The next morning while having coffee in the suite, I called a few select newspaper people whose names Bellarosa had given me. The story I put out was this: Frank Bellarosa wants a speedy trial within the next month, and any delay on the part of the U.S. Attorney’s office would be construed as justice denied. Mr. Bellarosa is innocent of the charge and wants to prove so in open court.
This, of course, would put Alphonse Ferragamo on the spot to develop a case quickly, and since there apparently was no case, Ferragamo had to either drop the charges or go into court with little chance of winning. Ferragamo wanted to do neither; what he wanted was for someone to knock off Bellarosa soon.
Anyway, after coffee that morning in the littered living room of the suite, I went into my bedroom and dialed Susan. “Hello,’’ I said.
“Hello,’’ she replied.
“I’ll be in the city for a few days and I wanted you to know.”
“All right.”
“Thank you for packing my bag.”
“Think nothing of it,’’ she said.
“Thank you just the same.’’ When husbands and wives get on this frigid roll, you’d think they were total strangers, and they are.
Susan asked, “Did you see my note?”
“Note . . . ? Oh, yes, I did.”
“John . . . ?”
“Yes?”
“We really have to talk about it.”
“The note?”
“About us.”
“Not
us
, Susan. About
you
.”
She didn’t reply for a few seconds, then asked, “What
about
me? What is really bothering you about me?”
I took a deep breath and said, “Did you call me last night? Did we speak?”
“No.”
“Well, then, it was a dream. But it was a very realistic dream, Susan. Actually it was my subconscious mind trying to tell me something. Something I’ve known for some time, but couldn’t come to grips with. Has that ever happened to you in a dream?”
“Maybe.”
“Well, in my dream I realized that you were having an affair with Frank Bellarosa.”
There, I said it. Well, sort of. She didn’t reply for a few seconds, then asked, “Is that why you’re in a bad mood? You dreamed that I was having an affair with Frank?”
“I think it was more than a dream. It was a nocturnal revelation. That’s what’s been bothering me for months, Susan, and it’s what has come between us.”
Again there was a long silence, then she said, “If you suspected something, you should have come to grips with it, John. Instead, you’ve become withdrawn. You’ve indulged yourself in playing Mafia mouthpiece and telling off all your friends and family. Maybe what’s happened to us is as much your fault as mine.”
“No doubt about it.”
Again, silence, because neither of us wanted to return to the issue of adultery. But having come this far, I said, “So? Yes or no? Tell me.”
She replied, “You had a silly dream.”
“All right, Susan. If that’s what you say, I will accept that because you’ve never lied to me.”
“John . . . we do have to talk about this . . . in person. There’s probably a lot we’ve been keeping from each other. You know I would never do anything to hurt you . . . I’m sorry if you’ve been upset these last few months . . . you’re a very unique man, a very special man. I realize that now. And I don’t want to lose you. I love you.”
Well, that was about as mushy as Susan ever got, and while it wasn’t a full confession of marital infidelity, it was something very like it, sort of like plea bargaining. I was pretty shaky, to be honest with you, and I found myself sitting on the bed in my room, my heart pounding and my mouth dry. If you’ve ever confronted your spouse with charges of sexual misconduct, you know the feeling. I finally said, “All right. We’ll talk when I get back.’’ I hung up and stared at the telephone, waiting, I guess, for it to ring, but it didn’t.
You have to understand that prior to that day in court and the subsequent media exposure, I wasn’t ready to confront this other issue of Susan and Frank. But now, having put my old life behind me forever, and now that I felt good about myself, I was prepared to hear my wife tell me she had been sexually involved with Frank Bellarosa. What’s more, I still loved her, and I was prepared to forgive her and start over again, because in a manner of speaking, we’d both had an affair with Frank Bellarosa, and Susan was right that this was as much my fault as hers. But Susan was not yet at the point where she could tell me it had happened or tell him it was over.
So, lacking a confession from Susan, I had to remain in that limbo state of the husband who knows but doesn’t know, who can’t ask for a divorce or offer to forgive, and who has to deal with the parties as if nothing were going on, lest he make a complete fool of himself.
Or maybe I could just ask Frank, “Hey, goombah, you fucking my wife, or what?”
• • •
Later that morning, Bellarosa and I met Lenny and Vinnie with the Cadillac outside the Plaza. We drove back down to Little Italy where we stopped at Bellarosa’s club for espresso. The Italian Rifle Club had few similarities to The Creek, as you might guess, except that it was private and that men discussed things there that had to do with manipulating the republic for the benefit of the club members. Maybe there were more similarities than I realized.
That morning Bellarosa had a series of meetings scheduled in his club, which was actually a large storefront with a black-painted picture window, dark inside, and divided into various dim coffee rooms and private rooms.
I was pretty much ignored most of the time, and sometimes they spoke in Italian, and sometimes when someone present didn’t speak any Italian, I was asked to leave the room with the words, “You don’t want to hear this, Counselor.’’ I was sure they were right.
So I drank a lot of coffee and read all the morning papers and watched some old geezers playing a card game that I couldn’t follow.
After an hour or so in the club, we left and got back into the car. Though there was a layer of clouds blocking the sun, the morning was getting hot, an urban heat produced by cars and people and yesterday’s sun still trapped in the concrete. Country squires can tolerate only about a week in Manhattan in the summer, and I hoped we wouldn’t be much longer in the city, but with this guy you didn’t ask questions about times and places.
