The Last Days of Il Duce

by Domenic Stansberry

  “Micaeli Romano called me today,” she said. “His mother’s having a birthday this week and he’s having a small party. Down in Pescadore. He asked me to come.”

  “Yeah?”

  “And he asked me to ask you.”

  I hesitated. I remembered how Wong had said Micaeli Romano had work for me—but there was all that tangled family history to contend with, and my brother’s dislike of the man, and other things I could not remember. Then I thought of Marie, and of the drive to the coast with her, and I said yes, of course, because it was in my blood to say yes to her, and how could you resist your blood.

  TEN

  PESCADORE

  We drove down to Micaeli’s place in Marie’s white convertible and thrilled along with the top down, winding through Devil’s Slide, the stark hillsides above and below us the plunging ocean. Marie wore sunglasses, her hair tied in a bandanna, and I rode in the passenger seat crouched beneath the wind. I was not sure I wanted to see Romano but I wanted to be with Marie, and when we reached the long stretches of open road below Half Moon Bay, and the sun burned through the fog, it seemed this was what I had been meant to do, ride beside my dead brother’s wife in a foreign convertible, whipped about by the heat and the cold.

  “Lieutenant Chinn came to your apartment, the day of the funeral?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “What did she ask you?”

  “Just questions.”

  “About us?”

  “About if I’d seen Joe lately.” Marie flashed her hand through her hair, and there was something in the gesture that said she did not want to talk about this anymore. I continued anyway.

  “Did she ask about us?”

  “It was so long ago, I didn’t think it mattered,” she said. “Anyway, she already knew.”

  “From Luisa?”

  “I guess.”

  “Did she ask your whereabouts the night of the murder?”

  “Yes.”

  “What did you say?”

  “The truth. Can we talk about something else?”

  “Where were you?”

  “You too?” she asked. “Are you a cop now too?”

  “Just asking.”

  “All right. I was out to dinner.”

  “Where?”

  “The Flower of Italy.”

  She didn’t have to tell me anymore, or even tell me who she’d been with, because I knew. Or at least I had a pretty good idea. The Flower of Italy was a favorite with the old school Italians, Micaeli Romano in his day—and now Michael Jr.

  On the hills above San Gregorio the fog closed in over us, and I could feel again the ocean chill a bit fiercer than I liked, and the sound of the wind whistling past grew louder, isolating Marie and me from one another, too loud to hear one another talk.

  Micaeli Romano’s farm was off the road south of Pescadore, between the ocean and the highway, an old estate that had been built some hundred years ago in the manner of an Italian villa, ornate trim and high porticos, painted in colors that had long since begun to fade and peel. The house sat in a valley warmer than the surrounding country, where the artichokes grew in long rows and Mexican laborers worked with knives to remove the thistle from the plant. All of it was Romano’s land, bought by his father some fifty years before, allowed to degenerate to a kind of European indolence. I had been here once when I was a child, and I knew Marie and my brother had spent some weekends down here, back when they were still married and Joe had wanted the old man to invest in one of his building ventures. I knew too that Marie had returned here after her divorce with Joe, and that’s where she’d met up with Michael Jr., though I didn’t know if that last part was true or whether the old man had any idea of the rumors that tied Marie to his adopted son.

  We pulled into the gravel drive. Some ocean-beaten date palms lined the way, and the pampas grass grew thick and wild all the way to the house. The old man himself came out to meet us, dressed in his baggy pants and his white shirt and his suspenders, clothes he had taken to wearing in his older years, as if now that he were an old man he wanted also to look as if he lived in an earlier century.

  “Nick.”

  He said my name all by itself, as if it were a magic charm, and I saw something like tears in his eyes. He gave me the embrace old Genovesi give to one another—though in fact I am not Genovesi—pulling me close and putting his cheek against mine, once on each side. I felt the old complicated emotions I always felt toward Micaeli and broke away from him as soon as I could. He embraced Marie the same way, only for a little longer; then he stood back to look us both over the way old people like to do. Then, nodding his approval, he led us into the house.

