The Last Days of Il Duce

by Domenic Stansberry

  “The way your brother came to me, his anger, it saddened me. It wasn’t what I wanted. A long time ago, your mother, I was very fond of her. I promised her I would help you boys. That’s why I was glad when you came to Pescadore. Who wants to leave the world with someone hating him? Because what are you, when you are gone, but what other people believe you to have been?”

  I didn’t want to listen to this kind of stuff. He was playing the role I’d seen him play all his life. The good patriarch. Father of North Beach. Lover of women and children. Not a perfect man, no, but kind in the heart. A man, faced with difficult decisions, who’d done the best he could. As he spoke, he made big gestures with his hands. I cut him off.

  “What did you and my brother talk about?”

  Micaeli looked at the gun. He was suddenly blunt. “The China Basin job. He wanted me to award him the contract.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “That it wasn’t so easy. The city, the banks, they have their requirements. I told him I would do what I could do. But I am an old man, and no one pays much attention to me. Put the gun down, Nick. I know you’re upset, but this.…”

  “Joe had been talking to Johnny Bruno. And Bruno told him about that man you had killed.”

  “Johnny Bruno’s an idiot.”

  I agreed but it didn’t stop me from rabbling on, telling the whole story Johnny Bruno had told me. The story of Pavrotti’s assassination that I’d heard and rejected but was now ready to believe. It did not matter for the moment that I did not have all the evidence I needed to prove Micaeli’s involvement. Why should it matter? Shame was shame, pride was pride, money, money. If my brother had lived to dredge up the old story, Romano and his son might have lost the China Basin contract. But not only that. With the public attention, the old judge would have lost his dignity in his dying day, and his dignity was what he loved most.

  “No.” Romano scoffed and made a little dismissive notion with his hand. “It has already been dragged around, that story. When I was judge, they tried to attack me with it then. The Mussolini business. And that dead fascist in Reno. But nobody believed.”

  He raised his head now, taking the posture of a judge. There was something in that posture, in his voice, it would be an insult to challenge and the insult would not be to him but to yourself. I could see why the Tenney Committee had believed him and why, now, I almost believed him too. It was his manner. He had in his face the dignity of the Italian peasant, though in fact he was not a peasant, and you could hear in his voice and see in the turn of his hand a flourish that somehow stung you to the quick of your heart, making you want to weep for all those who had come to America and felt shame over who they were, and you forgave them, those Italians, their Black Shirts and their Il Duce, because they were after all only Italians, and their sons had died, and their daughters had wept, and they had given themselves in the war.

  I hesitated. I lowered my brother’s gun, pointing it at the floor. I remembered how everyone in North Beach had always admired Micaeli. My mother among them, myself too, looking up at him with a gleam in my eye. In the end, though, he was like all those old Italian men who wanted your admiration. When you gave it to them, they gave you a little pat on the head but nothing else in return.

  “No,” I said, mustering myself. “You’re lying to me,”

  “Why would I lie?”

  “My brother went to Reno before he died. He was looking for a man named Bill Ciprione. You remember Billy, don’t you?”

  Micaeli said nothing.

  “Oh, that’s right,” I said, playing it up, “you knew him as Dios. Billy Dios. An old compagno, si. A man who did you a favor. I’m sure, of course, you paid him well.”

  Micaeli kept his tongue in his head. The whites of his eyes looked yellow to me, the color of a dirty sheet on a dirty bed in a prison with walls that reached to the moon.

  “Only Dios was dead,” I said. “So Joe searched out the daughter. And Joe and Dios’s daughter, they had a conversation.”

  Micaeli looked at me hard in the eye, and I looked him back. I thought of Ellen Ciprione, up there on her porch, and how’d she glanced back over her shoulder as I sat in the car, studying her. Micaeli made a little nod, and the yellow in his eyes seemed to brighten.

  “You had Pavrotti killed. You paid Dios to make the arrangements.”

