ABSTRACT
Guglielmo Zucco, or Googi, the Shabbas goy, who was sought by Joey on their wood-stealing expedition, lived in a three-room tenement flat on the Bowery between Stanton and Houston Streets. It was an old, sooty-colored crumbling structure that hung limp between the Grand Hotel, a Bowery flop house (25 cents a room, 15 cents a bed, showers free) and a loft building occupied by a wholesale crockery house and two paper-box manufacturers. Zucco père was a brigand of a Sicilian who, years before, had been separated from his savings by a pair of obliging countrymen who had sold him a money-making machine. They assured him that if he left fifteen ten-dollar bills in the machine (which they sold him for only fifty dollars as a special concession) he would find ten times that amount at the end of a week. Then they sat down and figured out with him that ten times $150 is $1,500 and with that tidy sum he could return to his native village and live out his years in affluence. And while he relaxed, the machine would re-vitalize inself for a second miracle. Zucco wanted to believe and bought the contrivance. To guarantee results they volunteered to insert the money properly for him. Didn’t he give them his savings with his own hands and didn’t he watch them insert the bills with his own eyes? Every night for six days he came home from work and prayed before the mysterious box with its magical arrangement of spools and wires.
