The Black Forest is a crime novel set in New York City in 1964. A teenager, Brenda Antonucci, witnesses the murder of her father outside a Hells Kitchen restaurant. Brenda is assaulted before being spirited out of the city to her parents suburban home. She remembers little of what happened, to the relief of the mob and the police.

Dylan Farrell is the first officer on the scene. He ignores his partner’s advice to call first before responding. He discovers Brenda in the back room of Musto’s a mob joint on Ninth Avenue. Detectives from the Special Investigations Unit are shaking the place down. They don’t want an active investigation. Dylan is expected to play ball to protect his fellow officers.

Dylan’s been down this road before. In 1956 his tank unit took part in Operation Reforger, an exercise designed to block Soviet troops entering West Germany through the Fulda Gap. In a tiny village in the Black Forest his tank kills a German girl on a bicycle. The accident goes unreported and the tank crew conspire to keep the secret.

Section One of the book is called “The Grasseaters.” This is a phrase from the Knapp Commission investigation into police corruption based in part from testimony from Frank Serpico. Grasseaters and Meateaters described two kinds of corruption from the casual to the methodical. Dylan Farrell is an ordinary guy who has to make a terrible choice: send his friends to prison or go along and become a grasseater.

Here’s the opening.

Chapter One

It was hot the night Brenda Antonucci was attacked, hot the way Hell’s Kitchen could be hot, buildings dripping with dark moisture, residents impatient and restless. Brenda had gone to Musto’s on Ninth Avenue, a ristorante with a limited clientele, a limited menu, and a room in the back for cards.

August of 1964 marked the tenth year of the war for control of the Westside book. Brenda heard her father mention the book many times, when he was on the telephone, his back to the kitchen table. She wrote a poem about the book in fourth grade, a poem her father had slapped her for, the nuns had slapped her for. Her mother had dragged Brenda through a novena about the poem, coughing through prayers, rosaries, gin, and cigarettes.

After that they didn’t talk about daddy’s book.

Her mother died in the spring of ’64, a week before Brenda graduated from Tenth grade. Brenda’s Sweet Sixteen party was canceled and the house swelled with relatives, friends, men with open collar shirts who told Brenda what a fucking shame it was about her mom. Vivien was a happy girl, a party girl, not a ball breaker like some. “She didn’t break balls,” her father moaned in eulogy. “Not my Viv.”

Big Dan Antonucci broke a lot of things on his way up the ladder in the Profaci family. It was his cursed luck to throw in with Joey Gallo, Crazy Joe and his brothers, Larry and Albert. After Vivian’s funeral some Gambino men came around for a meeting of the minds, to ask Big Dan if he renounced his allegiance to Joey. They sat in the back yard where the inflatable pool sagged in a turquoise mound. The men sat on lawn chairs borrowed from Brenda’s grandmother who lived in the old neighborhood where lawn chairs served a limited purpose.

Brenda gave them iced tea. Big Dan hung his head, rubbed his large hands together, allowing his iced tea to melt on the plastic table with the sunflower design. His glass sweated, Big Dan sweated, the Gambino guys fanned themselves with magazines.

They offered condolences. What a pisser, huh? She was too young, thirty-five years old, too young to go like that. A total pisser.

Viv looked good at the service, someone said. The sun beat down as they talked about traffic on the Southern State. Brenda listened while her older brother, Little Danny, sulked. He’d smashed her Ricky Nelson 45, the one with Waitin’ in School on the B side. Danny broke a bowling trophy by throwing it against the wall. Doctor Campo had given them a few sleeping pills, just in case. Brenda had taken a few but nothing had happened. She tried Scotch and threw up. Real grief seemed to elude her. Mrs. Donatelli had shrieked when Vivian’s casket was lowered. Brenda felt astonishment at the outburst; Mrs. Donatelli and her mother had never been close, although they were prominent in the Holy Names Society at the diocesan church.

Brenda’s focus turned to her father. Big Dan displaced all others in her small universe; his sorrow was that of a wounded animal, powerful, misdirected, confused, self-absorbed. Her father head locked the parish priest, demanding a full accounting from God for Vivian’s abrupt departure. Dan wept over his wedding album, shredding photographs until Brenda tugged the scrapbook from his scarred hands. Between outbursts Dan spoke about business. Brenda fed him veal shank while Dan railed about this guy or that guy, he named names, even joked about going on television with Estes Kefauver.