  Romano shrugged, but he didn’t deny it. “The authorities sent Dios away during the war,” Micaeli said. “Afterwards, he came back, here to North Beach. He started a family—but it didn’t work out for him. Myself, because of my position in the community, I felt some responsibility. I put some money for the daughter—in a blind trust. I never intended for her to find out where the money came from.”

  “But she did find out?”

  “Dios was estranged from his family. It wasn’t until a few years ago—after his first wife was dead, his brother too—that he made contact with his daughter. He wrote her a letter. And in that letter, he confessed his sins.”

  “The killing of Luci Pavrotti?” I asked.

  He avoided the question. “The daughter came to me,” he said, “the letter in her hand. On the verandah of my porch in Pescadore.”

  Romano’s eyes were suddenly teary, full of sentiment. He made a sweeping gesture with his hand, as if he were standing on that porch, studying magnificent vistas. His property. The laborers. The young woman in front of him. His chest swelled out. He went on, telling his story in the curious way old Italians have, referring to people not by their names, but by their place within the family. Father. Daughter. Lover. The Forgotten One. Throughout it all, he went on gesturing, operatic, as if he stood on a balcony raised above a stage.

  “I had feared an ugly scene. That the daughter, she would be full of the bitterness of her father. This girl, though, she began to weep. In my arms, there on the porch. There was no ugliness, only tenderness between us.” Micaeli paused again, his eyes full of innuendo, as if there were something he wanted to be sure I understood. I didn’t get it at first. “As time went on, things became more tender between us. Much more tender than you would think, between an old man such as myself, and a young woman. But then.…”

  He broke it off here, but I saw the vanity in his eyes, and I knew then what he was trying to tell me. Even with one foot in the grave, these old Italians, they were full of themselves. They wanted you to know they were not tied to their wives’ apron strings, and that young women still desired them. Don Juans, Casanovas unto their dying breaths, forever holding the mirror up to their own faces, whispering passionate good-byes.

  “That letter, the one Dios wrote his daughter?” I asked. “My brother found out about it, didn’t he?” It was a guess, but I knew suddenly it was the right guess. Joe must have had something concrete against Micaeli, or none of this made any sense. “The daughter, she told him.”

  “He bullied that letter out of her,” Micaeli said. His voice was fierce. “She did not intend to give it to your brother. He took it.”

  I was still missing something though, something terrible and obvious, and maybe I was just not letting myself see. Meanwhile, Micaeli held his head in the old way, regal, full of confidence. In that moment he looked as he used to look, not so long ago really, the older man with the young man still in his eyes. He had about him the look of success, of wisdom, but of a certain charm too, one of those people whose presence is like a steep precipice, where age and youth and beauty all exist together in a single facade, and that intermingling is, in some way, irresistible. I pictured him then, standing on the verandah in Pescadore, and for a moment I could almost imagine it, the embrace, the tenderness between the young woman and the old man who had been her secret provider. I could see that embrace, maybe, the sweetness of it, and the ugliness of it too, and I could see my brother bullying that letter. There was still something wrong though. I could not picture Ellen Ciprione on that porch. Another woman, maybe, but not her.

  “I didn’t kill your brother,” he said.


  “Maybe you didn’t pull the trigger—but you had it arranged.”

  “No. I don’t know why you say that. I gave him his money, that boy. I promised him I would talk to some people. To see if he could run a crew at China Basin. I give him everything he wanted.”

  “Why should I believe you?”

  “Your brother gave me the letter. I gave him the money he wanted. He was satisfied. I was satisfied. I had no reason to do him any harm.”

  “Where is this letter?”

  “In my case.”

  “Your valise?” I asked. My heart started to beat harder now, thudding like a machine.

  “Yes.”

  “Get it.”

  I wanted to see that valise, to touch it, to feel it in my hands, to know if it was the same black leather case, with the same gold zipper, that I had delivered for Jimmy Wong. Because if it was, it would prove to me what I’d already guessed. That Romano had decided to get rid of my brother—and that he used me to do it.

  “It’s right here. On the mantle.”

  He turned and picked it up and when he laid it down on the desk for me to see, all the blood seemed to rush up to my head at once, scattering my thoughts so they disappeared like flies into a damp cavern.

