His walk took him through the complex panorama of Greenwich Village, a pocket of nearly 80,000 souls three miles north of Wall Street and three south of Midtown. Nearly half the inhabitants were immigrants of varying generations. In the west, where the Craccos lived, the majority was Italian. Whereas the family was lucky enough to have their own modest apartment, many residents lived in shared units, two or three families together. It was a bustling world of shops and coffeehouses and clubs from which jazz and swing music escaped into the streets though open windows on hot nights, blending into a hypnotic cacophony. In this area you would also find bohemians—and not necessarily real ones from Czechoslovakia. It was the term used to describe New York’s intelligentsia, painters, writers, socialists, and even a communist or two. The Village had become their home.
In the north—from Washington Square College of New York University and the park, which Cracco could now see on his left, to Fourteenth Street—were the elegant apartments of financiers and lawyers and heads of corporations. Some of those inhabitants earned as much as $7,000 a year!
The East Village, his destination now, was populated by Ukrainians and Poles and Jews and refugees from the Balkans. The men were largely laborers and tradesmen, the women wives and mothers and occasionally washerwomen and shop tenders. Their homes were tenements, tall and grim—outriders of the Lower East Side, to the south, where the early immigrants to New York had settled. The perfume of those streets was cabbage and garlic.
Soon, after only two near-misses on the ice, he arrived at the snow-filled parking lot near the Bowery. He climbed into his Chevrolet and after five minutes bullied and tricked the engine to life. The gears protested as he sought first, and, when they finally engaged, he pulled out of the lot and drove north.
At seven p.m., Cracco collected Heinrich Kohl in front of a flophouse in lower Hell’s Kitchen, west in the Thirties.
The man climbed into the passenger seat.
“Anyone follow?” the German asked.
“No. I’m sure.”
Amid the dense traffic, Cracco piloted his truck south and west until he hit Miller Highway, the main thoroughfare along the Hudson River shore.
He heard a snap of metal and looked to his right. The German’s deft hands were slipping cartridges into the cylinder of a revolver. He put it in his pocket and loaded another gun.
Cracco thought: War is raging on virtually every continent on earth, a thousand people at least have died in the time it took this truck to drive from the hotel to the highway, yet that horror was distant. More shocking was the pistol he was now staring at. Six small bullets. The baker wondered if he could actually point the weapon at another man and pull the trigger.
Then, he pictured his country being so savagely attacked and decided that, yes, he could.
The truck eased slowly along the highway, through the northern portion of the West Village. He could see, now dark, the famed West Washington and the Gansevoort farmers markets—the city’s main meat packers and produce venues. Mornings here were beyond chaos, with purveyors and restaurateurs and individual shoppers mobbing the stalls. By eight a.m. the cobblestones grew slick with blood and fat from the sides of beef, the split-open pigs, and racks of lamb hanging from hooks in the open air. Poultry could be bought here as well. Not much fish; that market was in the Bronx. And at the produce market, every vegetable, legume, and fruit God had created could be found.
Now, glancing to his right, Cracco noted the many piers and docks striking out into the Hudson. Another memory: he and his brother Vincenzo and dozens of other boys leaping off the docks in Gaeta, south of Rome, a beach town where the Cracco family would drive in their Fiat on summer days. That is, they would make the trip if the sputtering temperamental vehicle didn’t overheat—which both brothers prayed at Mass would not happen, Cracco suspecting it was a minor sin to bend His ear for something so selfish. (Though He seemed to grant the supplications with blessed frequency.)
Here, too, in the sweltering days of summer, boys—and the occasional girl—would launch themselves into the gray Hudson River, not the most aromatic or clean body of water. But what did youth care?
He realized that Kohl was speaking to him.
“Si?” Then corrected himself, angry at the slip. He was, after all, supposed to be a spy. “Yes?”
“There. That’s it.”
A listing freighter was docking beside a pier, the structure and the ship equally dilapidated. The docks in Greenwich Village were not like those in Brooklyn or New Jersey, where the big cargo ships offloaded their valuable goods. Smaller ships plied these waters, like the hundred-footer that had carried their precious cargo into the country from Europe.