The Last Days of Il Duce

by Domenic Stansberry

  Downstairs, Luisa still knelt at the altar. She was disheveled and the strap that held her dress had started to fall off the shoulder. She lifted her head, hearing me and turning as if in a trance, rising from her knees and smiling, moist-eyed, momentarily overwhelmed with some miraculous joy. Then I realized what had happened and in that same instant, she realized it too.

  She had mistaken me for my brother. But no, her prayers had not been answered. Joe Abruzzi had not returned from the dead.

  “What are you doing? That’s not your jacket.”

  “I let Joe borrow it. A long time ago.”

  “Why do you come in my house and sneak up behind me?” she asked. “I know all about you, what kind of man.”

  “Was Joe doing coke?”

  “If you were a true brother, you wouldn’t ask such a thing.”

  “Then what was he doing on Linda Street?”

  She had no answer for this and it could be that no one had any answer, that he’d just been out for a walk, shot dead by coincidence, an addicted fuck, a teenage wannabe, a mugger who thought a gun was a prick and jerked off by watching it flash in his hand. Luisa knew all this too, though she knew it in Spanish, in the language of the shrine. She gave me a look like when Joe was still alive and she wanted me gone from her house.

  “I know about you.”

  “What do you know?”

  She cocked her hips a little, I cocked mine, and the air was charged with a lurid expectancy. It showed in my eyes, maybe, and in hers, and in the very slope of our bodies. I turned my face away, ashamed at what was in my head, but I could not help but glance back at her, checking her up, and when I did she glared at me in disgust.

  “How are you and the kids set?” I asked. “Maybe I could help out.”

  It was a lie of course. I didn’t have any money in the world and she knew this. Besides, she had her friends and the community around her, and after the funeral she and her two kids named Julia and Juarez Jones would disappear into that great other population of California the newspapers and television always mentioned but seemed to know nothing about. Out into the valleys of walnuts and cottonwoods and dried grass where the immigrants speak in a thousand tongues, building cities out of materials too vile and wonderful to imagine. I wished I could disappear into that other world too, but the magic hour for people like me had long passed.

  “I talked to the Green Street Mortuary,” I said, one hand on the door handle. “And everything’s cleared with the police. The funeral’s in three days.”

  I walked over to Linda Street, to the corner where my brother had been shot. There is a small playground there, a mural on the cement wall, blood-red colors, hanging fruit, a pregnant woman, a field laborer, her womb blousy and gauzelike, and through that gauze you could see the growing child. The dealers were trading beneath the mural. There was some of that yellow police ribbon lying about on the ground, and a chalk outline of my brother’s corpse on the white pavement where he had fallen, and that chalk had already begun to smear and fade. I sat down on one of the curbs and a dealer approached me. His eyes widened as he came near, he faltered a step, and it occurred to me that my brother’s picture had been in the afternoon paper and maybe the young dealer saw the resemblance, as Luisa had seen it, and thought I was my own brother come back from the grave.

  Then he came forward anyway. He was a business man first and foremost, and any sale was a good sale, even to a ghost.

  “Smack?” he asked. “Bag cocaine?”

  “No, thank you.”

  My voice was polite as hell. I buried my head in my hands and looked for the grief deep in there, buried under all those layers of dark. It took a while but then I found it and sobbed into my hands with all those dealers watching, juggling their rocks in their big-ass pockets, whistling at the moon.

  SIX

  THE TRIGGER

  Not long after I arrived here in Coldwater, I stopped paying attention to my surroundings. I learned how to ignore everything and to be watchful at the same time. There is farmland beyond the walls of the prison, I know this, and beyond the walls too are neat little stucco houses and palm trees and roads that lead to those houses, and it’s true that sometimes I imagine myself walking down one of those roads. Perhaps someone whispers my name, and I hear the voice of Homicide Detective Leanora Chinn, and I walk beside her straight and true.