  It was not the same valise.

  Not even close. Brown leather. Old and battered. Held shut with a buckle at either end.

  “I’ve had this for ages. It’s as old as me.” He fumbled with the buckles. “And opens about as easy.”

  “That’s your case?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a question.”

  “Shoot,” he said, then laughed, overhard, like this was a tremendous joke. My finger itched.

  “A black valise, Italian leather. I saw it up in your office in Pescadore?”

  “Oh, that.”

  “Who does it belong to?”

  “Marie.”

  He smiled again, shrugging. A shadow crossed his face, as if he realized the significance of what he’d just told me, how it tied Marie to my brother’s murder. Then the shadow passed and it occurred to me that perhaps he was setting Marie up the same way he’d set me. He wanted me to think she was the one who’d sent the valise to Jimmy Wong, with the money inside, to pass along to the killer.

  “How did it get to Pescadore?”

  “After your brother died, she came to visit. The two of you came together. Remember? One morning, she and I, we talked a while in my office—before you went down to the beach. She left the case behind. You know women, so forgetful.”

  He paused, as if having second thoughts, and looked at me with concern. “You should forget all this. Your brother was hell-bent for destroying himself—but you need not do the same. There is no reason to get all tangled up in the past.”

  “It’s too late now.”

  “Just turn away and go. You can have your job. We’ll pretend this didn’t happen. I’ll be dead in a few months, and none of this will matter. There’s no sense in embarrassing everyone in the community.”

  “It’s not the community I’m worried about.”

  “Marie’s in my will. I know about the two of you. You have my blessings. She’s a young woman after all, and there’s no reason for me to be jealous.”

  “Jealous?”

  It did not make sense to me. He’s losing his composure, I thought, babbling. What cause did I have to be jealous of him? Then I saw the vanity in his face again, the bit of smugness. I felt a spear of panic in my heart, and there was a wave of blackness, a moment of not seeing.

  “Give me the letter,” I said.

  Micaeli sensed the change in me, as if he had said something he shouldn’t. He struggled with the buckles, grunting and wheezing. He was nervous now, looking at the gun in my hand, and I wondered if he had the letter with him at all, or if he were stalling, and this was some kind of ruse. He hurried, as if reading my mind and knowing I didn’t believe him, and when he reached inside the bag, he paused a moment, and there was that look, those soft eyes, the fatherly smile on the old brown face, and as he fixed me with those eyes, a gun, I thought, he’s reaching for a gun, and I was torn, not knowing what to do, or whether to believe anything he had told me.

  “Don’t move,” I said but he didn’t listen. He moved anyway. Or I thought he moved. I pulled the trigger and shot him through the heart. He went on looking at me, with that wide open expression, blood started to come up out of his mouth, an infinity of time passed, in which it seemed he would never die, and so I pulled the trigger a second time. His body made a wild jerk and he was dead.

  I rummaged around in the case. There was no gun. Only the letter he had mentioned. I put it my pocket. Then I glanced down and saw his shoes.

  They were the same shoes I had seen in Marie’s closet.

  Then I realized the truth. It had not been Ellen Ciprione on that porch with Micaeli. Of course not. Ellen Ciprione was not the old man’s type. And I remembered something else. Billy Dios had two daughters. The daughter I wanted to talk to—the one who had come to Romano with her father’s letter in her hand—that daughter was not Ellen Ciprione. No, she was a different woman altogether, and that woman lived much closer to home.

  I had known it all along, I told myself. Or I should have known.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  INTERLUDE

  I left the way I had come, through Giannini’s garden. The old woman in the flowered dress sat as before, under her umbrella, still absorbed in her book. The Asian couple had sauntered off and there was no one else to recognize me. On Main Street I tried to control my gait, slowing down, more casual. It did not matter though because no one paid me any mind. At the last corner a young woman smiled and I smiled back. That was all the attention I got. In my car I fumbled for a while, searching for my shades on the dash, dropping my keys, until finally I hit my rhythm and disappeared from Sausalito, anonymous behind the wheel.

