The Ancient Rain

by Domenic Stansberry

  Closer by, a woman cried out, “Fascists!” Then she yelled again, “Asshole pigs!”

  She was not with the Code Pink people. Dante had seen her earlier, sitting on a mat just around the corner, an empty tin at her feet. Her hair was unkempt, and she yelled with both hands cupped around her mouth.

  “Nine-eleven didn’t happen! It’s just an excuse to terrorize the people, to fill us with fear!”

  Some of the Code Pink people started wandering back. Meanwhile Blackwell backed away from the mike. The press conference had ended. The woman continued yelling.

  “Stooges … patsies. Don’t you know it’s just an excuse…? It’s oil they want, the oil … I have X-ray eyes, I see through you all…”

  The group at the podium broke apart, heading back toward the building. A couple of the Code Pink women, sensing the police’s impatience, stepped in front of the woman, so as to make it more difficult for the police to intervene. The Code Pink women made the police nervous. Many of them were well connected in social circles and had to be handled gingerly.

  Dante separated himself from the scene. He wanted to talk to one of the arresting officers, hoping to find out what had become of Owens’s children. At the entrance to the Burton Building, he got hung up in security, then caught sight of Leanora Chin leaving through an exit on the other side.

  Chin walked briskly and he did not catch up with her until the corner, where she stood waiting for the light.

  “Excuse me,” he said.

  She regarded him, businesslike in her blue skirt and blue jacket, her hair done up in a twist. Likely she didn’t remember, but Dante had been in a room with her, maybe fifteen years back, when he was a young cop, at the North Beach Station. Back then she was a homicide cop with notoriety in the neighborhood for having arrested a local man accused of murdering his brother’s wife.

  “You’re with the press?”

  “No,” he said. “I prefer not to talk with them if I can help it.” He identified himself and handed her a card. “Bill Owens called me from the Bay Bridge this morning. And asked me to find his kids.”

  A couple of patrolmen on mop-up duty lingered up the block. Chin glanced their way, as if she might gesture them over if this man in front of her proved to be a nuisance.

  “What did you say your name was?”

  He repeated it. If it meant anything to her, she did not show it. She was with San Francisco Homeland, he knew—a division carved up out of the local police force and given federal money. Before Homeland, she had been with Special Investigations. Dante had gotten involved with SI in the past—an ugly business, undercover, growing out of his time in New Orleans. All buried deep in the files. Or it was supposed to be, anyway. Even so, there were other reasons the San Francisco cops didn’t care for him. If she knew anything about any of this, it didn’t show in her face.

  “The kids…” he said again.

  She stepped back, appraising him, and Dante became aware of the patrolmen still back there, hovering.

  “I was occupied with the arrest. At the scene, we allowed the subject to make a call, but apparently he was having trouble with his phone. So I turned the children over to the care of one of the patrolmen on the scene.”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “My understanding, the officer took them to school.”

  “School?”

  “The officer drove them to their school. It was either take them home, or to the station—and the girl wanted to go to school.”

  Chin smiled, a faint smile, as if bemused or troubled, he could not be sure. Whatever was on her mind, she was not going to reveal it, not to him. The conversation was over. The light changed again, and Chin crossed the street.

  The patrolmen followed him for a little while, coincidence maybe, or just for the hell of it, because they’d seen him at the press conference, maybe, then later, talking to Chin. Dante didn’t take it personally. Around the corner, now, Dante came across the woman who had been heckling the press conference in front of the Federal Building. She sat cross-legged on her mat on the sidewalk, the tin can pushed foward. Up close, he could see the pockmarks on her face and something off-kilter in her eyes. She had a vague resemblance to his mother.

  He put a dollar in her can.

  “Pig,” she said. “You think I don’t see through you, but I do. I know a goddamn pig when I see one.”

  FIVE

  Dante and Marilyn had had no plans for today, not really. Just to sleep late and maybe wander out to lunch.

  The night before, Marilyn’s dreams had been erotic.

  When she woke up, though, Dante hadn’t been there. She remembered his returning, she thought—his shadow splitting the gray light over the bed, his weight in the bed beside her, his lips on her cheek—but perhaps she had been mistaken. Perhaps it had been part of her dreams.

  There was no sign of him.

  For all she knew, Dante was still out on surveillance. Or perhaps he was in that room he kept for himself ever since his father passed, down on Columbus Avenue. Or down at his father’s old house on Fresno Street, empty now that the tenants had moved out.

  She and Dante had been talking about what to do with the house. They had been talking about going to Europe. They had been talking about their future.

  About a lot of things.

  She went to check for messages, to find out where he might be, but the cell rang in her hand. It was Beatrice Prospero. Marilyn worked for Beatrice’s father down at Prospero Realty.

  “Something has come up,” Beatrice said. “So now there is going to be an empty plate at Il Cenacolo this afternoon. I can’t make it. You know Pop, how he hates empty plates.”

  Il Cenacolo. The Inner Circle.

  Il Cenacolo was an Italian group that met for lunch every week down at Fior d’Italia. Old men, mostly—but old men with money, and Joe Prospero went to their lunches regularly.