  “This place, it was built by Marco Fontana. In a certain tradition,” said Micaeli. “There are not so many places like it. Not here. Not in Italy anymore either. It loses me money but I don’t care.”

  We stood on the verandah looking toward the road. Marie was inside, unpacking. Later this afternoon Micaeli’s son would arrive and also Micaeli’s sister and his brother-in-law, the old man Ernesto Tollini, all coming to celebrate the birthday of Guilia Scarpaci Romano. The matriarch, half-senile, older than anybody wanted to believe.

  “Marie’s missing this wine. It’s awful good,” I said.

  “She’ll be along, don’t you worry.”

  “But it has such a nice taste.”

  “Pour us some more.”

  I filled our glasses and drank. The wine came from some old crony of his, a vineyard in the interior, and had about it the taste of those empty hills. The old man watched me drink with pleasure. He was a good-looking man even now. Micaeli was somewhere in his seventies, though until recently he had defied his age, not graying really, staying clear-eyed and limber, lifting his head to laugh and drawing in public the looks of women ten, twenty years younger than himself. He was more gaunt now and seemed to have lost some weight, but his features still haunted you in a pleasant way, and his dark eyes still fixed you when he spoke.

  “You know I was always fond of your brother,” he said at last. “We had our troubles. I didn’t like some of the things he did to Marie. And when his business went dry, you know, he blamed it on me.”

  “It doesn’t matter now.”

  “It does matter,” Micaeli insisted. “You, your brother, your mother, you have always been like family to me. Marie too,” he said, nodding his head towards the house. “A man reaches my age, he has regrets. About this thing over here maybe. Or this piece of his past. I think you know some of mine. How it was once, with your mother and me.”

  “She had a husband, you know. My father.” I spoke with some anger. “You didn’t need to keep coming around.”

  “Maybe not. But your mother and I, after the war, after I married Vincenza, it was different between us. Just talk between old friends at the kitchen table. But your father couldn’t let go his jealousy.”

  “Would you?”

  “I did. Or I did my best. But you, Nick, you. I know that you’ve had some trouble and I want you to pull yourself together. Your mother would want this too. Meanwhile there is some help you can do for me.”

  I took another sip of the wine, waiting to see what was coming. Micaeli smiled and it was that irresistible smile, I remembered it from long ago, and I smiled back, not knowing whether to hate him or to love him; then he reached across and touched me on the arm.

  “But no business now. Tomorrow. In the afternoon. We talk in my office.”

  Marie appeared on the porch and behind her was Vincenza Romano, Micaeli’s loyal wife, tall for an Italian woman and regal, wearing a floral print dress and carrying a tray of bread, a saucer of oil. As they stepped onto the verandah, a car pulled into the drive. It was Micaeli’s only son, Michael Jr. He drove a new sedan, elegant, European, and he and his wife and his kids were like something out of a picture book, the way they raised their heads and sauntered up the walk. Michael Jr. wore a black suit, he had dark curly hair, and though he had been adopted, you would never
know so. He looked more like a Genovesi, an Italian of the North, even than his father.

  His wife was an elegant woman, purebred Anglo, thin of bone, sheer blonde hair. I watched her as she came up the stairs to see how she reacted to Marie, but there was nothing there I could see. Either she didn’t know about her husband’s affair with Marie, or that rumor wasn’t true.

  “Good to see you, Mike. It’s been a long time.”

  “Too long.”

  Michael Jr. lowered his voice in the manner of his father and clasped me at the elbow.

  “I’m sorry about Joe.”

  He seemed embarrassed, looking for something else to say but not finding it, and I just shrugged my shoulders. He was ten years younger than me, and I remembered the fuss when Vincenza and Micaeli signed the adoption papers, but the truth was I never really cared for him and maybe resented the life that had been laid out before him.

  Michael Jr. walked over to his mother, embracing her in the way his father had embraced me. He did the same to his father, then Marie, and as he did so I watched Michael Jr.’s wife again, the faces of his parents, of Marie, how she closed her eyes when his cheek pressed against hers, but no one seemed to be paying any attention but myself.

