The Last Days of Il Duce

by Domenic Stansberry

  SEVENTEEN

  THE HALL OF JUSTICE

  If fate has compelled you in a gray and miserable direction, so that you are witness to things you should not know, or have done things you should not have done, then there is a room waiting down in the Hall of Justice. It is not a pleasant room. It is small and ugly, and in it sits an ugly table and some ugly chairs. The walls and floors seem deliberately misaligned, stained with the oil of human sweat, and the lighting flickers forever out of sync. It is an ugly room, poorly ventilated, in which people tell ugly truths. Since nothing goes on here but such talk, the accumulated ugliness can do nothing but accumulate further. Once you’ve been in such a room, you never leave it, because it is but an entryway to other such rooms, and even if by some mischance you walk free into the outer light you carry this room still inside your heart. Any unexpected thing, a glance from a stranger, a footfall on pavement, a jingle of keys, will bring you back, so that every other place seems an illusion, and you are faced again with this dirty ceiling, these dirty walls.

  If we made our confessions in the open air, perhaps our guilt would float free and our crimes be forgotten. But in confines such as these, it is not only our own guilt we experience, but that of those who came before, and that of the world we carry within.

  For me that was the world where old men got sloppy over their wine and spilled out the guts of the old days. My father mocked their stories, so I mocked them too, but I listened anyway to their talk of how it used to be. How when to be a Calibraze or Siciliane or Abruzzi was not the stuff of romance but the stuff of fish guts and poverty. It did not matter even if you were Genovesi and thought yourself superior, because you still stunk after you worked, and you could not change your clothes enough to escape that stink, or eat food which was not cheap and sloppy and mushed together, or change the fact that your native country Oh terra bella! Oh patria mia! was rife with stupidity.

  Then came Mussolini. He of the magnificent voice and dismissive hand. Posters of Il Duce in the groceries and trattorias, all along Columbus Avenue, shrines and flowers.

  But in the end, the devil got into Mussolini’s ear. So the world fell into war.

  The old ones loved to tell that story, lingering not on the war itself but on the last days of the illusion, before the fall was complete, when Mussolini drove through the Italian hills with Claratta Petacci at his side and their assassin had not yet been dispatched from Milan. As the storytellers moved toward the conclusion, and how the mob had ripped the lovers apart, their eyes would get weepy. They would catch you looking at them, little American, last name of Jones.

  “Of course, he was a terrible man, Mussolini. A brute. The things those fascists did.”

  That did not stop them from finishing their story. Just as it did not stop the old men from swaggering the swagger of Mussolini, nor the old wives from crying the tears of betrayed women, nor the young women, wrapped in their American pearls, from turning their eyes towards the pictures of Claratta Petacci, imitating her brown-eyed pout and desiring her closet full of furs. No, all over North Beach, they were always telling it, the same story, the last days of Il Duce. It was the story in which everyone wanted a part. The old man, father of Italy. The young mistress. The jealous communist who murdered them both.

  No, the communist said, I did it for justice. Because the fascists had betrayed Italy. Tortured our Italian brothers. Lined them up in firing squads. Violated our wives and daughters.

  “Bah,” said the old women. “You wanted Claratta for yourself.”

  I didn’t know which was true, but I would think about it sometimes in my bed at night, just as I think about it now, inside this cell. I would imagine the young communist in his commandeered jeep, winding through the hills, taking Benito and Claratta from the cabin where they were hiding, marching them to the stone wall, holding up his gun, looking into those dark, fluttering eyes. I wondered then what I would do, if I would pull the trigger. And I knew, having come this far, the gun in my hand, there was no choice. The story needed its finish. The crowd was waiting in the square below.

  In the end, those old Italians, all their stories ended the same.

  EIGHTEEN

  ANOTHER EVICTION

  I itched to get out of town. I wanted to drive, to watch the scenery rise and fall outside the window. I called Marie and we made plans for the next day, to get out into the country.

