The Vendetta Defense Read online

  “Are you defending vendettas?”

  “No, I’m explaining them. This one, anyway. You have to understand the way it is, before you can represent my grandfather.”

  Judy fell momentarily speechless. Frank was turning the tables on her, and she didn’t like it much. His voice carried authority and weight, and she couldn’t let him win, for Pigeon Tony’s sake or her own. Frank’s words attacked the law she had been trained in, believed in, and had even come to love. Judy’s speechlessness stretched into two moments, which worried her.

  “John and Marco Coluzzi are not about to let this pass, Judy. They’ll come looking for him. That’s what sure as hell is going to happen next. What would you have me do then? He’s my grandfather. And your client.”

  Judy threw up her hands. “If that’s true, then why did I just get him out on bail? Why didn’t we leave him in jail?”

  “No, we did the right thing. He’d be in more danger in jail. On the outside I can protect him, and it’s my job to protect him. Your laws are going to be useless.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the Coluzzis are too smart for your laws. They have been so far. They have money and power, and they’ll get to him if we let them. Your laws can’t arrest anybody until after they murder somebody, and sometimes not even then.”

  Pigeon Tony nodded sadly. “È vero,” he said, and Judy translated. It sounded like the Latin noun veritas. Truth. Both men fell equally grave, their mouths set in identical determination and their Lucia eyes glowing darkly. Grandfather and grandson looked so much alike, because of the way similarities of feature and gesture skip generations, that Judy was taken aback. Maybe it was true, what they were saying. She never would have believed it if she hadn’t seen the melee in the courtroom with her own eyes. And if all of this vendetta craziness was true, Pigeon Tony would get killed long before she could get him to trial.

  “Fair enough,” Judy said to Frank suddenly. “I’ll give you that your grandfather may be in jeopardy. But we have to investigate this case, to build a defense. We have to go forward. So you protect him your way, and I’ll protect him mine. You fight back, only to save him, and I’ll use the law.”

  Frank broke into a relieved smile. “You want to bet on who wins?”

  “I can’t take your money,” Judy told him. “Now let’s go.”

  Judy had no religion per se, but she did believe in karma, Krispy Kreme doughnuts, and Vincent van Gogh. In fact, she was sure it was her terrific karma that had sent her boss out of the office when she had arrived with her battered clients. She hoped she had enough in her reserve tanks to get out of the conference room as cleanly. She had changed back into her yellow clogs to help her escape, and also for obvious style reasons.

  She cracked the conference room door to check if the coast was clear. Her eyes swept the office. A square, open meeting area with fancy blue carpet, ringed by lawyers’ offices with secretaries’ desks in Dilbert cubicles in front of each. Printers were printing. Keyboards were clacking. Lawyers were yapping. Secretaries were doing the real work. All was in order. And no boss.

  Judy snuck out of the conference room with Frank and Mr. DiNunzio at her side. The Three Tonys, which sounded like an operatic trio but wasn’t, trailed behind. The secretaries averted their eyes pointedly as the injured passed, the way the nicest people avoid gaping at car accidents, but the lawyers contributed to gaper block. Murphy and Murphy’s lawyers, wasting time in the hallway, stared as Judy approached. And Murphy’s lined lips parted when she spotted Frank, though Judy wasn’t sure whether her reaction was due to the fact that he was so good-looking or that he was so good-looking even with an open wound.

  “These are my clients,” Judy said to Murphy’s lawyers, as they passed them. “Please don’t drool, stare, point, or laugh. Just say good-bye.”

  Murphy thrust a manicured hand at Frank. “I would never do such a thing. You must be Frank Lucia. I saw you on TV.”

  “Yes, you did,” Judy said. The courthouse fight qualified as Action News. “Now, say good-bye.”

  “Hello,” Murphy said to Frank, ignoring Judy. She shook Frank’s hand, and he shook back, which Judy noticed with disapproval. “That was quite a show you put on at the courthouse. Everybody throwing punches, even outside, when the cops tried to break it up. The news guy said it was the biggest brawl they ever had there.”

  Frank smiled. “He was just being modest.”

