Neither Pietro Lombardi nor Dominick Marra was among the players today. I waited until one of the contestants made a difficult carom shot to finish a game, then talked to two of the men whose names I knew. Pietro and Dominick hadn’t been around all day, they said. Neither knew where I could find them.
I left the players to their match and drove to North Beach.
THEY WEREN’T AT Pietro’s apartment, they weren’t at Dominick’s apartment, they weren’t at Spiaggia’s saloon. One of their drinking cronies said he thought he’d seen them in Washington Square Park after church, and that was where I found them. Sitting side by side on a bench across from the Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church—Pietro in the sun, Dominick in the shade of a big leafy tree. Not talking, not looking at each other, not doing anything except sitting there in the slumped, bowed-head posture of la miseria.
I sat in the sun next to Pietro. He didn’t look at me, but Dominick raised his head and laid his sad eyes on my face. He did not seem surprised to see me.
Pretty soon he said, “You got something to tell us.”
“Yes.”
“About Gianna.”
“Yes.”
“You find her?”
“Last night. In Marin County.”
“Dead,” Pietro said to his hands. It wasn’t a question.
“More than a week now. Since last Saturday night.”
Dominick crossed himself. Pietro closed his eyes; that was his only reaction.
She’s been dead to him ever since he found out about her, I thought. Dead in spirit. Dead in the flesh doesn’t mean much after the spirit is gone.
Dominick said, “How she die?”
“How doesn’t matter,” I said. “What matters is that one of the men responsible is dead and the other one is in police custody. It’s finished.”
“Two men?”
“Two men were involved, yes.”
“Bisconte, he’s one?”
“An accessory. You don’t know the man who did it.”
He didn’t ask the man’s name; he didn’t want to hear it.
I said, “Bisconte didn’t kill anybody. The police still think he caused Ashley Hansen’s death but they’re wrong.”
More silence. Dominick asked the question with his eyes: You know who, then?
“It was Pietro,” I said.
Pietro looked at me for the first time. And nodded; there was no denial in him. “But I don’t mean to. I don’t want to hurt her.”
“I know that.”
“Ah, Dio, ” Dominick said, and crossed himself again.
I said to him, “You’ve known the truth for days. Pietro told you. The same night it happened, after you and I talked at Spiaggia’s.”
“Si. He’s got to tell somebody.”
“You both should have told me.”
“We talk about it. But you say the police, they think it’s Bisconte. All right. Maybe they catch him, maybe they don’t, and maybe nobody he ever finds out it’s Pietro. But you . . . ah, I should know you find out, good detective like you.”
“I don’t want to hear that,” I said.
“Hear what?”
“Good detective. I don’t feel much like one today.”
Pietro said, “Everybody, he’s gonna know pretty soon.” He sighed heavily, looked past me at the looming Romanesque pile of the church. “This morning I make confession to priest. Now I make confession to you. Then you take me to police and I make confession to them.”
“Maybe he’s already tell police,” Dominick said.
“No.” I touched Pietro’s arm, gently. “What happened that day, ’paesan?”
He wasn’t ready just yet to talk about it. Reliving that time was something he had done once with Dominick and once this morning with his priest and probably many more times in his own mind, but each replay would be as painful as the original experience. He took out one of his twisted black cigars, lit it with a kitchen match. Its odor was acrid, sulfurous on the warm afternoon air—the same odor that had been in his granddaughter’s apartment on Wednesday, that I’d pretended to myself I was imagining as phantom brimstone. The truth was, nothing smells like a Toscana; nothing. And only old men like Pietro smoke Toscanas these days. They don’t even have to smoke one in a closed room for the smell to linger after them. It gets into and comes off of the heavy user’s clothing.
That was one of three things that pointed to Pietro. The other two were words spoken at Giacomo’s restaurant on Friday night. Dominick’s claim that he’d confessed the truth about Gianna was one; it had rung false to me. In almost the same breath he’d said he would rip his tongue out before he’d hurt his friend—that had been truth. Pietro had already known about Gianna when Dominick went to see him on Wednesday; he’d found out by confronting Ashley Hansen. The other thing was Pietro calling Ashley “that bionda tintura .” Bionda tintura: dyed blonde. Last Sunday he’d told me he had never been to Gianna’s apartment, never met Ashley Hansen, so how had he known she had dyed blond hair? The newspaper report of her death wouldn’t have mentioned it. His granddaughter might have, except that they hadn’t spent much time together in the past eight months and it wasn’t a likely comment in any case. She might say “I have a blond roommate” but not “a dyed blond roommate.”
So I’d known Friday night that Pietro was responsible for Hansen’s death. Or I would have if I’d let myself think about it. But I hadn’t wanted him to be guilty; the “good detective” had wanted it to somehow turn out to be Bisconte. Today there was no denial left in me either.
Pietro was still silent. To ease him into talking about it, I asked, “Why did you go to Gianna’s apartment? To see her or to see Ashley Hansen?”
He continued to sit rigidly, smoking his Toscana. Kids ran past us, chasing each other, yelling. Over near the statue of Benjamin Franklin, a Chinese girl squealed as her boyfriend tickled her. On one side of the path not far away, a middle-aged man in a business suit and a younger man in street clothes exchanged an envelope for a small packet, both of them trying so hard to be nonchalant that they achieved the opposite effect. On the grass across from them, a homeless black man in rags lay sleeping or passed out in the sun, his belongings heaped around him like a half-destroyed bunker. Summer Sunday in Washington Square.
