The Last Days of Il Duce
Domenic Stansberry
New York
ONE
A VISION IN THE FOG
My name is Niccolò Jones, and I’m writing this down in the prison yard at Coldwater Penitentiary. Three people I used to know are dead. Two of them I loved, the other I hated—though lately I am less sure about the difference between those feelings. I tell myself it doesn’t matter. Either way, I do little else but imagine the day I’ll be out of here.
I see myself walking those bleached white streets, under that startling sun, and I climb the long hills above North Beach. When I get to the top, I look down at the blue Pacific. Like in a dream I see the deep channels, where the cold water of the ocean mixes with the bay, and I think about all those tourists eating their lunches beneath the stone walls of Alcatraz. They are like flocks of birds, those tourists. When I was a kid, my mother took us to the old island prison on Fugazi’s steamer, and I stood out on that rock, looking back at my neighborhood across the water. Maybe when I climb that hill and take my last look around, the wind will get into my eyes, and I’ll feel like that kid again, longing for the blind alleys of home. But sooner or later I’ll walk back down that hill, and I’ll leave Chinatown and North Beach and all these streets forever.
When my brother and I were growing up in North Beach, they called us the Abruzzi boys. We would walk down the street together and watch the old men playing bocci in Columbus Gardens. The teenage punks would joke and laugh and yell out:
“Here comes the Abruzzi boys!” Then they would rough up our thick black hair with their long fingers.
In fact our name was not Abruzzi but Jones. Niccolò and Joseph Jones. My father was where the Jones came from. He was a carpenter, or had been before he went lame in the war. It was my mother who was the Abruzzi, and though we were only half Italian, that’s what counted in this neighborhood. So we were the Abruzzi boys.
We came to the park to watch the old men roll the bocci around, but more than that we came because the Catholic school girls would be there too, dressed in their pleated skirts and white blouses. Their eyes were big and brown and their hair was dark and their gestures seemed always about to reveal some secret. They were flirtatious in the way that girls in our neighborhood were, not with us but with each other and their grandfathers. In their more daring moments, though, they smiled sidelong at those angular boys a few years older than ourselves, who carried on their bodies a vague animal smell mixed with the grime and sweat of the city. There was one particular girl. Maybe her eyes were darker, her skin more olive than all the rest, or maybe it was the way her skirt fell across her knees. I don’t like to think about her now, but back then my brother Joe and I would watch her thin brown legs from across the park, and later we would whisper her name to one another in the darkness of our bedroom on Vallejo Street.
Sometimes Micaeli Romano, the lawyer, would come and sit on the park bench beside us, and he would watch the girls too. Romano was in his early 40s then, a purebred Genovesi whose iron-black hair had recently started to gray. We knew him because some afternoons he drank beer with my mother at our kitchen table. One day at the park my little brother got up and left because he did not like Micaeli Romano. Micaeli patted my arm.
“Joe’s a good boy,” he said. “Your little brother loves his father. But you, you’re a good kid too, Nick Abruzzi. You have your mother’s brains. You’ll make something of yourself, and I’ll help you, when the time comes. Your mother has high hopes. For both of you.”
He gave me a wink and I realized right then there was a part of me that hated Romano too; he was so sly and good-looking and everybody admired him so much. Though I was too young yet to know the stories that went through the neighborhood, I saw how he glanced at my mother when her back was turned, looking her up and down, and I saw too the small tight smile of pleasure on my mother’s face. At that moment, I didn’t care. Instead I was glad to be seen with him, the important man, the successful Italian, the big shot lawyer Micaeli Romano. People looked at us and I liked that. Because one of those who looked was the girl whose name my brother and I whispered in the dark. Marie Donnatelli. The girl of the brown hair and brown eyes. With whom one day my brother and I would laugh and tussle down at Ocean Beach, where the sky is always gray, and the three of us—Marie and myself and Joe—would roll over one another and tumble in the high dunes. But I’m getting off my story and I promised myself I would tell it straight.
