“Volare” was still playing as Jimmy opened his eyes.
He almost choked on a deep gasp of air.
He rose shakily from his tortured slumber and looked around his room.
Spears of sunshine poked through the holes in the afghan blanket hung across his bedroom window. Jimmy hated the morning light. He was the only member of the Martello family with hazel eyes, and they’d teased him mercilessly about it. The only other person in the clan with light eyes like his was his least favorite uncle, and he hated that connection.
Jimmy’s nonna used to call him il vampiro out of sarcastic endearment.
She’d crocheted that afghan for his sixth Christmas. He wondered how she’d have felt knowing it had become a curtain years later.
“Doesn’t the garlic make you sick, little Jimmy?” she would tease in Italian while she cooked every morning.
“Wrong monster, Nonna. The only thing that can take me down is a silver bullet. I’m a werewolf,” Jimmy would always reply with a laugh, playing their game. She’d scratch the scruffy shadow of stubble that sprouted from his jaw.
And every time, she’d shake her head as she stirred her wooden spoon in the deep steel pot. “Vampiro!”
He missed her.
Nonna passed away four years ago, and last night was the first time he’d seen her in a dream since.
Dream?
Nightmare.
Jimmy sat up straight in the bed, taking stock of his surroundings. As Dean Martin completed his next looping chorus, he picked up his phone and turned off his alarm’s music.
The room was dark and cold and made him think of a coffin.
Yet he was still alive.
And today was his twenty-fifth birthday.
He pushed himself up out of bed, and with a swift tug, pulled his nonna’s afghan from the curtain rod. The August sun seared through the window’s glass and the screen to beat against his face. Jimmy smiled. The outside world looked different today. He shook his head and ran his fingers through his jet-black hair, a final farewell to the residue of last night’s dream.
He slipped his black Gucci slides on over his white socks, but he didn’t bother changing out of the teal basketball shorts he’d slept in.
He threw on a wifebeater, which they crudely called a guinea tee. It was an obvious look for a dark-skinned Sicilian man, but Jimmy was all for stereotypes
He had family from Tunisia, as did many of his friends. Calling them guineas was the kind of casual racial slur he’d been hearing all his life. It wasn’t going to make him change his look. More often than not, Italian men like him wore white ribbed tank tops, whatever the weather. To Jimmy, it was more like a mark of belonging.
It was appropriate attire for today. The summer block was hot in more ways than one.
In the bathroom, Jimmy splashed cold water onto his face and brushed his teeth before he went out, opening the door to his brownstone. He stood on the steps overlooking his street—Doctors’ Row.
Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, had a different kind of vibe today. The air was crisp and clean, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. It was like the whole world was celebrating his birthday with him. That was the kind of love he could get on board with. There was even a part of him that believed he deserved it.
Jimmy surveyed his neighborhood, standing tall and toned, like a Roman statue.
He had the kind of muscular build that came from playing a lot of pickup ball in Brooklyn playgrounds. Born and raised in Bay Ridge, he was a wanderer at heart. He enjoyed venturing out to other parts of Brooklyn to play ball and talk music—hip-hop—with the guys in Bed-Stuy. It was a nice change of pace. Otherwise, all day and every day, he was surrounded by Italians. His whole block was flooded with them, second-generation, third-generation Italians, from the top of the boot down to Sicily and Sardinia.
His neighborhood could double as a map of Italy.
Jimmy walked over to the corner store and grabbed his favorite coffee-flavored soda, Moka Drink, from the refrigerator, earning the scorn of the owner, Giuseppi, from behind the counter. “Why do you always drink that Calabrian piss juice?” Giuseppi quipped. It was their regular banter. It wasn’t funny, but it was a little ritual. “Drink Manhattan Special like a real Sicilian. I’m telling you, the espresso in it will put some hairs on your little beanbags.”
Jimmy laughed and grabbed a second bottle of Moka Drink out of spite.
“Just for you, ‘Seppi, I’m gonna drink two today. One for each hand. It’s my birthday!”
As Jimmy handed
Giuseppi the five-dollar bill for his sodas, Giuseppi pushed the money right back to him. “Your money’s no good here, birthday boy. And here, have some of this…” He slid a tiny bottle of sambuca into Jimmy’s hand. “This’ll really make you grow hair on your beanbags.”
Jimmy stepped outside of the store, cracked the cap off his first Moka Drink with his teeth, and took a sip. He had no idea if there was any real caffeine in the soda, but it woke him up every morning without fail, so real or not, it was good enough for him.
