“Don’t you have any conscience in all this? Things you do—your father, he would be ashamed.”
In reality, Dante’s father had not thought much of Sorrentino. The man had worked at the Mancuso warehouse for a summer when he was young, and Dante remembered what his father had to say: good shoulders, but not much brains and a bad disposition. “No,” Sorrentino said, “he told me once, your father, about all the expectations he had for you. About what you were supposed to be. But after the kind of things you pull, your line of work—I mean, maybe you should be the one in the paper.”
Sorrentino had been drinking, it was apparent. Cholino’s was the place old cops came to hang out when things went bad, mingling with vice officers who had a few bucks to dish out if you were willing to play the mark: drinking all night in the Tenderloin and coming back with a list of low-level creeps to help the squad boys make quota. Down the street, at the moment, some uniformed officers sat parked in a cruiser, watching the street action, but neither Dante nor Sorrentino paid them any mind.
“To hell with you, Sorrentino,” Dante said, and he was about to say more, to tell Sorrentino what his father had really thought about him, but he looked at the old man’s bull-dog face and felt something like sympathy.
Sorrentino himself was not so restrained.
“To hell with you!” he countered. The man took him by the arm. “Let me tell you one thing. You are a selfish pig. You left that girl years ago for New Orleans. She waited for you.” Dante tried to pull away but Sorrentino had his fingers in the fabric. “And now she’s blind, and it’s all because of you.”
Sorrentino had his lips pursed in a look Dante hadn’t seen since he was a kid, on the faces of the old Italians when they were filled with disgust—when they wanted to indicate that you were a person beneath contempt. They puckered their lips up like one monkey telling another monkey to kiss his ass.
“And your mother … and your beautiful mother, if she were still alive…”
Dante had had enough. His sympathy and pity gave way to something else. “Let go, old man,” he said again, but Sorrentino only tightened his grip. So Dante came around with his other hand and knocked himself free. He could have walked away then but something got into him. Or maybe this was the reason he’d hung around, waiting. He grabbed Sorrentino by the collar, the same way he’d grabbed the Mexican at the Tamale House, but Sorrentino was strong, built like an ox, low to the ground, and he did not move easily—and Dante did not protect himself. Sorrentino attacked low, hitting him in the solar plexus. Dante felt himself doubling, and the old man hit him again. The blackness veered up, and in that blackness Dante came around with his elbow, smashing Sorrentino in the jaw. He planted a side kick at the knees, trying to knock the feet out from under him.
Sorrentino did not fall. There was noise farther down the sidewalk, footsteps approaching, men hollering. Dante hit him again, low, hard in the stomach, and saw the old man’s jaw drop and his eyes glaze. The temptation was to go harder now, to beat Sorrentino until he fell down, and he would have done so and kept on going, but the cops were on them.
They pulled Dante off, and as luck would have it, one of the officers knew Sorrentino from the old days.
“What are you doing hitting an old man?”
Dante shook his head.
“He’s a bum!” yelled Sorrentino.
Dante was not sure which of them had gotten the worst of it. His hand hurt and his ribs were sore, but he could see that Sorrentino was breathing hard and bleeding from the mouth. Dante worried the old bastard would have a heart attack. The younger cop walked Sorrentino over to the cruiser, and the other one stayed with Dante.
“So what was this about?”
“We were talking,” said Dante.
“About what?”
“The weather.”
“The weather?”
“About the rain. He told me it had been raining for a long time, and I told him it wasn’t true.”
“I can see why he doesn’t like you. What I want to know, I want to know why you hit this old man.”
“I didn’t like the way he was talking to me.”
“So you hit an old man.”
“I did.”
A couple of cops appeared at the corner and another approached from across the way. They stood awhile, listening to this exchange.
“Put the locks on him for me, will ya?” said Sorrentino’s buddy, “while I go down and talk to Guy.”
