The Last Days of Il Duce

by Domenic Stansberry

  FOURTEEN

  REMEMBRANCES

  When I was a young man in law school, there was a professor, an old German, teacher of the history of law, who had on his office door a saying from the philosopher Santayana. Something to the effect that those who did not remember history were condemned to fulfill it. I was a diligent boy then, and so I studied my books and read my history and scorned those who led the unexamined life. My own conclusions in years since is that the philosopher may have glimpsed the truth, but he didn’t get the whole picture in his eye. Because awareness may let you see what is about to happen, even contemplate its design, but as to whether it opens an avenue of escape, that is another question. It could be recognition is just the last stage in the completion of the design, a trembling of the web, whereby the spider senses exactly where it is we lie.

  When my mother died, I discovered in her trunk two stacks of old letters. The first, tied with lavender ribbon, written in Italian and sprinkled with endearments (Oh bella! Oh mi amore!) had been sent to her by Micaeli Romano during the war. My command of Italian is not wonderful but I learned from those letters that Micaeli had hoped my mother would defy convention and divorce my father. Those hopes were crushed when my father was injured in a shipboard accident. My mother could not bring herself to leave her maimed husband.

  The second stack of letters was unbound, written in the blunt hand of my father.

  “Offshore, Corsica. Mussolini on his last legs. Only fifty miles out but all I see is water, flat and endless. German planes yesterday.”

  My father returned not long after that letter. Micaeli, stationed in Italy, stayed until the end of the war, then signed up for a second tour. He did not come home to North Beach until three years later, until after he had met Vincenza in Florence and married her on the steps of some cathedral.

  I first read those letters a few days after my mother was buried. It was in the old house, and my father was downstairs that day. He’d be dead too, in a few months, but I didn’t know that then. I’d been living my life pretty much as they both had wanted, working for a law firm downtown, still engaged to Anne. The longer we were together, the more everyone expected we would be married. I had to admit I liked being with Anne. I enjoyed her wholesome and fervent spirit, and maybe it was true I loved her and was just too stupid to know. Still, I could see our path together snaking ahead through the years. Though that way seemed pleasant and lush, I could not help looking back with a certain longing, especially on those days when I visited Joe and brushed past Marie in the hall. She would glance up at me with those eyes from our childhood, and I’d imagine her warm breath on my cheek and her voice saying she would never let me go, not really, she would be a figure in my dreams, half-buried in the sand, and one day it would be she and I again, embracing in the waves. Or that’s the kind of thing that went through my mind when I read those letters.

  I was in the middle of them, when my father came into the room. I could see from the way he looked at me that he knew what they were, and maybe he’d read them himself.

  “Do you want to me burn these?” I asked.

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “If I had wanted that, I would have done it a long time ago. Those meant something to your mother.”

  He always effaced himself; he always acted the fool. “What about you?” I asked. “What do they mean to you?”

  My tone of voice, he should’ve hit me with his crutch; but he didn’t. He was long past that. “When you want something,” he said, “you have to be cautious.”

  I laughed.

  “Sometimes you have to take your hands off. You chase something too hard, you run it down, you corner it—then you end up killing it. You destroy everything. So instead you let things be. You appreciate something for what it is. Otherwise you are tempting fate. You are looking for trouble. You will start things going you can’t control.”

  “I don’t buy it,” I said.

  “You will. You’ll learn to accept things the way they are. So put the letters down.”

  I put them down, but I didn’t agree with him. I did not want to live my life like my father. Nor did I want to do what Micaeli and my mother had done, hiding their desire in letters bound with lavender ribbon. So a few days later I drove down to Redwood City, where Marie and Joe lived as husband and wife in a pretty little bungalow a few blocks from the freeway. I told myself I was going to visit my brother, but of course I knew he worked during the day and it was Marie who answered the door.

  We walked together up some naked hillside, Marie and I, making a path through the dry grass. We didn’t speak much, because there wasn’t much to say. We both knew what was in our heads. Then we reached the top of the hill and sat down under a live oak whose branches looked like an old man’s fingers that had somehow sprouted leaves. I put my arms around Marie and we lay beside each other, trembling on that golden hill.

  “Let’s just hold each other,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “We don’t need to do anything else.”

  “We shouldn’t.”

  “It would ruin everything.”

  So we lay like that for a little while, like schoolkids touching one another while pretending not to touch. Her dress was thin and the scent of her body under the sun was like the scent of the sky and the earth, and I could not help but caress her, my hand under her billowing dress. Soon her legs wrapped up around my chest and we became fierce like animals under that tree. We did not get off the hill until after four in the afternoon. By then my brother was home. Or at least his truck was in front of his house. So I left Marie off around the corner and drove back to San Francisco.

  Six months later they were divorced, and Marie and I met secretly. We met during the day, when I was supposed to be at work; at night, when I was supposed to be in the library preparing a case; on weekends, when I told Anne I was tied up with colleagues. We met in hotels, in diners, in barrooms. We did, I guess, what Micaeli and my mother had done before us. Anne figured it out, but I didn’t care. And I didn’t care either when I lost my job for not being around. Then, after everything had been risked and the affair could not remain a secret much longer, I plunged my dick into a bucket of ice.

