A foolish thing to do.
Smith would come after him, he figured. If not now, then eventually. And in the meantime, there was still Dante Mancuso.
Mancuso was a stubborn son of a bitch, he knew. Chances were the cops, with no one pushing, they’d get distracted, lose the trail, but Mancuso would circle around. He would figure everything out. The man had the tenacity of a paranoid, the inability to let go. The truth was, Dante’s whole goddamn family had been that way. He remembered the grandfather, with his fucking hook nose, lying in his boat, whispering to his goddamn fish. And the mother, off the edge, that one.
No, Dante wouldn’t let go.
The cell rang again.
Smith.
Nick picked up. There was only so long you could avoid what was coming. Sooner or later you had to answer the call.
“I know how hard this has been on you,” said Smith. “I know how much you loved your daughter. And you may not want to hear this now, it may seem insignificant, but I wanted to let you know, to ease your mind, that everything’s been squared away.”
Smith went on then. All the venture money had been secured. Solano Enterprises would be moved into the building soon, just as planned. The cash flow problems were over, so Nick didn’t have to sweat. Smith did not mention Nick’s call from the night before. And for some reason, this frightened him more than if it had been the other way.
“The market’s down,” Antonelli said. “I hear everyone’s closing shop.”
“Our investors are smarter than that. They know those who ride the tide, who stay the course, will reap the profits down the line.”
Antonelli understood. He understood it in a blink, and was surprised he had not understood it earlier. Perhaps he had not wanted to understand. It was the oldest game around. Solano Enterprises was a shell, and Smith was the one who yanked the string. He used the investment money to create the shell, and used the shell to attract more investment money, but the company itself was an illusion, and the money kept draining away. And Solano Enterprises had drawn Nick into the deal, getting him to finance the Water-house Building so the game could keep going, filling the offices with people, offering stock options down the line, fattening the cow. But with the rumors, with the crash, it had all started to fall apart. No doubt Smith and his buddies were draining the remaining cash even as they spoke.
Himself, Nick, he had been a pawn. And Solano too, he figured. The real players were the venture firms. They drew in the investors and sucked the gravy. And his daughter, he guessed, had figured it out.
“What I want to do is arrange a meeting. I know you have lots of other things on your mind. But some of our people are in town. They’d like to get together with you. Take a tour of the building.”
“My daughter—”
“I know,” Smith said. “I’m sorry. Sometimes, a little distraction … Isn’t that what they say at times like this? Keep yourself engaged with the world.”
Antonelli struggled to compose himself. He stepped onto the fire grating. There was Serafina’s across the way and there was Stella herself, standing in the open door. I am trapped, he thought. Because if I blow the whistle, I ruin myself. And if I say nothing, Smith can take me down at any time.
“These things have a way of passing,” Smith said.
“I can see the police station from here,” Antonelli said.
“Excuse me?”
“I can see the patrol officers. I can see the little black-and-white cars.”
There was no response.
“I think Mancuso, the detective, knows. He will figure it out. He will piece it all together.”
“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”
“You killed my daughter,” he said.
“I don’t see how you can blame that on us.”
“I only thought you were going to scare someone. A little push. I didn’t know who—”
“You’re imagining things. In your grief.”
“I didn’t know what kind of a son of a bitch you were.”
“Tell me,” Smith said, and his voice was suddenly very calm. “How’s your wife holding up under this?”
Antonelli heard the tone. He understood the innuendo.
“My wife knows nothing. It’s me you want, not her.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll go to the police.”
“I don’t think that would be wise. In your state. You’re very upset. You haven’t slept. Things have a logic that isn’t really there. I think the best thing, if you could meet with our people.”
“What do your people intend to do with me?”
“Don’t be silly.”
“No.”
“I’ve ruined everything.”
“What—”
Antonelli lowered his voice. “Okay.”
He glanced to the street. He heard a few strains of music, a swelling voice, then an orchestra, and guessed it was coming from Mollini’s shop, where the kids, like their father before them, liked to listen to opera behind the counter. Meanwhile Stella still stood in her doorway, and she had been joined by couple of old-timers, old man Mollini himself, it looked like, and George Marinetti, hobbling over his cane. A Chinese man looked up at him, then away, not seeing. No one saw him except maybe that teenager midstride in the crosswalk, crossing against the light.
“I have another appointment.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“I think this should take precedence.”
“I agree.”
“Well, let me tell you where to meet.”
“Don’t worry.”
“What?.”
“I’ll be right down,” said Nick. “I’m on my way.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Dante was headed toward Antonelli’s office. Up on the corner of Stockton and Vallejo, Joe Mollini stood in the door of the family butcher shop. Dante had gone to school with the younger brother, and it had been the same back then, always a Mollini in the doorway, and the opera playing inside. Joe Mollini was in his early fifties now. In the window, there was the same sign as always, along with his father’s recipes for Sicilian meatballs. In the afternoon, the elder Mollini and Marinetti usually came and sat at the card table inside. They came after they had finished their lunch at Serafina’s, Dante knew—though likely that routine would change soon.