  Meanwhile I strolled around the old streets of the Beach. I did not see my surroundings so much as I saw imaginary other places, little paradises, where Marie and I might escape. I felt excitement at the idea of leaving, if only for the day, perhaps the same excitement the other sons and daughters of my parents’ generation had felt when they made preparations to clear out for good. It was only the oldest ones left now and the hangers-on. Leaving was something I should have done a long time ago. I hadn’t the nerve then, but a second chance was coming. Things were circling around again for Marie and me. All I had to do was take what Micaeli was offering. Talk to his son. Be patient. Before long I would be respectable again. Other opportunities would follow. A man keeps his eyes open, that’s what happens. We’d leave the Beach at last and find a little place to the south, or north, it didn’t matter, someplace with a palm and a golden hill, where old Italians didn’t exist.

  But nothing changes overnight and I still had some work to do for Jimmy Wong. A building of his, a three-story walk-up near Jackson Square, was scheduled for demolition. Only an old Chinese man on the first floor wouldn’t leave. Usually Jimmy saved the Chinese evictions for his own people, but he was in a crunch and didn’t want the Chinese neighbors to see him throwing out one of his own.

  Anyway, the old man was no plum. I’d been through it with him a couple of times before. He’d shouted at me in Chinese, refused to open the door, and wouldn’t let me serve him with the papers.

  So I brought Rickie and Eddie Lee and told them we might have to bust open the door on this one, just drag the old man’s stuff into the street. Inside we ran into an unexpected difficulty. The old man had his grandson with him, a burly kid maybe twenty-five years old, thick through the shoulders, long black hair and a Fu Manchu mustache. He wore a kimono over his jeans and t-shirt.

  “You’re a son of a bitch,” the kid told me.

  “It’s not my idea. You know Jimmy Wong? It’s his property.” I dug into my pocket and pulled out a couple of dimes. “There’s a phone booth on the corner. If Jimmy tells you okay, then okay.”

  My plan was to get the Lee brothers started while the grandson was out looking for a phone. I gave the kid my sincerest look but apparently it wasn’t sincere enough.

  “Just talk to Jimmy. He’s a reasonable man.”

  “I’m not moving.”

  “He’s your people.”

  “You don’t understand, do you? It’s not a race issue, it’s class.”

  The streets here had been filled with kids like him, maybe ten, fifteen years back. ABC’s, the old Chinese called them. American Born Chinese. College-educated, amateur communists out for a weekend with the ancestors. I remembered them carrying the red flag down Kearny Street while the old Chinamen—who hated Mao more than they hated the dirt itself—yelled curses from the thin-railed balconies above, heaping over chicken guts and old vegetables, all the refuse of Chinatown.

  The kid in the kimono tried to argue with me. Meanwhile his grandfather, wearing a plaid shirt and green khakis, paced back and forth among the half-packed boxes. From the looks of the apartment, and the expression on the old man’s face, it seemed the grandfather knew the situation was hopeless and didn’t want to fight us anymore. The grandson though had worked himself into a brand-new frenzy.

  “You fucking assholes, throwing my grandfather out just for an extra buck.”

  “Come on, kid. The building’s empty. No one lives here anymore. It’s going to be torn down.”

  “This should be housing for the old. We don’t need another office building.”

  “I don’t
know anything about that.”

  The truth was I didn’t much care what Jimmy did with his buildings. The building, sandwiched between Chinatown and North Beach, was in the shadow of the TransAmerica Pyramid. Whether Wong wanted to put offices here, or high-rise apartments, it wasn’t my concern.

  “I checked the permit applications, it belongs to High Wind enterprises.”

  “So?”

  “It is a joint venture, Ellipse and Far West.”

  And as the kid began to talk, going on with the interconnections—TransAmerica owned by Merrill Lynch transferred to Far West Holding through Singapore Incorporated via Chevron and Bechtel through the Suez Canal courtesy of Marco Polo—I heard somewhere in there the name of Micaeli Romano’s holding firm, and I realized that this deal involved Romano as well as Jimmy Wong, and I smiled to myself because it had never occurred to me they might work together (and were probably working together on China Basin too), but of course it would be true, because this was the way of business, and after all it was a small world and even smaller neighborhood.

