here?”
“I’m Frank, please, and I’ve known the DiNunzio family since the day Mary was baptized. In fact, I’m her godfather’s son.”
Bennie didn’t know that Italians really did have godfathers, and in truth didn’t know much about Italians at all, despite her surname. “So you came to us through Mary.”
Mary took over. “Frank came to see me when he probated the will of Tony Brandolini, who died last month, of cancer. Tony was a contractor, and his father, Amadeo Brandolini, was interned in 1942, as part of the internment during World War II. Mr. Brandolini was a fisherman, from the days when you could fish right off the port of Philadelphia.”
Bennie raised a palm. “Slow down, wait a minute. What do you mean by ‘interned’? Interned means confined during war. Imprisoned.”
“Yes, exactly. Well, you know that Japanese people living in this country were interned during World War II, even if they were citizens. Their property was taken, and their homes.”
“Yes.” Bennie remembered the historic Korematsu case, which held that it was constitutional to seize the property of American citizens who had the misfortune of being Japanese during wartime. The stirring dissent by Justice Brennan was renowned by fans of civil liberties. By the way, having pink hair wasn’t a civil liberty. “I remember the time. Not a nice chapter in our history.”
“Ours, either,” Frank added, and heads nodded around the table, except for that of the old lady with the magnified glare. She fingered a gold necklace with a tiny horn charm as she looked daggers at Bennie, like a Neapolitan Madame Defarge. She sat next to a heavyset, balding man who appeared to be her husband but, unlike her, was dressed normally and was kind-eyed behind bifocals.
Mary cleared her throat. “Well, more than ten thousand Italians, citizens and legal immigrants, were interned in this country. They were covered by the same act and declared enemy aliens, even if they’d lived here for twenty years or more. They were ordered to register and sent away to internment camps in Missouri, Texas, and other states.”
It was news to Bennie, even with her background in civil rights work, but it didn’t surprise her. The government assumed all sorts of powers in wartime and used them to their fullest extent, for good and sometimes not-so-good reasons.