You'll find it printed on the pink slip--the 'squeal
book'--by this time. 'Gainst the rules for me to talk," he added with
a good-natured grin, then to the crowd: "G'wan, now. You're blockin'
traffic. Keep movin'."
I turned to Craig and Luigi. Their eyes were riveted on the big gilt
sign, half broken, and all askew overhead. It read:
CIRO DI CESARE & CO. BANKERS
NEW YORK, GENOA, NAPLES, ROME, PALERMO
"This is the reminder so that Gennaro and his father-in-law will not
forget," I gasped.
"Yes," added Craig, pulling us away, "and Cesare himself is wounded,
too. Perhaps that was for putting up the notice refusing to pay.
Perhaps not. It's a queer case--they usually set the bombs off at
night when no one is around. There must be more back of this than
merely to scare Gennaro. It looks to me as if they were after Cesare,
too, first by poison, then by dynamite."
We shouldered our way out through the crowd and went on until we came
to Mulberry Street, pulsing with life. Down we went past the little
shops, dodging the children, and making way for women with huge
bundles of sweat-shop clothing accurately balanced on their heads or
hugged up under their capacious capes. Here was just one little colony
of the hundreds of thousands of Italians--a population larger than the
Italian population of Rome--of whose life the rest of New York knew
and cared nothing.
At last we came to Albano's little wine-shop, a dark, evil, malodorous
place on the street level of a five-story, alleged "new-law" tenement.
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