  Murphy laughed, as did her friends, since that was their job. And the only job for which they were qualified. Judy had had enough.

  “Well, we have to go. Say good-bye.”

  “But aren’t you going to introduce me?” Murphy asked, and Judy gritted her teeth. Murphy wasn’t interested in meeting The Three Tonys.

  “Frank Lucia, this is Murphy. She uses only one name. Nobody knows why. Now let’s go.”

  “Nice meeting you,” Frank told Murphy, as Judy took his arm. She wanted to avoid Bennie, and, okay, she was a little jealous of Murphy. She was allowed to have more than one reason for doing something. She was a complex girl.

  They headed for the reception room followed by The Three Tonys, who no longer reminded Judy of anything musical but rather of those municipal trucks that were signed SLOW-MOVING VEHICLE. They shuffled across the plush carpet, war-weary, and though she felt sorry for them, she wanted to go. They had almost made it to the reception desk when Judy’s karma reserves ran out.

  “Just the lawyer I want to see!” Bennie boomed, bustling into the office, carrying her heavy briefcase and two newspapers under her arm. She stopped momentarily, introduced herself to Frank and The Slow-Moving Vehicle, and smiled for their benefit. The smile remained fixed as she yanked a newspaper from underneath her elbow and handed it to Judy. “Judy, I have to get to my office, but I thought you might like to have this. You may want it for your scrapbook. And this story is very informative. Looks like your boxing lessons are paying off.”

  “Thank you,” Judy said, also for the clients’ benefit, and opened the Daily News, Philadelphia’s biggest tabloid. UNCIVIL LAW, screamed the banner headline, and under it was a photo of security guards leading her and Frank out of the Criminal Justice Center. Judy thought they made a nice couple, but it didn’t seem like the right time to say so. “Yes, the arraignment did get a little out of hand.”

  “Apparently. This isn’t the kind of thing you want to do too often, Judy. Assault and battery in a courthouse, that is.” Bennie turned to Frank, and at least she was still smiling. “By way of explanation, we at Rosato and Associates usually confine our felonies to the office.”

  Frank smiled grimly. “Don’t blame Judy for this. It’s on me, and she has already dressed us down. I know it doesn’t help our case. It won’t happen again. Sorry about that.”

  Bennie waved it away and took off. “No need to apologize,” she called back. “Not if you won.”

  “We did,” Frank answered, calling after her, and as Bennie hurried to her office, she shot him a thumbs-up.

  It left Judy and The Senior Citizens standing there in amazement, until Judy realized she had to get rolling. She grabbed her telephone messages from the receptionist on the way out and paged through the soft pink slips on the way to the elevator. Three were from opposing counsel in her civil case, one was from the general counsel in Huartzer, and one was from Mary. She’d ignore all but the GC’s and Mary’s for the time being. Her e-mail would go unread, her voicemail unchecked.

  She had Italians to defend.

  9

  Judy was relieved to find there was no press outside the office, and the only congestion was the standard rush-hour traffic on a warm evening. The sun dropped low, a cool, fiery disk edging behind the buildings, filling the twilight sky with a dusky orange wash. Businesspeople flowed onto the sidewalk from the buildings lining Locust Street, their heads bobbing as they moved en masse to the PATCO train station to New Jersey at the end of the street. Couples walked hand in hand, heading for the ritzy shops and restaurants in C
enter City. Judy noticed Frank’s eyes scanning the crowd, his smooth brow a worried wrinkle, and she realized it wasn’t the press he was worried about. She edged closer to Pigeon Tony, though it was hard to believe the threat was real.

  She and Frank herded Tony-From-Down-The-Block and Tony Two Feet into a cab with Mr. DiNunzio, directing them to their respective houses. She and Frank grabbed the second cab, sliding into the backseat with Pigeon Tony in the middle. Judy and Frank were roughly the same height, but Pigeon Tony, squeezed between them, came only to their shoulders, and Judy felt oddly as if he were their very small, very gray-haired child. He didn’t seem as worried about the crowd, and he was completely captivated by the cab, looking around its filthy interior with wonder, his brown eyes recording the greasy door handle, the open and sooty ashtray, and the smudged plastic divider between them and the driver. Judy caught Frank’s eye with a smile.

