The Big Boom

by Domenic Stansberry

  “Oh,” she said.

  Then she was gone, over the edge. Clawing at the air.

  The two men, carried by momentum, tumbled backward. Dante had had training. The dark calm that had settled in his brain was gone, shattered by adrenaline, and his movements were automatic, brutal. He drove his elbow into the man’s temple, then a knife hand into his throat. He picked up a rock and smashed it into his face. He smashed the rock into the man’s mouth and then lifted it again, and smashed into his eyes, into his nose, and then smashed him again. He could not stop himself. He smashed the man’s face until it was a pulp. Until the skull cracked and the face was raw with blood. Then he stood up and looked down into the cove.

  Sylvia lay some hundred feet below. She lay there in her white blouse and her pencil skirt and her black boots, her body sprawled and broken. She lay on a rock shelf with the line of the surf maybe ten feet away and the tide rushing in.

  Dante backed away. He meant to find the path but instead tripped over the Englishman’s corpse and stumbled along the clifftop A few steps more and he collapsed into the weeds and the succulents growing helter-skelter along the rim.

  This time Dante didn’t get up. He put his face into the sand and let the darkness come.

  When he woke, it was night. There was an offshore breeze and the sky was clear and there was a moon overhead.

  He walked to the edge. The tide had come in, and the waves were up against the cliff. It was a small cove, with a rock reef at the mouth, and the water churned violently. Just because the tide had come in, though, didn’t mean the girl’s body had been taken out to sea. Dante knew this from experience, from seeing bodies of people who had drowned in coves like this. There were eddies and crosscurrents, whirlpools within whirlpools, and it was not unusual for a corpse to be buffeted back and forth, smashed over and over against the rocks.

  Dante went back to the Englishman. He was tempted to leave the son of a bitch where he lay, but there would be forensic evidence, he knew, small details connecting him to the death, and he might as well put those to a minimum. Dante rifled the man’s wallet first, pulling the identification. Then he grabbed him by the ankles and dragged him to the edge of the cliff. The next part was not easy. He propped the man on the edge, into the sitting position. Then pushed him over. The cliff was sheer, jutting over the inlet, and the man hit the water more or less in the same spot where the girl had landed hours ago, before the tide came in.

  Then Dante walked over to the van.

  Inside he found the corpse of Arturo Lind. He searched the man’s wallet, and found the gun, too, lying on the floor. Then he returned to the corpse and unbuttoned the shirt. It was not easy to get it off, and the shirt stank of death, but he had no choice: His own shirt was covered with blood and he could not be wearing it in public. Then he drove the van toward the edge of the cliff, creeping along the path, until he was in the spot where the Englishman had gone over. He released the emergency brake and got behind the van and pushed. There wasn’t much of a slope but there was enough. The van went over the cliff and into the ocean.

  He drove the girl’s Polaris out to the airport and abandoned it in long-term parking, then took a taxi back into town. When he reached his apartment, he left a message for Cicero’s people, asking for a check on the VIN numbers and the registrations and the various names he had pulled from the wallets. Then he fell asleep, a sleep that was deep and black, but by no means black enough.

  When he woke up, he was still wearing the dead man’s shirt.

  THIRTY

  That afternoon, Barbara Antonelli had visited with Father Campanella. The priest had come to the house to give comfort, and to get material for the eulogies, as it had been years since he’d seen their daughter. After they had talked for a little while, Father Campanella asked Mrs. Antonelli if she wanted to take confession.

  “There will be communion tomorrow, and if you would like to go…”

  Father Campanella was a kind man, by no means a stickler, but he was a priest, nonetheless, and Barbara Antonelli knew what he was implying. She had not taken the sacrament for some time, and it was best, before communion, to unburden the soul.

  “No,” she said.

  She could see the priest’s confusion. He leaned forward, concerned, wondering perhaps if she had misinterpreted him. If her grief had muddled her senses.

  “I know this is very hard. I think it would be good for you to take communion with the congregation. Self-forgiveness—regarding things beyond your control—but if you’re more comfortable with another confessor …”

  “No, it’s not that.”

