The Queer Black Hand Note

“Psst”.

“Vincento?”

He was like a cat, from the back alley to the dimly lit sidewalk beside her, he was suddenly there, holding her hand.

“How is my Ethel?” said Vincento.

They caressed, her curly blonde locks spilling back from her eager face as she succumbed to his embrace and his exploring hands.

“Vincento! Not here. Not now. Someone might see us”.

Ethel grabbed his wandering hand and clasped it in hers, and they stood grinning at each other in the dim glow of the gas light at the Italian end of the street where the row houses crammed closely together. The twilight stick-ball game dwindled to an end, little boys and girls were shuffling back to their homes.

“When then?” said Ethel, “when can we be together?”

“When I have enough money,” he said, sighing.

Ethel spotted her little sister Helen peeping at them from behind a plane tree. The girl took off like a jack rabbit toward their home at the far end of Cleveland Street.

“Give me a week and I will get the money, I promise”, said Ethel. She kissed him on the cheek, then raced after Helen, intent on intercepting her before she tattled. Ethel’s petticoat and skirt flounced about her legs, and her boot heels clacked on the sidewalk. 

Vincento returned to the shadows, thinking on his prospects with the mercurial girl from the big house near the park.

+++

Ethel was called to account in the dining room, where Erskine Gordon and his wife, Dorothy, sat in judgment at one end of the table, while the two youngest children, Hazel and Mildred, clawed at their distracted mother.  Helen, arms crossed in a righteous way, breathlessly related how she’d seen Helen throw herself - half naked - into the arms of a swarthy brute in an alleyway, where biblical things of an unspecified nature took place under cover of the night. 

“I will not stand your dallying with that Italian boy”, said Dorothy, alarmed at Ethel’s descent from grace as reported over the course of several weeks by the inscrutable Helen. A chance encounter, forgiven; chit-chat at the stoop, admonished; a walk in the park, condemned; but a tryst under cover of the night was a worrying progression. “You are too young to be talking to a man of that kind, alone, at night, and a man of unknown intentions!”  

Erskine explored his well-ordered mind in search of wisdom regarding the management of a fourteen-year-old girl but came out of the search empty-handed. He therefore took his cue from the disposition of his wife.

“Ethel, you will be assigned additional chores for the next week”, he pronounced.

“It’s unfair!” said Ethel, stamping a heel on the wooden floor, which rattled the Welsh dresser, and caused their small dog to run yapping into the hall, “You treat me worse than the cook or the maid!”

“Would you prefer we treat you as a child?” said Erskine.  

Ethel’s life was one of drudgery, and constraint. While her father - a man of consequence - toiled daily at his office at the Knickerbocker Coffee Company, and her mother - a woman of solemn virtue – visited churches and women’s groups in pursuit of good causes, Ethel was confined within the well-appointed town house on Cleveland Street, neither woman nor child, tasked with endless chores.

+++

It was another warm sunny day, which added to Ethel’s misery. She threaded a corner of the sodden sheet into the mechanical mangle, turned the handle, and gray water sluiced onto the ground as the wrung sheet snaked toward the basket. She cared naught for the sun, the breeze rustling through the locust tree, the yapping mutt or the whining siblings. She dreamed of dark-haired vagabonds in the streets of Palermo, of dusty olive groves on the baking slopes of Momma Etna, of blood-money, cutthroats and deadly feuds. How she yearned to be a veiled bride, on a boat, heading across the turquoise water to Sicily with Vincento, the Black Hand capo, by her side.

“You’re making it dirty, all over again!” said Helen, pointing at where the damp sheet was piling up on the dirt in the back yard, “I’m telling mother”.

+++

Ethel offered to deliver the gooseberry jam to her aunt who lived on the far side of the park, and, to her surprise, her mother agreed, apparently tired of her sullen behavior. So, Ethel set out cheerfully in the direction of her aunt’s house until out of sight, then turned in a different direction, toward Rockaway.  

“Vincento!” cried Ethel.

Vincento took the woven basket from Ethel and walked beside her along the bustling sidewalk. Chest out, swaggering, he doffed his hat at passers-by, many of whom acknowledged him with a nod. He was a fresh-faced man of growing importance, well-known by the local tradesmen, though barely eighteen. He made Ethel feel important too.

“Mia Bella”, he said, waving his cloth cap gaily in the air, “the day seemed dull, but now it is ablaze”. Ethel was wearing a red velvet bolero jacket, a bright white blouse, and a high-waisted blue skirt. Vincento examined her like found treasure: red, white and blue, through and through, and the prettiest girl in Brooklyn. 

Ethel was quick to business; she had a plan. They stepped into the afternoon quiet of Levy’s Bakery, where the owner effusively handed Vincento two prune pastries – free of charge.  They sat at a small table, where they might speak freely. She was a top-notch dame, smart as a whip, his ticket to the top. 

“Vincento. It is time”, she said in a low voice. “I cannot bear the waiting. You will have the money before the weekend, and we can elope”.