  Rickie and Eddie Lee were getting anxious and a little bored. They came up behind me and tried to engage the kid in some dialogue.

  “Shut up, punk.”

  “Shut up yourself,” the kid said, brave as hell. But his hands were shaking, and Rickie and Eddie began edging him into the far room.

  I used the distraction to squeeze past the boy to the grandfather. The old man had moved away from the main action and was looking down at things that were the things of his life. To be honest, there wasn’t a whole lot there. A black and white TV. Some bags full of this and that, a glass Buddha, a portrait of his wife. His grandkid was still bellowing somewhere behind us and the situation was getting heated. I motioned to the old man, suggesting we step out on the porch. Outside I handed him a room key with a little ticket attached, and on it written in Chinese was the name of the Ling Wei Hotel. I pointed at the truck and told him we would be down with his stuff later, and that Jimmy Wong had come up with a week’s rent for him, and it was nice at the Ling Wei, every bit as nice as this place, with running water and a clever little stove for heating tea. Then I gave him thirty-five bucks, again courtesy of Jimmy Wong, and pointed to the hotel ticket and told him to go. He hesitated, glancing inside to where his grandson was still arguing with the other two Chinese. There was a look of concern on the old man’s face, but I gave him the gentle hand on the shoulder and off he went. I lit up a cigarette and watched him walk away, out into the crosswalk, his eyes fixed on the Ling Wei up ahead.

  The grandkid was right, of course. It was money behind it all. Nothing to do with who you were or where you came from. It was money made the whole difference, and bought you your dreams, and there was no sense in letting skin color or any kind of romance tell you different. It was the fact of things, like it or not, and if you couldn’t accept it, then you would get what the grandkid was about to get from Rickie and Eddie, who had their own frustrations with this life and got their pleasure where they could.

  Late that afternoon I went up to the Pyramid for my appointment with Michael Jr. His office overlooked the neighborhood, the pastel apartments and concrete gardens of North Beach. He smiled and shook my hand, clasping it between both of his at once, a gesture startlingly similar to that of his father in its force and warmth. His features too were animated with the same spirit as Micaeli’s, so that any physical difference between himself and his adoptive father did not seem so great as it might have been, as if his appearance itself had been reshaped by lifelong proximity to the older man.

  He gestured for me to sit down but instead I took a long look at his feet.

  “What?”

  “Your shoes.”

  “Yes?”

  “I been looking to get myself a new pair.”

  “Ox-blood. I just bought them.”

  “Very nice.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You ever wear the Italian ones, you know. With the sharp toes. And the little bibs?”

  “What? Oh, those. Not too durable. And not exactly our generation.”

  “Sharp though.”

  “Yes. A bit too sharp. They make a man look as if he has cloven feet.”

  We both got a little laugh out of that. Then Michael Jr. got down to business, telling me more or less what his father had told me the week before in Pescadore. Various parties were coming together to swing the China Basin deal, along with the main backers from Hong Kong, and my job would be to work with a team of lawyers trying to keep the deal from blowing up because the people in neighborhoods didn’t like the design, or the city didn’t like the contractors, or any one of a thousand other reasons. He went on with the details, and I remembered for the first time in a long time why I had lost interest in the pursuit of the law. I gave him the wide-eyed look, nodding my head like a junior partner, but the truth was I was still thinking about his shoes and wondering if he had lied.

  “Several of the principals will be in Sausalito in a couple of days, at my father’s place. I’m going to be out of town, but he wants you there. Shake hands with the Hong Kong money.”

  “What time?”

  “About eleven, on Tuesday. It’ll be brunch. You don’t have to say much, just take it in.” He checked me over for a second, up and down. “Go to Stephano’s, have yourself outfitted. We have an account there. You should wear a suit.”