Dante stood on the sidewalk with the cuffs on. The Federal Building towered over the block and below that was Civic Center Plaza. The streetlight changed, and he could see city workers in the crosswalk. Civil service employees, lawyers, local politicians, and clerks. People on jury duty, office girls, litigants, court reporters, small-time criminals. A few glanced his way, but the neighborhood went bad fast, and most did not give a second look at the man standing there with the cuffs next to the parking meter.
All this while, the older cop was talking to Sorrentino, getting his side of the story. Sorrentino was loud and Dante could catch bits of what he was saying, laying out the Owens business for his buddy, complaining how he, himself, had been served up to the press by prick-face over there, by that little donkey with the hook nose. In a little while they led Sorrentino across the way, back into Cholino’s. Sorrentino, despite his infamy, still had friends on the force—which was more than Dante could say. It wasn’t unheard of for the uniforms to consort with the undercovers, for them all to mingle a little here at the edge of the Tenderloin on a Friday afternoon.
Now the older cop came back. His name was Officer Allen. He and a Chinese cop took Dante over to the cruiser. The car was parked in the mouth of an alley and they walked Dante past the car into the alley itself.
“I been on the horn. Seems you have a little bit of a history with the force.”
“Yeah.”
“We’re going to let you go.”
“That’s kind of you.”
Officer Allen, however, did not move, and he made no attempt to take off the cuffs. Dante stood with his back to the car, his thighs against the rear fender. His departure from the force, his adventures since, this particular case, none of these things had made him popular with the SFPD.
“Arrogant fuck, aren’t you?”
“I don’t know. Depends on how you define arrogance.”
“You’re backing the wrong horse. Kicking an old man around. Helping a criminal get off.”
Officer Allen stood there, and the other one, Lee or Wu or Yang, whatever his fucking name was—stepped away. Dante had an inkling of what was coming now but there was nothing he could do. Officer Allen drove his fist into Dante’s stomach and then hit him again. Dante fell to the ground. The cop let him lie there for a little while, nudging him with his toe. Dante rolled over, faceup, staring into that great fog overhead, not seeing it, not feeling, really, the drizzle that fell on his face. The cop nudged Dante’s cheek with the toe of his shoe and put his heel on Dante’s nose. He put his weight a little harder on the nose, enjoying himself.
“Allen,” said the Chinaman.
“It’s okay. I’ve got permission.”
The Chinaman said nothing.
“Everyone says San Francisco cops are soft. We’re not soft.” Allen leaned forward now, pressing a little harder with his heel. “If you want to make a police-brutality case, go ahead and report it, okay. We’ll see what kind of publicity you really want, Mr. Investigator. Mr. Attack-an-old-man-on-the-street. I’m sure you’ll find lots of people on your side, an upstanding man like yourself.”
Dante said nothing. He was not quite conscious.
“Roll over.”
Dante grunted. Allen kicked at him, and Dante rolled onto his side. Then the other cop, the Chinaman, unfastened his cuffs.
“You’re free to go,” said Allen.
PART SEVEN
Epilogue
THIRTY-FIVE
After his father’s death, Dante had lived for a while in a c
old-water flat on Columbus Avenue. In fact, he had not given the place up. He still stayed there on occasion, more so these last few weeks since Marilyn had gotten out of the hospital. She had needed him at first, close by, but he sensed in her a growing remoteness. Also, more practically, he was keeping late hours on a new case, and she needed her rest, she needed to heal. So he had stayed at the place on Columbus a few nights this week. Maybe it didn’t make sense, since the house on Fresno Street was empty, but he had mixed feelings toward his parents’ house.
Now Dante walked down the hall, to the shared bathroom, and examined himself in the mirror. Despite the beating he had gotten the day before, he did not look too bad. His nose was swollen, but it was not broken. His elbow was sore and his chest hurt and occasionally he felt a sharp pain shoot up his side, but he was not pissing blood, and he figured he would be all right.
He walked uphill to Marilyn’s apartment at the top of Union Street and rang her bell. Marilyn took a while to come to the door, then regarded him as if examining a puzzle.