  “They are going to have entertainment. Susan Ford is going to be there,” she said. “The opera singer.”

  “Is she going to sing for them?”

  “A little bit, after lunch.”

  Marilyn laughed.

  “What’s so funny? The man who arranged the opera singer, his name is David Lake. His wife died recently … and he has property to divest. Very wealthy.”

  Marilyn understood the opportunity. These were potential clients, men with real estate. Joe Prospero liked to schmooze, but he didn’t sit on houses anymore, not at his age, and Beatrice could not handle every listing.

  “I have to call Dante.”

  “Have you got something planned?” she asked. “You have your boyfriend now, so you don’t care about Il Cenacolo? You don’t care about old men with money?”

  “It isn’t that.”

  “Okay,” said Beatrice. “I’ll tell Pop you don’t want to go.”

  “Of course I’ll go.”

  “Pop won’t be mad if you want to throw this chance in his face,” said Beatrice, in that tone of voice she had sometimes, walking the edge, so that it was hard to tell if she was joking or being sly. “Don’t worry. It’s no problem, you treat my father like that.”

  “I will go. I want to go.”

  “You want to go?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then put on the dog. A little heel, a little gloss,” she said. “The old men like it when you dress up.”

  * * *

  The men who crowded the bar at Fior d’Italia did not seem as old to Marilyn as she had thought they might be. Most of them were of another generation, it was true, twenty, thirty years older then herself—gray hair, dark suits, the smell of worsted wool and shoe polish—but they did not seem so old to her as they might have at one time, nor did their age seem quite so unattractive. Perhaps because Marilyn was getting older herself. Or because she did not have, quite as much as some women, an aversion to older men.

  Joe Prospero, Beatrice’s father, was there at the bar, standing in the midst of them, carrying on in the way that he did.r />
  Her own father had never been part of Il Cenacolo. Whether that was because he had not been interested, or because he had not been asked, she didn’t know, but her mother had been Jewish on one side, a German Jew, only half Italian, and that may have been part of it.

  But things there were different now, or so they said.

  Either way, there were people she knew here, people who had known her parents, and who had known her as a child. For a second she had the impulse to turn heel. She tugged on her blouse, aware of herself in her black skirt, her heels. A man at the end of the bar regarded her. He wore a white shirt and sat a little apart from the others, and the seat next to him appeared to be empty.

  “Ah, Marilyn,” said Joe Prospero, coming up from behind.

  Prospero was somewhere in his seventies and moved in a way that might be described as spry. He had started his real estate firm when he was a young man, and most of the North Beach Italians had done business with him at one point or another.

  “This is Marilyn, Joe Visconti’s girl, you remember her?” Prospero said.

  She shook hands all around. These were people whose essence she recognized not by their faces so much as by their slouch, their smell. Their features she did not recognize until she peered beneath the wrinkles. Then the names came. Frank Besozi and Al Capricio. Liz Francesa and her brother Steve. Nan and Jimmi Tucci. She worked her way through the crowd to the innermost of the inner circle, at which point there was no one at all, just herself, turning one way and then another, standing alone, regarding the newcomers lingering by the wall—the Johnsons and O’Haras and Steins—who maybe were Italian on one side; or had married an Italian; or in some cases, because times had changed, were not Italian at all.

  Now Nan Tucci peered into her face.

  “Ah, yes, the Goat Girl,” said Nan Tucci.

  Again with the name. Because Marilyn once upon a time had held the goat by the bridle in the Columbus Day parade.

  Marilyn felt her smile tighten. She had never liked the moniker, but more than that she saw in Nan Tucci’s face a certain light, a glee. Nan had always been a gossip. They were all gossips. They used to talk about her mother in the old days, she knew, but now she supposed the gossip was about herself. Rumors about how she had gotten along after her parents’ deaths. Rumors about how she had managed to support herself, and about the lovers she had taken.

  She looked back at the bar.

  The man in the white shirt was still there—his eyes skitted away—but in the seat next to him now was Tony Mora. Mora was an estate attorney—a younger, ambitious man whom Marilyn had dated once upon a time.

  Mora gestured at her, motioning her over. Prospero saw the gesture, too. He was a bit drunk and put his arm around her.

  “Don’t talk to Tony Mora, you’re my girl now,” said Prospero, laughing. “My new girl.”

  Prospero didn’t mean anything by the remark, probably; it was just the kind of thing he said sometimes. Or if he did mean anything, it didn’t matter, because he was too old to pay any mind. Besides, she liked the old man. True, he was a fool, and he got excited for no reason, but maybe this was a good thing. Apparently Nan Tucci didn’t see it that way. She cut her eyes and turned her back. The woman had something else to talk about now.

  Across the room Tony Mora went on smiling. He gave her another wave, gesturing her down his way. Marilyn did not really want to talk to Mora, but she did not want to be impolite—and he was sitting next to the other man, the one who had been regarding her. Tony wore a cashmere polo, thin cut. He was always like that, in love with clothes, in love with himself. The other man was, in comparison, downscale. Just a white shirt, gray slacks. A suit coat draped over his chair.

  He wore a Rolex, though, and imported shoes. Up close, his looks were ordinary. He carried, though, a sweetness in his eyes.

