The Last Days of Il Duce Read online

  “I have weed, hash. Good herb. No coke.”

  “I want coke.”

  “Wait a minute. I get my friend. He meet you at that table over there. Forty bucks for a rock, but you don’t smoke it here. Smoke it someplace else. Now give me the money.”

  That was the way the kids worked their business. One took your money, strolled away, then one of his buddies met you with the drugs. They kept the stuff stashed somewhere nearby, working it so nobody was holding it for very long and it was tough for the cops to make a sting.

  I reached as if to pull money from my wallet but instead I took out a picture of my brother, then laid a couple bills out across it.

  “I don’t want the coke. I want the man who sells the coke. I want to know if he knows my brother, in the picture.”

  The kid glanced down.

  “Fuck you,” he said.

  Then he sauntered back to his friends. They talked me over in Spanish for a while, and laughed, kicking at the pigeons. A customer came up and I watched them go through the routine with a new guy, this time selling a couple of joints. After that they ignored me, or pretended to, and I began to feel as if I were fading into the invisible world. So I went down to Linda Street, to try the dealers there, and got the same treatment more or less, only now someone was following me. A white man, hair the color of oil, wearing a black blazer and long black tie. I saw him again outside Picaro’s, a bohemian cafe where management didn’t bother to chase off the junkies who wandered in every fifteen seconds begging for change. They were part of the local charm.

  I gave the junkies nickels and quarters, showing them the picture of my brother, and at last some old junkie older than death itself told me he thought maybe he’d seen my brother in the El Corazón, a movie theater that had been converted to a hotel ten years back, and these days that hotel was a crack palace first class. The man who would know for sure, the old junkie said, was in room 21.

  So I headed to Mission Street. The man in the blazer still followed me, eating a burrito as he walked, licking his fingers, not seeming to care if he was conspicuous or no. I ignored him and clumped up the rotting stairs of the El Corazón, then down a long hall to the back of the building. At the end was number 21 and inside I found a surly little man in a white t-shirt. The man’s arms were tattooed and his hair stood up in a lick, wet and ugly, as if a cow had dragged its tongue over his head.

  “You looking for some jewel?”

  I went through the same routine again, taking out my wallet and the picture.

  “This is my brother.”

  “I got one of my baby sister. You wanna trade?”

  “I want to know if you ever seen him.”

  “The cops already been round here with this. And I told them the same thing I’ll tell you; I ain’t never seen this brother of yours.”

  “An old junkie, he told me he’d seen him here.”

  “I know that junkie. He’s full of shit. Now you want some jewel? If no, then I don’t have dick for you. Capisch?”

  “I understand.”

  “I got me a business here. Free enterprise. Lai-zay faire. I don’t want any trouble.”

  The little man sat behind a desk, his hand inside one of the drawers. If I gave him any trouble I guessed he would shoot me, then take his drugs and his money and disappear down the fire escape. Or maybe he would just flush the drugs and tell the cops I was some kind of burglar broke into his room in broad daylight, come to steal his cowlick.

  I turned to the door.

  “Hey?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Your picture.”

  I went back to the desk to pick it up but the man stopped my hand, gandering all over the photograph. His eyes went sentimental all of a sudden, his face slack, soft as a peach. Then he let it go.

  “No, your brother ain’t never came around this place. But I tell you, I know how it feels. You want some jewel, I give you a break. One time.”

  “Thanks a ton.”

  I walked down the hall, thinking what a swell guy he was, and as I walked past those hall doors, one after another, I noticed all of them were shut. I could hear some godawful moaning behind them, and laughing. I was glad not to know what was going on inside.

  Outside, the man in the blazer was gone. I looked around for a place to have a beer, or something to eat, but then I looked around again, up and down those streets, and felt a dirty wave of anguish wash up into my gut. My brother was dead and I would never find anything I needed in the Mission. These people would never help me. I walked down to Capp Street, past the little immigrant boys who sold their bodies for ice cream and candy, and I kept walking, all the way down Market, through the thickening crowd, until I was back home in North Beach. I walked past the familiar bars along Broadway, where everything seemed to me somehow simpler and more wholesome: just girls in G-strings and giggling tourists and old men beating off into the Naugehyde.