“Did you lose your key?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“I didn’t want to startle you.”
“That’s considerate.”
He followed her in. There was an awkwardness between them, a separation. “I came to see if you wanted to go out to dinner.”
“What happened to your nose?”
She stepped closer, examining him. She still wore the eye patch but he had grown used to it. The way she touched him, the look on her face, for an instant, he imagined they could step back in time.
“I tripped on the sidewalk.”
She looked skeptical. “That doesn’t sound like you.”
“I’m getting clumsy I guess … For dinner, I was thinking, if you want to join me, the U.S. Restaurant?”
She shook her head, and moved away with a nonchalance that made him uneasy. The jury in the Owens case was still out, but they did not speak about this.
“Didn’t I tell you? I have to go out tonight.”
“Maybe you did tell me.”
“I don’t want to go, it’s a client thing for Prospero.”
“Where are you going?”
“To the opera. Prospero has a box, and he takes turns inviting his employees.”
“That’s good. It’s good for you to get back into the business.”
“I suppose.”
“Why don’t you stay awhile?”
She got dressed then, and he watched her. It was part of their routine. He watched her standing there in her slip as she studied herself in the mirror. He watched the serenity with which she made up her face. He watched her put on a pastel skirt and a white sweater and some new pumps, and then take them all off for another outfit. She still wore the patch, but she had gotten better with the makeup, and the grafts were healing. She moved with her familiar adroitness. Even so, there was something different about her, something changed. She put up her hair, letting the tendrils fall about her cheeks, then changed into darker colors, a silk blouse and also a pair of pearls that, he knew, had once belonged to her mother.
It wasn’t Prospero, he thought.
“I wish you could come.”
“You look good. The patch becomes you.”
She walked over and kissed him, as if experimenting with an idea. Then walked back to look in the mirror.
* * *
Dante ate dinner at the U.S. Restaurant. The place was popular with the old-timers. It had changed locations recently, and for a while had tried a new menu, hoping to attract a younger, more affluent set—pasta al dente, designer sauces, specialty risotto—but the young people did not come and the old ones complained. The regulars wanted their soft noodles, their dark sauce from the can, their bread with the hard crust and their meatballs held together by eggs and cheese.
Dante ate his meal, then went to the house on Fresno Street.
Owens and his family had cleaned it up pretty well, putting clean sheets on the beds and sweeping the floors, leaving their trash cinched in a plastic bag on the back porch. The only evidence of their having been here was a discarded Game Boy disk. Regardless, the place had an empty, deserted feeling. After the trial started, the defense had had little use for him—and he had not talked to Owens for some time. They had used him, there was no doubt, but that’s what the defense did. Dante went into the closets and took out some of the old things, the old pictures, that had belonged to his mother and father. He hung up a painting of the Amalfi coast, one of his father’s favorites, and a photo of the Mancuso warehouse, and gathered from an old box pictures of his family on the wharf, his grandfather, his uncle Salvatore, his mother in a thin white dress.
There were more pictures up in the attic, he knew, boxes in the garage, photo albums and bundled letters: pictures of relatives back in Italy whose names he no longer remembered; a portrait of the Virgin; Holy Communion cards; business ledgers from the past half century, numbers written in a careful hand, column after column.
Listen.
He remembered his mother, beckoning him. You can hear, I know you can.
La Seggezza, as it was called. The intuition—a special power. His grandmother had had the gift, apparently, and his mother as well.
Then came the voices.
They had taken her to Agnews first, the state asylum, in the South Bay; then up to Sonoma County. But there was nothing they could do for her. The whisperings of the doctors, the numbers on the calendars—messages in code. She was in touch with the other side, with something haunting her, but whatever it was, it never became manifest; it would change shape before she could pin it down.