  “I’ll even take a bath.”

  “Same old Nick.” He laughed, strained as hell, patting me on the back. “A million laughs.”

  For an instant the mask cracked and I could see beneath his charm, which after all was not really his charm but his father’s, and it wasn’t hard to tell he had reservations about the whole damned thing and thought the old man was crazy for letting a man like me inside the family door.

  NINETEEN

  EXIT PARADISE

  The next morning I dandied on one of the new shirts I’d picked up from Stephano’s, crisp and white, and a new pair of slacks. I met Marie on a corner at the edge of the neighborhood and drove south. We kept the windows open. I had not drunk anything the night before, and the morning air was invigorating. I caught Marie regarding me, enjoying my unrumpled and healthy look, and as we moved out of the fog down the peninsula I felt the weight of Little Italy fall away.

  We headed down 101, driving through all the little towns that had become one big town. Milbrae and San Bruno and Daly City. Sunnyvale and Mountain View. Sweeping past the ragged little stuccos that sat hunched alongside the freeway. Past the bowling alleys and motels on one side, the mudflats on the other, where dozers shoveled concrete fill for new industrial parks. We kept going further south, away from the bay, off the peninsula and into the valley, past more of the same stucco houses, the same hotels and industrial parks, then past them all one more time, then yet once again, before the landscape broke open and the road narrowed as in some not-so-distant past and there were orchards to either side. The city was gone behind us, we had left the freeway, but the traffic was still fast. The cars ahead set the pace, the ones behind made sure you did not falter, and the oncoming traffic came at us through some skewed geometry.

  “Where did you go when you left town?” Marie asked. “You never told me.”

  “Reno,” I said.

  I caught a glimpse of another driver, like myself, straining for a look at the countryside, wanting to enter it but unable to do so, driven forward by some inner energy over which he had little control. Marie flinched. “What were you doing in Reno?”

  “Client work,” I lied. “Divorce.” I didn’t want her to know what I’d been doing. There was no sense to it, and it had all led nowhere anyway.

  “I didn’t know you were doing that kind of work.”

  “Sometimes,” I said.

  She turned her head away from me, and looked out at the landscape. We were still hurtling forward, propelled by the traffic.

  “I’d like to take a walk,” she said.

  “Me too.”
r />   “Then let’s get out of this damned car.”

  “I’m doing my best.”

  There were no turn outs and I had to thrust the car forward onto the shoulder, fishtailing through the gravel and the high yellow dust. I killed the engine when we hit the scrub on the side of the road.

  We were somewhere south of San Jose, in an old valley tucked between the hills, overgrown with oak and grass. Beyond the scrub was a creek with a path running alongside. The creek was dry and to one side stood an apricot orchard and on the other lay wild land.

  We followed the path up the dry bed, Marie first, myself just a few steps behind. She wore a white blouse and red slacks and big silver earrings. Now that I’d come to see my brother’s death as an act of fate, not part of conspiracy, I didn’t see much reason to hold back anymore. He’d been a son of a bitch to her anyway, I told myself, and a burden round my neck. The sun was hot overhead, the insects chuttered in the grass, and I felt my desire more fiercely the further we walked. Some Mexican families worked under the apricot trees ahead, splitting the harvested fruit with long knives. A young boy smeared the apricots with sulfur, then lay them to dry in a wooden tray. I could hear the flies swarm from a hundred yards down the path.

  The Mexicans watched as we walked by, pretending to still be at their labor, but I could see in the men’s eyes they were regarding Marie, and I could see, too, the women regarding me, and I imagined that the heat and desire between Marie and me was such that other people could not help but notice and desire us too. I cursed myself for all the time I had allowed to pass bound up and tied by filial loyalty.

  “Let’s keep going,” I said. “Away from the people.”

  Her blouse was damp, and there was sweat on her brow. There was sweat too on my clean shirt, and I felt good walking under the sun, and strong and young.