“Relax,” Ferdy told her, and then to make sure she relaxed, he sat down on the couch and pulled her down in his lap.
“Come on,” she said, “everybody’s here.”
“They only the boys,” Ferdy said, and he starts mushing her up.
You can hear a pin drop in the street down there. Everybody on the rooftops are quiet, too.
“What do you think...” Beef starts, and I give him a shot in the arm to shut him up.
From inside the building across the way, and through Harry’s open window, I can hear one of the cops talking. At the same time, while they’re pulling Harry over to the door of the apartment, Donlevy’s climbing up that fire escape. He’s up to the fourth floor now, and going quiet like a cat.
“How about it, Manzetti?” the cop in the hallway yells, and we can hear it plain as day through Harry’s open window.
“Come and get me!” Harry yells back.
“Come on out. Throw your gun in the hallway.”
“Screw you, cop!”
“How many guns you got, Manzetti?”
“Come in and count them!”
“Two?”
“Fifty-two,” Harry yells back, and that one really busts me up.
I stop laughing long enough to see Donlevy reaching the fifth floor, and making the turn in the ladder, going up to the sixth.
“He’s gonna plug Harry in the back,” I whisper.
In the hallway, the bull yells, “This is only the beginning, Manzetti. We haven’t started playing yet.”
“Your friend in the street don’t think so,” Harry answered. “Ask him if we started or not. Ask him how that slug felt.”
Donlevy is almost on the seventh floor now. He steps onto the fire escape as if he’s walking on eggs, and I can see the Detective’s Special in his fist. I hate that punk with every bone in my body. I almost spit out the window at him, and then he’s flattening himself against the side of the building and moving up to Harry’s window, a step at a time, while the bull in the hallway is talking, talking, and Harry is answering him. Donlevy gets down on his knees, and he’s got that gun in his right hand, and he’s ready to step up to the window and start blasting.
That’s when I started yelling.
4
“The window, Harry! The window!”
Donlevy looks up for a second, and I can see the surprised look on his face, but then he begins to back off, but he’s too late. The slugs come ripping out of the window, five in a row, as if Harry’s got a machine gun in his mitts. Donlevy grabs for his face, and then the gun flies out of his hand, and then he clutches at his stomach, and then he spins around and he’s painted with red. He stumbles forward to the fire escape, and then he crumbles over the railing and it looks as if he’s going to hang there for a second. The crowds on the rooftops are cheering their heads off by now, and then Donlevy goes all the way over, and Harry is still blasting through that window, pumping slugs into Donlevy’s body, and then Donlevy is on his way down, and the cheers get cut off like magic, and there’s just this godawful hush as he begins his drop, and then a lady in the street starts to scream, and everybody’s screaming all at once.
“He got him!” I said, and my eyes are bright in my head because I’m happier than hell. “He got Donlevy!”
“Two down,” Beef said.
“They’ll get him,” Aiello said, and he’s got a worried look in his eyes now.
“You sound like you want that,” I tell him.
“Who me?”
“No, the man in the moon. Who you think, who?”
“I don’t want them to get Harry.”
“Then stop praying.”
“I ain’t praying, Danny.”
“There ain’t a bull alive can take Harry,” I inform him.
“You can say that again,” Ferdy says from the couch.
Tessie ain’t saying nothing any more. She figures she might as well play ball or Ferdy will get nasty, and she knows Ferdy’s got a switch knife in his pocket.
A phone starts ringing somewhere across the alleyway. It’s the only sound you can hear on the block, just that phone ringing, and then Harry’s head pops up at the window for just a second, and he waves up, not looking at us, not looking at anybody, just looking up sort of, and he yells, “Thanks,” and then his head disappears.
“You saved his life, Danny,” Ferdy said.
“And he appreciates it, dad,” I answered.
“Sure, but what’re they gonna throw at him next?” Aiello says, and from the tone of his voice I figure like he wants them to throw a Sherman tank at him.
“Look, meatball,” I tell him, “just keep your mouth shut. You talk too much, anyway.”
“Well, what the hell. Harry ain’t nothing to me,” Aiello said.
“Hey,” Ferdy said, “you think the bulls are gonna come up here and get us?”
“What the hell for? They don’t know who yelled. It could have been anybody on the roof.”
“Yeah,” Ferdy said, and he kisses Tessie and Tessie gets up and straightens her skirt, and I got to admit Ferdy knows how to pick them, but she still don’t compare to Marie. She goes in the other room, and Ferdy winks and follows her, and I figure we lost a good man for the proceedings. Well, what the hell. There’s just me and Beef and Aiello in the room now, and we’re watching through the window, and it suddenly dawns on me what Aiello said.
“What do you mean, Harry ain’t nothing to you?”
“He ain’t,” Aiello said.
“A,” I told him, “you’re looking for a cracked head.”
“I ain’t looking for nothing. What the hell, he’s a killer. He’s wanted everywhere.”
“So what?”
“So that don’t make him my brother, that’s all. I never killed nobody.”
“He’s from the neighborhood,” I said, and I tried to put a warning in my voice, but Aiello didn’t catch it.
“So it’s not my fault the neighborhood stinks.”
“Stinks!” I walked away from the window and over to Aiello. “Who said it stinks?”
“Well, it ain’t Fifth Avenue.”
“That don’t mean it stinks.”
“Well, a guy like Harry...”
“What about Harry?”
“He... well... he don’t help us none.”
“Help us with who? What’re you talkin’ about?”
“Help us with nobody! He stinks just the way the neighborhood...”
I was ready to bust him one, when the shooting began again outside.
5
I rushed over to the window. The shooting was all coming from the streets, with Harry not returning the fire. It seemed like every cop in the world was firing up at that window. The people on the roofs were all ducking because they didn’t want to pick up no stray lead. I poked my head out because we were on the other side of the alleyway.
“You see him?” Beef asked.
“No. He’s playing it cool.”
“A man shouldn’t walk around free after he kills people,” Aiello said.
“Shut your mouth, A,” I told him.
“Well, it’s the truth!”
“Shut up, you dumb crumb. What the hell do you know about it?”
“I know it ain’t right. Who’ll he kill next? Suppose he kills your own mother?”
“What’s he want to kill my old lady for? You’re talking like a man with a paper...”
“I’m only saying. A guy like Harry, he stinks up the whole works.”
“I’ll talk to you later, jerk,” I said. “I want to watch this.”
The cops were throwing tear gas now. Two of the shells hit the brick wall of the building, and bounced off, and went flying down to the street again. They fired two more, and one of them hung on the sill as if it was going in, and then dropped. The fourth one went in the window, and out it came again, and I whispered, “That’s the boy, Harry,” and then another one came up and sailed right into the window, and I guess Harry couldn’t get to it that time because the cops in the hallway started a barrage. There were firetrucks down there now, and hoses were wrapped all over the street, and I wondered if they were going to try burning Harry out. The gas was coming out his window and sailing up the alleyway, and I got a whiff of the apple blossoms myself, that’s what it smells like, and it smelled good, but I knew Harry was inside that apartment and hardly able to see. He come over to the window and tried to suck in some air, but the boys in the street kept up the barrage, trying to get him, and I felt sorrier’n hell for the poor guy.