Within five years of his wedding day, Francesco opened the doors to a small funeral parlor that bore his name. He worked the long hours required to get a competitive business off the ground, catering to the needs and requests, religious or otherwise, of the working-class Italians who made up the bulk of his clientele. While he serviced the dead on the first two floors of the four-story brownstone that housed the parlor, Lucia worked out of their third-floor apartment, designing and stitching white dresses and dark suits. These would then be offered up for sale at reduced prices to bereaved family members eager to make the dearly departed look their best in their final resting place.
The couple had enough money to cover the mortgage and their monthly expenses, with enough to put aside for the occasional dinner at a restaurant outside their neighborhood. They enjoyed each other’s company, treated each other with a mutual respect not common in most of the marriages in their circle, and were not afraid to display their affection in public. All was perfect, except for the fact that they had yet to have children. “It will happen when it’s meant to happen,” Francesco told his wife after yet another futile visit to a doctor long on sympathy but short on answers. “And when it does, it will be more than worth the wait. A special kid just takes a little longer to arrive.”
Andrew Victorino made his appearance one week shy of his parents’ tenth wedding anniversary, on a sultry August night in 1956. The couple, as expected, doted on their only child, happily catering to his every wish, and allowed to do so by the substantial income Francesco enjoyed from his now thriving business. There were camps for gifted children and trips to Europe in the summer, and private school the rest of the year. And if these outlets could not provide or fulfill a need, Francesco and Lucia brought in a tutor who could and did. For Andrew, it was, both above and beneath the surface, an ideal childhood. “My mom used to read me these bedtime stories—some in English, others in Italian, most of them sad—about kids my age going through all sorts of hardships I could never imagine existed,” he once told a college roommate. “I would sit in my bed at night, long after she had turned out the light and closed the door to my room, and wonder what it would be like to have to live like one of those kids. By the time I hit my twelfth birthday, I didn’t have to wonder about it anymore. I was one of them.”
Francesco Victorino was putting the final touches on the corpse of a young man who had fallen victim to an unforgiving lung disease. It was late, closing in on midnight, the large basement room shrouded in darkness and enveloped in silence. Francesco stared down at the young man with the sunken cheeks and the thinning hair and slowly shook his head. It was indeed a thin line that separated those who lived from those who died, those who were spared illness from those who were haunted by its hard clutch. The longer he lived, and the more days he spent working in the company of those who were touched by death’s hand, the more Francesco had come to appreciate life’s short attention span. He had long ago come to the realization that he ranked among the lucky few, the ones for whom death had yet to reach out its iron grip. He had skirted its grasp during the madness and suffering of the World War II years and had emerged from that period a determined man, made much older than his age by the horrors he had lived to witness. This, he had later realized, was why he had chosen a profession that kept him in death’s company on a daily basis. And it was also why he took such pride in ensuring that the deceased were afforded as comfortable and as warm a final parting as he could conjure. If you walk among the shadows of death, it might make you a less appealing target, he reasoned. Or maybe it was all just a matter of luck: the unseen flip of a celestial coin that ultimately decided who would live and who would die.
Francesco Victorino’s coin flip was about to turn on the losing side.
The man stared in silence at the undertaker, drugs and drink soaring through his frail body in lethal doses, his mind racing with images that bore no connection to reality. He kept the thin fingers of his right hand wrapped around the hard black handle of a thick, sharp knife, the knuckles red and the skin peeled back raw. His legs trembled as he stood with his back to the wall, his body partially hidden by a dark curtain. He had not tasted food in three days, and his only nourishment came courtesy of a warm six-pack of Colt 45 malt liquor. He was wearing jeans that were both frayed and stained, and a Deep Purple T-shirt that had once been white as a morning cloud. The veins in his arms were swollen, jabbed full with Blackbeard, the newest and the best low-grade, crumpled-singles heroin for the habitual on-the-nod user. He kept his eyes on the undertaker, gazing out at him through a glazed-doughnut stare, watching as he worked with quiet precision on the body of a young man less than seventy-two hours dead. He tried to keep his breaths short, taking in the cool, moist air of the room through clogged and caked nostrils. Every two minutes or so, he let out a sudden shudder, sending his entire body, from felony-flyer feet to greasy hair hanging loose across his forehead and eyes, into a long, rhythmic series of low-wattage spasms.
