CHAPTER TWENTY
THE WRONG UMBRELLA
Danny Marino was beginning to suspect that he had become a messenger service for people who didn’t like messages.
Tony Spada was still looking at him.
“The blue suit won’t be ready Thursday.”
“That’s what he said.”
Tony picked up the racing form.
That seemed to conclude the matter.
Danny stood there another moment.
“Anything else?”
Tony looked surprised.
“Should there be?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then we’re even.”
Nicky Bellomo was at the card table working on a piece of cheesecake. Danny couldn’t figure out where Nicky found all this food. There were no restaurants in the building and Nicky rarely seemed to leave.
Nicky pointed his fork at Danny.
“You get the rolls?”
“No.”
“I asked you to get rolls.”
“Tony said no rolls.”
Nicky looked at Tony.
Tony continued reading the racing form.
Nicky returned to the cheesecake.
Danny sat down.
For the next twenty minutes nobody said anything.
Then the telephone rang.
Tony picked it up.
“Yeah.”
He listened.
“No.”
Another pause.
“I understand.”
He hung up.
Danny waited.
Tony opened the racing form again.
Five minutes passed.
Then Tony said, “Go over to Forty-Second Street.”
Danny looked at him.
“Now?”
“No. Next Christmas. Yeah, now.”
Danny got up.
“Where on Forty-Second?”
“There’s a cigar store between Lexington and Third, next to Luigi’s Pizza. You know the place?”
“I can find it.”
“You go inside. There’s a barrel full of umbrellas by the door.”
Danny waited.
Tony looked back at the racing form.
“What about it?”
“There’ll be a lot of umbrellas in it.”
“All right.”
“Only one of them has a curved wooden handle. Take that one and bring it back here.”
Danny stared at him.
“It’s the Bumbershoot,” he told Danny.
“You mean the umbrella?” Danny queried.
“Yeah, the Bumbershoot, the English umbrella with the carved handle, that’s what I said.”
“Does it belong to somebody? Do I pay for it?”
Tony lowered the paper.
“Everything belongs to somebody. Just take the Bumbershoot and go.”
Danny put on his coat. Nicky looked up from the cheesecake. “If you’re going past Lindy’s Deli — ” Nicky waved a hand in the general direction of the door.
Danny hastily said “I’m not going past there.”
“I didn’t say anything,” Nicky said.
“You were going to.”
Danny went outside. The rain had stopped, but the city hadn’t noticed yet.
People still carried umbrellas. Water dripped from fire escapes. Tires hissed against the pavement. The gutters along Second Avenue were full of cigarette packages, newspaper, and the remains of somebody’s lunch.
Danny walked west.
He had plenty of time to think about the blue suit. He didn’t know what the blue suit meant. He didn’t know if there was a blue suit. He didn’t know if Mr. Caruso was a tailor or a registered hoodlum.
He remembered that Tony couldn’t or wouldn’t talk to Caruso on the telephone. Maybe the phones are tapped. He didn’t know why Charlie at the funeral parlor needed a password. He didn’t know why or for what anybody had paid him five hundred dollars. He was beginning to accumulate a considerable amount of information about things he didn’t know.
The cigar store was exactly where Tony said it would be.
Danny stopped across the street. It was a narrow place with a red-and-gold sign over the door. Cigars in boxes filled the window. A wooden Indian stood just inside, looking embarrassed about the whole arrangement. Danny crossed the street.
A bell rang when he opened the door. The man behind the counter was reading a newspaper. Danny glanced at the umbrella stand. There were the umbrellas.
They all had straight black handles, except one, that had a curved wooden handle. Danny picked it up. The man behind the counter continued reading. He didn’t even look up. Danny waited.
Nothing happened.
He carried the umbrella outside. He had gone half a block when a voice behind him said:
“Hey.” Danny kept walking. “Hey. You,” said the voice again. Danny stopped. A short man in a gray overcoat was coming toward him. “You took my umbrella.”
Danny looked down at the umbrella.
“Did I? Sorry, I thought it was mine.”
“I left it in there two minutes ago.”
“Curved wooden handle?”
“Yes.”
Danny handed it to him.
“Sorry.”
The man gave him a peculiar look.
“You just walk into stores and take umbrellas?”
“Not usually.”
The man opened the umbrella, although it wasn’t raining. Danny watched him walk away. He went back to the cigar store. The man behind the counter was still reading the newspaper. Danny looked at the umbrella stand.
A bunch of umbrellas.
He stood there.
The man behind the counter turned a page.
Danny said, “Was there another umbrella here?”
The man looked up.
“What?”
“With a curved wooden handle.”
“You took it.”
“That was the wrong one.”
The man shrugged.
Danny went outside again.
He stood under the awning.
This was new.
Until now, the errands had been meaningless.
This one had gone wrong.
He wasn’t sure whether that was an improvement.
A taxi pulled up. A tall man got out carrying an umbrella. Curved wooden handle. He went into the cigar store. Danny waited.
The taxi drove away.
Two minutes later the tall man came out, but without the umbrella. He turned toward Lexington Avenue and disappeared into the crowd. Danny went back inside.
There were a bunch of umbrellas in the stand.
One curved wooden handle.
Danny picked up the curved wooden one.
The man behind the counter didn’t look up.
Danny carried it back to Second Avenue.
Tony was still behind the desk.
Nicky was no longer eating cheesecake.
He had found a sandwich.
Danny put the umbrella on Tony’s desk.
Tony looked at it.
“What took you so long?”
“I got the wrong umbrella.”
Tony stopped.
Nicky stopped chewing.
It was the first time Danny had ever seen Nicky stop chewing voluntarily.
Tony looked at Danny.
“What do you mean, the wrong umbrella?”