It was 1986, almost thirty years later, on a Thursday night, and I was drinking in a Chinatown bar named Kim’s. It had been called something else before, Salvadore’s or Dante’s or Marino’s, I don’t quite remember, there’s been so many along here; then the old Italian who owned the place sold out. It used to be you could glance inside and see all the old Italians drinking their American beers. They would be staring across the bar at pictures of their relatives as they looked when they first came over from the old country: all mustachioed, wearing those baggy pants and fat suspenders. For some reason Kim’s still had the pictures of those dead Italians on the wall, even though most of its clients now were Chinatown downbeats, old yellow men who spoke no English if they could help it and who stared quietly over their Miller beers into the gloom of those Italian eyes.
I liked to sit there with those old Chinamen. It was quiet inside Kim’s and when someone did talk, it was in a language I didn’t understand.
There were certain things I didn’t want to understand anymore. I was just past forty, that age when you wake up in the morning and feel something thickening inside and only people too old to matter refer to you as a young man anymore. I had ruined my life in all the important ways, but I knew the small things that helped a man survive. For one, I nursed a beer pretty well. This night I nursed first one, then another, until finally it was Friday morning. I climbed off the stool and got out into the street without wobbling more than a little.
It was foggy outside and that fog was smothering everything. Kearny Street was empty and I could see down to Columbus, where some tourists fresh from the strip joints crossed the street. A woman in the group let loose a throaty laugh. Behind her a crumbum in rags rolled his shopping cart down the walkway. The woman glanced my way, I think, and the crumbum did too. The fog was warm and the muffling of sounds created an intimacy on the street between us. Then they all moved on and I was alone in Chinatown.
My soul was filled with an intimation of things to come, but I did not know what those things might be. I walked through a side alley heavy with the smell of pork grease and littered with vegetables from the Chinese stalls. I did not want to go home, so I went to the old Ching-Saw Hotel, where often there are young women in the lobby. Behind the desk was a jaundiced-looking white man, about my age, about my build, with the same kind of gut under his red polo shirt. Only my shirt was not red and his was embroidered with a Manchurian dragon over the pocket.
“All the girls are out. Convention in town.”
“There’s always a convention in town,” I said and slid him the money anyway.
He gave me a hard once-over, then the pasty little grin that such men make their specialty. I gave him the grin back and sat in one of the lobby chairs to wait.
After a little while one of the girls returned, but she had a Chinese tourist with her—Portland, I guessed, from the moldy look of him—and they went upstairs together, pulling and tugging at one another’s clothing. About the same time a group of Vietnamese street toughs wandered past the lobby window and into the side alley, disappearing behind the dumpster. I knew the routine here. The toughs were waiting for that tourist to come out the back door; then they would give him the business.
Maybe what the desk man ha
d said about the convention was true. Because there was no in-and-out action in the lobby and I had to wait more than an hour, until at last a taxi pulled up and a girl stepped out alone. She was a small girl, whose hair was midnight black, and she looked at me wearily. It was getting on towards dawn.
Upstairs, she was more cheerful. We had a drink, and in bed she was still delicate but did not seem so small. She kept her eyes closed and her face was like a primitive mask, and she pushed herself against me, breathing heavily in my ear, while outside in the alley I could hear the Vietnamese boys joking around. After a while there was silence down in the alley, then the sound of the alley door creaking open. There was a thudding noise down there, over and over, a stifled cry, and a sound like a lead pipe against the concrete wall. All the while I still went after the Oriental girl. She lay beneath me, one hand under her head, her eyes still closed, and every once in a while grunting in a small fierce way. I knew she was tired, and suspected she was bored as well, but she went on moving her hips and my desire increased in a hopeless way until at last, her eyes still closed, she reached out and touched my face, and that small intimacy was all I needed. Outside there was a clattering in the alley.
“This your first time here?”
“Yes,” I said. “I live alone. In a little cottage.”
“In the city?”