The man gripped the knife handle as tight as he could muster and took several silent steps forward, inching closer to the undertaker as he quietly and carefully neared the end of his death ritual. The man’s every movement was fueled by the insane drive of the desperate addict to seek out the easy mark, to find the quickest route to fast cash that would pay for the next high that lay in wait. The warm needle that just ached to course its way down the glory roads of his arms and legs there, just waiting for the cash transfer and the grab. The man, James Pelfrey, was a twenty-two-year-old twice-convicted petty thief and doper, hectored and hounded by the police since he first cracked the puberty mark, who lived hand to nickel bag by pulling down small-time scores and late-night widow push-in-and-snatch jobs. He got the idea to reach for a hit against Victorino’s Funeral Home while nursing a series of cold taps at a local alehouse, his head resting against the old stone of the bar that his family had once owned and gambled away. He was doing a bent ear to the two men in cheap suits off to his left, discussing matters of money—mostly, who had it and who didn’t. That’s when he first heard mention of the small parlor nestled between a Met supermarket and Eliot’s Dry Cleaners just under the IRT number 2 elevated subway line along White Plains Road in the East Bronx. “The place is a fuckin’ gold mine,” the cheaper of the two cheap suits said. “Wives, mothers, sons, and daughters all paying out cold cash to bury a young husband or an old father. And the dead doin’ nothin’ but layin’ there, not able to breathe one fuckin’ word about their hard-earned dollars taking a fly out of their relatives’ pockets and into the clean and crisp pockets of the dago gravedigger.”
“Owning one of them funeral places is like owning a piece of a fuckin’ casino, is what I heard tell,” the other cheap suit said, his words coated with anger. “Every day, every night, some poor bastard bites the bit and his ass ends up on that fucker’s cold slab while his cash does a fast fade.”
“Somebody with a head on his shoulders and a pair as big as this room could make a move on a place like that,” the first cheap suit said, slugging down another in a steady line of shooters. “Walk himself away with a nice and sweet payday. Fuck, if I had the time and was the type who leaned in that direction, for sure as shit I’d take a jab at a hit myself. But, if truth be told, a cold room packed top to bottom with the fresh dead is more than enough to make me want to take a step back.”
“The dead can’t fuck with you,” James Pelfrey said, the words meant to be more a murmur than spoken aloud as he interjected himself into the conversation that would alter the course of his one-way life. “Seems to me the best place to go for a prime-time score would be a place where the dead outnumber the living.”
“Listen now to the doper’s words,” the second cheap suit said, raising an empty glass in Pelfrey’s direction. “As fucked-up as he is, even he knows a good plan when he hears it.”
“Well, go ahead then, you think it’s so fuckin’ easy,” the first cheap suit said. “Take down that undertaker and make your score. But d
on’t you forget to come back here and square us a few rounds on the arm once you do.”
Andy Victorino was in the spacious and elegantly furnished third-floor dining room, helping his mother arrange cups and plates on the thick, hand-carved table. It had, down the years, evolved into a family tradition shared by the three of them each evening: a hot cup of espresso and two chocolate biscotti when Francesco closed up shop for the night and made his way up the hall steps. It gave them a chance to reflect quietly on the day or discuss a variety of matters big or small that pertained to all three, but mostly school or recreational activities built around Andy’s often overloaded schedule. On a few of the nights, they would just sit through dessert in silence, each lost in his own world of thought.
“Papa is running late,” Andy said, glancing at the wooden clock positioned in the center of the wall just above an antique hutch filled with silverware and dishes. “As usual.”