Dante would not get past Joe Mollini without talking, he knew this. It was the way things were. You walked past the corner of Stockton and Vallejo, you talked to one of the Mollinis.
“Is it sold?”
“What?” asked Dante.
“Marinetti’s. Did your girlfriend sell his place?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come on. You know everything, a job like yours. Marinetti, he says they have multiple offers.”
Joe Mollini was a good-natured guy. Like his father, he took things as they came. He was not reluctant to speak up, though, and you could see from his expression that he had feelings on the issue.
“I don’t object to anybody making a commission on a sale,” he said. “We all have to eat. But sometimes, you know, Prospero’s people push somebody to sell when they don’t want. I’m not saying anything about your girlfriend, but George Marinetti, he’s friends with my father … and it’s his daughter behind this.”
“If he doesn’t want to sell…,” Dante said, then he fell silent. He didn’t know if he should get into this. Meanwhile, the music inside seemed to have gotten louder. Antonietta Stella, maybe, singing Verdi. The opera where the young woman gets murdered in the monastery.
“He will have no choice,” said Joe. “If Marinetti gets the offer now, and he decides not to sell, then he has to pay the commission anyway. You see, he’s roped in. And if he sells—if he leaves the neighborhood—what the hell am I supposed to do with my father. If Marinetti goes, my father’s going to be in here all day—no friends … no nothing …”
Mollini was agitated now. A car screeched to a halt just around the
corner, someone shouted, but Mollini did not turn his head. The streets here were always full of racket.
“It’s no good … these old men, to take advantage …”
The butcher shop sat on a corner, with windows on either side of the building, and Dante could see traffic had stopped on Vallejo and there was some kind of commotion. There was an unearthly noise, a high wailing cry that at first Dante thought came from the music inside, from Antonietta, the famous soprano. Only the noise was nothing like Verdi.
Dante broke away. He was quick, but by the time he got there the crowd was already three deep in front of the sundry shop and growing thicker. The wailing was more ungodly up close and did not sound human. A Chinese woman was on her knees and pulling at her hair and she began suddenly to pound her head against the brick building. A baby stroller lay sideways and a man’s body was skewed across it. A small form lay on the concrete nearby.
A doll, Dante thought.
Stella swooned in the middle of the street, head between her knees. Meanwhile Marinetti was wobbling on his cane at the curb, and Mollini’s father, Ernesto, was trying to keep him from toppling. A cop from Columbus Station was running down on foot. A Chinese teenager waved her hands, pointing to the balcony overhead, to the stroller. Dante saw them but he did not see them. He was trying to restrain the woman. Then he got another glimpse. The doll wore a little blue cap. Only the doll was not a doll, and blood was pooling beneath its head. The man nearby lay with his feet over the stroller, and his cheek against the walk. Dante had not put together what had happened, but he would in a moment. More onlookers had gathered. Witnesses. People gesturing to the balcony, then to the stroller. To the man who lay on the sidewalk. To the hysterical woman who had emerged from the sundry shop at exactly the wrong moment, pushing the stroller, and whom Dante could no longer contain. She broke away. There were more cops now. The crowd thickened. They spoke in English and Italian and Chinese. The noise they made rose up and was lost in the woman’s wailing. Even so, in the background, he could still hear the music from Mollini’s shop. Dante looked again at the dead man. Nick Antonelli. He lay at Dante’s feet with his eyes open and his skull crushed against the walk.
PART THREE
TWENTY-NINE
In the end, it was simply too much. You tried to resist. To avoid those things which seduced you with the sweet logic of your own demise. You hid your cigarettes in the filing cabinet, you walked a circle around the liquor store, you stayed away from the corner where the sweetest of dreams were sold in aluminum wrapping.
But you could not stay away forever.
Because these things, they conveyed a logic of their own. The logic was powerful. It was the logic of the moment. The logic of no tomorrow. It was the logic that said rot and decay were their own kind of beauty. And the hunger you felt—in your heart, in your gut—it was the hunger for that beauty.
After Dante left the scene on the sidewalk, he started walking. Aimless walking, at least at first, without a conscious destination. He was thinking of the stained nightgown, the missing computer, the mess Barbara had cleaned up from Angie’s floor. He was in SoMa, headed toward Brannan, and he saw the underpass ahead.
Suicide, the cops were saying.
He’d heard the talk at the scene, and did not doubt the determination. Antonelli was depressed over his daughter’s death and had thrown himself from the window. Dante stood beneath the underpass now. There were some kids in the alley. Homeless, in sleeping bags. Ex-cons crouched around a fire. Meanwhile the dealer was watching. Waiting.
There was foil on the ground. He picked it up. There is something I am not seeing, he thought, something I am missing.
He felt the hollowness inside. It was a void, like oblivion itself, and he put the old foil to his nose now and closed his eyes, trying to remember Angie’s face. He looked at the dealer. The man was smiling. The man was coming toward him now. Dante dropped the foil.
He turned and left.
