Chapter 16
Frank entered the butcher shop to pick up the ingredients he needed to make his Bolognese sauce.
He’d called Justine the night before to let her know he would be coming to her apartment Saturday morning around ten o’clock to make an authentic Italian dinner for her.
The sauce, made from scratch, would take at least five hours to cook, and that meant he would be able to spend most of the day with her.
He still hadn’t figured out why he felt so drawn to her and knew it only wasn’t because of her race.
What confused him was he didn’t think of Justine solely as someone with whom he could have sex, because he enjoyed talking and sharing a meal with her, while discovering her to be more interesting than any other woman he’d encountered before.
Since becoming sexually active as a teenage boy, he’d slept with women, and not once had he permitted himself to become romantically involved with any of them.
They’d become mere receptacles for his lust.
However, unlike his father, Frank never mistreated a woman because of what he’d witnessed when growing up.
It was as if Sal took pleasure in punishing his daughters for what he considered the slightest infraction.
If they came home ten minutes late beyond their curfew, they were punished.
If they didn’t cook the sauce to his liking, they were punished.
None were permitted to date because he feared they would sleep with boys and become puttane.
The only female exempt from his tyrannical behavior was his wife. He was meek and almost subservient to her. What Frank and Gio didn’t understand is why Gianna D’Allesandro had allowed her husband to come down so hard on her daughters when her sons were exempt.
When Justine asked if he liked being a bachelor, Frank hadn’t lied to her when he answered in the affirmative.
He was able to run his businesses, come and go at different hours of the day and night, and not have to answer to anyone but himself.
With each passing year, Frank realized he was becoming not only more selfish, but also more discriminating when it came to whom he wanted to interact with.
He’d become a successful businessman who was the complete opposite of CEOs of large corporations.
He wasn’t transported around in chauffeur-driven limousines, had no standing reservations at the finest restaurants, and didn’t own penthouse apartments high above the city’s noise and streets.
He was Francis Michael D’Allesandro, better known in the neighborhood where he’d been raised as Frankie Delano, someone who was respected by many and feared by those who were equally afraid of Salvatore, the Serpente, D’Allesandro.
Frank didn’t drive a flashy car or own gaudy jewelry, and he favored casual attire.
The exception was a suit whenever he had a meeting with an investment broker.
He rented a two-bedroom apartment on the second floor above a laundromat and checked in on his mother every day.
After a long conversation with Gianna, he had decided to accept her advice to move his brother and his family into the brownstone, where they could have more space for Gio’s expanding family.
Gianna would get to see her grandchildren every day, and her younger son would be there to check in on her.
It was early morning, and there was only one customer in the butcher shop. Frank nodded to the elderly man behind the counter lined with fresh meat. “Buongiorno!”
“Buongiorno. What can I get for you this morning?” he asked Frank after his customer walked out.
Frank smiled at the man, who’d come to work for his father when he owned the shop, and had continued after Sal had passed away. “I need a pound of ground beef chuck, pork shoulder, lamb shoulder, and a half pound of chicken livers, sausage with garlic and fennel, and pancetta,” he said in Italian.
Guillermo raised bushy white eyebrows. “So, someone is making Bolognese,” he replied in the same language.
Frank nodded. It had been a while since he’d made the sauce which happened to be his favorite, second only to marinara.
But only if his mother made the marinara.
Not only would he make Bolognese but also an Italian white bean and sausage soup.
He waited patiently as Guillermo removed a pork shoulder from the freezer showcase, cut off a portion, then placed it in a scale lined with butcher paper, grinning when it weighed exactly sixteen ounces.
Frank didn’t know how the elderly butcher did it, but he was able to visually measure whatever a customer requested to within ounces.
Guillermo put the meat in a grinder labeled PORK ONLY, ground the meat and wrapped it in paper, then wrote what it contained with a short nubby pencil.