  “I know there’s a tendency to blame ourselves, at such times,” he said. “And maybe this is what happened with your husband. Maybe that is why … What I am trying to say, sometimes one person takes the leap into despair, and another follows, imagining that their sins are so great, there is no forgiveness. But that, too, is a kind of vanity …” The priest hesitated. “What I am trying to say: The Lord is kind. Whatever you imagine you have done, let me assure you …” Barbara started to sob then. He reached across to her, put this hand on her hand. “Lower your head, please, and close your eyes.”

  Father Campanella said a prayer. It was a prayer for the living who were left behind, a prayer that entreated her to close her eyes and let go of her sins. It was the prayer for the deaf and the dumb, for the dying, for those paralyzed by deed or emotion, unable to move their tongue: a prayer by which those without speech could simply close their eyes and let loose of their sins, but she did neither of these things.

  At the end, Father Campanella waved his hands over her head in the gesture of absolution.

  “Tomorrow,” he smiled. “Take communion.”

  But she had let go of nothing. She kept it all held tight.

  The next day, at the funeral mass, a moment came when Barbara Antonelli felt herself at the center of attention—as if everyone in the old cathedral were sitting in judgment, waiting to see what she might do. It was a big service—bigger than the church had seen for a while. The Antonellis had roots in the community, but there’d also been a story in the paper: about the daughter who’d drowned and the father who’d jumped to his death, and the ornate caskets coming all the way from Italy. So the place was brimming with people: old Italians she’d assumed dead long ago; North Beach hangers-on; suburbanites, like herself, and their children and grandchildren, too. And the old ones from Serafina’s. And Dante as well, sitting in a pew across the way. But there were also people she did not know: fallen Catholics drawn to the ritual, maybe, come to sit in the old cathedral, amidst the chanting and the incense. Come to see the grieving mother and the ornate coffins arranged at the front of the church.

  Gucci had done well to procure the coffins, she knew. First, Angela’s. Then at the last moment, her husband’s, made from the same Italian oak.

  Barbara sat in the front row, in the widow’s seat. No doubt everyone was watching her. No doubt they had their comments, on how she was dressed, on how she held her head. No doubt there were those who speculated that there was something else behind the deaths—and those who wondered why Father Campanella had agreed to a church service, given her husband’s death was a suicide. But Nick was from the neighborhood, and on more than one occasion, he had given grandiose sums to the church.

  After the opening liturgy, Father Campanella took the pulpit. He talked about a moment many years ago when he had seen father and daughter at the church, and how he’d noticed then a certain light in their eyes, a light that was similar in its exuberance, in the way it beheld the world. The priest talked about how everyone who ran across the Antonellis, whether it was the father in his office or the daughter at the newspaper, they immediately found themselves staring up into the light of those dark eyes, swept away by these appetitive, emotional people who wore their hopes and fears on their faces for everyone to see. Barbara Antonelli, as she listened, realized that many of these people in the church had their own memories of Nick
and Angie, and it was as if all those different versions of her husband, of her daughter, were here in this room, in her consciousness, and the church itself were a kind of prism, the coffins at its center. The light fell through the stained glass, reflecting from the polished caskets, there at the foot of the altar. Barbara glanced at Dante and remembered a moment some fifteen years ago when she had been watching him come across their living room, thinking: yes, this young man is right for my daughter, dark and passionate, a little too dark, maybe, those eyes of his, but earnest. Then Nick had come from behind and smirked into her ear.

  “You want to fuck him?”

  It was a crass thing to say, but that was Nick. Maybe Dante had heard, maybe not, but either way, he and Angie had broken up not too much later. Nick was a selfish bastard.

  I should have divorced him.