  I bought myself a can of beer from the corner store and sat on a stoop outside the Dante Hotel, looking across at the naked lights of the strip joints and at the hawkers out front, those fat little men in ribbed shirts and black slacks, bouncing up and down, trying to steer the passersby inside. In the middle of the block was a place called J. Ferrari’s, which was nothing from the outside but a blank door and a window whose glass had been spray-painted black.

  It was an easy place to miss, and the only reason I noticed it now was because a small, monkey-faced man emerged from inside. People in the neighborhood called him J. Ferrari because that was the name stenciled on the window, but the truth was that that lettering was very old and the ugly little man was only in his thirties. I did not know his real name, but I knew Ferrari’s had been a bookie joint when I was a kid, and that even now the sleaze joints and restaurants up and down the block paid rent to the little man. Though the prominenti denied it, people around the neighborhood said part of that money went back to some old mobster in Chicago, and they told you too that Ferrari’s was the place to go if you ever wanted to have someone’s fingers cut off, or if you wanted your wife to disappear into the bay, and that had always been so and always would be, so long as there was an Italian in North Beach. I’d got a look inside J. Ferrari’s once, and it was nothing at all, just a small room with a desk, though I’d heard rumors there was a hidden door in the wall, leading into the bowels of the building, and from there you could follow the old tunnels into Chinatown. I did not know if any of that was true, but I did know I’d seen Chinese stopping by his office, same as Italians.

  None of that mattered to me though, because the monkey man was not my problem, and I wanted to get myself a drink.

  I crossed the street and was starting in serious at the bar. After a while a little girl named Suzie came and sat beside me. She was half-Filipino, half-black, and half-Italian, she told me, the daughter of an American soldier, born in captivity, and she wanted to give me a blow job. I put my arm around her and stumbled out into the street; then I gave her a few bucks and a little kiss on the cheek and told her to go away.

  “Not tonight, Suzie.”

  “Too late. You already pay.”

  “What you mean?”

  “You got time coming. You deal with me, you get what you deserve.”

  I was sky drunk and didn’t understand. Two men rushed at me from the mouth of the alley, big men, and though neither of them was the man in the blazer, I thought of him anyway and believed he had somehow tracked me down. I had done myself stupid, I thought, going down to the Mission, fucking around where I shouldn’t fuck. I tried to run but I was too drunk and big tears were rolling out of my eyes. They caught me and threw me against the wall. One of them held my arms behind my back, the other one snapped on cuffs, the little girl stood nearby watching, hands on her hips—and suddenly it came clear to me. I had been wrong. These weren’t thugs, these were vice, all three of them. The girl was no little girl at all but a cop, and now they were going to take me down for solicitation. They pulled out my wallet, looking for
identification, and one of the cops recognized the name.

  “Abruzzi Jones,” he said. “This guy’s brother was just shot down in the Mission.”

  “Look at those tears.”

  “Poor son-of-a-bitch.”

  “It’s a rotten place, this world.”

  “Hey,” protested Suzie. “It’s not that rotten. He broke the law.”

  “It’ll never stick. The judges in this city, they’re all soft hearts.”

  “Or perverts.”

  “Oh, fuck you guys!” said Suzie. “You go in there. See if you like their fat hands on your thighs.”

  The men ignored Suzie. Out of the milk of human kindness, or because they were a little drunk themselves, they let me go. They pushed me out of the alley and told Suzie to go back inside, this one was no good, a weeper and a wailer, and please go back and find someone whose brother hadn’t just been shot through the heart.

  NINE

  LEANORA CHINN

  The next day I got a call from Lieutenant Chinn. The investigation was ongoing and she needed a few minutes of my time.