  Frank leaned down to his grandfather. “Pop, you ever been in a cab before?”

  “Me? Sure!” Pigeon Tony startled as if he’d been awakened by an alarm clock, and his hand flew into the air in a grandiose gesture of a dismissal. “Me inna cab alla time!”

  “I thought so,” Frank said, and Judy decided then she’d never put Pigeon Tony on the witness stand. He was a worse liar than she was, if that were possible.

  The cab lurched off, then came to a quick, nauseating stop, since there was nowhere to go. Frank fell silent, and Pigeon Tony returned to the Total Cab Experience as Judy looked out the window. The driver took a left, going south on one of the number streets, and she watched as they left rush hour behind and the scenery changed. The view going crosstown on the number street was different from that on Broad Street, which was a wide, mainly commercial artery, and the single lane south afforded Judy a perspective of the city she hadn’t seen before.

  Frank stayed quiet, Pigeon Tony looked drowsy, and the shops and businesses of Center City gave way to rowhouses. Those near the business district were four stories of colonial vintage, their mullioned windows bubbled with old glass, their bricks a soft melon color with a refined white line of mortar. The cab rattled along a few blocks south, passing gentrified houses on Rodman and Bainbridge Streets, which showed off new, modern picture windows and repointed brick. In a few short blocks, only three dollars on the meter, they were into South Philly, where the rowhouses lost their top story.

  Judy found it apt, somehow. The houses here were stripped-down, no-frills, working-class, but each was different in its own way. Though they all had a front door and single window on the first floor, with two windows on the second story like wide-open, honest eyes, and each façade had been lovingly customized by the homeowner. Some had plastic awnings, corrugated in orange and green, many adorned with the family’s initials, a script D or C. Some rowhouses sported flagstone stoops, some were of old-fashioned marble, and many were made of brick. Here and there wrought-iron railings had been added, and she saw one railing painted bright red to match the exterior molding. It struck Judy that these differences, whether her taste or not, contrasted with the sameness she had seen in the housing developments, strip malls, and Gap stores she’d driven past earlier the same day. It seemed so long ago now. She felt fatigue creep though her bones, and she still had so much to do.

  It grew quiet in the cab except for the churning of the old meter, and Judy kept looking out the window as the sun dipped behind the buildings, leaving the sky a darker haze of clay-orange. The waning light filtered onto the rowhouses, emphasizing the redness of the brick in some and the rust-orange of others, setting the sandstone-hued brick, thin with skinny mortar lines, glowing in the twilight. Judy, who had been painting in oils for most of her adult life, saw the bricks as a gritty mosaic of amber, titian, and apricot, all the more beautiful because they housed people, and families, within.

  The cab carried them along, and on each corner of South Philly would be a store, a grocery, a beauty parlor, bakery, a tavern, and all of them named after people. Sam and El’s. Juno’s. Yolanda’s. Esposito’s. There wasn’t a chain store of any type in sight. The names telegraphed the ethnicity of the owner and, by extension, of the neighborhood. Judy took note that the corner stores grew solidly more Italian as they got closer to Pigeon Tony’s house. Only two blocks away she began to feel a weight on her right arm and looked over.

  It was her client, dozing on her shoulder, and he had just begun to snore, soft as a puppy.

  BOOK TWO

  With arms provided by the Agrarian Association or by some regimental stores, the blackshirts would ride to their destination in lorries. When they arrived they began by beating up any passer-by who did not take off his hat to the colours, or who was wearing a red tie, handkerchief, or shirt. If anyone protested or tried to defend himself, if a fascist was roughly treated or wounded, the “punishment” was intensified. They would rush to the buildings and . . . break down the doors, hurl furniture, books, or stores into the street, pour petrol over them, and in a few moments there would be a blaze. Anyone found on the premises would be severely beaten or killed. . . .

