Toughs. Ed Falco

his lips twisted into a sneer. "Your pal Coll killed a bunch of little kids. What do you think happened?"

      Dominic slapped the kid across the face, took him by the collar, and pulled him close. "Who do you think you're talking to, you little snot?"

      "I ain't said nothin'," Frankie answered, and then he was crying again, the tears glistening on his cheeks.

      "Let him go." Loretto found a couple of dollar bills in his wallet and stuffed them in Frankie's pocket. "I didn't have anything to do with this. Neither did Dom."

      Frankie took several steps back until he felt he was safely out of reach. "Yeah, well, the Mick's still your friend, isn't he?" He took the bills from his pocket, threw them on the street, and sprinted away.

      Dom picked up the bills. "We're attracting attention," he said, and again he linked arms with Loretto and guided him down the street. He was a full head shorter than Loretto and he pulled him along like a tugboat. A block later, crowds were thinning out. "The kid's right, isn't he? This was Irish."

      Loretto nodded.

      "For Christ's sake," he said, "now he's gone and done it."

      Loretto's thoughts were caught up with the stout woman who had grabbed his hand and pushed it over the kid's wound, with the cop who had questioned him, and with the old woman dressed in black with a child in her arms. In his head he heard the word morto flying out in a whisper from the old woman and through the crowd.

      "Some birthday present," Dom said.

      Loretto looked at Dom in a way that made it clear he didn't know what he meant.

      Dom added, "Some birthday present Vince gave you."

      "Sure," Loretto said once he remembered it was his birthday. They were nearing the faded red brick tenement building where he'd shared a cold-water flat with Dominic for the past year, since they'd both turned twenty. Loretto had moved out of a single cramped room behind the bakery where he'd started working at sixteen. He'd run away from Mount Loretto every chance he'd got since he'd turned twelve, and at sixteen they'd given up on him. Sister Mary Catherine found him a job at the bakery and he'd worked there a couple of years before Dominic's uncle Gaspar took him on. Dominic had moved out of Gaspar's apartment, where he'd lived since he was an infant. His mother had died of pneumonia soon after he was born. A year later his father had been beaten to death. The way the story went, he'd said something fresh to a girl on a trolley and the next day he'd been found on the street outside his home with his head bashed in.

      Mrs. Marcello, at the top of their stoop, held her face in her hands and practically screamed. "Loretto!" She hurried down the steps to meet him. "What happened?" She held him at arm's length and looked him over.

      Dominic said, "He got blood all over him tryin' to help one of those kids that got shot."

      A middle-aged woman widowed since her twenties, Mrs. Marcello had been standing guard in front of her building from the moment she'd heard the shooting. Her late husband had left her the building when he'd died in the 1918 flu epidemic, along with most of the rest of her family.

      "I'm taking a bath," Loretto said, and he gently extricated himself from Mrs. Marcello's grasp.

      "Dominic," she said, leading both the boys up the steps and into the dim hallway, "go get the kerosene out of the basement. I got a five-gallon jug at the bottom of the stairs."

      "Yeah, but that's yours," Dominic said.

      She shushed him. "Take it." Her eyes filled with tears at the sight of

      Loretto in his bloody clothes. "Go! Go!" She pushed Loretto up the steps with one hand and Dominic down to the basement with the other.

      When Loretto opened the door to his apartment, he found it suffocatingly hot, though neat and in order, thanks mostly to Dom, who had taken to picking up after him and doing most of the cleaning. Now he crossed the sparsely furnished living room and made his way to a bowed triptych of windows that looked out over 107th. He opened the windows to let the heat out. At the scene of the shooting, crowds were still gathered behind police barricades, though the last of the ambulances had departed, leaving only police cars and a swarm of cops and reporters. Loretto'd known Vince Coll since he was seven years old and Vince was nine, when Vince and his older brother, Pete, had been sent to Mount Loretto after their mother died. This, shooting children—this was something Loretto couldn't figure.

      Dominic entered the apartment carrying a glass jug of kerosene. He lugged it over to the big silver water heater in the kitchen and knelt to fill the tank.

      "What are you doing?" Loretto tossed his jacket onto a chair, sat on the window ledge, and went about taking off his shoes.

      Dominic filled the tank and screwed the top back on the jug. "What's it look like I'm doing?"

      "Are you crazy?" Loretto peeled off his socks. "Don't light that thing! It's a hundred and ten degrees in here and you want to light the water heater so I can take a hot bath? You and Mrs. Marcello, you're both crazy."

      Dom sat on the floor and crossed his legs under him. He squinted as if trying to work out a problem. "I don't know what I was thinking. Must be the shooting's got me rattled."

      Loretto took off his pants and undershirt and tossed them on the chair with the rest of his clothes. "Do me a favor." He gestured toward the chair. "Throw my clothes in the trash for me." He went into the bathroom, where he sat on the edge of the tub in his underwear and turned on the water.

      Dominic gathered Loretto's clothes from the living room chair, tucked them under his arm, and paused a minute at the window to look down at the crowded sidewalks around Richie Cabo's club. The words Now he's gone and done it rattled around in his head as he watched a small army of cops and reporters mingling with the crowd, trying to get someone to talk. The cops in their blue uniforms and the reporters with their press cards were not likely to have much luck. This was a Sicilian neighborhood and people here wouldn't be inclined to talk with any stranger, let alone a cop or a reporter. When he looked at his reflection in the window glass and saw that his tie was askew and his hair was mussed, he dropped Loretto's clothes on the chair again and took a minute to straighten himself out. He was short and stocky, with a pudgy face that was so flat it looked unnatural. He ran a pocket comb through his hair, doing the best he could to keep the black curly mop of it in place. When he was finished he picked up Loretto's clothes again and left the apartment, passing the bathroom on the way. Loretto was still sitting on the rim of the tub in his boxers, looking at the blank wall as though a movie were showing there.

      On the street, Dom stuffed Loretto's clothes into a battered metal trash can under the stoop. Mrs. Marcello had started chattering at him in Italian as soon as he stepped out the door. She wanted to know how Loretto was doing, had he been hurt, was it their friend Vince Coll that did it, like everybody was saying. Dom answered that Loretto was fine and neither he nor Loretto had any idea who did it. On his way back into the apartment, at the top of the stoop, he asked her what she'd heard about the kids who'd been shot.

      Mrs. Marcello answered in English, with a shrug. "It's a miracle no one was killed."

      "Yeah?" Dominic said. "I thought that little one was dead?"

      Mrs. Marcello pursed her lips and shook her head. "Not yet," she answered. "He's hanging on. So is his brother. It's the Vengelli boys, Mi chael and Salvatore. And the baby, little Michael Bevilacqua." She shook her head again.

      When Dom asked her why she was shaking her head, she shrugged.

      "They don't think they're going to live?"

      Again Mrs. Marcello shook her head, meaning no, they didn't think the boys would live.

      "Who else?" Dom asked.

      "Flo D'Amello and Sammy Devino. But they're okay."

      Dominic started to ask her how she knew all this and then stopped. No doubt she'd already talked to one of the relatives or friends of the families who'd passed by her stoop, which was how she knew everything she knew about the neighborhood—which was everything.