  I don’t mean to suggest I have lost touch with reality. Partly it is a way of acting. The other prisoners leave me alone. Not out of fear or respect or some notion of human dignity, but because I have managed to adopt the manner of a fixture, a person who blends into the ordinariness of a place and its routine. Everything they say about prisons is true, just as it is true that men here, as in other occupations of life, survive by holding themselves aloof. At night I hear the other prisoners roll about in their cots. I hear them moan and know they are masturbating and know too that their cell mates go on reading, or picking their toes, or whatever it is they do to get by. Because we have seen what happens when that aloofness is dropped. Maybe two cell mates touch one another and begin to kiss. I see the small red flare of a cigarette, forbidden after lights out, and smell the sweetsick smell of the tobacco, and am overwhelmed maybe with my own hunger and a sense of fear, because that small grunt might not be pleasure at all but the sound a man makes when he is muffled about the throat, then stabbed with a kitchen spoon that has been filed into another shape altogether. When two men want the same thing, when desire seeks physical expression, these are our problems. So I act as if I do not hear. I close my eyes and drift to the edge of sleep, past the infinite shades of blue, dreaming of my other life until I am on the streets of North Beach again, and this prison cell is a shadow world.

  When I got home I took my brother’s gun and stashed it way back in my bottom drawer, underneath clothes which I never wore. I looked at the newspaper clippings, and still could make nothing of them, and after a while I figured there was nothing to be made. It was just Joe, looking for work, and the clippings revealed about as much of importance as the obituaries of the old Italians over which he’d scribbled his notes. I told myself, though, that there would be other leads to follow. I held in my head the vague notion I would somehow solve the mystery of my brother’s death.

  The next morning an article appeared in The Chronicle, a short little item in the crime section, in which the reporter let himself wax eloquent. “For Joseph Abruzzi Jones the hard times came to an end two nights ago, when the 38-year-old North Beach native was shot dead in a drug deal in the Mission.”

  I did not particularly like this spin on events and was brooding over it when I got a call from Jimmy Wong, pissed off because I’d missed filing a deadline on some Russian refugees he wanted me to evict. I didn’t feel much like talking to Wong. I gave him the silent treatment and let him hang there on the phone.

  “What’s the matter with you, Abruzzi?”

  “I’m busy.”

  “What do you mean, busy?”

  “I’ve got appointments, Jimmy. I got some dagos to evict. One o’clock sharp. Chinks at two. Jiggaboos at three. A man has to keep busy.”

  Then I hung it up.

  I paced back and forth, grubbing around in my emotions, in the guilt over things I had done, or imagined I’d done, or maybe not done at all when I should’ve, but didn’t have the nerve. Instead I’d lingered in the old neighborhood, not getting out but not staying either, not really, always lingering on the edge.

  I wasn’t going to do that anymore, I told myself. Though what I was going to do instead I had no idea.

  I studied my brother’s picture in the newspaper, figuring the case was all but closed now, the police were satisfied. I wanted to blame someone for what had happened but there was no one to blame except Joe himself or circumstance or maybe myself for being who I am. I took a drink, then I cursed all that crap and threw my glass against the wall.

  SEVEN

  OCEAN BEACH

  We held the funeral out in South
City, in the Italian Cemetery, where I’d gone often enough as a kid, when I was still in school and the old Italians of the neighborhood were dying off one by one. There had been green space between the graves then, an open meadow between the Italians and nearby Colma Cemetery. In the years since that time, the meadow had filled with graves, and the boundaries between the Italians and everyone else had disappeared.

  My mother was buried up with the old Italians, because that’s the way she wanted it, but my father was in a VA plot the other side of the hill. We were laying Joe somewhere in-between, alongside a family whose name was Panarelli on one side and Merriwether on the other.