  “Odds and ends,” she explained.

  “Should I come down?”

  “No. I’ll be out in the neighborhood today. Your place, I’ll stop by.”

  I thought Leanora Chinn arranged it that way to be polite, to spare me a trip to the station. After she knocked on my door, though, I realized the other reason; she wanted to get a peek at me in my native habitat, to see what she could see. I sensed she was disappointed. The place was clean, or at least clean enough, and there wasn’t any blood smeared on the walls.

  She looked over some old photographs hanging by my desk. Relatives from Italy. The neighborhood in the old days. Marie and Joe and I, leaning against that car down at Ocean Beach, in that photo I’d swiped from my brother’s place the day after he died.

  “Family?”

  “Yeah. My wall of ancestors.”

  Chinn peered into a shot of my mom and dad out on a Sunday stroll, striking a pose in front of Stephano’s Garment Shop.

  “That building’s been torn down.”

  “Yeah, but Stephano’s still going strong. Down on Union Square.”

  “I remember him. Needle and thread, cuffing everyone’s pants.”

  “You from the neighborhood?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I live in the same house I grew up in.”

  I gave Lieutenant Chinn a second look. She had hard eyes, it was true, but she had small delicate lips, with a faint gloss on them, and she wore a straight skirt and a simple blouse, each one a different shade of blue. If you saw her on the street you might just think she was a Chinatown working girl, with her wholesome face and her quick walk, but the truth was, her clothes were police colors, even if they were not police uniform, and her eyes were black as her hair and unforgiving.

  “This woman, Marie Donnatelli?” Lieutenant Chinn pointed to Marie in the picture.

  “You know Marie?”

  “I stopped by her apartment day before yesterday. Day of the funeral. I was parked in my car, across the street, when you dropped her off.”

  “Oh.”

  Chinn looked at me with those eyes of hers and I felt my chest tighten. Because before Marie climbed out of the car, she’d given me a quick sisterly kiss—as if to change the meaning of everything that had gone before—but I’d reached out and put my hand under her coat, fumbling, and Marie had let out a sweet little moan and buried her head in my shoulder.

  “What was your relationship with Marie?”

  “She was my brother’s first wife.”

  “That part, I know.”

  “To be honest I haven’t talked to her, nothing but a hello on the street, not for years. Then after the funeral, we took a drive around. We talked a little bit.”

  “You used to be lovers, didn’t you?”

  “Marie tell you that? Or Luisa?”

  “Does it make any difference?”

  “Probably not. Anyway, it was a long time ago. We were kids. It was before she married my brother.”

  “Before she married your brother?”

  “Yes. Before.”

  “What kind of relationship did they have?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was it violent?”

  “They had Latin tempers, if that’s what you’re asking. But it was only shouting and fuss. Nothing serious. Anyway, it was over between those two. There wasn’t any reason for them to be fighting now.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah.”

  “A neighbor in the complex told us there was an argument at Marie’s apartment. Between a man and a woman, a couple of days before the murder.”

  “I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

  “It got loud and ugly.”

  “Maybe it came from a different apartment.”

  I walked to the window and glanced down into the street, past the Naked Moon to Zirpoli’s Books, where in the days before my time the neighborhood men would gather, smoking their cigars, and listen to Mussolini on the radio. Some hipsters hung out front now, posturing in their black sweatshirts and black jeans, tossing jibes at the tourists, mocking their polo shirts, their Midwestern pastels. Beyond them the gaudy lanterns of Chinatown receded up the hill.

  Leanora Chinn stood behind me. She put something soft into her voice. “I grew up on this side of Grant, just a few blocks up.”

  “What school?”

  “Galileo.”

