Carmella Commands
“Well, I’m helping him make his vermouth and gin, so far,” answered Nicolo. “But he’s going to put me on deliveries in a few days.”
Carmella gazed in rapture. Making deliveries, she knew, was the last word in bootlegging honors. It put you in touch with people, real people, big people, people like Mr. Barrington. You got tips on where to buy real estate. As for the mixing, it was a matter of pride to Doty Street that Mike had so many vermouth customers. That meant, of course, that they served cocktails for dinner—real cocktails, not the denatured kind. Not every bootlegger in Little Italy had customers for vermouth.
They went to two movies, with a soda after each, and then to a dance hall. Carmella was an instinctive dancer, with all the feeling for rhythm and the sense of lying back on the music, as on a cloud, that dancing can mean. Nicolo had to count his steps, sometimes audibly. Mostly he preferred to do a corner foxtrot, scarcely moving beyond the confines of a square yard. Carmella loved the gliding long-step movement about the floor.
Once a patron tipped the orchestra leader to play a waltz. He played it very badly, of course, as modern orchestras do, and was in desperate need of a metronome. But still it was a waltz. Nicolo tried it in terms of the foxtrot, and stumbled. Carmella, who had never danced a waltz before, stopped short and absorbed the rhythm. Suddenly she seized Nicolo, and
[114]