  Only a handful came to the burial. Luisa’s kids laid some red Mexican roses, the color of lips, over my brother’s casket, and Father Campanelli read the passage from the book about the dust to the dust and the ash to the ash. Meanwhile, I looked over the meadow at the gray stones rising from the grass and the road rolling through the cemetery. A yellow taxi moved down that road, coming toward us. Luisa let out a little wail and the kids tilted against one another, lugubrious as hell, all but identical in their dark suits and linen collars.

  After the priest had done his bit, we lowered my brother down. I tossed in the first shovel. Campanelli and the funeral people tried to lead us away then, because this was the moment known as the twilight moment, when the grave was still open, the family vulnerable, and widows most likely to hurl themselves in. Luisa would not leave but she did not hurl herself either. She stood at the edge of things watching the grave diggers do their work. She held a spray of roses in her hands and she would wait, I guessed, until the grave was tamped and packed, then she would place the flowers on the dirt.

  By this time the taxi had stopped and a woman had gotten out, standing way back among the willows. It was Marie. She watched us from a distance. I waited a beat or two, then decided to head in her direction. Father Campanelli choose that moment to put his hand on my shoulder.

  “How are things with you, Nick?” His voice was thick. We had known each other since I was a kid.

  “I’m doing well. Things considered.”

  “If you need someone to talk to?”

  The old priest’s eyes were rheumy and tired. He still kept the old calm, though, and had about him the smell of black cloth and incense that reminded me of the altar and those days long ago when I confessed to him all my sins, leaving out only how I walked around with my dick so hard that it was all I could do not to fall down and screw the dirt. Rumor was the old priest had prostate cancer now.

  “I dedicated this morning’s mass to your brother.”

  “Thank you, Father.”

  “I’ll say another tomorrow.”

  “I appreciate that.”

  I glanced up toward Marie, then he glanced too and saw what was drawing me away.

  “You’ll come see me?”

  The way his voice quavered I could not be sure if he meant for religious purposes or because he was an old man and just wanted to talk. It didn’t matter. He knew I was going to give him the brush. It was how you had to be with a priest.

  “Sure,” I said. “I’ll come by the chapel.”

  I hurried through the cemetery, snaking through the stones, with Marie up ahead, and behind me the long sound of the dirt falling into my brother’s grave. I could feel Campanelli watching me and didn’t like the feeling. He knew why I was hurrying, I guessed. With all the confessions he’d heard over the years, there wasn’t much he didn’t know about what went on in North Beach. I reached Marie, but when I turned the old priest was gone. It was just Luisa watching the diggers now. Her two kids played tag among the graves.

  “Is that Joe’s wife?” asked Marie.

  “Yeah. That’s Luisa. She’s not crazy about me.”

  “Why not?”

  “Joe told her some things. About you and me, during your divorce. That’s what I think.”

  “He didn’t know about that.”

  “Joe had his suspicions,” I said.

  Marie was dressed in black. She wore a black kerchief too over her blonde hair and her lips were red like an apple. Her skin did not seem so olive as it had once been, but rather to have grown fair with the years, almost white. The sight of her up close startled my heart and the feelings were the same as they’d always been, only rawer and without much sense of innocence about them. I wanted to be with her, to drive her home, so I went over and paid the taxi driver his fare.

  “Can you afford that?” she asked.

  “No. But you always were extravagant.”

  “Is that what you think? That I live an extravagant life?”

  “Compared to some. Anyway, we haven’t seen each other much these last years, you and me.”

  “I didn’t know if I should come to the funeral.”

  “There weren’t many people to object, were there?”

  “His wife.”

  “She didn’t see you.”

  We climbed in my car and drove up Cemetery Avenue to the freeway, where above you the row houses of Daly City sweep over the hills, one line after the other, while below the gravestones tumble like dominoes toward the bay.

  “When you get down to it,” I said, “Joe was happy with simple things. He didn’t want much.”

  “That’s not true. Your brother wanted plenty.”

  “He wanted you.”

  “Well, he got me, didn’t he?”

  “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “A couple weeks back. He stopped by to talk.”