  She thought of Dante and wondered why he had not called.

  “David made the arrangements for our entertainment today,” said Tony. “You know David Lake, I assume? He’s an opera hound.”

  “I haven’t had the pleasure,” she said.

  Marilyn realized this was the man Beatrice had mentioned, whose wife had just died. He’d been rich from the beginning, Beatrice said, but his wife, a Getty, had been even richer. David Lake was younger than she had expected, and she caught him, now, studying her hand as they talked, looking for the ring.

  “Verdi?”

  “Not really,” he said. “Wagner.”

  “David has a box,” said Tony. “He’s taken Lydia and I, on several occasions.”

  “You and Lydia—how nice.”

  “Yes. Myself and Lydia. We were going to Greece this summer, but now, with all the trouble abroad, we’ll have to do something closer to home.”

  “Oh.”

  “And what is it that brings you to Il Cenacolo?” asked David Lake.

  “I work with Joe Prospero.”

  “Real estate?”

  She nodded. “May I ask you, is the singer here?”

  “She has been delayed.”

  Just then, though, as if on cue, there came a fuss from behind, the group grew more animated, and Marilyn realized the opera singer had arrived. David Lake arose, Tony following, and Marilyn expected this would be the last she would see of them. A moment later, however, after he had done the introductions, David Lake came back to her. When it was time to go to the banquet room, he stuck close by.

  * * *

  Fior d’Italia was the oldest Italian restaurant in the country, or so it claimed—a place done up in the old fashion, with heavy tables and ornate crockery. Il Cenacolo had been meeting here for so long that a banquet room had been named for them. The room held two long tables, and on the walls hung pictures of the club going back to the early days, men elbow-to-elbow at these same long tables, napkins stuffed into their collars.

  There hung as well pictures of people who had spoken here. Caruso. And DiMaggio. Marconi and Antonietta Stella. And others, perhaps not so well esteemed. Ettore Patrizi, the editor of L’Italia, imprisoned for sedition. Rossi, whose son had been taken away for raiding the city treasury. But they were up there anyway, along with Mayor Moscone and Alioto and all the rest.

  When the food came, it was heavy, old-school stuff. David Lake leaned over to her.

  “I am selling one of my houses. Looking to simplify,” he said. His smile was awkward. “You perhaps would like to take a look at the listing?”

  “If you would like. Of course.”

  The others were watching the way he leaned toward her. There would be more talk now. They would go backward in time, talking her over. How she’d been going out with Dante’s cousin—when was it, fifteen years ago?—then had switched from one Mancuso to another. How Dante himself had disappeared, down in New Orleans. There were rumors about that, too, and what he had been doing—government work, some said, security—no, drugs, guns, smuggling. While he was gone there had been a string of other men. Young men, old men. Men with money. When you got down to it, she was an opportunist, they said. Or so she imagined them saying. A little plumper than she used to be, though. Looser in the chin.

  Now here she was back with Dante. No ring on her finger. Not getting any younger. And her eyes still roving.

  Susan Ford, the soprano, sat at the far side of the table alongside Joe Prospero. The old man was enjoying himself, and the singer was effervescent. Every once in a while her eyes cut toward David Lake. It was apparent that the singer had not expected it to go this way. She had expected to be sitting next to a wealthy widower, yes, but not one so old as Joe Prospero.

  It was a meal with many courses, and halfway through, the waiter circled the table, head bowed, as if looking for someone. Prospero gestured in Marilyn’s direction.

  The waiter came to her.

  “There is someone to talk to you.”

  “Me?”

  “In the main dining room, at the bar.”

  When she saw him, Marilyn felt her heart pull in two directions
. It was not like Dante to come searching for her like this. She could see at a glance that he had not slept the night before. He had sharp features, dark eyes, and those eyes seemed even darker now. She liked how he looked, standing alone, waiting for her, handsome and disheveled at the bar—and she liked that he was pursuing her. Even so, she was not yet ready to leave.

  “So you want me to go with you. To the school?”

  “I think it would be better if it wasn’t just me. If there was a woman along.”

  “I’m not dressed for kids.”

  It was true. She wore heels and a silk blouse and a skirt slit to the knees. She could not see herself walking into the office of the private school, past all those mothers in the car line.

  “Owens’s kids’ll remember you, from the time we were out at their house. The girl, Kate, you two went for that walk.”

  “Can this wait?”

  “It will be too late.”

  “Someone else will take care of them. Some friends of theirs.”

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea. I managed to get through to Jill Owens, out in Chicago,” he said. “They’ve gotten some ugly calls in the past. I don’t think it’s anything to worry about, but … it might not be a good idea to rely on neighbors.”

  She saw the weariness in his face. It wasn’t like Dante to get her involved in his work, and she figured it was on account of his weariness—and because he could not imagine himself spending the evening alone in Owens’s house with the children. She found it hard to imagine, too. She remembered the feeling she had had this morning, not knowing if she had dreamed his presence or if he had been in the bed beside her.

  The darkness that emanated from him was too much at times, but she did not like it when he was gone. She did not like lying in bed alone.

  “But the kids, they don’t know either of us. Not really.”