A puzzled look flickered across Vincento’s face, “you think it is not - a bit sudden? I have business…”. He paused.

“What kind of business?”, said Ethel, impatient.

Vincent looked uncomfortable and checked they were not being overheard, “It is family business. You know I cannot tell you more”.

“Well, it will soon be my business too”, she said.

Beneath the good looks and the easy charm, there was a hard-minded man who meted out threats and their consequences, like sour candies to children at a parade. This girl, soon to be woman, was telling him what to do and it sat uncomfortably with him.

“Do you think there’s another way? Perhaps I should pay your father my respects?” said Vincento, who was confident in his ability to persuade others, though mindful of the hurdles that stood between him and respectable society.

“It’s no use Vincento. My father suspects the Italians of corrupting the neighborhood. He would kick you to the curb like a dog," she leaned close, "and you would be forced to do something… terrible, I think.”

She was rushing action at him faster than he liked. Vincento learned early that a man never runs toward danger. 

+++

Busybody Helen discovered the envelope on the doormat in the hallway. She rushed it to her father, who was about to leave for work. He opened it, blanched, tucked it into his jacket pocket and grabbed his hat.

Helen understood that she had discovered something important, but he left without explanation. 

Later, sitting at his big oak desk at his office at the Knickerbocker building, Erskine opened the envelope. The letter was abundantly decorated with crossbones, skulls, a dagger-pierced heart, and an outstretched hand, all rendered in black ink.

“Black Hand order Mr. and Mrs, Please you leve $1,000 under the doghouse or if not you biggest girl will be stole outrite. If you notify the police or anybody we will beat to death. There is fore in our gang and we knows you and yours. C.G. the leader”

Erskine Gordon was a tolerant man who ran a business that employed dozens of men from diverse backgrounds and races, including Irish, Italian, Jews and Blacks; and he conducted business with the honest intent of betterment for all, but he was also prudent, a man of tradition, who favored a salad bowl of peoples over that of the faddish melting pot. Foremost and forever, he was a red-blooded capitalist and a law-and-order man.

News of the Black Hand Society were all over the papers. A reign of terror, that started in Manhattan’s Little Italy and the West Village spread across the East River, facilitated by venal politicians and ineffectual police, depicted variously as corrupt, cowardly, or stupid. There were kidnappings and extortion in Flatbush, dead men in Red Hook gutters, and a taxi driver stabbed through the neck on Cleveland Street! Erskine Gordon weighed his options like sacks of coffee in his warehouse, and it was the law-and-order man that proceeded to the Liberty Avenue Station, where he would instill into the police the right combination of moral clarity, courage, and intelligence.

The queer note was greeted with skepticism by Detective O’Brien, a tall, lugubrious man. It did not accord with O’Brien’s understanding of the criminal mind. “The method of the Black Hand is to operate within the silent walls of their own kind. It is most unusual for their racket to touch upon the everyday citizen” said Detective O’Brien, “or the pillars of the community, so to speak”.

Sergeant Walsh, a squat, burly fellow, was more responsive to Erskine’s concern. “We will place an additional patrolman on the ground for a few days”, he said, “with instructions to confront any group of four men that cannot provide a sensible account of their intentions”.

“In the meantime, you should take precautions”, suggested Detective O’Brien.

“And we will interview the young Italian man you say she met recently”, said Walsh, cracking his knuckles.

Erskine resolved to lay a trap.

+++

Erskine shuttered the windows and double-locked the doors.   It was not yet dark outside, but the gaslit house was gloomy inside. The family were gathered in the dining room again.

“I don’t understand! Why don’t you just pay the ransom?” said Ethel.

“It is the principle of the thing”, said Erskine. 

“These Black Handers are dangerous” said Ethel, “I’ve heard that they never forgive, and they never forget. They are cruel and heartless, and their vendettas pass from one generation to the next and are inescapable”.

“I wonder where you heard that?” said Helen, trilling at her sister’s illicit knowledge of things Italian, happy to stir things up.

“Can’t we just give them the money and not miss a thing?” said Ethel, “after all, it is my life that is at risk! Surely, I should have a say in the matter?”

Erskine handed Ethel a wad of railroad stock certificates that he’d retrieved from the filing cabinet in his study. “Go into the garden, make sure nobody is looking, and place these papers beneath the doghouse as instructed”.

Ethel was placated by this unexpected turn of events. 

“I have a plan”, said Erskine, and from the small closet in the corner of the room he withdrew a canvass-wrapped shotgun. “If the Black Handers come, it will be bad for them, because I will be camped out in the Kitchen, ready to blow them to smithereens”, he said. 

Ethel had much to consider.

+++

Two days passed and the mood soured inside the barricaded house. The girls languished in boredom, tensions escalated, and a dispute over care of the dog led to a ferocious catfight between Ethel and Helen. Dorothy, exasperated, implored her husband to put away the gun and end the lockdown, which he agreed to, readily. He had acquitted himself in an upright way, had scared away the Hand, and he was keen to resume work at the office.