  “It’s wonderful to have the family together,” said Micaeli and he put one arm around his son, the other around Marie, and pulled them close at the same time, clutching them to his Italian heart.

  We ate dinner in the front room, Micaeli sitting at the head, his wife Vincenza beside him. They placed the old matriarch at the end opposite, where she sat perched in her antique dress, lace collar, eyes glazed with cataracts. Guilia was the birthday girl, ninety-seven years old. She wore a thick layer of porcelain-colored makeup, giving her the look of a broken doll whose face had been plastered with mud. I ended up next to her, while Marie was on the other side of the table, next to the Tollinis. Teresa Tollini was Micaeli’s sister, and her husband Ernesto was a restaurateur, a buddy of Micaeli’s from the old days. They had brought a couple of their grandkids with them, and these kids sat together with Romano’s grandkids at a smaller table in the next room, hands and faces immersed in their spaghetti, the thick sauce, color of blood, that was like a drug once you got started eating and couldn’t stop. When I was young I would eat until I was silly, sitting alongside cousins and cousins-of-cousins, all of whom would eat more and more—and eventually I would give up, defeated, because I was only half Italian, after all.

  “Ah, Nick,” said Ernesto Tollini, leaning across the table. “At least you still live in North Beach. All the other young ones, they have left the neighborhood.”

  “I guess I’m the only one not to make it rich.”

  “Good for you, my boy, good for you. There are other things besides money. It is nothing but tourists in my restaurant now.”

  “It is not just the young ones who left,” said Mrs. Tollini. “It’s everyone. No one cares nothing about the old neighborhood anymore.”

  Micaeli’s sister had always liked to argue, and the argument Teresa Tollini was launching now had been going on since I was a kid. The Italians should stick close, stay in the neighborhood. It had seemed a vital argument twenty, thirty years before, the cause of much anguish and shouting as neighbor after neighbor loaded their cars, their trucks, and hauled off toward a better life. It seemed beside the point now. Mrs. Tollini brought it up anyway, directing it to her brother Micaeli, who had abandoned them like the rest.

  “That’s not true. We still have our law office in town. And I walk the streets every day,” said Michael Jr. He smiled in that agreeable way he had, the good son following his father’s path even though the footsteps in front of him were too large and he wobbled as he went.

  “No,” said Mrs. Tollini. “You don’t walk the streets. You drive the streets. You park beneath the building and when the day is over you drive home to Los Altos. That is not what I call living in the neighborhood. Like your father. When he’s not here, on his farm, he’s in that condominium in Sausalito.”

  “More wine?” asked Vincenza Romano, the good wife.

  She headed toward Mrs. Tollini with the bottle, her goal to distract the conversation. Mrs. Tollini did not want to be distracted. Meanwhile Marie was talking to Helen Romano, Michael Jr.’s wife, and the two women tilted toward one another, laughing, a gay kind of laughter, and I was sure then that there had been nothing between Marie and Michael Jr. Or almost sure.

  “We all make our mistakes,” said Ernesto Tollini.

  He was addressing his old buddy Micaeli. They slipped into Italian as they did whenever they talked of the old days. I caught enough to understand they were discussing Ettore Patrizi, the newspaper editor whose widow Angelica had died in a nursing home just the week before.

  “Angelica never got over what they did to her Ettore,” said Teresa Tollini. “They had no right.”

  “Ettore was in love with Mussolini. Every column in his newspaper praised Il Duce, even after the war started. That’s why he ended up in jail.”

  “Those days everyone was in love with Mussolini. Churchill. Gandhi. Before the war, all the great men visited Il Duce’s estate in Rome. They were all impressed.”

  “But they did not stay in love with him. Ettore did not have enough sense to sniff the wind.”

  “Bah,” said Teresa Tollini. “La Italia was an Italian newspaper. Who was Ettore supposed to write about? He helped bring Marconi to North Beach, remember? And Caruso, all the great Italian artists. The reason the government put him in jail was not because he was a fascist. It was Italian culture he was writing about. And Roosevelt did not want for us to be Italians anymore.”

