One afternoon, she found in his shirt breast pocket a crinkled deposit slip from the Morgan Bank of 23 Wall Street. Eager to return it to him, she instructed her son to sit outside and summon her when the man approached.
Mauro wiped his nose with a slender arm as he watched an orderly row of black ants enter a narrow breech in the steps where, earlier, he had inserted a pignoli nut.
Mama,” he shouted, “sta venendo!”
Removing her apron, Mauro’s mother scurried to the wrought-iron fence and held out the slip, her hand trembling with nerves.
In greeting her, the man removed his boater, revealing hair lighter than the color of straw.
Mauro watched incuriously.
The man thanked her and buried the paper in a side pocket. Returning his hat to his head, he said, “Perhaps the boy would profit from a visit. Wall Street, the financial capital of our country, and the New York Stock Exchange, of course.”
She smiled in agreement.
He tussled the boy’s hair as he climbed the steps, soles scraping brownstone.
He rented the apartment in Paterson after learning the city was the anarchists’ capital of the United States, home to La Questione Sociale, a weekly newspaper whose circulation at one time exceeded fifteen thousand, roughly the equivalent of the daily distribution of The Wall Street Journal. Its publisher was Errico Malatesta, a proponent of violence as a means to social change.
Another Paterson resident, Gaetano Bresci, returned to Italy in 1900 and killed its king, Umberto I.
And a third Italian anarchist, Luigi Galleani, also lived in Paterson for a while, until he was deported. His admirers, known as Galleanists and largely comprised of laborers of Italian descent, absorbed his philosophies. A few had bombed police stations, creating the infernal weapons by following Galleani’s instruction manual that bore the title “La Salute è in Voi,” a crude translation of which is “To Your Health.”
“The irony of it!” said the man who had dyed his hair the dark color of a Mediterranean native. His tittering laughter drew the ire of the people at an adjoining table in the library’s reading room. He quickly gathered his notebooks and blue prints, leaving the Galleani manual in plain sight.
In fact, he had no real need for the Italian’s instructions. In the Yorkville section of Manhattan, there were Germans, some of whom had served the Fatherland in the Great War, who knew how to build bombs far more sophisticated, and devastating, than those the Galleanists deployed.
Using the name Errico Bresci, the man purchased a wagon built in 1893. At a stable on Paterson’s Mill Street, he bought a ten-year-old harness for the dark bay he kept under the Brooklyn Bridge.
T.J. O’Neal Jr., a resident of Nutley, New Jersey, transported himself to lower Manhattan via the Tubes from Newark. He did so daily, endeavoring to complete the crossword puzzle of the Newark Star before arriving at the Hudson Terminal.
The twenty-minute ride was inevitably uneventful, for Mr. O’Neal traveled after the morning rush had ended. From his window, he saw the great concrete and sandstone towers of Wall Street, one rising higher than the next, as if climbing each other in competition for a gold ring hidden among the clouds. Though he had been a waiter at Ye Olde Chop House on Cedar Street for more than a decade, he still felt a jolt of amazement at the sheer audacity of the district, the intensity of its activity and its presumption of
Today, a man carrying a tennis racket assumed the seat next to Mr. O’Neal, arriving at the moment the train slid to the underground.
“Hello,” said the black-haired man, who introduced himself as Fischer.
Mr. O’Neal nodded politely, but in such a way as to discourage further conversation. The puzzle beckoned.
“I’ve seen you,” said Fischer, adjusting his tennis racket. “You are amiable.”
Mr. O’Neal gripped his pencil and edged against the train’s sidewall.
“September,” the man said, “in this, the year of our Lord nineteen hundred and twenty, on the day you read in your newspaper that many police of the Old Slip Station have been reassigned...”
The waiter frowned, but did not turn away. He had heard rumor of a pending action by the New York Police Department against Communist agitators marching at Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company headquarters and its assorted car barns.
“On that day, you are best served to remain at home.” The man nodded knowingly. “A dastardly deed. Chaos.”
The train eased its speed as it entered the Hoboken terminus
“I am in the employ of the Secret Service,” he continued, “and I know whereof I speak.”
He stood as the train came to a halt, reaching high for a leather strap.
Mr. O’Neal watched as the man tucked his tennis racket under his arm and departed.
Mauro’s mother ironed her son’s white cotton shirt, his brown short pants, his brown knee socks, and polished his black shoes with diluted vinegar, also replacing the news-papers that had covered the holes in their soles. After she bathed him, she watched as he dressed, and admonished him to remain as neat as he was at that moment.
He grimaced as she dragged a comb through his thick curly hair.
She handed him her last handkerchief. “Use it,” she said.
“Sí, Mama,” he replied.
She tugged him toward the living room, tapping the sofa as she sat.
The boy nestled into the plump cushion at his mother’s side. His feet failed to reach the floor.
“Grazie,” she said.
“Thank you,” the boy replied in singsong, his accent thick.
“Sì, por favore.”
“Yes, please,” he recited.
“Non, por favore.”
“Ah, Mama! Arresto!” he whined, jutting his bottom lip, thrusting his hand in the air. “Sì, non. Non, sì. No, yes. Sono parlaro inglese—”
She grabbed his earlobe. “You listen to me,” she said in rapid Italian. “This man... You know where he’s bringing you, this man? You think there you walk around like they dragged you out of the straw?”
Straw?
“L’America,” she said, letting go.
“Sì, Mama, ma—”
“Dovete essere il la cosa migliore?”
“Be the best,” Mauro replied dutifully.
“Ah.” She nodded in triumph.
The man bought, separately, red ink and a set of rubber stamps. Last night, after rinsing the black dye from his hair, he pressed the same message onto five sheets of coarse paper
It had cost him fifty dollars and the price of a meal at the Hotel Marguery to learn from a postal inspector the precise language the anarchists employed in previous threats. During the supper, the man told him of the troubled tennis pro Fischer and his postcards bearing predictions of doom.
Now, as dawn beckoned, the man whose hair was once again lighter than the color of straw, folded the sheets of paper and slipped them into an inside pocket of a blue suit that had once belonged to his late father, a builder of solid repute, a diminutive man who had been as dedicated and self-effacing as his wife was disdainful and superior.