Dorothy unshuttered the windows, the children resumed their activities, including play in the back yard, where Ethel was unusually attentive to her youngest sisters and the dog. It was in this more relaxed atmosphere that Ethel offered to visit her aunt again, to which Dorothy agreed enthusiastically, though against the objections of Helen on whom the burden of tea-time chores would fall exclusively in Ethel’s absence.

Erskine left for work with his mind at peace. He happily attended to his affairs, and returned home in a good state of mind, only to find the house in turmoil. Dorothy was barely able to string a sentence, consumed by worry and dark thoughts. The two youngest girls were weeping. 

“It is the Black Hand!”, said Helen, somewhat merrily.

Erskine administered smelling salt and a tincture of Paregoric to his prone wife, and she was soon restored just enough to explain that Ethel had gone to visit his sister and had not returned. It was nearly 9.00 pm. and dark. Erskine set off for the Police Station, via Cypress Hills, where he soon discovered that his sister had no idea of the whereabouts of her niece and hadn’t seen Ethel in weeks.

“I blame myself”, said Erskine to Sergeant Walsh as the Liberty Avenue Station, “I have let down my guard, and my family too. They have kidnapped the poor child”. Sergeant Walsh was a hardened man, witness to the worst of humanity, but the sobbing father elicited from him a gentle attentiveness.

“Mr. Gordon, have faith, we will pursue every lead, hunt down these Black Handers, bring them out of their hole, dead or alive,” said Walsh, shooting from the hip, “We will fight their terror with that of our own”. 

“But what of my daughter?” said Erskine, who could see Walsh’s heavy-handed approach ending badly. The sergeant needed neither moral clarity nor courage, but perhaps he lacked the intellect Erskine had intended to instill on his prior visit.

Detective O’Brien hurried into the interview room, hatless, collarless, and disheveled, having been called from home to deal with this emergency. Unlike Walsh, O’Brien led with the mind, not with the gut.

It soon came out that the doghouse had been moved, the stock certificates – relating to a bankrupt railroad, and therefore worthless – had been removed by an unseen hand, and that Ethel had voluntarily left the house, carrying a covered basket on her way to her aunt’s.

“It is as clear as day, she has been kidnapped”, exclaimed Walsh.

“Is it possible”, said Detective O’Brien as delicately as his irritation would allow, “that the Black Hand that wrote the note may have been that of your daughter?”

+++

Vincento and Ethel were sitting on the wharf on the South Shore, overlooking Sheepshead Bay. They were watching clammers at work in the stinking mud, and oystermen on their skiffs, shunting in the deep with their poles. Ethel thrilled at this close proximity to the ocean, the same body of water that kissed the sandy shores of Sicily a thousand or more miles away, and which might soon carry her away. He took the sheath of papers from her, wincing at the pain in his chest.

They had the engraved appearance of the dollar bill, and an imprinted face value that made Vincento’s eyes pop. These stock certificates belonged in a world of which Vincento could only dream. He had visited that world once. he’d wandered along Wall Street with other boys from the borough, he’d gawped at the bunting, the flags, the Hansom cabs, the men in spats and toppers, until shooed away by a burly beat cop. Vincento didn’t stop running until China Town, fearing that the establishment was on his neck.

“I have seen my father looking over them at his desk. He says their value goes up with the Market”, said Ethel.

Vincento flinched again. The squat policeman who’d jumped him on Cleveland Street had drummed him hard about the ribs, threatening worse if he didn't wise up. The establishment was onto Vincento and knew exactly where he lived. This girl was top-notch, his ticket, but out of his league. 

“Surely the Black Hand can help us?” said Ethel, for whom the secret society was another kind of ticket, not up, but out…out of Brooklyn. There was no going back now.

Vincento rolled the stock certificates into a scroll and tucked them into his waistcoat. “I will cash them in, and we will leave for a better place tomorrow”.

“But how long will you be? Where should I go? What should I do?” she said, alarmed, frightened.

“Wait here, I will be back soon enough”, he said.

+++

Two days passed. Sergeant Walsh came by each day and reassured Mr. Gordon that Ethel would soon be found, his team would visit every house at the Italian end of the street. They had leads, they were closing in. 

Dorothy was bed-ridden, incapacitated by the ebb of denial and flow of grief. Erskine sat in his office, unable to work; he wondered at fatherhood and the uncommon wisdom required in the understanding and management of daughters, and womenfolk in general; because, clearly, he was lacking. Meanwhile, Helen, burdened by her older sister’s chores, seethed with discontent and jealousy. 

On the third day, with the Gordon home in the grip of a new reality, there was a loud rapping on the front door. Helen was there in a flash, and opened the door expecting Sergeant Walsh, but it was the lank figure of Detective O’Brien instead, accompanied by a uniformed cop. O’Brien removed his hat and enquired about her father’s whereabouts and availability in the most solemn way. Erskine appeared in the hallway, blinking at the light that shone from behind the Detective.

“It is Ethel. We have found her”, said O’Brien.  

The black mud on O'Brien's shoes and about his pant legs smelled of rotting shellfish and the putrid ocean.