  It was the same school as mine, only Leanora was a few years younger, one of those Chinese girls who clustered at the edge of the asphalt, back when the streets were Italian and the playgrounds too and God stuffed every piece of ravioli with a dollar bill. Two separate worlds, the Chinese and the Italians. Though we lived side by side, we kept our distance. The Chinese spoke their own language, or at least the old ones did, but they fell silent at your approach. I remember swaggering into that silence, but the longer I swaggered, the deeper that silence and the more I feared it would overwhelm me.

  “We lived in Winter Alley,” she said at last. “My family was one of the first to move across Broadway. 1965. The street was full of bougainvillea then.”

  “It was also full of Italians.”

  “Yes.”

  “They didn’t like seeing you then, moving onto their street.”

  “They don’t like seeing me now. A Chinese cop.”

  “Well, they’ve been here a long time. My parents came in the ’30s. The old ones, before that.”

  “Mine came during the Gold Rush.”

  I did not want to get into this because I knew there was no way of getting out. Nobody forgets anything in this world. Because even if the mind forgets, the blood remembers. Just as the children of the long-dead Genovesi do not forget how the Sicilians drove their grandparents from Fisherman’s Wharf, the Chinese do not forget how Sbarboro’s Italian dragoons torched Chinatown, nor do the granddaughters of pigtailed fishmongers forget the faces of Italian kids who threw rocks through their windows late at night. I was one of those kids, I guess, just as I was a kid who stood on the corner and watched the Chinese girls, all dressed up, plaid skirts and skinny legs, disappear down alleys I’d been warned never to go.

  “A plainclothes saw you down in the Mission at the El Corazón,” said Leanora Chinn. “I don’t think that’s a great idea.”

  “The man in the blazer?”

  “He said you were putting yourself at risk.”

  “Someone has to find my brother’s murderer.”

  “Not you. Not in the Mission.”

  “I showed his picture around. No one recognized it.”

  “They’re not going to tell you that. Besides, that picture looks as much like you.”

  “They’ll think I’m his ghost,” I said.

  “They’ll think you’re a cop. You keep wandering around, you’ll stumble into something, nothing to do with your brother, and someone will think you’re after something that you’re not, and you�
�ll get hurt for no reason you care about, and it won’t do anybody any good.”

  “It wasn’t a drug deal. That wasn’t why Joe was killed.”

  “Then why?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let me ask me you some other questions.”

  Then Lieutenant Chinn went down her list, reading off a little pad, all the while sitting with her knees close together, her feet crossed at the ankles. Who were my brother’s enemies? Was he sleeping with anyone besides Luisa? What were his business contacts? She went on like this more or less and I answered her questions. I don’t think I helped her much. Then finally she stood up to go and told me I should leave the investigation to the police. I took that to mean they were writing it off as a street homicide, drug-related, or a robbery. I was almost relieved. I didn’t want to think about it anymore.

  Before she left, just before I took her hand to say goodbye, Leanora Chinn asked me another question.

  “Where were you the night your brother was murdered?”

  I should have known it was coming but I didn’t, and now I felt a hard little noise in my chest, thumping out of tune.

  “I was with him earlier that day. We had some drinks, drove around. I left him about seven.”

  “Where did you go after?”

  “Here, to North Beach.”

  “Where were you between 10:00 and 10:30?”

  “That the time of death?”

  “Pretty close.”

  “I was here.”

  “Did anybody in the neighborhood see you?”

  “The clerk down at the Corner Smoke. I went in for cigarettes. Before that I had dinner down at Jojo’s Place. About nine. You can talk to the owner. Or his wife. They both saw me.”

  “Good,” she said.

  I could see how she was piecing the times together, the chronology, and that it was okay with her, airtight, but then she smiled, a smile that wasn’t a cop smile but a woman’s smile, and it confused me because there was something about it of the girl next door, that American glance over the fence mixed in there alongside the Chinese. After she was gone I lay there thinking about her, and I thought about Leanora Chinn more that night and about all the boundaries that are never crossed. Whether I contemplated crossing those boundaries, I don’t remember, and it wouldn’t have mattered anyway because as I lay there the phone rang. It was Marie.