  “I can’t do this to my brother,” I told her.

  “You’re not doing it to him.”

  “I can’t face him if he finds out.”

  “What about me?”

  “You’ll find someone. You’re that kind of girl.”

  “You shouldn’t talk to me like that.”

  “How else should I talk?”

  “Like you talked on the hill. With your hand up my skirt.”

  “I keep seeing his face.”

  “It didn’t bother you before. Just who did you imagine you were fucking?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Figure it out.”

  We fought then, the kind of fight where all the angles of the world are in the wrong places, so that it felt like anything could happen. The next weekend she went to Micaeli Romano’s place in Pescadore. She’d been invited there along with her uncle, an old Genovesi like Micaeli, another buddy from the old days. Michael Jr. was there too that weekend. Maybe there was nothing to the stories I heard later, or maybe Marie took up with him to make me jealous, but either way we didn’t see each other, much after that.

  But at least I was a faithful brother. I listened to my father. I let loose of Marie and then Anne and made my life like a mirror, following Joe on his big spiral down.

  And now here, at the bottom of the spiral, was Johnny Bruno saying my brother’s death, like my father’s misery—and the death of Il Duce’s favorite general—this too was the fault of Micaeli Romano. I didn’t know whether or not to believe him. Maybe I wanted to see how close to the bottom of that spiral I could get. Or maybe there was a part of me that still thought you could make something different out of your future by studying the past. Either way, I decided to take the cash money Jimmy Wong had paid me for
delivering his valise, then fly out to Reno and see what I could see.

  FIFTEEN

  RENO

  I caught the next red-eye out, flying alongside a bunch of nervous Neds and Nellies who wanted nothing more than to spend Saturday morning stuffing slots. At the airport I rented myself a car and drove the hazy blue streets, finally settling on a two-story motel called the Big Lucky. My room smelled of gin but at least the Big Lucky was close to the center of town and not so shabby as it might have been. I plugged the machine in the lobby for a while, then hiked over to the Alta Hotel. The Alta was not so very different from the Ling Wei, except it was Teddy Roosevelt’s picture in the lobby, and the old bastards who lived here wore string ties on their shirts. They had faces like Indians, those old men, spider crevices under the eyes, skin like leather cured in an atomic wind. The desk clerk wore a cowboy hat. The owners had him jeweled up behind a glass case, bulletproof.

  “Bill Ciprione? No such man livin’ this here hotel.” The clerk ran his finger down the register one name at a time.

  “You sure?”

  “Not since I had this post.”

  “How long’s that?”

  “Three weeks.”

  “Who’s been here longer?”

  “Can’t truly say. But there’s an old son of a bitch for you. Elmore Torn. The one with the gray fedora. Doesn’t look like he’s been out of the corral as of late.”

  I hunched beside Elmore. He had fine gray hair and eyes that were very large and blue. I asked him if he knew Bill Ciprione.

  “Italian man?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s a few Italian men here. More before. Which one was he?”

  “I’m not sure. Only that his name is Bill. Maybe Billy.”

  “It’s not so smart to get involved with Italians.”

  “You want a cigarette?”

  “Don’t smoke.”

  “Want me to buy you a drink?”

  “Too far to walk. Bring one here for me.”

  “Where do I get one?”

  “Down the block. Ernie’s Liquors. A can of malt.”

  “You’re too old for malt.”

  “Get it for me anyway. And I want a cigar.”

  “I thought you didn’t smoke.”

  “Not cigarettes. Cigars, all right. With a can of malt.”

  “Okay. I’ll go get it for you in a minute. But do you know Ciprione? He’s seventy-five, maybe eighty years old.”

  “The one with the mustache?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Well there was a Bill here, Italian guy, he lived upstairs. 7-A. A couple times, I remember, his daughter came to visit.”

  “The daughter, she from around here?”

  “I don’t know anything about her. All I know is the old man used to go every Monday to play cards with his friends. Down at the Ace, you like to talk to his friends. They know more than me.”

  “Where?”

  “The Ace Card Room, that’s what I said.”

  “That’s where he is?”

  “No. He’s dead, sonny. Your friend is dead. Somebody killed him, but he looked like hell anyway. Ugly fuckin’ Sicilian.”

  “He’s dead?”

  “Yeah. Strangled to death in his room.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Who kills old Italian men? You tell me. I never did understand those people. He didn’t have fifteen cents in that room.”

  The old man touched his hat, which looked older than the dirt itself, and a little piece of the brim came off in his hand. I asked him for directions to the Ace and he told me it was just a few blocks down. He called after me.

  “My malt.…”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be back.”

  I found Ciprione’s friends at the Ace, like the old man said. The place was dark inside, like Portafino’s, and the men sat regarding their cards just like the old men in North Beach, so I felt as if I had come all this way to talk to these men I had always known but who still regarded me as an outsider. It was the same deal as always. Though they were old and their lives were almost over, I was envious of them. At least in their old age they could dodder off into the sunset, old Italians together. They could stagger up and down the sizzling streets of this disappointed land and tell stories of how things used to be. They did not even look askance as I approached, but I had a sense of mission now and was past being polite.