“He loses track of time,” Lucia said with an understanding shrug. “He concentrates on his work, not on the hour.”
“Should I go down and get him?” Andy said, this time looking at his mother and giving her a wide smile in anticipation of the answer he knew he would get.
“Go,” Lucia said with a wave of her right hand. “And don’t you keep him too long. Help him clean up, and then you both get back here before my coffee tastes like old rubber.”
Andy had already made a hard dash out the door and was halfway down the hall stairs by the time she had finished her admonitions. Lucia slid a chair from the table and sat down, her slippered feet folded one over the other. She shook her head, the rich dark strands of her black hair coating the sides of her face, and smiled. This time of the night, long after the mourners had left the parlor and the house was as quiet as a country morning, belonged to her son and her husband. The special few minutes the two shared in the basement, their evening talks covering a wide variety of topics, further cemented the cast-iron bond that existed between them. “They are so very much alike,” Lucia once told her best friend in the city, Angelina Cortese, a widow who owned the florist shop across from their parlor. “It’s as if they were one person. Andrew is so driven—sometimes I think too much so—but then so is Francesco. And both treat work as if it were its own reward. Andrew asks his father hundreds of questions, and each one is patiently answered. And if Francesco doesn’t know or isn’t totally sure, they both make their way to the library and don’t come back until they have the answer they need.”
“Does Andrew want to be an undertaker like his father?” Angelina asked.
“He wants to be a doctor,” Lucia said with a glint of pride. “He respects the work his father does, but he would much rather save a life than prepare it for its departure. Still, the time spent down in the mortuary with his father will serve him well once he’s in medical school. He has already seen the dead, and learned that from them he has nothing to fear. It’s the living who give us all our grief.”
Francesco Victorino turned when he felt the shadow descend. He looked at James Pelfrey, saw the shaky smile on the thin man’s face and the large blade of a knife hanging from his right hand. He saw the violent tremors in the legs and upper body, and the lost look embedded in a set of eyes the color of old chalk. Francesco Victorino had seen more than enough bodies in his life, both living and dead, to know what the one now standing before him had come to do.
Bring his dream to an end.
“Give me the money,” Pelfrey stammered, his voice sounding as if it were delivered through a clogged drain. “Every single fuckin’ dime you got, and maybe I let you live. Maybe I don’t leave you dead on one of your own slabs. How fucked-up would that be, undertaker? Your ass found on one of your own slabs?”
“I keep no money down here,” Francesco said in a manner as calm and relaxed as he could muster. “Look around for yourself and see. But, believe me when I tell you, there is no money in this room.”
“You lyin’ bastard,” Pelfrey said, the low gurgle of his words reaching for a harsher tone. “Who you tryin’ to bullshit? You got funerals coming in and out of here all day long, like it was some fuckin’ parade of the dead. I seen it myself, with my own eyes. Even came to one of your fuckin’ funerals a while back, for some cousin of mine got shot up near the Wakefield movie theater. And knowing all that, you got the balls to tell me you got no money?”
“I said I keep no money down here,” Francesco said.
Pelfrey ran a white-coated tongue across a set of parched and chapped lips. The fingers gripping the knife handle were drenched with cold sweat and the veins in the back of his neck were doing a drum solo, the pounding reaching all the way up to his temples. He lifted the knife closer to the undertaker, the sharp blade now mere inches from the man’s chest, and glared at him through drug-infested eyes. “Then give me what you have on you,” Pelfrey said.
Francesco stared back at the young man for several seconds and then slowly shook his head. “I have no money,” he said in a low voice. “Not in the room and not in my pockets. I have nothing to give you.”
Pelfrey’s eyes widened as if they were shocked awake by a cold blast of air. He reached out his left hand and grabbed the back of Francesco’s head, his fingers clutching a thick mound of brown hair. He pushed Francesco closer and managed to curl his lips in what passed for a snarl. “Then I have something to give you,” he said.