Dante lay on the couch, in the old television room, with the big RCA. A wire ran from the rabbit ears on the roof to a plate attached to an old-style antenna, but the antenna itself had long since been taken down. The couch smelled of cigar smoke and wine, of his father’s last years. Dante dreamed as he slept, and in his dreams there were people saying things he could not quite hear. It was raining. On the roof, there was the noise of the rain, the noise of leaves, the sound of his grandparents singing, the aria of the fishing boats, of trash cans rolling up and down the street. The noise of his father coughing and the squeaking of bedsprings, of his mother sighing. It was the noise of the fog; of those poets hollering in the street; of the accountants on their adding machines; of Italian radio; of Marinetti and Johnny Pesci arguing over who was stupider, the Sicilians or the Calabrians; over whether it was Mussolini who ruined Italy, or Hitler, or Roosevelt; over politics and issues of importance that no one remembered … Do nothing … And in the morning he awoke with a headache, as with a fever, the feeling of having eaten too much, hungover, his nose still sore, and the image of something in his head that he could not quite remember, that would not come to consciousness, of children he would not have—of Marilyn whispering something to David Lake, maybe; of Elise Younger in the shadows; and then he was on the mudflats again, and the sky that had been so dark with birds was empty now, and gray, and the cliffs were barren. The tide was coming in, and there was nowhere for him to go.
Dante got out of bed.
The phone was ringing.
He did not recognize the voice at first. It was Cicero, back from his cruise. The jury in the Owens case had finished its deliberations, the old man said. That was the inside dope. They could expect a verdict later that afternoon.
THIRTY-SIX
There was a mist in the air, a primordial grayness—a dampness that was not quite rain, but almost, as if the water were seeping through the air. The fog muffled the sound so that there was a kind of intimacy, a closeness. It was not a closeness that made you feel comfortable or cozy, but rather one that constricted the vision to a field of gray, so you were not sure what would come out of that grayness. Dante walked out of that gray field down Telegraph Hill toward Cicero’s office.
Cicero had been mistaken.
The verdict had not come in that afternoon, but came several days later. Dante had see
n the television footage—the thin, exhausted smile on Owens’s face, while across the room Elise Younger let out a moan—and then the camera caught her as well, the anguished look, her head falling forward into her splayed fingers.
“Not guilty.”
Now, three weeks had passed. The case was not so much in the news anymore, and Dante walked up the long stairs to Jake Cicero’s office. He had a check to pick up, and also a report to pass along concerning a case involving a man who had held up a bar down on Columbus Avenue. Dante’s job was to find some mitigating evidence, but there had not been much.
“How’s Marilyn?” asked Cicero.
“She’s fine.”
“Healing up?”
“Last I saw.”
Cicero gave him a curious glance, but he did not press the matter. He leaned back in his chair, with his feet up on his desk, and his Genovese eyes staring at him, brown eyes, the color of the dirt. Cicero had gotten a tan out there in the Mediterranean, and he looked good—though Dante knew the man was worried about his heart and had lingering concerns about his marriage and the way his wife, a younger woman, had behaved on the boat. Still, he seemed happy to be back, with his line of bocce trophies on the wall behind him, and on his desk a picture of the stripper Carol Doda in her prime. Tits like melons, the big ones that had been genetically altered.
Perfect shape, perfect size. But touch one, put it in your mouth, and then you’d know it wasn’t the real thing.
That was the joke, anyway—the one Cicero liked to tell.
Outside, a light had begun to shine beyond the mist, as if the sun might break through.
“Do you think it’s going to clear up?”
“No,” said Cicero.
“I think that’s the sun up there.”
“I don’t know why everybody is so in love with the sun.”
“Not everybody is.”
Outside, there was a peculiar stillness. Cicero’s place was on the third floor of a building that tilted precariously over the Broadway Tunnel. They were on the lee side, however, away from the traffic, and given the way the mist muted the noise, the rise and fall of the sound of cars rumbling in the tunnel, the grayness of the sky, the gulls squawking on the rooftop, it felt as if they were on a cliff at the edge of the sea. “Owens returned your call, by the way. He says he’d be glad to meet with you.”
The Ancient Rain Page 21
