The Last Days of Il Duce (2 page)

She turned then, Marie Donnatelli, and her eyes met mine from across the park. Or I thought they did, though in another minute she was gone, walking the other way. I told myself it was no coincidence, us seeing one another that morning; Marie would soon circle back into my life. I had told myself the same thing before but that didn't matter. I told it to myself again when I went home and lay down to fall asleep, envisioning once more that moment when I had looked across the park, the smell of the Asian girl still on my body, and seen Marie emerging from the fog.

TWO

AN EVICTION

In the morning I got a call from Jimmy Wong. A few weeks before he'd had me serve some papers on the Mussos, down on Filbert Street, and now Jimmy wanted me to go down with the Lee brothers to make sure the Mussos got out of his building on time.

The Mussos' apartment wasn't much but I could sympathize. My apartment wasn't much itself, just two rooms and a stove over the racket of Columbus Avenue, but I didn't want to get tossed out either.

“It's almost noon, Abruzzi. You hungover again?”

“No,” I said. It was almost the truth. It takes a lot for me to get hungover. Still Wong could hear the netherworld in my voice and the clock said eleven-thirty. Four hours, I told myself, that's all the sleep I'd gotten. I remembered clutching my pillow and dreaming of the Chinamen dancing in the blue fog.

“Ed and Rickie will be out front of the Mussos' at one. You be there too and make sure things go smooth. No trouble.”

“Since when do you have any trouble?”

“That's what I mean. That's why I want you there. You're a good lawyer, Abruzzi, if you didn't drink so much.”

Wong said things like this but he knew the truth about me, or at least he had something close figured out. Otherwise I wouldn't be doing for him the work I did. It had been five years since I'd had an office bigger than the desk in my apartment, even longer since I'd done anything those in the profession might consider the practice of law. I hadn't been disbarred though, so I guess this counted for something.

“You come by when you're done. I got some more work for you.”

There was no sense in sleeping now. I grabbed a grinder from a cart on the street and ate sitting on the grass in Washington Square. A couple of old wops gestured at me, men of Romano's generation, and I could see them talking me over from their places on the bench. No doubt they were saying what a worthless son I was, disgrace of the neighborhood, the kind of thing old wop men are always saying. I lay back in the grass so I wouldn't have to see them, and I stared up at the spires of the Church of Saints Peter and Paul.

I didn't want to think about the old Italians. I wanted a drink but it was almost twelve-thirty now, and I didn't want to go evict the Mussos with liquor on my breath. It is easy for me to keep my mind empty when I sit in a darkened bar, raise a glass to my lips, then a cigarette, then open my sweet chops and watch the smoke come pouring thoughtlessly out. It's not so easy when you're lying out in the bright sun, staring up at the spirals of the cathedral where your brother married the woman you love and, years later, Father Campanelli whispered the liturgy over your mother's casket, your father sobbing in the pew for everyone to hear.

An old woman joined the old men on the bench. The three of them spoke in Italian, I figured, pointing every once in a while at me in the way one points at a child who does not yet have the ability of speech. It wasn't hard for me to guess the kind of things they were saying.

A mama's boy, that one. UCLA. Law School. Little Rose Abruzzi nearly died giving birth to him. Big shot office downtown, Mr. Lawyer, but look at him now. A bum in the park. That's what you get, you mix an Abruzzi and a Jones. But who listens to an old man these days? Who listens to anyone?

I did not want to have my life picked over like this. I decided to leave but before I could get myself away, the old ones were already up and stuttering over their canes. I peered into their ancient faces and thought I recognized Charlie Marinetti, a schoolteacher so many years ago, and though he gestured in my direction, and seemed to be looking where I stood, I realized he did not recognize me at all. Because as the old ones crept by I heard them talking. Not of me, but of Mussolini and Claratta Petacci. Arguing over which one of them it was who ruined Italy, or whether it was not Il Duce and his mistress at all but the Ligurians in general, or the Sicilians, or the hardheads from Calabria. Then they halted mid-stride, pointing back in my direction but still not seeing me, discussing some event that had happened long ago, maybe, here on this spot where I stood.