“No. Out in the country. Down a shady lane.”
I’m not sure why I lied. The truth was I lived two blocks over in North Beach. Maybe I wanted to her to think I was an innocent and then see how she treated me. I lingered a moment next to her, touching her as if I loved her—and maybe I did love her, just a little—then I stood up and put on my pants. The money I’d given the little man downstairs only covered the room fee, so I gave the girl what she wanted. At the last minute she reached up and pulled me by the shirt collar and whispered into my ear.
“Go out by the back door. Sometimes, the police, you know, they wait out front.”
“Thanks, sweetie.”
As I left the room I felt a small pang in that part of my heart that pretends to be innocent, but I still knew better than to listen to the girl. The back door was for the out-of-towners and fools, thinking they were sneaking away, discreet as hell, only to get mugged by the Viet punksters in the alley. Probably one of them was the whore’s brother.
I walked out the lobby but in the end it wouldn’t have mattered, not tonight. Because the kids had already scattered and the Chinese tourist, maybe fifty years old, sat propped against the alley wall. He wore a handsome suit, I saw that, and when I stepped closer I saw he wore a red tie about his neck and they had used that to choke him pretty bad. His businessman’s paunch hung over his belly, and his belt was undone as if he had forgotten to zip up.
Maybe he was dead but it wasn’t much of my business, and I figured there wasn’t much the San Francisco cops would do anyway except blame whoever stumbled close. So I left him where he was.
It was almost dawn now and the pastry shops along Columbus were starting to open. I went into Antonio’s, the owner of which I’ve known since I was a kid, but like a lot of the people in the neighborhood Antonio wouldn’t talk to me since I’d gone to work for Jimmy Wong. He didn’t mind selling me his coffee though, and I didn’t mind sitting in his window and looking out toward Washington Square. The square was filling, as it did every morning, with Asian men and women doing Tai Chi, not just a dozen or even a hundred but a thousand or so, every shape and color and age, all of them stabbing at the air, huffing and saluting the rising sun, while meanwhile a few old wops sat on their green benches, in the middle of the park, reading L’Italia as if nothing in the world ever changed.
I was tired and decided to go home. The sun was breaking through earlier than usual, the blue sky showing over the cathedral spires, so for a minute the Asians seemed to be cast in great shadows of light. I paused to look at them and then across the park I saw someone else watching. My brother’s wife. Or his ex-wife. Rumor said she was sleeping with Micaeli Romano’s boy now. She dyed her hair these days, a snowy blonde, like some Italian women do, thinking to make themselves American, but I still knew it was her.
She turned then, Marie Donnatelli, and her eyes met mine from across the park. Or I thought they did, though in another minute she was gone, walking the other way. I told myself it was no coincidence, us seeing one another that morning; Marie would soon circle back into my life. I had told myself the same thing before but that didn’t matter. I told it to myself again when I went home and lay down to fall asleep, envisioning once more that moment when I had looked across the park, the smell of the Asian girl still on my body, and seen Marie emerging from the fog.
TWO
AN EVICTION
In the morning I got a call from Jimmy Wong. A few weeks before he’d had me serve some papers on the Mussos, down on Filbert Street, and now Jimmy wanted me to go down with the Lee brothers to make sure the Mussos got out of his building on time.
The Mussos’ apartment wasn’t much but I could sympathize. My apartment wasn’t much itself, just two rooms and a stove over the racket of Columbus Avenue, but I didn’t want to get tossed out either.
“It’s almost noon, Abruzzi. You hungover again?”
“No,” I said. It was almost the truth. It takes a lot for me to get hungover. Still Wong could hear the netherworld in my voice and the clock said eleven-thirty. Four hours, I told myself, that’s all the sleep I’d gotten. I remembered clutching my pillow and dreaming of the Chinamen dancing in the blue fog.
“Ed and Rickie will be out front of the Mussos’ at one. You be there too and make sure things go smooth. No trouble.”
“Since when do you have any trouble?”