  It was a beautiful day, the kind in picture books. As I sped over the bridge, the high pylons towering in front of me, the cables looping in the rearview mirror behind, the air seemed scented with possibility and I felt a delirious calm of the sort I’ve only read about in books, experienced by ascetics and priests. I had a fleeting thought I should get rid of the gun somewhere on the Marin headlands. Stand on a cliff, hurl it in the water. I didn’t do it though; I didn’t want to call attention to myself. It would be easier in the city. Then I could simply wipe the gun clean, drop it down an iron grate, into the sewers of Chinatown. When that was done, despite everything, Marie and I could escape all that had happened and make our way into the future.

  That unexplainable feeling of clear-eyed well-being, of relief and calm, stayed with me until I was over the bridge and into the city. It disappeared as I drove down Bay Street into North Beach. My chest tightened. I thought of the Asian couple in the courtyard. I thought of the old woman with her book. I thought of the young woman who had smiled at me on the corner and even the toll-taker at the bridge. Any of them might identify me. And there were others too who knew I had gone to visit Micaeli that afternoon. Romano’s son. His wife. Probably my name was even written inside his appointment book, alongside his business buddies from Hong Kong.

  I found a parking place on Broadway, and pulled out the envelope, and when I glanced at it, my heart began to race all over again. The letter had been mailed from Billy Ciprione at the Alta Hotel. It was addressed, of course, to Marie Donnatelli.

  Billy Dios was Marie’s father. No war hero, dead in Korea. Rather he was one of those petit fascists, as they called them, men exiled during World War Two.

  The letter told Dios’s story. How he’d come back to North Beach after the war, tried to start a little family, but the old ghosts haunted him. Everything like Micaeli had said, only with names provided now, places. The woman Dios had abandoned was Marie’s mother, six months pregnant. Then there was the part Micaeli wouldn’t talk about. “In my younger days, when I first come to Reno,” Dios wrote, “I did some things maybe a man sh
ouldn’t do.” One of those things had been to arrange the murder of Pavrotti. He’d done it at the request of Micaeli Romano. It was a horrible thing to do, maybe, Dios admitted, but then Pavrotti was a horrible man. The fascists had turned out to be rotten, stupid to the core, betraying everyone, and that stupidity had ruined his life. So he’d been happy to help out his old friend Micaeli, who in turn helped out Dios’s estranged family in North Beach.

  After Pavrotti’s death, wrote Dios, he went straight. He went into the foundation business, started a new family, always with his old family in mind. He told his story quickly and simply. As the letter approached its end, the handwriting grew more slanted and crude, barely legible.

  Now, my first wife, your mother, she is dead. My second wife too, and it will not be too long before I follow. But I want my daughter in North Beach to know her father did not forget her. He thought of her all these years. She was his little girl, and it broke his heart, everything, the way it happened. Now he wants nothing more than her forgiveness.

  Forgive me, please.

  Your father,

  Billy Dios

  The letter had been postmarked several years back. It had taken Billy Dios a while to die, in his little room in the Alta Hotel. Whether he’d gotten his forgiveness or not, though, that was something I didn’t know.

  I put the envelope back into my pocket and got out of the car. In the afterglow of the shooting, so close to the death, I had felt as if anything could be accomplished. I had liberated myself, Marie, all of us. Now, standing on the corner of Columbus and Grant, looking down into the giant maw of the past, that street where all the old Italians had strolled and strutted and fought their battles with one another over who were the real Italians, it seemed escape was impossible. I put one foot in front of the other and hurried my way up those concrete stairs toward Marie’s apartment on Telegraph Hill.

  TWENTY-SIX

  THE FINAL CHAPTER

  I thumbed the buzzer six times before she answered, three quick bursts, then three more, with no patience inbetween. Her hair was damp and she looked unraveled in the heart and pale in the face, disturbed at the sight of me. I still had the revolver in my pocket and my sunglasses on. The lenses were cheap, the inside of the apartment dark as steel.