The American Lady(48)

Once the man had gone Franco locked up the warehouse. He was dead tired, but he knew that he wouldn’t sleep easily tonight. Perhaps after a few glasses of wine . . .

But instead of setting off toward Mulberry Street, he sat down on one of the empty steel drums that his workers used as table and chair during their breaks, and he stared out at the water. A fishing fleet was just setting out to the open sea, the lights from the boats dancing gently on the waves.

Genoa to New York. It was a long way, especially if you spent the crossing below deck, crammed in between hundreds of barrels of wine, hardly able to catch a breath of air, with no water to wash in and just the bare minimum to eat and drink. This was why they had begun by taking only strong young men in their prime. If one of those young fellows had run into trouble with the law, who cared about that? The de Luccas certainly didn’t, as long as he had money to pay for his crossing. Soon, though, they realized that there were many other men who wanted to cross the ocean this way, men who were not so young and not in such good health—men who would never have passed the official health checks at immigration. Though Franco had pleaded with his father to take more care choosing who to send, there were a few older men on board each time.

He lit a cigarette and sucked greedily at the smoke.

What if the old man had died during the crossing? Would the others have sat there quietly and waited? That was exactly what they had been told to do, of course, with bloodcurdling threats. But perhaps they would have forgotten all that with a dead man in their midst. Perhaps they would have drummed on the side of the wooden crate and made such a din that one of the crew noticed them. And then? What would the ship’s officers say if they found a dozen stowaways hiding in the huge crates used for de Lucca wine? The risk was simply too great—though his father turned a deaf ear to all his protests. Franco felt a pang of bitterness at the thought. Why did the old man insist on weekly telephone reports if he wasn’t going to pay any attention to his recommendations?

He flicked the cigarette, and it arced through the air, landing in a puddle.

At first he had believed what his father told him, believed that they were doing a good deed by making it possible for young Italians to enter America even if they had been refused their papers for whatever reason. Franco hadn’t seen anything wrong with the fact that their families had to beggar themselves to pay for the crossing, or that the men themselves had to spend a year working for certain handpicked restaurant owners—all customers for de Lucca wine—until the rest of the cost was paid off. After all, his family had to be paid for the risk. He even thought it was rather heroic to help a few poor souls toward a better future by smuggling them in among the crates of red wine. Perhaps he might still think so today if his father hadn’t sent him to New York with a few hundred dollars to make sure that the customs agents turned a blind eye at the right moment. For the first time he saw with his own eyes what it was like when the crates were unloaded, when the men crawled out on all fours, weak with thirst. And then his romantic ideas died, never to return. Franco realized that there was nothing heroic in buying and selling human beings.

For this was what it was.

He, Franco, was a slave trader.





14

It took some time for Ruth to wake up from her faint. She lay on the chaise longue, surrounded by her Art Nouveau treasures, pale and exhausted, with a damp cloth on her brow. As soon as she opened her eyes she called out, “Wanda . . . ? Where is my daughter? I have to go to her, I have to explain everything. I . . .” She sat up, swaying.

Marie held her tight by the arm. “Wanda has run off. She doesn’t want to see anyone.”

“Run off?” Ruth began to cry, putting her hands in front of her face like a child. “What have you done? I . . . I don’t want to lose her.”

Marie was struggling with tears as well. The good cheer from earlier in the evening had long since evaporated. She forgot about Pandora, about Franco, about how she had wanted to make him laugh by turning the dance fiasco into a humorous anecdote.

“I’m so sorry, so dreadfully sorry! It was a chance remark . . . I don’t know myself how it happened. I promise you I’ll make everything right!” She would have promised Ruth anything just then, but her sister’s face remained buried in her hands.

“There are some things that cannot be made right,” she muttered without looking at Marie.

After Steven had come to Ruth’s side to take over for Marie, she left the apartment with Harold to look for Wanda again. While he walked along Fifth Avenue calling her name, Marie went to the small bar on the corner of Sixth Avenue. She paid no attention to the customers’ high spirits on this Saturday evening, any more than she let the oppressive heat on the streets put her off.