Gee, haw—left, right—zig, zag—and thus, by a series of right-angular progressions which, reduced in size, and to scale, and transferred somehow to a ribbon of metal, would have made an adequate saw-blade, the car was now edging ever so carefully down a narrow street which definitely proclaimed itself Little Italy. The street at various points was full of boys playing baseball, shouting purely Italian phrases and none other. Bambinos in buggies, or lying comfortably on dark-eyed mothers’ breasts, were to be seen in profusion. Little girls, playing on the sidewalks, would dart out every so often to retrieve a ball, making it necessary for Lou to almost inch his way along. The stores along here were flyspecked as of windows, replete with green goods and gourdlike fruits, and held in view pearshaped cheeses strung on stout strings.
The Marchesi Flats, looming up ahead on the right side of the car, though facing chiefly on the further north and south street beyond, were unmistakable. While their rear could not be seen at all because of a somewhat modern 5 or 6-story modern windowless orange brick storage warehouse that looked out squarely on this narrow east-west street just to the side of their main front, the single oncoming Leaf Street side entrance of the Marchesi Flats facing on this particular street was enough to mark the whole assemblage as one of those architectural monstrosities out of the World’s Columbian Exposition Days of 1893, where no less than Little Egypt herself introduced the Hoochie Koochie. Days wherein all the architects seemingly tried to create the same identical exterior to their flatbuildings—but made of their interior layouts of stairways and entranceways veritable Chinese puzzles, individual to each.
For they were built, the Marchesi Flats were—certainly the segment that lay back on this street, and consequently the whole—of dingy red brick, and full 4 stories high, and, therefore, bearing precarious-looking fire-escapes on their fronts—rears, too, beyond any doubt—like incrustations of some sort. Their sidewalk levels, at least on this street, and doubtlessly similarly on the street beyond, consisted of two dingy looking stores, the further one a corner store, of course, with a narrow black-painted and high-transomed door between, leading to this segment of the flats themselves. Or rather, to be exact—assuming the interiors were as hundreds of others built in 1893—to narrow, uncarpeted wooden stairway leading to flats above. In short, the Flats Marchesi were slum, slum, slum, today—too small in ground area, in toto, to provide ground suitable for a modern housing development—too large to be economically torn down. And destined doubtlessly, as Lou, at the wheel, was reflecting at this moment, to be here in 2060—maybe even 2160, providing wood, plaster and baked brick held out that long!
A man was standing in the doorway of the flats that led to the particular coterie reached from this street only. He seemed to stand there stiffly, and even uneasily, as though waiting for the car, and must therefore, so reasoned Lou at the wheel, be Marchesi himself. The orange brick warehouse was now bearing down on the side, beyond it a narrow gangway cutting it off from the Flats Marchesi—so narrow, indeed, that it couldn’t really be called a gangway—was but a separating “slit”, so thin that only a slender l6-year old girl could ever have traversed it rearward, and that only, probably, sidewise! Now the fact of the store this side of the oncoming doorway being untenanted was discernible, for it became a barbershop with chairs, yes, but no barbers—and no tools—a revolving striped pole that was completely static—nothing, now, but a For Rent sign! Now the identity of the furthest cornermost store was fully evident as a grocery store. Now the man himself—who was already detaching himself at sight of the car from the doorway—was fully observable in every detail.
He was a man all of 60 years of age. Corpulently stolid, grey of hair on bovine head bearing a purple velour hat, with troubled jet black eyes and a touch of unshavenness. He wore a black shirt with scarlet tie, and a navy-blue stiffish suit such as Italians all wear on important occasions, or unimportant ones.
The two men in the car, coming to a stop at the curb, hopped out, Lou in the lead.
Already boys in the street were stopping their baseball game—some were trailing up to look, see, and listen!
It took very little in this district to draw a huge crowd.
Marchesi, as he was to prove indeed, in a moment, to be—and as one, moreover, who knew too well how a crowd could form in this district—boomed forth a quite disarming greeting.
“Ah, my good friends—Charley and Fred—what are you doing—around here? Drop upstairs a minute, won’t you both? We will have a bit of wine! I have some very good wine—just in from Italy. And my signora will sing. We will have a gay time, say not?”
“Believe we will, Joseph!” said Lou, with a moue. “’Twill be nice to talk about old days.”
The knot threatening to form dissolved as quickly as it had started. The call of “batter up” showed the baseball game was running again just where it had left off.
All was serene again, in Little Italy. At least on Leaf Street!
Marchesi was leading the way majestically across the sidewalk—holding the door of the entrance open for his “guests”—closing it again. Now they were all inside, in a high-transom lighted narrow hallway whose calcimine was either yellowed or peeling, and with tiny fragilely padlocked mailboxes studded about like flies on the righthand wall, and a narrow wooden stairs going skyward.
“Up this stairway, gentlemen,” Mr. Marchesi said. “All the way to the top. I’ll pick up the crowbar on the way. I have it ready outside my own flat. Beneath his flat, yes.”
On the way up the first flight, he asked a question backward of himself. To Lou, who was in front of the two men following Marchesi.
“You know all the facts, do you, officers?” was his query.
“The names are Ousley and Tomaroy; I’m Ousley,” said Lou. “Yes, we guess we do know them all. The Captain fired ’em at us like a gatling gun, though he did, at that, sort of—of mortise ’em together—into a—a quaint little picture like—But we’ll ask further—if we’ve overlooked any. Three flights ahead of us, eh? Awoo!”
On they tramped, rounding finally the first landing where light from the usual skylight found at the top floors of all these old buildings fell in sufficient degree to reveal four darksome transomless doors gazing forth at various curious angles to each other. The very angles suggested that indeed some Chinese puzzle had been followed in laying out this segment of the flats, for the Captain had definitely said that the flat where he was sending his two plainclothesmen to “faced westward”. And, the Captain had said moreover, from knowing this district and even the flats themselves out of his own older days, the flat in question had a rear kitchen facing eastward. That meant, Lou figured frowningly—and he had once, in the long ago, been of mind to become an architect—that meant that the corner segment over the store must be reachable by a stairway that had north-facing doors, and would probably have to have some kind of a cross-corridor up above to take in the flats—oh, to hell with it! To hell with it! Who could tell what thoughts had gone through the brains of the men who had designed these old buildings back in the days when construction had not cost too much? Each had, it is true, tried to make the exterior like many others—but had indulged his creative senses in making the interior layouts so startlingly different that builders had bowed to their sheer “genius”!
No sounds of accordions playing gaily were in this segment of the flats—no melodious singing of O Sole Mio from throaty voices. No high voices of children. Evidently this segment of the Flats Marchesi was tenanted by people who both—husband and wife—worked daytimes, and had no children, at least today. Else Mr. Marchesi had artfully studded this segment where he lived with such people—so as to have peace and quiet. Undisturbed, even by such things as shots of suicides—which now he’d nevertheless gotten!
On they tramped to the next landing, which was