  —ROSSI,

  The Rise of Italian Fascism (1983)

  At the beginning of December, it is time to mate the birds. . . . All cocks and hens should be allowed to select their own mates. A widowhood cock or hen performs better when they are permitted to choose their mate. Isn’t a man or woman happier if they select their partner than those that are forced into “shotgun” marriages, etc.?

  It is a fact that a cock or a hen will perform well in the races for many years. But if one of the pair is lost, the remaining bird never seems to do as well as it did with the old mate.

  —JOSEPH ROTONDO,

  Rotondo on Racing Pigeons (1987)

  10

  As he dozed, Pigeon Tony was remembering the first day he met his wife. He did not know the day exactly—he was never a precise man, but he did know the year because he wasn’t stupid either. He was seventeen years old, and the year was 1937. It was a Friday night, in the early spring, in May.

  Pigeon Tony, then merely Tony Lucia, was living in the house of his father and mother, in a village outside the city of Veramo, in the mountainous Abruzzo province of Italy. Tony worked hard, helping his father in their olive groves and with the pigeons, spending all his time in the company of birds and old men, having no time, or finding no time, for the frivolities that consumed others. That he was shy was his own secret, or so he believed. That he was also undesirable was something he knew anybody could see.

  Tony Lucia was little and skinny, too skinny, his mother said all the time, with his legs like lengths of twine with a knot where the knee would be. His wrists were as fine as a child’s. No matter what Tony ate, he never got heavier. No matter what Tony lifted, pulled, or carried, his arm muscles grew no bigger. He had flat feet, which hurt if he walked too far for too long. But that he was strong was beyond doubt; he was the only child of the Lucia family—his mother could bear no more—yet Tony could handle the chores of ten sons, and did.

  When he first met his wife, he was doing one of these chores, hauling their pigeons by cart to a shipping for the race on Saturday. It would be a weekend of good flying weather, starting with a warm evening, now on the edge of darkness. Tomorrow would be the first race of the old bird season, and it had taken the day to travel north from Veramo to the city of Mascoli in the Marche province, where the birds would be released, the trip made slower because Tony was on his bad feet. Even so, out of kindness he led rather than drove their pony, an overweight, sway-backed brown creature with a brushy black mane and stiffness in his right hind. The beast pulled the cart gamely, and in back of the cart the pigeons cooed, called, and beat their wings in their wooden cages, sending pinfeathers into the air, transforming the assembly into a swirling cloud of dust.

  The pigeons knew they were being shipped to race and anticipated the event as much as they felt fresh despair at having left their mates behind. The Lucias used the widowhood method of racing, leaving the captive
hen at the loft, so that the cocks felt eager to fly home faster and so were agitated until they were finally released to be on their way. It didn’t help that the dirt road was a rocky one, winding through the hills of the region, and the pigeon cages, piled five on top of one another and tied up with twine, jostled right and left. The birds felt unstable in the creaky cart with the weary pony yanking them along, and Tony couldn’t blame them for that.

  They all plodded ahead, with Tony barely noticing the terrain, even though he had never been in Marche before on his own. Abruzzo, on Marche’s southern border, was considered by the Marchegiani to be far less sophisticated than their province. And for their part, the Abruzzese had a popular saying: “It is better to have a dead man in your house than a Marchegiani at your door,” because the men of Marche had been used as tax collectors by the Romans, and so were universally hated.

  But Tony took no notice of differences between men, for all of it sounded like generalizations to him, and he was not the political sort, despite the heated politics of the day. His concerns were his family, his olives, and his pigeons, and he practically walked backward as he led the pony so he could make sure no birds fell off the bumpy cart. It was the reason he was almost run over by another cart that suddenly came roaring down the curving road, bearing a beautiful woman and a Blackshirt, Angelo Coluzzi.

  “Hey! You! Hey! Stupido!” Coluzzi shouted to him. Almost out of breath, the Blackshirt pulled hard on his leather reins, bringing his matched brown horses to a stuttering halt, leaving them tossing their heads against the painful bit, their mouths gaping and their nostrils flaring. “Why don’t you watch what you’re doing, bumpkin? You’re hogging the whole road! Fool!”