The blade of the knife wedged in Francesco’s stomach, the blood flow running in a tight pattern down the front of his starched white shirt and onto the creases of his blue slacks. It formed a puddle over the top of his black loafers and coated the gray concrete floor, looking as still as a lake under the sharp glare of the mortician’s light. A thin line of blood rolled down the right side of Francesco’s mouth, his eyes did a flutter dance, and the color began to drain from his face. His knees buckled and he was held in check by the shaky grip of the addict, who jammed the blade of the knife deeper into his stomach with every fresh wheeze he took. “You spend all your time taking care of the dead,” Pelfrey whispered. “But now, who the fuck will take care of you?”
Pelfrey let go of the knife and took two steps back, watching the undertaker fall to his knees, both hands gripped around the blade jutting from his stomach. The junkie stared with openmouthed amazement as the life slowly seeped out of a good man, the adrenaline rush now doing a mix-and-blend with the heroin, giving Pelfrey the most sustained rush of his wasted days. He winced when Francesco fell facedown to the hard surface, the knife now buried handle-deep inside his body, the thick pool of blood around him taking the shape of a full moon. “Sweet dreams, undertaker,” Pelfrey said, and turned to leave the room.
He stopped when he saw the boy standing in the shadows off to his left, a cocked .38 revolver held in two thin hands. The boy kept his eyes on Pelfrey, his breath coming out in a rush, his calm manner betrayed by eyes that welled with tears. Pelfrey took a quick glance around the room and then looked back at the boy and gave him a slow smile. “You lookin’ to rob the place, too, little man?” he asked in hushed tones. “If so, it’d be nothing more than a time killer. Ain’t nothin’ here but the dead.”
“The man you just killed is my father,” Andy Victorino said, the barrel of the gun that was kept hidden in the bottom drawer of Francesco’s desk aimed squarely at the junkie’s rail-bone chest.
“He’s dead because he lied,” Pelfrey said without a hint of remorse. “Tried to sell me some wolf tickets about him having no money.”
“He never lied,” Andy said. “He had no money to give. But even if he did have money and gave it all to you, it wouldn’t have mattered. You would have killed him anyway. It’s what people like you do.”
“And now what are you going to do about it, little man?” Pelfrey said. “You gonna kill me? Shoot me dead with your papa’s gun? Why, I’d bet a cold turd like you ain’t even shot off a round before. And even if you did, you’ve never pulled on somebody alive—somebody that can walk and talk and breathe. I ain’t no
fuckin’ tree, kid. You pull that trigger and you’re gonna have a murder pinned on your ass. And you ain’t ready for any kind of shit like that. Because that’s not what people like you do. Or am I wrong on that, little man?”
Andy Victorino did his all not to gaze at his father’s body, the dark puddle spreading far enough to reach down to his legs and feet, the life gone, replaced now by the cold stillness of the dead. He had heard his father’s and the stranger’s initial verbal exchange as he moved down the stairwell into the dark void of the morgue and had frozen in place. He couldn’t figure out who it could be or what he could want, especially as it was three hours past the parlor’s closing time. He took a long, deep breath and eased down the final three wooden steps leading into his father’s work area. He had his back to the old wood desk that his father used to file his large amounts of paperwork and, when time allowed, to write letters of comfort and hope to those who had left their recently departed in his care. The voices in front of him were gaining in strength and threat. With ghostlike moves, Andy slowly slid open the bottom drawer of the desk and reached for the loaded .38 Special his father kept there. It had been a gift left to him by a longshoreman’s widow, her husband lost to her in a barroom brawl that had escalated from closed fists to bullets in less time than it took to pour a full pint. His father was initially reluctant to accept such a gift, not being a man who found comfort or need to back up his words with a weapon, but the widow insisted. “Trust me, it won’t do anybody a goddamn bit of harm at rest in your desk drawer,” she said through her veil of tears. “And in this world you have no idea when it might come in handy.”