“That’s what I mean. That’s why I want you there. You’re a good lawyer, Abruzzi, if you didn’t drink so much.”
Wong said things like this but he knew the truth about me, or at least he had something close figured out. Otherwise I wouldn’t be doing for him the work I did. It had been five years since I’d had an office bigger than the desk in my apartment, even longer since I’d done anything those in the profession might consider the practice of law. I hadn’t been disbarred though, so I guess this counted for something.
“You come by when you’re done. I got some more work for you.”
There was no sense in sleeping now. I grabbed a grinder from a cart on the street and ate sitting on the grass in Washington Square. A couple of old wops gestured at me, men of Romano’s generation, and I could see them talking me over from their places on the bench. No doubt they were saying what a worthless son I was, disgrace of the neighborhood, the kind of thing old wop men are always saying. I lay back in the grass so I wouldn’t have to see them, and I stared up at the spires of the Church of Saints Peter and Paul.
I didn’t want to think about the old Italians. I wanted a drink but it was almost twelve-thirty now, and I didn’t want to go evict the Mussos with liquor on my breath. It is easy for me to keep my mind empty when I sit in a darkened bar, raise a glass to my lips, then a cigarette, then open my sweet chops and watch the smoke come pouring thoughtlessly out. It’s not so easy when you’re lying out in the bright sun, staring up at the spirals of the cathedral where your brother married the woman you love and, years later, Father Campanelli whispered the liturgy over your mother’s casket, your father sobbing in the pew for everyone to hear.
An old woman joined the old men on the bench. The three of them spoke in Italian, I figured, pointing every once in a while at me in the way one points at a child who does not yet have the ability of speech. It wasn’t hard for me to guess the kind of things they were saying.
A mama’s boy, that one. UCLA. Law School. Little Rose Abruzzi nearly died giving birth to him. Big shot office downtown, Mr. Lawyer, but look at him now. A bum in the park. That’s what you get, you mix an Abruzzi and a Jones. But who listens to an old man these days? Who listens to anyone?
I did not want to have my life picked over like this.
I decided to leave but before I could get myself away, the old ones were already up and stuttering over their canes. I peered into their ancient faces and thought I recognized Charlie Marinetti, a schoolteacher so many years ago, and though he gestured in my direction, and seemed to be looking where I stood, I realized he did not recognize me at all. Because as the old ones crept by I heard them talking. Not of me, but of Mussolini and Claratta Petacci. Arguing over which one of them it was who ruined Italy, or whether it was not Il Duce and his mistress at all but the Ligurians in general, or the Sicilians, or the hardheads from Calabria. Then they halted mid-stride, pointing back in my direction but still not seeing me, discussing some event that had happened long ago, maybe, here on this spot where I stood.
I went down to the Mussos on Filbert Street. They lived in an old wood frame building, set back in the alley, surrounded on all sides by a gravel walkway. This building, like the building next door and the fence that rose between them, had all been painted the same shipyard gray. The apartments inside the building were close on top of one another, and in the center ground between them was a cement yard, with a potted banana tree that received too much water and very little sun. These used to be cheap homes for the dockworkers but the docks were all closed now. It was all Chinese families except in the smallest apartments, where there lived the young clerks and aging bachelors of the financial district, who came home each night in their starched white shirts and lay alone in their beds thinking how someday they’d claw their way to a spot a little higher on the hill, maybe, where you could see over the concrete to the palm trees and the shimmering water.
The Lee brothers, Ed and Rickie, stood out front waiting for me, but the Mussos had themselves locked up tight inside their apartment. There was no pickup, no trailer, no U-haul truck, no sign anyone was getting ready to move.
Jimmy Wong liked to have someone like me around in situations such as this: someone the same skin and blood as the people being pushed out. There wasn’t as much of this kind of business for me as there used to be, though we often found an old Italian or two, living in a rent-controlled apartment, whenever Jimmy acquired a new building.
The Last Days of Il Duce Page 1