  Had she spoken the words aloud? She felt suddenly self-conscious, there in the church, with all those eyes on her. There were the many eyes, and the many minds, and the one mind that lived in the many, the single consciousness that saw her thoughts in their nakedness: that saw her sitting with her daughter’s laptop glowing in her darkened bedroom in San Mateo, reading Angie’s journal that in the end was only partly concerned with Solano and his crooked business.I know how my father is … I know all the rumors … and how he has hurt my mother … But the question I have to ask myself … Why has she put up with him? Not for him … not for me … for herself …

  Father Campanella lingered at the pulpit, offering his formal remonstrance now, the warning against despair, offering in his stumbling way the same caution he had offered her. The caution against suicide, against the withering of the heart. Because when one of us makes the step into the darkness, another might follow. And we must resist that temptation. Because the world is not a mechanism. The universe is not a random pulse of light. Because we cannot know what was in the Nick Antonelli’s heart, or if indeed he did not roll his eyes up to God in the instant before death.

  Then Campanella descended from the pulpit and returned to the liturgy. Offering a prayer to the Eucharist. Something about the Light Everlasting. Something about the land of the living and dead conjoined. Something about the blood running down the altar and down the steps of the church and into the square. Barbara knew how the rest of the day would go. She would ride in a black car out to the graveyard, and she would stand with her head bowed, and then the people would embrace her one by one, and one of those people would be Dante, who would look her into the eyes knowing there was sometime she was withholding, but she would not tell him, not now, not ever. Because her daughter had been right. She had an image in her head, and it was too late now to let it go.

  Father Campanella raised the chalice. He raised the host. The bells rang three times more. Three times three.

  In a moment Campanella would step down from the altar. He would head toward the communion rail with the chalice. She knew what was expected, but she knew, too, that the greatest sacrilege was to take the host when you had not let loose your sins. Because it was true, that night, when her husband had staggered drunk in front of Serafina’s, she had wished him dead, wished him in hell, and held a stony silence that let him know she would never let go of that wish, never forgive him, even if she never uttered a word of what she knew, even if she kept up the charade for the world, even if she’d already tossed the computer into the weeds by the side of road, for the weather to destroy, for the buzzards to shit on, because she did not want their laundry hung in public. Father Campanella was headed to the rail now. The congregation was watching, waiting. They would not move until she moved.

  She knew what they wanted to see. She went to the altar. She knelt on the marble. Father Campanella waited for her to make the sign of the cross, signifying her acceptance, but this last gesture she did not make. The congregation was gathered around, pressing on either side.

  She tilted her head back. He put the host on her tongue. All that was left was the trip to the cemetery, and those empty graves.

  Later that day, Dante was crossing through Chinatown when he heard the oompah and the oompah-pah, and the rat-a-tat. The clang-a-bang and the sad horn and the big bass drum. The Green Street Mortuary Band was coming down Stockton, past the Blue Pagoda, and the Chinese Shirt Shop. Past Little City Meats, home of the Sicilian meatball, and Ying’s Hopeless Café, with its window display of headless chickens. On they came, with their rickety snares and their kazoos, their sad, sad flutes. The people on the street stopped to watch, and the tourists were delighted, though there were some who did not know the superstition and crossed the path of the parade, looking for a better camera angle. The mourners were Chinese. They carried paper dolls. They carried bamboo toys and peddler drums and pictures of the Buddha Child. At center of the parade were the open cars, reserved for the immediate family, as was the North Beach tradition, and in the last car, alone, rode a woman sundered by grief. Dante didn’t recognize the woman at first. Then he saw the placard mounted above the windshield. On the placard was a picture of an infant, all dressed in blue.

  THIRTY-ONE

  Jake Cicero didn’t go much to funerals anymore. It was an endless task, once you committed yourself. True, the living needed you on such occasions; but once you reached a certain age, the burying was endless. So he paid his respects in other ways. He had his girl at the agency send flowers. He signed a card. If it was someone he had known well, he would drink a glass of wine to their memory down at Gino’s. And if he could remember, he would send their widow, on Christmas, a gift pack of salami and cheese.

  But mostly he didn’t think about it too much. The dead were dead, and he was sure they were not thinking about him.