“Ay, cugino, it’s not even eight o’clock, why the hell are you up? On your birthday, no less,” his cousin Nicky hollered as he approached the front of the store. With Jimmy seated and Nicky standing, they were almost the same height. Nicky was shorter than Jimmy, with a fuller face and more pronounced nose, yet they were cast from the same genetic block.
“Come on now, Nick, what did Nas say about waking up early on my born day?” Jimmy replied with a smile. They weren’t just family; they were best friends. In the Martello family, it was rare to venture outside the safety of the clan and make real friends, and with good reason.
Jimmy’s father, Italo Martello Jr., was the don of the Martello crime family, close cousins to the Bonannos, one of the more notorious crime families of New York City and New Jersey. Jimmy’s grandfather, Italo Sr., had retired to the position of underboss a few years back. As the newly minted boss, Italo Jr. handled most of the day-to-day now. Italo Sr. had developed lung disease from the twin killers of a lifetime of puffing on thick cigars and the lungfuls of asbestos he’d inhaled when he’d served in the navy at nineteen and they were pulling the stuff off ships.
“I gave them my heart, and the bastards took my lungs too,” Italo would say through his hacking cough.
He was industrious, though. Over the years, he found new ways to make money. Lots of them. And while he was always tied to his family—who were neck-deep in racketeering and other crime—that didn’t make him a gangster. He was one of them, but he wasn’t one of them.
It wasn’t until Italo found his way to the doorstep of his cousin, Santo Bonanno, that all that changed, and his tenure with the Mafia truly begun.
He entered by running numbers for his distant family, which meant taking part in the Mafia lottery—highly illegal, but with scope for netting a huge reward. Italo had a gift for numbers. Had he stayed in Palermo, maybe he could have done something with his gift; studied and become a math professor at Catania University, maybe. Instead, he became a human calculator for the Mafia. He earned a reputation for both impressively quick calculations and an unmatched memory of numbers.
Jimmy inherited that gift with numbers, though he made a point not to ask questions about the other side of his family’s business. He didn’t want
to know. Questions meant you risked getting answers, and just like with his bedroom in the morning, he liked to be in the dark.
Jimmy had a lucrative job managing the family’s finances and putting his MBA from Fordham to good use. He’d developed a system for dealing with it that he liked to think of as numerical ignorance; every transaction was reduced to the bare numbers, nothing else. He didn’t need to know what had been bought and paid for, or what had been sold. They were just numbers, not crimes. He could almost believe that. One day he’d be made, though, because it always came back on the numbers guy, but he was a long way down the line, and he didn’t want to think about it.
His uncle Domenico was a capo, but Domenico’s son, Domenico Jr., known affectionately to most as Nicky, wasn’t made yet, either. Italo and Domenico’s youngest brother, Salvatore, was, technically, next in line. They called him Sale, though they pronounced it Sally, which was short for Salvatore but translated literally to salt in Italian. It was an inside joke. Sale was always salty about something. He was obsessed with learning the intricacies of the family business, but no one trusted him with the information.
The Martello family owned one of the largest construction companies in Brooklyn, where they funneled most of their money before it circulated through poker tables. The closest Sale got to the secrets was answering the phones at the front desk and making copies of blueprints whenever he got fired from whatever job the family had lined up for him. He wasn’t exactly a gifted kid.
Everyone had known Sale would wind up in prison one day. There was a tragic inevitability to it, but none of them had thought it would be because he’d become a drug mule for some local gang. He was an idiot. He’d stuffed kilos of cocaine into Magnum Trojans and swallowed them one by one. Someone snitched, telling the cops to “Check Salvatore’s ass…” If Salvatore’s family didn’t have any faith in him, why should the Nineteenth Street Crips? That was the logic.
Salvatore was sentenced to six years at Rikers Island. He’d served only three so far.
Italo Jr. and Domenico hoped he’d shank somebody and end up staying there for life.
Now, Jimmy and Nicky
sat on the stoop outside of Jimmy’s brownstone. Jimmy passed Nicky his other Moka Drink, and Nicky cracked the cap off with his teeth and sipped at it.
“Any idea why Zio wants us all at the house today?” Nicky asked, referring to his uncle—Jimmy’s dad.
Jimmy’s father had a home on Bay Ridge Parkway that was big enough for all the family to gather on Sundays. At 2:00 p.m. every Sunday, Jimmy’s mother, Anna, would finish rolling the meatballs and fry them before putting them into the sauce for dinner. It was tradition. Family time. Only today was Saturday. That wasn’t tradition. That was unnerving.
“Dunno, surprise party for pretty boy here,” Jimmy cracked, pointing at himself with his two thumbs.
They both laughed and clinked their Mokas together before taking another sip.
“Salute, bro,” Nicky said.