I went down to the Mussos on Filbert Street. They lived in an old wood frame building, set back in the alley, surrounded on all sides by a gravel walkway. This building, like the building next door and the fence that rose between them, had all been painted the same shipyard gray. The apartments inside the building were close on top of one another, and in the center ground between them was a cement yard, with a potted banana tree that received too much water and very little sun. These used to be cheap homes for the dockworkers but the docks were all closed now. It was all Chinese families except in the smallest apartments, where there lived the young clerks and aging bachelors of the financial district, who came home each night in their starched white shirts and lay alone in their beds thinking how someday they'd claw their way to a spot a little higher on the hill, maybe, where you could see over the concrete to the palm trees and the shimmering water.

The Lee brothers, Ed and Rickie, stood out front waiting for me, but the Mussos had themselves locked up tight inside their apartment. There was no pickup, no trailer, no U-haul truck, no sign anyone was getting ready to move.

Jimmy Wong liked to have someone like me around in situations such as this: someone the same skin and blood as the people being pushed out. There wasn't as much of this kind of business for me as there used to be, though we often found an old Italian or two, living in a rent-controlled apartment, whenever Jimmy acquired a new building.

Such was the case with the Mussos. They were still paying 1950s rent. We couldn't evict them for that, so I wrote up a damage complaint. When the Mussos went through the roof with the injustice of it and refused to pay, then I drew up the thirty-day notice and served it up, legal as hell, while Ed and Rickie Lee stood on the sidewalk with their arms crossed, just to emphasize the point. It was possible to fight us but that took money and brains, and people with both these commodities didn't do business with Jimmy Wong to begin with.

The Mussos' notice expired today. I knocked on their door. The lace curtains were drawn shut and it was quiet as death inside there, but I had been through this kind of thing before. Jimmy Wong had given me the key to the place. As soon as I stuck it in the lock, Mrs. Musso was all over me. She was about fifty, a small wiry-haired woman with plump breasts and beautiful, imploring eyes. She clasped her hands together, leaning against me, and dropped to her knees at my feet. Meantime her husband stood shame-faced in the middle of the living room, watching. All around us the apartment was filled with the kind of rococo junk that wops love.

“You can stay, if you just pay the bill. And sign a new lease, with the new rent.”

My voice cracked a little as I spoke. Maybe because I knew it wasn't possible. Musso was an electrician, who made his living doing handyman jobs around the neighborhood, but he was getting old and no one hired guys like him anymore.

When he didn't answer, I motioned to the Lee brothers out on the street. They were thick-chested Chinese boys, stout like wrestlers, and they tripped a little as they came into the house. Mrs. Musso threw herself at me, her eyes wild and fierce. She pummeled me with both her fists and her body was up against mine too and all the while she yelled in Italian. I grabbed her by the wrists. I felt her breasts against me and felt too an embarrassing stir of desire, then she begin to sob and I let her go. I sat on the porch and lit a cigarette. The Lee brothers came out with a flowered lampshade, a chest of drawers, a ceramic pig from Italy. Then it was the couch draped in black lace, the picture of the Virgin, the stiff-backed chairs, the thirteen cans of olive oil. The stuff accumulated on the sidewalk. All this while I stared down into Chinatown, where the men in their gray suits and the women in their smocks and the little children with their black eyes all filled the streets, more and then more of them it seemed to me, while overhead the Chinese characters filled the signs, neon blinking in the mid-afternoon, all those indecipherable letters rolling and tumbling into an upended martini glass over the liquor store.

After awhile the Mussos worked up some nerve. They came up next to me and Mr. Musso spit at my feet.

“Curse you, Nick Abruzzi,” he said.

“His name's not Abruzzi.” Mrs. Musso looked at me in disgust. Her eyes were still beautiful. “He's a fucking Jones.”