We made a stop at Ferrara’s, where Bellarosa picked out a dozen pastries for Anna, which were put into a nice white box with green and red string and which Bellarosa carried to the car. I can’t describe to you why the sight of this big man carrying that little box daintily by the string struck me as so civilized, but it did. It wasn’t exactly Aristotle contemplating the bust of Homer, but it was a profoundly human act that made me see the man, the husband, and the father. And yes, the lover. Whereas I’d always seen Bellarosa as a man’s man, I saw now that my original impression of him as a man whom women would find attractive was accurate. Well, not all women, but some women. I could see Susan, Lady Stanhope, wanting to be debased and sexually used by this insensitive barbarian. Maybe it had something to do with her seeing her mother in bed with a gardener or stableboy or whoever it was. Maybe this is something that all highborn ladies fantasize about: taking off their clothes for a man who is not their social or intellectual equal, but is simply a sexual turn-on. And why should this be such a shock to men? Half the wealthy and successful men I know have screwed their secretaries, cocktail waitresses, and even their maids. Women have libidos, too. But maybe Susan Stanhope and Frank Bellarosa had a more complex relationship.
Anyway, we spent the rest of the morning in Little Italy, Greenwich Village, and environs, making a few quick stops, sometimes for talk, sometimes for taking provisions aboard the Cadillac. The car soon smelled of cheese and baked goods, and some horrible salted codfish called
baccalà
, which I suppose couldn’t be put in the trunk because of the heat. Bellarosa explained to me, “I’m going to send all this stuff home later. This is all stuff Anna likes. You want to send something to your wife?”
It annoyed me that he always referred to Susan as my wife, instead of by her name. What did he call her when they were alone?
“You want to stop for something? Flowers or something?”
“No.”
“I’ll send these pastries from Ferrara’s like it was from you.”
“No.”
He shrugged.
As we headed up toward Midtown, he said to me, “You called this morning? Everything’s okay at home?”
I replied, “Yes. How’s
your
wife? You call this morning? Everything okay at home?”
“Yeah. I’m just asking you because if you got problems at home, you don’t have your mind on business. And because we’re friends. Right?”
“How was I yesterday in court?”
“You were fine.”
“Subject closed.”
He shrugged again and looked out the window.
We stopped at the Italian Sailor’s Club on West Thirty-fourth Street, and Bellarosa went inside by himself. He came out fifteen minutes later with a brown bag and got into the car. Now what do you suppose was in that brown bag? Drugs? Money? Secret messages? No. The bag was filled with small crooked cigars. “These are from Naples,’’ he said. “You can’t get them here.’’ He lit one up and I could see why you couldn’t. I opened the window.
“You want one?”
“No.”
He passed the bag up to Vinnie and Lenny, who took a cigar apiece and lit up. Everyone seemed happy with their little duty-free cigars. Of course, today it was cigars, tomorrow it could be something else that came out of the Sailor’s Club. Interesting.
Instead of stopping for a three-hour lunch at an Italian restaurant, we stopped at an Italian sausage cart near Times Square. Bellarosa got out and greeted the vendor, an old man who hugged and kissed Bellarosa and nearly cried. Without asking us what we wanted, Bellarosa got us all hot sausage heros with peppers and onions. I said, “Hold the mayo.’’ We ate outside the double-parked car as we chatted with the old vendor, and Bellarosa gave the man a hunk of goat cheese from Little Italy and three crooked cigars. I think we got the best of that deal.
If a man is known by the company he keeps, then Frank Bellarosa was sort of a populist, mixing with the masses the way the early Caesars had done, letting the common people hug and kiss him, venerate him, and lay hands on him. At the same time, he mixed with the highborn, but if the Plaza was any indication, he seemed to treat the powerful with cool contempt.
The sausage man was not tending his cart and, in fact, shooed away a few people so he could better tend to his luncheon guests, dining alfresco in expensive suits in the heat of Times Square with the Cadillac blocking traffic. What a bizarre little scene, I thought.
We wiped our fingers on paper napkins, bid our host
buon giorno
, and got back into the car. Still chewing on a mouthful of sausage, Bellarosa said to Vinnie, “You tell Freddie to hit these guys up for another fifty cents a pound on the sausage and let them pass it on to their customers.’’ He said to me, “It’s a good product and everybody eats it—your Spanish, your
melanzane
, they love this shit. Where they gonna go for lunch around here? Sardi’s? The coffee shops serve shit. So they eat on the street and watch the pussy go by. Right? That’s worth another quarter. Right? You like the sandwich? You pay another two bits for it? Sure. So we hit the vendors for another fifty cents a pound and they pass it along. No problem.”
“Now that we’ve all discussed it,’’ I said, “should we take a vote?”
He laughed. “Vote? Yeah, we’ll vote. Frank votes yes. End of vote.”
“Good meeting,’’ I said.
“Yeah.”
Actually, I was impressed with Bellarosa’s attention to the smaller outposts of his empire. I suppose he believed that if he watched the price of sausage, the bigger problems would take care of themselves. He was very much a hands-on man, both in his professional life and his personal life, if you know what I mean.
• • •
We crossed the East River into the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn by way of the Williamsburg Bridge. After that, I was lost. Brooklyn is a mystery to me, and I hope it remains so. Unfortunately, I had a guide who pointed out everything to me, the way people do who think you care about their squalid little part of the world. Bellarosa said, “There on the roof of that building is where I got my finger wet for the first time.”
I had the impression he wasn’t talking about sucking his thumb. I said, “How interesting.”
Anyway, we stopped at a beautiful old baroque church covered with black grime. “This is my church,’’ Bellarosa explained. “Santa Lucia.”
We got out of the car, went to the rectory, and knocked on the door, which was opened by an old priest, who went through the hugging and kissing routine.
Bellarosa and I were shown into a large second-floor commons room where two more elderly priests joined us and we had coffee. These people drink a lot of coffee, in case you hadn’t noticed, though it’s not so much the caffeine they’re after, but the shared experience, sort of a wet version of breaking bread together. And wherever Frank Bellarosa went, of course, coffee was made and served, usually with something sweet.