He’d resisted one temptation, but he could not resist them all. Back in North Beach, he went into Gino’s place on Broadway, on the old Barbary Coast, and started to drink.
The next day, when he felt the weakness in his knees, and the darkness in his head, and the girl’s tongue in his mouth, Dante would ask himself how he had let things come to this. How come he had not figured things out a little sooner, before he’d raised the glass to his lips. Maybe it was the grief. Or maybe it was just because the woman was beautiful and he had been drinking. Maybe it was that the part of his brain that recognized danger had shut down, as sometimes happens when people suspect that they themselves are somehow culpable, and so close their eyes to the punishment they have coming. At any rate, Dante was sitting in Tosca’s when the woman came in. It was just after five, and the crowd had started to pick up. On the television the Giants were involved in an early spring rout of the Padres—a mechanical thrashing in which no one seemed to take any real pleasure. The Giants’ players were bigger and faster, and their pitcher bullied the ball across the plate.
Dante had gotten a glimpse of the young woman when she first walked in. She had dark hair and a white blouse and by the looks of her worked somewhere in the downtown district. She lingered at the end of the bar—as if waiting to meet someone, perhaps, or wondering if this was indeed the place she had been searching for. In a little while, she stood next to him, trying to get the bartender’s attention. By this time the bartender had moved away and was occupied at the well.
“Are you from the neighborhood?” she asked.
She was maybe ten years younger than himself. Her blouse was silk and her hair was up off her face. It was brown hair, longish, pulled up, but with a thin ringlet curling down either side of her cheeks.
“From the neighborhood, yes, I can see.”
“What makes you say that?” he asked.
“The way you hold yourself. Standing there.”
“There is no neighborhood.”
“That proves it then.”
“What?”
“That you’re from the neighborhood. The rest of us—we wouldn’t know. We’d think it was the real thing.”
“I guess you’ve got it nailed.”
“I guess I do.”
She smiled then, and he couldn’t help it, he smiled back. She had something about her, this stranger. A dark-eyed young woman with wide, thin lips that had a kind of wry twist—a Bess Myerson, all-American kind of look that made you feel like you were at a football game with the queen of the parade: the girl with the rich father and the big house at the end of the block.
Twenty-seven years old. White blouse and pencil skirt and a scarf suggestively draped about the neck. Cashmere pout.
“Yourself?” he asked.
“I’ve been here maybe a year.”
“What brought you?”
“Same thing that brought everyone else. What’s your business?”
“I used to be a cop,” he said, wary, watching to see the effect it had on her. None, it seemed. “Now I am in the private sector.”
“Detective?”
He gave the slightest nod.
“I’m a lawyer. Corporate. Used to be in the criminal end—but you know …” She shook her hair loose and something in the motion told him she was lying. In the first place, she wasn’t old enough. Then she changed all of a sudden, and her voice went soft. “Really, I’m just an assistant,” she said. “I haven’t passed the bar. I got out of school a year ago, and I spent a year as an intern, in the DA’s office.”
Maybe that was what disarmed him, that small maneuver—that seeming bit of honesty. Or maybe it was the small crescent of freckles on her cheek. Or the angle of her jaw, how he could see that underneath her well-chosen clothes, she was rangy and thin, and looked more like a kid than a woman.
“Why did you come here?”
“The pot of gold.” She laughed. “There’s been a lot of hiring, and Westin Financial, they hired me. Internet litigation.”
“I heard th
ere was a lull.”
“Not for us,” she said. “Let me buy you a drink.”
She went away to corner the bartender, and Dante stayed where he was. This time of day, it wasn’t your usual North Beach crowd. Or not the one Dante was used to anyway. It was a look to the future kind of crowd. With hip haircuts and a vision of how things were going to be, ignoring for the moment anything that contradicted that vision. And for a moment Dante wished he were one of them.
The young woman came back and handed him a drink. After a while she reached out and touched his nose.
“May I?” she asked.
She was coy, but he didn’t mind. He let her touch his nose. She ran her fingers over the appendage as if she were stroking something of great value. “It’s a beautiful nose,” she said, and there was a touch of mockery. “I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”
He closed his eyes. He liked it, her fingers on his nose, there in the dark.
“I want to take you home,” she said.
He looked back at her now. Her eyes were very dark and her skin was pale and there was something wrong about the way she said it. Something off about her eyes. It was the look of a person who was perpetually hungry, like those people beneath the underpass. He should have noticed sooner.
“All right,” he said. “Take me home.”
“Drink your drink first,” she said. “I know a place we can get something to eat.”
They toasted and he drank a little, sipping it partway down. He looked at her again, and things which should have clicked earlier, clicked now.
“What’s that you’re drinking?” he asked.
“Mai tai.”
She gave him the Bess Myerson smile again. Mai tai. The same drink the girl had with Whitaker, first at the casino, then at the little bar across from the boat dock. Coincidence, maybe. But he did not think so. Last time around, she’d been working with two men—at least according to what Rose had told him. He glanced around, but no one matched the descriptions. Maybe Rose had gotten it wrong, he thought. Or maybe the men were waiting outside.
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