I'd had enough. I walked down to the Naked Moon to get a drink and watch the girls take off their clothes. While I was there I got on the phone to Wong and told him to send a truck over to the Mussos. I had an address for their kids down in the South Bay, and I was sure those kids had a swell place for all this stuff on the sidewalk, and also a couple extra rooms for Mom and Pop.

THREE

THE VALISE

Jimmy Wong's office was six flights up a building that didn't have an elevator. At least it didn't have an elevator the public could use. There was a coded one in the lobby, for office tenants and their employees, but for some reason Jimmy couldn't find it in himself to let me up that way. So it was the long climb up a dirty stairwell with a steel banister and concrete walls.

“You need the exercise,” he said. “I walk those stairs every day.”

Maybe it was true. Jimmy Wong was a fit-looking guy. He was about my age, and he had the smell of success on him and wore suits that were cut in Milan.

Wong had been born in San Francisco. So had his father and his father's father before that, but Jimmy had done better than any of them. He had a house over in Marin, and a pretty little wife who decorated the house, and a couple of kids in private school. His office was nothing fancy but it was on the top floor, overlooking the gaudy fronts and tin pagodas of Chinatown, so you could see all the way down to the Oakland bridge and the water beneath its girders. On his walls hung a picture of Chinese coolies building the railroads more than a hundred years ago, their backs all bent and faces weary. Jimmy had the habit of walking over and staring at that picture while you talked to him, then answering back, eyes empty, as if he hadn't heard a word. The truth was, he didn't give a fuck what you said, coolie or no. He made his money trading property, leveraging Hong Kong money into the neighborhood. He was pretty good at what he did, I guess, but I wouldn't want to have him for a landlord.

“I don't have your kind of stamina, Jimmy. You make all your clients climb those stairs? Or just the ones with weak hearts?”

Jimmy was studying his coolies. There was one white man in the picture, an overseer apparently, who seemed to be the only one aware of the photographer's presence. The overseer, who wore a battered derby hat, had one hand tucked in his waistband, as if posing; the other hand—through some flaw in the photograph, though it was hard to be sure—seemed to disappear into one of the coolie's skirts.

“I have something I need for you to deliver.”

“Another notice?”

“No. A package.”

It wasn't the kind of work Jimmy usually wanted from me. There was a leather valise on his desk, and he walked over and touched it with his fingers.

“I got a call yesterday. A friend of yours. Micaeli Romano.”

“I didn't know you were acquainted.”

“Our paths cross. Business matters. He asked if it was all right with me if he talked to you. He has some work for you. A job.”

“He asked your permission?”

I acted surprised even though I knew it was the kind of thing Micaeli would do. Micaeli was very old-world, full of grace and decorum, the kind of man who did not shrink into himself with age. He seemed to respect others and so people respected him. Or most people did. He had done well as a lawyer, even served as a judge. His adopted son practiced real estate law and the two of them had some investments in that direction now, a holding company, properties scattered about the city.

“He asked me if it was all right he should talk to you. He wanted to be sure he wasn't stealing a valued employee.”

“That's considerate.”

My voice betrayed my resentment and I knew that resentment was something a man like Jimmy Wong—who respected his elders and his ancestors, especially the wealthy and powerful—could not understand. But Jimmy knew nothing of my life, how my feelings towards Micaeli Romano were all mixed up with my mother's admiration of him, my father's scorn, the meddling he'd done in our lives.

“He wants you to pay a visit.”

“I'll think about it.”

Jimmy held his hand tucked in his waistband. At length he let go of what he was thinking and reached again for the valise. He took out a fat manila envelope that had been wrapped around with tape. Then a second envelope, similar but much thinner, as if there were only a paper or two inside. He examined them both a moment, then clasped them back up inside the valise.

“You deliver this to the address I give you. A man will answer the door and then you hand in the suitcase. He'll shut the door in your face but you stick around. In a minute, two minutes, who knows, he'll hand the case back to you. Empty. You bring the case back to me.”

“Why don't I just take the envelopes?”

“It's nicer this way. I'll return the case to the client.”

“It's not yours?”