“There were about a dozen umbrellas in the barrel by the door. One had a curved wooden handle. I took it. A guy came after me and said it was his.”
“What guy?”
“Short. Gray coat. About forty-five. Maybe fifty.”
“You give it to him?”
“It was his umbrella.”
Tony stared at him.
Danny pointed to the umbrella on the desk.
“Then another guy came in with this one.”
Tony didn’t touch it.
For several seconds nobody moved.
Then Tony said, “Did the first guy see you?”
“He talked to me.”
“Did he see your face?”
“Unless he talks to the back of people’s heads.”
Tony leaned back in his chair.
Nicky put down the sandwich.
Danny looked from one to the other.
“Is that bad?”
Tony ignored the question.
He picked up the telephone and dialed.
He waited.
“It’s me.”
Pause.
“The wrong umbrella was there.”
Another pause.
“No. He got the right one.”
Tony listened.
Then his expression changed.
Not much.
But enough.
“Who?”
He listened again.
Danny watched him.
Tony said, “You’re sure?”
Another pause.
“All right.”
He hung up.
Nobody spoke.
Finally Danny said, “What?”
Tony looked at the umbrella.
“The first umbrella wasn’t there by accident.”
Danny waited.
Tony didn’t continue.
“Whose was it?”
Tony folded the racing form very carefully.
“I don’t know.”
That answer bothered Danny more than anything else Tony could have said.
Because Tony Spada knew things.
Tony knew who belonged to whom. He knew which streets belonged to which people. He knew who could sit at which table, who could use which telephone, who could walk into which social club without being introduced.
Tony knew which men could never be seen together. Tony knew the rules. And Tony didn’t know who owned the umbrella.
Nicky picked up his sandwich. He looked at it. For once, he didn’t take a bite.
Danny looked at the umbrella lying across Tony’s desk.
It was an ordinary black umbrella with a wooden handle.
Probably cost twelve dollars.
Maybe fifteen.
Tony reached over and turned it slightly. He inspected the brass band around the handle. Something had been engraved into the metal ring. Danny leaned closer. It wasn’t a name. It wasn’t initials. It was a tiny crown.
Tony covered it with his hand.
“Danny.”
“Yeah?”
“You never saw that.”
Danny looked at him.
“Saw what?”
Tony nodded.
“Good. I like the way you think.”
Outside, it had started pouring rain again.
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CHAPTER TWENTY BREAKDOWN
THE WRONG UMBRELLA
What Happens
Danny returns from delivering the message about the blue suit and is immediately sent on another apparently meaningless errand.
Tony tells him to go to a cigar store on Forty-Second Street. There will be a dozen umbrellas in a stand. Danny is to take the one with the curved wooden handle.
He does.
Unfortunately, it belongs to somebody else. A short man in a gray overcoat follows Danny out of the store and demands his umbrella back. Danny returns it.
Danny goes back to the cigar store and waits.
A tall man arrives by taxi carrying another umbrella with a wooden handle. He leaves it in the stand and walks away.
Danny takes this second umbrella back to Tony.
When Danny explains what happened, Tony becomes concerned.
The first umbrella—the wrong umbrella—was not there accidentally.
Tony makes a telephone call.
For the first time, Danny hears Tony admit that he doesn’t know who is behind something.
Then Tony notices a tiny crown scratched into the silver band around the handle of the correct umbrella.
He immediately tells Danny that he never saw it.
What Changes
Until now, Danny has been moving through a world controlled by people who seem to know exactly what they are doing.
Danny doesn’t understand the messages, passwords, meetings, errands or rules—but Tony does.
That changes here.
Tony encounters something he doesn’t recognize.
For the first time, the mystery is bigger than Danny’s ignorance.
It is also bigger than Tony’s knowledge.
The Wrong Umbrella
The accidental-looking first umbrella is the important clue.
Somebody knew:
-
where the exchange would take place,
-
what kind of umbrella would be used,
-
and approximately when Danny would arrive.
That means somebody is watching the machinery closely enough to interfere with it.
We don’t yet know why.
We don’t even know whether the interference was directed at Danny, Tony, the messenger, or somebody else entirely.
The Crown
The tiny crown is deliberately unexplained.
It may be a mark, a signature, an organization, a warning, or something else.
Tony recognizes that it matters.
But apparently he doesn’t recognize something about it.
That is more disturbing than if he had recognized it immediately.
Danny’s Position
Danny remains useful precisely because he is nobody.
But being nobody is becoming more and more difficult to maintain. People are beginning to see his face. The man with the wrong umbrella has now spoken directly to him.
Danny may still be outside the organization, but he is becoming visible to people outside it as well.
Nicky
Nicky performs an important dramatic function here. He stops eating. For Nicky Bellomo, this is approximately equivalent to an air-raid siren. If something is serious enough to interrupt Nicky’s sandwich, Danny knows something has changed.
The Larger Mystery
We still do not introduce the person behind the larger game. We don’t know whether the crown belongs to one man, a group, another criminal organization, or something nobody has yet considered.
All we establish is this:
There may be another level above the level Danny has been watching.
And Tony Spada doesn’t know who’s up there.
What the Chapter Accomplishes
The chapter begins as another comic, pointless Danny Marino errand.
Then something goes wrong.
The comedy remains, but the atmosphere changes.
The important revelation isn’t the umbrella.
It isn’t even the crown.
It’s Tony’s answer:
“I don’t know.”
That is the moment the world of the story gets bigger.
That crown can now disappear for quite a while. We don’t have to explain it in Chapter Twenty-One—or even mention it. It’ll be much more effective if, several chapters from now, that little crown turns up somewhere it absolutely shouldn’t be.
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Here’s the Bardo bus now!!!
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See You At The Top!!!
gorby