A young man wearing a bloodstained apron came from the back of the shop, carrying a tray of center-cut pork chops. Guillermo told Frank he’d recently hired the man because he needed someone to assist him in butchering large cuts of meat after he’d strained his back lifting a whole hog.
Several bells jangled when the door opened, and a man walked in and stood at the counter. In a motion almost too quick for the eye to follow, Guillermo’s assistant handed the man something, and in exchange, he pocketed what Frank knew was money.
Moving quickly, Frank stood with his back to the door, preventing any escape. “What’s in the hand!” he demanded in a dangerously soft voice.
The man, who looked barely out of his teens, shoved his hand in the pocket of his jeans. “Nothing, man.”
Frank, at six-two, was a full head taller and weighed at least forty pounds more than the man who’d just lied to him.
“If you don’t take your hand out of your pocket, I’m going to have Mr. Guillermo call the police, but that’s after I beat the shit out of you and then tell them you tried to rob the store.
As they say, the ball is in your court. You can decide what is best for you. Now!” he shouted.
The man obeyed and held out his hand with a glassine packet Frank knew contained heroin.
He didn’t want to believe Guillermo had hired someone who was selling drugs in the shop.
He stepped aside and opened the door. “Get the hell out of here and never come back.” Waiting until the junkie disappeared, Frank glared at the man behind the counter, whose eyes were now big as saucers, while all of the color had left his face, leaving it a ghostly white.
“You, in the back!” he ordered. Please, Lord, don’t let me murder this man with my bare hands, he prayed as he walked around the showcase and opened the door to the walk-in freezer.
Once the door closed behind them, he grabbed the front of the man’s apron and shook him like a large dog would a chihuahua. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing dealing drugs in my cousin’s shop?”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know it belonged to your family.”
Frank couldn’t believe what he’d just heard. “You thought it would’ve been okay if it didn’t belong to my family?”
“I … I didn’t mean it like that,” he sputtered.
“Do you know what folks in some Middle East countries do when they find someone stealing?”
The younger man shook his head.
“They cut off his hand. And if he’s found to be a liar, then they cut out his tongue.
You’ve done both. My cousin gave you a job, and you stole from him by selling drugs rather than meat.
And there’s no doubt you lied to get this job because he was old and wouldn’t pay attention to what you were doing.
But it ends today. Where do you hide your drugs? ”
“It’s … it is on the top shelf in my locker.”
Frank cursed under his breath. He didn’t want to believe the butcher shop had become a stash house for a dealer. “Who did you buy the shit from?”
“I have contacts with some of Bumpy Johnson’s people over in Harlem.”
“How much did you pay for it?”
“A hundred dollars?”
“Do you owe them any money?” Frank asked.
The man shook his head. Frank smiled, the gesture more sinister than benevolent.
“And because I’m in a good mood today, I’m going to flush your drugs down the toilet and give you what you paid for them.
I want you to answer one more question for me and that is, why have you become a drug dealer? ”
The man’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down as he swallowed.
“I don’t make enough working here because the landlord who owns the building where I live just raised my rent.
Me, my wife, and two kids live in a studio apartment, and the greedy bastard decided to raise my rent from twenty dollars a week to thirty because I don’t have a lease.
I’m dealing to save enough money to move into a place with at least one bedroom. ”
Frank’s eyebrows rose a fraction. “How much more do you need to cover the increase?”
“Forty dollars a month.”
“I’ll have Guillermo give you a ten dollar a week raise to cover the increase. You should be glad you caught me on a day when I’m feeling compassionate; otherwise, your wife would be putting flowers on your grave.”
“Are you going to fire me?”
“No, because Guillermo needs you, and it’s not easy finding a good butcher.
My brother will be taking over the shop this summer, and I want to warn you that if he’d known you were dealing drugs, he would cut your heart out while you were still breathing, then sit on your body to eat his lunch.
What’s your name and where do you live?” The man told him what he wanted to know.
Frank nodded. “Now go and get your stash.”