He did not like the slum. In Italian, he said to his wife, “I did not come to America to live in yet another slum,” and then he set about trying to find work. He thought it might be a good idea to get himself another pushcart, but he didn’t speak English at all, and he didn’t know where to buy his produce, or how to go about getting a vendor’s license, or even that a vendor’s license was necessary. He got a job on the waterfront instead. He was always a small man, and lifting bales and crates was difficult for him. He developed a powerful chest and muscular arms, so that he looked like a bandy-legged little wrestler after two years of working the docks.
Well, America is the land of opportunity. That’s the God’s honest truth, you can take it or leave it. You don’t have to stay in a slum, and you don’t have to keep working on the docks. If you have the will, determination, and ambition of a man like Salvatore Palumbo, you can in twenty-five years own a little house in Riverhead—in an Italian neighborhood, yes, but not in a slum or a ghetto—and you can have your own fruit-and-vegetable store seven blocks away on Dover Plains Avenue, and people will call you Sal instead of Salvatore.
At 12:00 noon on May 1, Detectives Meyer and Carella were in another part of the city making a series of startling discoveries while Sal Palumbo stood on the sidewalk outside his store and polished his fruit. They discovered first of all that Anthony Forrest was a graduate of Ramsey University, a fact they had never known. And then, carried on the wave of this fresh discovery, they remembered that Mae Norden, the wife of the slain lawyer Randolph Norden, had told them her husband had studied at Ramsey Law. Like men who had found the elusive piece of a very tiring jigsaw puzzle when the piece was right there on the table all along, just under the ashtray, they exuberantly tied the first two deaths with the death of the prostitute Blanche Lettiger, who had also been a student at Ramsey, and foolishly and joyously believed the puzzle was almost finished when in actuality it had only just begun.
Sal Palumbo had no such feelings of soaring joy as he polished the fruit. He liked fruit, indeed he loved fruit, but he did not polish it because it gave him any particular pleasure. He was not the kind of person who could go wild over the color of an apple or a pear. He polished the fruit because when it was polished it looked better to his customers, and when it looked better to his customers, they bought it. One of his customers was walking toward the store now, an Irish lady named Mrs. O’Grady. He did not know the Irish lady’s first name. He knew that she lived someplace in Riverhead, but not in the immediate neighborhood. Palumbo’s stand was on Dover Plains Avenue, just below the elevated structure, near the corner of 200th Street. There was a station stop on that corner, and every Tuesday afternoon at about this time, Mrs. O’Grady would come down the steps leading from the station and stop first in the candy store on the corner, and then next in the butcher’s shop alongside it, and then she would walk to Palumbo’s store, which was two stores down from the butcher’s shop in the shadow of the station platform.
“Ah, signora,” Palumbo said, as she approached, and she promptly answered, “Don’t give me the Eye-talian malarkey, Sal.”
Mrs. O’Grady was perhaps fifty-two years old, with a trim, spare figure, and a devilish twinkle in her green eyes. She had been doing business with the merchants along Doyer Plains Avenue for five years now because she liked their prices and their goods better than those available in her own neighborhood. If you had asked either Mrs. O’Grady or Sal Palumbo about the casual flirtation that had been going on between them for the past five years, both would have said you were out of your mind. Palumbo was married, with two grown married sons and with three grandchildren. Mrs. O’Grady was married, with a married daughter who was pregnant. But Palumbo was a man who liked women in general, not only southern Italian types like his wife, Rose, with her dark hair and her darker eyes, but even trim little types with small compact breasts and tight small backsides and green eyes like Mrs. O’Grady. And Mrs. O’Grady was a passionate sort who liked nothing better than a good strong man in her arms, and this little fellow Sal Palumbo had good strong arms and a great massive chest with curling black hair showing at the open throat of his shirt. And so the two of them bandied small talk over the fruit, carrying on a flirtation that would never be openly recognized, that would never come to so much as a touch of the hand, but that nonetheless flared once a week every Tuesday over the pears and the apples and the plums and the peaches.
“Well, it don’t look so good to me today, Sal,” Mrs. O’Grady said. “Is this all you’ve got?”
“What’s the matter with you?” Palumbo demanded, his voice carrying only the faintest trace of an accent. “Those are beautiful fruit. What do you want? You want some nice pears today? I got some apricots, too, the first of the season.”
“And bitter as poison, I’ll bet.”
“From me? Bitter fruit from Sal Palumbo? Ah, bella signora, you know me better than that.”
“What are those melons?”
“What are they but melons? You see them with your eyes, no? You just named them. They’re honeydew melons.”
“Good?”
“Beautiful.”
“How do I know?”
“Mrs. O’Grady, for you I would slice one open, but only for you, and only because when I slice it open you’ll find a melon so sweet, and so ripe, and so green as your own eyes.”
“Never mind my own eyes,” Mrs. O’Grady said. “And you don’t have to slice it for me, I’ll take your word. No plums yet?”
“We can’t rush the summer,” Palumbo answered.
“Well, let me have two pounds of the apples. How much are the apricots?”
“Thirty-nine a pound.”
“That’s too high.”
“I’m losing money.”
“I’ll just bet you are,” she answered, smiling.
“These have to be shipped in, you know. Refrigerator cars. The grower makes money, the shipper makes money, the railroad makes money, but by the time the apricots get to me, what do I make?”
“Well, give me a couple of pounds, so you can lose some more money.”
“Two?”
“I said a couple, didn’t I?”
“Signora, in Italy, a couple is always two. In America, a couple can be three, four, a half a dozen. Ma che?” He spread his hands and shrugged his shoulders, and Mrs. O’Grady laughed.
“Two pounds,” she said.
“You need some lettuce? I got nice iceberg and nice Romaine, whichever your heart desires.”
“The iceberg,” she said. “You know who has really good fruit?”
“Sal Palumbo has really good fruit,” he answered.
“No, the fruit man in my own neighborhood. And his apricots are cheaper.”
Palumbo, who was reaching over the crates stacked in front of his stand, reaching onto the slanting stand itself to the rear, where his apricots were piled in neat rows, said, “How much are his apricots?”
“Thirty-five cents a pound.”
“So then go buy his apricots,” Palumbo said.
“I would,” Mrs. O’Grady replied, “but he was all out of them when I got there.”