The Last Days of Il Duce (6 page)

“That's not true. Your brother wanted plenty.”

“He wanted you.”

“Well, he got me, didn't he?”

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“A couple weeks back. He stopped by to talk.”

“You two never let off, did you?”

She didn't answer and I felt all the old tension between us, the ugly stuff. It wasn't the way I wanted things to be. When the road crowned I took the next exit, onto the Sunset Highway. The wind was blowing hard and up above you could see the place where the weather changed and the fog billowed up under the blue edge of the sky. From here the clouds were a dark, blustering gray all the way to ocean.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

“Ocean Beach.”

We looked at each other a long moment, and I found myself taking in the full angle of her face, and I saw the age that was starting to appear, and I realized she wasn't going to say yes or no, and that everything was up to me. I felt our car vanishing into a stream of cars, all of us rolling along on the road between the houses and the graves.

The breeze was harder down by the ocean and harder yet when we got to the other side of the sea wall. Though it was late July, summer on this side of the city is as bad as winter and the ocean had that bitter look. Behind us the abandoned windmills at the edge of the park cut a shadow against the sky, and in front of us the sand was filigreed with a yellow foam. Clumps of wood and refuse had washed onto the beach; down current there was heavy equipment, tractors and cranes digging a trench for new sewage pipes that would take all the junk and refuse and crap of San Francisco and deposit it a dozen miles further out. The pipes they used now were not long enough—and when the current was wrong, everything came washing back to shore.

Marie tightened her coat around her.

“The police think it was a street thing,” I said. “Some kind of drug deal gone bad, but I don't believe that. Things were going well for Joe. He had some work lined up.”

“Maybe,” Marie said.

She looked out at the gray ocean, the gray sky, the gray rocks, and it was suddenly all too goddamned gray for me.

“There's things you never saw when you looked at your brother. You didn't know everything.”

“What are you trying to tell me? The cops are right?”

The seagulls were cawing above us, the pelicans screeching, and the sound of a bull seal echoed out from the rocks.

“Son of a bitch,” she said and began to sob, a little at first, her arms hanging loose under her long coat, and I went up and put my arms around her, but carefully, so that we did not touch too close. She seemed far away, lost in her own swelling grief, and I was remote from her until at last she leaned into me, and I felt the relief, all her grief coming out, and noticed too the scent of her hair and the softness of her body, and she was crying harder now, and I felt looking out at the ocean the great waves building and building, so that the tears rolled a little down my face too, and the salt taste was in my mouth. I imagined my brother as a child and saw how he looked, smiling at me, and I clutched Marie more tightly, suddenly aware of her body in a way I had tried not to think of, at least not right now, but I could tell she was aware of my body too, and my lips touched the crook of her neck. She pulled away so that I was looking into her dark eyes and she was looking into mine. Then I kissed her, a wild kiss, and she kissed me back, a kiss sinful and innocent at the same time, with the taste of something unspeakable. Then we let each other go and stood staring down at our feet, where the water had rushed up, then receded, and the yellow scum was floating on the sand.

EIGHT

THE SEARCH BEGINS

The next day I put on my dirtiest clothes and fancied out into the Mission, looking for my brother's murderer. I am not sure what got into me; it wasn't the kind of thing I usually did. I told myself I didn't believe the police explanation. Maybe that was part of it. Maybe, though, it had something to do with the way Luisa had treated me before the funeral and the lousy way that made me feel. I wanted to prove to myself I was a good brother, and the way to prove that was to wander around the streets of the Mission, a picture of Joseph Abruzzi Jones in my pocket. I thought I might find somebody who'd seen him on the street the night he died, or at least find out if he'd been on the slide again, like the police seemed to think.

I went back to Dolores Park, down into the hollow under the pepper trees, and squatted on a bench there in front of an outdoor table. Some young men loitered under a statue nearby, kicking at the pigeons, and it didn't take long. One of them, a Mexican kid—his body thin like a rake, chest concave—sauntered over and sat down across from me.

“Cocaine?” I asked.

“I have weed, hash. Good herb. No coke.”

“I want coke.”

“Wait a minute. I get my friend. He meet you at that table over there. Forty bucks for a rock, but you don't smoke it here. Smoke it someplace else. Now give me the money.”

That was the way the kids worked their business. One took your money, strolled away, then one of his buddies met you with the drugs. They kept the stuff stashed somewhere nearby, working it so nobody was holding it for very long and it was tough for the cops to make a sting.

I reached as if to pull money from my wallet but instead I took out a picture of my brother, then laid a couple bills out across it.

“I don't want the coke. I want the man who sells the coke. I want to know if he knows my brother, in the picture.”

The kid glanced down.

“Fuck you,” he said.

Then he sauntered back to his friends. They talked me over in Spanish for a while, and laughed, kicking at the pigeons. A customer came up and I watched them go through the routine with a new guy, this time selling a couple of joints. After that they ignored me, or pretended to, and I began to feel as if I were fading into the invisible world. So I went down to Linda Street, to try the dealers there, and got the same treatment more or less, only now someone was following me. A white man, hair the color of oil, wearing a black blazer and long black tie. I saw him again outside Picaro's, a bohemian cafe where management didn't bother to chase off the junkies who wandered in every fifteen seconds begging for change. They were part of the local charm.