  As it happened, the Antonellis’ service and Bill Whitaker’s were held on the same day. If Cicero was going to go to either of them, it would have made more sense, perhaps, to go to the Antonellis’ service over in North Beach. Antonelli had been his client after all, and Cicero had known the family. Instead, Cicero had driven across the bay, and now stood with his head bowed in the back of a little chapel in Tiburon. He had come on account of the Whitaker woman. She wore a navy smock and had a bit too much powder on her face. The little girl was there, too, and the boy, and some members of Ann Whitaker’s family. A sister, he guessed. A brother-in-law. Nieces and nephews and maybe a neighbor from down the street.

  The corpse had been shipped out to Indiana, to Whitaker’s hometown, and so the service here was modest. Cicero stood in the back, and Ann Whitaker glanced at him on her way out. She looked right at him, but her face was pretty much empty of expression.

  The last time Cicero had talked to her had been several days back, over the phone, when he’d told her about her ex-husband’s death. Her reaction had been muted. She hadn’t been inclined to talk to him then, and didn’t seem inclined to talk to him now, but he lingered nonetheless, and afterward drove to her condominium.

  He brought a tray of lasagna with him that he had picked up from Molinari’s deli, and his intention was to carry it up to her door.

  He told himself he was here on business, but there wasn’t much truth to that. He had gone into her background, done his research, and he doubted Ann Whitaker knew anything about her ex-husband’s dealings with Solano, and doubted, too, that there was any connection between her and Angie Antonelli. So he put it down as a courtesy call—tying up loose ends, preserving relationships.

  Why am I here?

  He knew. Things between him and Louise were slipping. His doing or hers, he didn’t know. Probably his. The truth was, Louise had fallen in with that group down at the club, and it wasn’t just the cruise she wanted. She had rich tastes. She liked her clothes, she liked her shoes, she liked her restaurants and her languorous dinners. He couldn’t blame her. On his part, he liked the way Louise looked when she was dressed to the nines, and he still felt a thrill when she put her hand to her throat and peered at him through those lashes of hers. At the same time, though, being with her, sometimes it was like walking lo
ng hours through a shallow lake.

  The unhappy truth: between the two of them, himself and Louise, they had left too many people behind. Children. Spouses.

  But Ann Whitaker …

  He picked up the lasagna. Lasagna was a tradition in North Beach. When somebody died, you brought comfort. You stopped by. You brought something to eat, to drink. You talked a little and you did not let the person be alone. You brought lasagna. You brought wine.

  She opened the door.

  “Yes?”

  “I wanted to offer you my condolences.”

  Ann Whitaker looked at him with his carton of lasagna and his slouched shoulders, and he could see instantly the folly of the whole thing.

  “I don’t have anything else I can tell you.”

  “No,” he said. “I just came—”

  “I saw you at the service. I’ve told you everything I have to say. I’ve talked to the police. My husband drowned, and whatever was going on with his business, his life, I don’t know. And I don’t want to know.”

  “I came to offer my sympathies.”

  She pursed her lips. A kid stood behind her, and he saw this woman was not so much perplexed by him as wearied, that there was no condolence that he could give because there was none she wanted, and anyway he was here for his own peculiar reasons. Because he had left two wives behind and a handful of children, and he thought maybe he could get back from her what he had lost. Because he was an old man who wanted to feel young.

  She saw all this maybe, but her expression did not change.

  “Let me get on with my life,” she said.

  Cicero stepped away. She shut the door without looking up.

  The next day Cicero was in his office. Between the Antonelli case and his obsession with the Whitaker woman, he had let a lot of other things get away from him. Some new cases had come in from the city, from the Public Defender’s Office. It was the usual odd assortment. A woman who’d had an anxiety attack and pushed her neighbor down the stairs. A punkster who’d stabbed his girlfriend in front of Wing Piu Projects. A petty thief facing a felony conviction for stealing a stereo. All of these involved knocking on doors, in neighborhoods where people didn’t want to see you. All required looking for inconsistencies in the cops’ case, things the defense lawyers could use to catch the defendant a break, even if the defendant didn’t necessarily deserve a break. Cicero spent the morning looking over the files. Then he put his feet up on the desk and closed his eyes.