  Micaeli slapped his hand on the table and his old judge’s voice boomed out.

  “Ettore Patrizi was a fascist!”

  There was a bit of theater in the old man’s posture. Then, though, his eyes darted furtively at Marie, and she looked away from him, down at her plate. I did not know the meaning of this exchange, and thought that Marie was thinking about her own father, who had disappeared from North Beach before she was born. (There were rumors about him—an adventurer, an Italian loyalist, a drunk—but then there were rumors about everyone. The truth, Marie told me once, was that he had died during the Korean War. Then, after her mother’s death, Marie had been raised by her uncle on her mother’s side, and she had taken the uncle’s last name.)

  The room fell quiet. It had been years since I had heard a conversation like this and then only in whispers. Most of North Beach had been touched by the scandal, even my mother and father, who had been forced to sit before the Tenney Committee in 1942, back when the government was grilling everyone who ever walked through the door of the Italian Social Club.

  “Hush, let us be quiet. These are all dead people. It is not worth arguing over them,” said Ernesto. “There is no need to go over this one more time. Our grandchildren, please.”

  The grandchildren, as if on cue, looked up from their spaghetti. I remembered doing the same, hearing the rush and flutter of the adult conversation build to a pitch, then a sudden stop, an insistence on silence. Even so, I’d gathered enough over the years to know the details of what had happened, or what people thought had happened. When the Committee got my mother on the stand, she had refused to talk. My father was a different story. He recited the names of a dozen or more local Italians, doing so, he said, because his wife had fallen into bad company and he did not want her to go to jail. My father was not the only one to cooperate.

  One man named as a fascist sympathizer had been Micaeli himself. On the witness stand, though, Micaeli gave such a speech, full of love and patriotic devotion to America, expressing it not just on his own behalf but the behalf of all other Italians, the cannery workers, the net menders, the old women in their black dresses, that the allegations against him did not stand. In the end it was only a handful who went to jail. Even those who did go, what exactly they had done, aside from listen to Mussolini on the radio, no one was really sure.

&
nbsp; Teresa Tollini held a grudge and was not ready to let it go. “It’s not fair. Look at the Chinese. They walk up and down Grant Street, waving red flags, Mao say this, Mao say that. No one arrests them. Instead, we do business with them, we sell them our neighborhood.”

  “Basta!” shouted Ernesto. “Enough is enough.” Ernesto was red in the face and wanted to exert his authority. He turned to me. “I’m sorry to hear of your brother. It is a great unhappiness.” He paused, staring into his sauce. A little bit of it stained his chin. “I saw him down in North Beach, you know, a couple of weeks ago. In Portafino’s.”

  This puzzled me. Portafino’s was an old man’s hangout, full of old Italians playing cards. I looked to Marie again, but she seemed to have disengaged. It was not like her not to be listening, though, and I wondered if she were putting it on.

  “Paying his respects. A good man, your brother.”

  “Yes, I remember your brother, a beautiful boy,” said Guilia Scarpaci Romano all of a sudden. All this time the ancient matriarch had been so silent beside me that her voice took me by surprise. Her eyes, glazed as they were, looked at nothing in particular, but her voice, tinny and a bit hoarse, sounded like a melody recorded in an earlier age, though the equipment that played it back was not so good anymore. “And where is your wife, that beautiful woman you married? Anne, that’s her name. Your mother always talked so wonderfully about her.”

  The others at the table glanced down, embarrassed for me. Micaeli’s mother went on praising Anne’s looks, her sophisticated demeanor, apparently unaware how in the end Anne and I had never married.

  “And your mother, you know, she was so proud of you. There wasn’t a woman in North Beach more beautiful than your mother. Isn’t that true, Micaeli?”

  This caused more embarrassment at the table. The old woman had a sly smile on her face and I wondered if maybe she wasn’t more aware than she seemed. Meanwhile Vincenza Romano jumped up and brought in the spumoni. She put it around the table, a slice in front of everyone, and brought a candle for every slice. Then she handed round some matches.