Jimmy stood up from the steps. “A’ight, bro, I’m gonna head to the barber shop, get a shape-up. But I guess I oughta shower first,” he said, lifting up his arm to expose his hairy armpit.
Nicky pinched his nose. “You smelly scumbag!” he joked. “I’ll see you at two.”
But two was optimistic; Jimmy was running late for his father’s house, but he wanted to look as sharp as ever. He broke out his midnight blue Brioni suit and paired it with Bontoni brown leather shoes. He wore his Patek Philippe Nautilus on his wrist. It was more than a watch. It was a timepiece. The gold crucifix from his confirmation hung around his neck, along with a gold chain holding the Italian horn protecting him from the evil eye—or Il Malocchio, as Nonna had called it. His barber, Johnny, did an extra good job with his shape-up today. Jimmy felt like a million bucks, and he looked twice as good. It was rare that he got dressed up, but he always felt great when he did.
Finally, his iPhone chirped that his Uber Black was approaching.
Jimmy locked up and walked outside, fixing his diamond-studded cuff links on the way. He felt like he was auditioning to be the next James Bond. He had it in the bag.
“Hoot-hoot!” Mrs. Maita yelled from her open window next door. “Don’t you look dashing, little Jimmy! If I was thirty years younger, you’d be in trouble, young man!”
Jimmy looked up at his elderly neighbor and smiled. Thirty? he thought, grinning. More like fifty. “Grazie, Mrs. Maita. You’re looking beautiful, as always.”
Mrs. Maita brushed the gray hair away from her face. “You really are a little charmer, that’s for sure and certain, Mr.
Heartbreaker.”
“That’s me.” He flashed her a grin.
The black Escalade rolled up.
Jimmy hopped inside
It was less than ten minutes from his father’s house, even in traffic, but that forty-seven-dollar Uber ride was worth every cent.
He jumped out of the SUV, pleased to see his mother, Anna, was waiting outside to greet him.
Wrapping him up in a big embrace and kissing his forehead, she said, “Happy birthday, my baby.”
He slid his hand into his coat pocket and pulled out a tiny wrapped jewelry box.
“Thank you for bringing me into the world, Ma,” he replied with a big smile. “This is your day as much as it is mine.” Jimmy loved his mother more than anything, and every birthday, he would buy her a gift as a reminder of the day her life changed forever. That was the thing about birthdays to Jimmy: They were big for two people, not just one. Yet people tended to forget the woman who became a mother on that day all those years ago, so it felt good for him to make a fuss.
“Always my sweet boy,” she said, as they walked inside the house. “Your father’s in his study.”
“I’ll go find him.”
Jimmy approached his father’s study and knuckle-knocked on the heavy cherrywood door before he pushed it open a crack.
“That you, my boy?”
“Sure is, Pop!”
“Come on in,” his father yelled from the other side of the study, out of view.
Italo and Jimmy were mirror images of each other, only Italo was older and grayer. He had that same Sicilian skin, though it was slightly darker. The genetic line was strong. Italo’s father, Italo Sr., looked like an even older and grayer version of the pair, pruned by all of those years in the sun.
Nicky’s father, Domenico, had a stronger nose and chiseled jaw that made him movie-star handsome. Nicky inherited the family nose.
His father wasn’t alone in the study. Jimmy’s nonno, zio, and cugino were all there.
Jimmy first kissed his nonno on each cheek, followed by his father, and then his zio and cugino.
His father walked back to Jimmy.
“Happy birthday, my boy,” he said, holding Jimmy’s face in both of his hands.
His smile was warm. As warm as he’d ever seen it. There was such obvious pride in his eyes.
Italo dropped his hands and clapped them together.
“OK, we’ve got a
little family business to attend to. Shall we?”
Jimmy half expected people to jump out from under the desk and yell, “Surprise!” But very quickly, it was obvious that wasn’t happening. His father walked behind the desk and opened a drawer. He pulled out a travel humidor that held Cohibas lined up like soldiers. He turned toward his hidden liquor cabinet and pulled at the accordion door, displaying two bottles of red wine with the Martello family crest on the label.
The Martello family never made a business out of selling its own wine, but it was a beloved tradition to make a few bottles every year to keep them connected to the earth and the old country.
During their first big trip to Sicily, back when Jimmy was nine and Nicky barely seven, they’d stayed in Zio Edoardo’s villa. He’d cracked a joke that Jimmy had never forgotten: In order to earn their keep, they had to make wine. “Rinse your feet,” Edoardo had told them in a thick Italian accent. “And climb in Don’t be squeamish. Come on, in, in.” He’d ordered them into a giant tub full of red grapes. Jimmy and Nicky had giggled like it was the funniest thing, ...
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