“Not the bionda,” Pietro said abruptly. “I don’t go to see that one.”
“Gianna then?”
“Si. Last Sunday, after you tell us about Bisconte, I call up there. I want to ask her about this man.” By “her” he meant Gianna; he couldn’t seem to bring himself to say her name. “Only she’s not home. So I talk to the bionda tintura. She’s polite but she don’t tell me nothing. Next day I call back, I talk to her again. This time she’s no polite, she’s tell me mind my own goddamn business and she’s hang up on me.”
“So you decided not to wait for me to find out about Bisconte. You decided to ask around the neighborhood yourself.”
“Bisconte.” He spat the name this time, as if ridding his mouth of something foul.
“And Wednesday somebody told you he wasn’t just a florist.”
“I don’t believe she’s know him that way . . . she’s sell her body for man like that. But I got to know. I go to her apartment. She’s not there, only the bionda tintura. She don’t want to let me in, that one. I go in anyway. I ask if she and . . . if they sell themselves for money. She laughs. In my face she laughs, this girl what have no respect, this whore. She says what difference it make? She says I am old man—dinosaur, she says. But she pat my cheek like I am little boy or maybe big joke. Then she . . . ah, Cristo, she come up close and she say, ‘You want some, old man, I give you some.’ To me she says this. Me.”
Pietro shook his head; there were tears in his eyes now. “I push her away. I feel . . . feroce, like when I am young man and somebody, he make trouble with me. I push her too hard and she’s fall, hit her head on the table and I see blood and she don’t move . . . mio Dio! She was wicked, that one, but I don’t wa
nt her to die....”
“Accident,” Dominick said, nodding at me. “You see?”
“I think, call doctor quick. But she’s dead. And I hurt here, inside”—he tapped his chest with a gnarled forefinger —“and I think, what if my ... what if the other one, she come home? I don’t want to see her no more. She’s dead too. For me, in here”—again he tapped his chest—“she’s dead too.”
Grim irony: Gianna really was dead then, four days dead. Two young women, roommates, hookers, dead by violence in separate and unrelated incidents four days apart. Coincidence, quirk of fate, divine punishment . . . call it what you wanted. High-risk professions breed bizarre happenings; and these days prostitution is a damned high-risk profession.
Pietro finished his cigar. Then he straightened on the bench, seemed to compose himself. His eyes were clear and sad now, the tears dried to thin cakes at their corners. “We go now, hah?” he asked me.
“Go where?”
“Police.”
“No,” I said. “We’re not going to the police.”
No reaction from Pietro, but Dominick brightened a little. “How come we don’t go?”
“As far as they’re concerned it’s a closed case. As far as I’m concerned too. Pietro’s made his confession to God. Nobody else is important; nobody else ever has to know.”
We sat there, three men who had lived a lot of years and seen too many things, cut off for the moment from the ebb and flow of park and city life around us—as if all the activity were happening behind a thick pane of glass. After a time I glanced at Pietro, and on his face was an expression of the deepest pain. He might have been thinking of Ashley Hansen, or of his granddaughter, but I doubted it. I had the idea that he was thinking of the old days, the days when families were tightly knit and there was respect for elders and the teachings of his church, the days when bocce was king of his world and that world was a simpler and better place. The bitterest of woes is to remember old happy days....
In a voice so low I barely heard the words, he said, “La bellezza delle bellezze.” The beauty of beauties. Twice before he had used that phrase in my presence, and both times he had been referring to Gianna Fornessi. Not this time.
“Sì, ’paesan,” I said. “La bellezza delle bellezze. ”
Chapter Twenty-Four
MONDAY MORNING, as usual, I went down to the office at nine o’clock—and half of it was missing.
Eberhardt’s half.
Eberhardt was gone.
He had made his decision sometime after I’d left him on Saturday . . . if he hadn’t already made it before I showed up at his house. And on Sunday he’d acted on it. Come in here with one or two people to help him, like a pack of thieves in the night, and moved out his desk, computer, creaky old swivel chair, ugly mustard-yellow file cabinets, even the frigging porcelain water cooler that he’d bought at a garage sale and never used. Everything that belonged to him, down to the chipped coffee mug with his name on it. And when they were done he’d locked the door from out in the hallway and shoved his key through the crack underneath. I almost stepped on it when I walked in.
On my desk was a single sheet of paper with a hurriedly written check clipped to it. One of his personal checks, not a joint agency check; an unused stack of those was sitting there on my blotter too. His check was made out in my name, in the amount of $750, with a notation on the bottom that read, “One half June rent.” On the sheet of paper itself was a message, likewise hurriedly scrawled in his sloppy hand. A one-word message.
“Quits.”
So this was how it ended—not with warmth but with cold, not with a bang but with the finger. Afraid or unwilling to face me again; no more dialogue, no more conflict. Just one word on a piece of paper and gone. Neat, clean . . . from his point of view. But not from mine.
I still didn’t know why.
I still didn’t know what he imagined I’d done to him.
For a long while I stared at the check and the note, not moving, not letting myself feel anything. Then, slowly, I tore both in half and kept on tearing the pieces until I had confetti. I let the confetti fall like dirty snow—like ashes—into my wastebasket.
Qual’ rincoglionito di mio nonno, I thought.
And: Good-bye, Ashley Hansen.
And: Not just another whore.
And: La bellezza delle bellezze.
And now: Quits.
Epitaphs. All of them, epitaphs.
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