She prayed her father would settle down. He was the breadwinner. Brenda did the Stations of the Cross, offering her body to Holy Office, commending her spirit in contemplation of sin. Big Dan made indiscreet remarks on the telephone. Brenda cringed when she heard him say how fed up he was. Dan spoke to bosses and under bosses in a vigorous new way, offering candid opinions about their leadership abilities, their generosity, their testicles.

Dan said he was allowed a three day mourning period. He didn’t go to work. Brenda worried about the west side book. What was happening to it? She knew the book required Dan’s constant attention, otherwise rats and chiselers would take the food from their mouths, the clothes from their backs. Her mother had understood the nature of Dan’s dedication, his attention to detail. Vivien had spoken to other women in hushed tones about the press of affairs, fucking cops, fucking deadbeats.

Brenda had the wild fear the men visiting from the city might do something to her father. Her father wasn’t making eye contact, speaking to them with his eyes turned downward.

One of the men became agitated. “Come on, no more bullshit, Dan. This thing is out of control.”

Brenda waited around in the kitchen in her one-piece bathing suit, a pink suit her mother had bought her for her fifteenth birthday, because a bikini was out of the question.

“You want to be a slut?” he mother asked.

Brenda cracked the ice cube trays, emptied them, then refilled them with water. Four grown men might need a lot of ice. Yes, she wanted to be a slut if that meant being a grown woman with the ability to choose her own clothing, her own friends, her own life. She’d almost said that to her mother that day in A&S with the snotty sales girl watching; yes, I want to be a slut.

Good thing she hadn’t. She be doing stations of the cross for the rest of her life, pondering Jesus’ sacrifice when all she wanted was a sexy bathing suit or at least some breasts. She was flat as a pancake where her mother had been well endowed, full figured, a regular Rosalyn Russell according to what she’d overheard.

“Bring us some wine,” Big Dan bellowed.

She hurried outside with the bottles. The Gambino men didn’t smile at her this time. They didn’t make jokes or ask how she was doing.

“Leave it,” her father snapped. “Bring some glasses.”

Big Dan had been quiet after the guests left, quiet in a way Brenda decided constituted fear. Her anxiety grew when her father began to pace in the family room. He snatched the car keys from the hook above the telephone, started to say something to her, juggling the keys in his left hand, his expression pained. “I’m going in to the city,” he said.

“Is everything all right?” Brenda asked.

“Sure. I won’t be back till late. Here’s a couple of bucks for you and your brother.”

He handed her a twenty.

“I don’t need this much,” she said.

Her father shrugged, kissing her forehead. “Keep an eye on Danny. If anything comes up, leave a message at Musto’s. You got the number?”

Brenda nodded. Standing close to him, she caught the tang of sweat under his shirt as he hugged her, the rough stubble of his beard, tobacco and wine on his breath. “If Bobby Forks calls…ah, forget it.”

She watched him drive away. They’d lived on Long Island three years now. Brenda could not get used to it; there were no sidewalks, only driveways and lawns, trees and cars. She’d grown up in Bay Ridge, far from the Manhattan, but Brooklyn had its own rhythm, and smells. Brooklyn had sidewalks, stoops, street corners, bakeries and Laundromats on the bigger streets. People gathered at these places, they talked, they knew one another.

Brenda didn’t see Danny until he was behind her. He snatched the twenty of her hand, pushing her onto the sofa with a harsh laugh. “You’re too stupid to take up space,” he said.

“That’s dad’s money,” she said.

“You don’t get it, do you? He ain’t coming back. Twenty bucks? Since when does he hand out that kind of money?”

“Since mom died.”

Danny looked stricken. “What? There’s more?”

He searched the house, smashing the cookie jar he’d made in the fifth grade, turning their mother’s dresser inside out, throwing her clothes and underwear all over the bedroom. Tears ran down his cheeks as he screamed and threatened her, but Brenda had hidden the money well, Her father had given Brenda four hundred dollars to buy groceries; she knew why Danny wanted the money. She was not going to let him take their food money to buy a gun.

He smacked her a few times before rushing out of the house, slamming the door behind him. Brenda waited for twenty minutes in case he came back. Then she peeled out of her bathing suit, took a shower in her mother’s bathroom, and got dressed. She called for a station taxi and when it arrived, Brenda went over to Massapequa Park to wait for a train.

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