  “You two never let off, did you?”

  She didn’t answer and I felt all the old tension between us, the ugly stuff. It wasn’t the way I wanted things to be. When the road crowned I took the next exit, onto the Sunset Highway. The wind was blowing hard and up above you could see the place where the weather changed and the fog billowed up under the blue edge of the sky. From here the clouds were a dark, blustering gray all the way to ocean.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “Ocean Beach.”

  We looked at each other a long moment, and I found myself taking in the full angle of her face, and I saw the age that was starting to appear, and I realized she wasn’t going to say yes or no, and that everything was up to me. I felt our car vanishing into a stream of cars, all of us rolling along on the road between the houses and the graves.

  The breeze was harder down by the ocean and harder yet when we got to the other side of the sea wall. Though it was late July, summer on this side of the city is as bad as winter and the ocean had that bitter look. Behind us the abandoned windmills at the edge of the park cut a shadow against the sky, and in front of us the sand was filigreed with a yellow foam. Clumps of wood and refuse had washed onto the beach; down current there was heavy equipment, tractors and cranes digging a trench for new sewage pipes that would take all the junk and refuse and crap of San Francisco and deposit it a dozen miles further out. The pipes they used now were not long enough—and when the current was wrong, everything came washing back to shore.

  Marie tightened her coat around her.

  “The police think it was a street thing,” I said. “Some kind of drug deal gone bad, but I don’t believe that. Things were going well for Joe. He had some work lined up.”

  “Maybe,” Marie said.

  She looked out at the gray ocean, the gray sky, the gray rocks, and it was suddenly all too goddamned gray for me.

  “There’s things you never saw when you looked at your brother. You didn’t know everything.”

  “What are you trying to tell me? The cops are right?”

  The seagulls were cawing above us, the pelicans screeching, and the sound of a bull seal echoed out from the rocks.

  “Son of a bitch,” she said and began to sob, a little at first, her arms hanging loose under her long coat, and I went up and put my arms around her, but carefully, so that we did not touch too close. She seemed far away, lost in her own swelling grief, and I was remote from her until at last she l
eaned into me, and I felt the relief, all her grief coming out, and noticed too the scent of her hair and the softness of her body, and she was crying harder now, and I felt looking out at the ocean the great waves building and building, so that the tears rolled a little down my face too, and the salt taste was in my mouth. I imagined my brother as a child and saw how he looked, smiling at me, and I clutched Marie more tightly, suddenly aware of her body in a way I had tried not to think of, at least not right now, but I could tell she was aware of my body too, and my lips touched the crook of her neck. She pulled away so that I was looking into her dark eyes and she was looking into mine. Then I kissed her, a wild kiss, and she kissed me back, a kiss sinful and innocent at the same time, with the taste of something unspeakable. Then we let each other go and stood staring down at our feet, where the water had rushed up, then receded, and the yellow scum was floating on the sand.

  EIGHT

  THE SEARCH BEGINS

  The next day I put on my dirtiest clothes and fancied out into the Mission, looking for my brother’s murderer. I am not sure what got into me; it wasn’t the kind of thing I usually did. I told myself I didn’t believe the police explanation. Maybe that was part of it. Maybe, though, it had something to do with the way Luisa had treated me before the funeral and the lousy way that made me feel. I wanted to prove to myself I was a good brother, and the way to prove that was to wander around the streets of the Mission, a picture of Joseph Abruzzi Jones in my pocket. I thought I might find somebody who’d seen him on the street the night he died, or at least find out if he’d been on the slide again, like the police seemed to think.

  I went back to Dolores Park, down into the hollow under the pepper trees, and squatted on a bench there in front of an outdoor table. Some young men loitered under a statue nearby, kicking at the pigeons, and it didn’t take long. One of them, a Mexican kid—his body thin like a rake, chest concave—sauntered over and sat down across from me.

  “Cocaine?” I asked.