  I slapped the picture of my brother into the middle of their playing table.

  “What you want?”

  “That picture, it’s my brother. He came up a couple of weeks back to a visit a friend of yours. Bill Ciprione.”

  “Bill’s dead.”

  “So’s my brother. I don’t think it’s coincidence.”

  The old men just stared. They wanted to go back to their poker. After a while one of them spoke, bald, nodding his head up and down. He was a million years old and had a face like Julius Caesar.

  “Ciprione was an old man. Old men, we die. Sometimes young men die too.…”

  I told him to shut it up. He had that look in his eyes. As if getting ready to go off on one of those speeches old Italians specialize in. Shrugging their shoulders and patting you on the head. In the end telling you nothing, holding all the secrets of the world for themselves.

  “You know a man named Micaeli Romano? From North Beach?”

  No one spoke.

  I could not stand how they denied everything, these old men. I felt the outrage my father must have felt sitting in the witness chair in 1942, knowing how they were all intertwined. The Italians had stolen his wife away, ruined his life, seducing her in the back room of Fugazi Hall, underneath the picture of Il Duce. Yet they just sat there watching him, their eyes sad and innocent, shaking their heads at the way he betrayed them.

  “In 1953 Romano arranged the death of Luci Pavrotti. Ciprione knew the details, and my brother came here to talk to him about it. That’s why my brother is dead, goddamn it, and that’s why Ciprione’s dead too. It’s not some goddamn coincidence.”

  One of the old men trembled all over.

  “Fuck you,” he said to me. “You stupid little boy. Italians, we fought for this country.”

  “Take it easy,” said another one. He gestured at his trembling friend, as if to reprove me. “Fred here discovered the body. They were best friends. Thirty years in business. Foundation work. Bill Ciprione was a good man.”

  “My brother was a good man too,” I said, even though it occurred to me there was room for doubt, same as with anyone. Then for no reason I could put my finger on, I thought of something else. How Chinn had asked about Marie and Joe, if it had ever been violent between them. Though I didn’t say anything about it to her, I knew it had been, that in the days before the divorce he’d left his marks on Marie, swatting her up and down the bungalow. I had kept it from Chinn then, and I didn’t want to think about it now either. I pushed it from my head.

  “I want to get underneath this,” I told the old men. “What about his daughter. Where can I find her?”

  “Which daughter?” said another one of them, at the far end of the table. His friends gave him a look, as if he were talking too much. The talker turned his head, avoiding my eyes, and I lost my chance to pin him down.

  “You’re wrong about everything,” said Fred. He was in the grips of some kind of palsy now, shaking like a leaf, but it did not affect his speech. “Ciprione died a natural death.”

  “I heard he was strangled.”

  “No. He had asthma. He choked in his sleep.”

  “But the old man—in the gray fedora—he told me.…”

  “Elmore, he likes a story. Buy him a can of malt, he’ll tell you anything.”

  “Check the newspapers,” said the bald one, like Caesar. He glared at me steady, his voice stern, full of authority. “Look at the medical records. Go to the police. He was just an old man who died in his sleep.”

  Then the old Italians went back to their cards and I realized they
had done with me. They weren’t going to talk to me anymore.

  On the way back I walked past Ernie’s Liquors and strolled inside. I bought the can of malt and the cigar but I didn’t take them to Elmore Torn. I walked instead to a park across from one of the casinos, and I opened the can of malt and drank it myself. I knew tomorrow I would do like the old Italians said. I would check the papers, the medical records, the police reports. I would verify the date of death and the cause. Then maybe I would wander around for a while with my brother’s picture, check the hotels, but I would find nothing, and I would have no choice but believe the old Italians were telling the truth. Johnny Bruno had sent me on a chase to nowhere.

  I finished up the beer and crushed out the cigar, choking a little on the smoke. Then I went back to my hotel room and called Marie. I told her I was out of town on business, but I would be back soon. I told her I wanted to see her. We whispered to each other in hushed tones on the telephone, and I forgot the old men, and I forgot my brother’s death, and I told her I would be back the next day, and when just a little time had passed, not too long at all, I’d walk her down Columbus in full view of the world.

  But I didn’t go back the next day. Instead I checked all the things I knew I should check, talked to all the people to whom I knew I should talk, and they all told me Ciprione had died innocently enough, just like his friends said. Then I got another idea. I leafed my way through the Reno phone book, running my fingers down the long columns of tiny print.

  Ciprione, Ellen.

  The dead man’s daughter. If Joe had been to town last week—if any of Bruno’s story was true—then maybe Joe had found his way to the daughter too. It was the only thing I hadn’t checked out.

  Her address was there in the book, beside the name, and I went there that morning. Her house was about a mile from my motel, a small house on a street of small houses, all built just after the war without too much time or attention. The houses weren’t wearing too well, and when Ellen Ciprione came to the door, it didn’t look like she was wearing too well either. She was a brunette, a few years younger than myself, with a lot of damage around the eyes. She had that vaguely familiar look such people sometimes have, like maybe she lived in the neighborhood and I passed her on the street every third or fourth day. It wasn’t true, though; I had never seen her before.