I gave the junkies nickels and quarters, showing them the picture of my brother, and at last some old junkie older than death itself told me he thought maybe he'd seen my brother in the El Corazón, a movie theater that had been converted to a hotel ten years back, and these days that hotel was a crack palace first class. The man who would know for sure, the old junkie said, was in room 21.

So I headed to Mission Street. The man in the blazer still followed me, eating a burrito as he walked, licking his fingers, not seeming to care if he was conspicuous or no. I ignored him and clumped up the rotting stairs of the El Corazón, then down a long hall to the back of the building. At the end was number 21 and inside I found a surly little man in a white t-shirt. The man's arms were tattooed and his hair stood up in a lick, wet and ugly, as if a cow had dragged its tongue over his head.

“You looking for some jewel?”

I went through the same routine again, taking out my wallet and the picture.

“This is my brother.”

“I got one of my baby sister. You wanna trade?”

“I want to know if you ever seen him.”

“The cops already been round here with this. And I told them the same thing I'll tell you; I ain't never seen this brother of yours.”

“An old junkie, he told me he'd seen him here.”

“I know that junkie. He's full of shit. Now you want some jewel? If no, then I don't have dick for you.
Capisch?
”

“I understand.”

“I got me a business here. Free enterprise. Lai-zay faire. I don't want any trouble.”

The little man sat behind a desk, his hand inside one of the drawers. If I gave him any trouble I guessed he would shoot me, then take his drugs and his money and disappear down the fire escape. Or maybe he would just flush the drugs and tell the cops I was some kind of burglar broke into his room in broad daylight, come to steal his cowlick.

I turned to the door.

“Hey?”

“Yeah?”

“Your picture.”

I went back to the desk to pick it up but the man stopped my hand, gandering all over the photograph. His eyes went sentimental all of a sudden, his face slack, soft as a peach. Then he let it go.

“No, your brother ain't never came around this place. But I tell you, I know how it feels. You want some jewel, I give you a break. One time.”

“Thanks a ton.”

I walked down the hall, thinking what a swell guy he was, and as I walked past those hall doors, one after another, I noticed all of them were shut. I could hear some godawful moaning behind them, and laughing. I was glad not to know what was going on inside.

Outside, the man in the blazer was gone. I looked around for a place to have a beer, or something to eat, but then I looked around again, up and down those streets, and felt a dirty wave of anguish wash up into my gut. My brother was dead and I would never find anything I needed in the Mission. These people would never help me. I walked down to Capp Street, past the little immigrant boys who sold their bodies for ice cream and candy, and I kept walking, all the way down Market, through the thickening crowd, until I was back home in North Beach. I walked past the familiar bars along Broadway, where everything seemed to me somehow simpler and more wholesome: just girls in G-strings and giggling tourists and old men beating off into the Naugehyde.

I bought myself a can of beer from the corner store and sat on a stoop outside the Dante Hotel, looking across at the naked lights of the strip joints and at the hawkers out front, those fat little men in ribbed shirts and black slacks, bouncing up and down, trying to steer the passersby inside. In the middle of the block was a place called J. Ferrari's, which was nothing from the outside but a blank door and a window whose glass had been spray-painted black.

It was an easy place to miss, and the only reason I noticed it now was because a small, monkey-faced man emerged from inside. People in the neighborhood called him J. Ferrari because that was the name stenciled on the window, but the truth was that that lettering was very old and the ugly little man was only in his thirties. I did not know his real name, but I knew Ferrari's had been a bookie joint when I was a kid, and that even now the sleaze joints and restaurants up and down the block paid rent to the little man. Though the
prominenti
denied it, people around the neighborhood said part of that money went back to some old mobster in Chicago, and they told you too that Ferrari's was the place to go if you ever wanted to have someone's fingers cut off, or if you wanted your wife to disappear into the bay, and that had always been so and always would be, so long as there was an Italian in North Beach. I'd got a look inside J. Ferrari's once, and it was nothing at all, just a small room with a desk, though I'd heard rumors there was a hidden door in the wall, leading into the bowels of the building, and from there you could follow the old tunnels into Chinatown. I did not know if any of that was true, but I did know I'd seen Chinese stopping by his office, same as Italians.

None of that mattered to me though, because the monkey man was not my problem, and I wanted to get myself a drink.

I crossed the street and was starting in serious at the bar. After a while a little girl named Suzie came and sat beside me. She was half-Filipino, half-black, and half-Italian, she told me, the daughter of an American soldier, born in captivity, and she wanted to give me a blow job. I put my arm around her and stumbled out into the street; then I gave her a few bucks and a little kiss on the cheek and told her to go away.

“Not tonight, Suzie.”

“Too late. You already pay.”

“What you mean?”

“You got time coming. You deal with me, you get what you deserve.”

I was sky drunk and didn't understand. Two men rushed at me from the mouth of the alley, big men, and though neither of them was the man in the blazer, I thought of him anyway and believed he had somehow tracked me down. I had done myself stupid, I thought, going down to the Mission, fucking around where I shouldn't fuck. I tried to run but I was too drunk and big tears were rolling out of my eyes. They caught me and threw me against the wall. One of them held my arms behind my back, the other one snapped on cuffs, the little girl stood nearby watching, hands on her hips—and suddenly it came clear to me. I had been wrong. These weren't thugs, these were vice, all three of them. The girl was no little girl at all but a cop, and now they were going to take me down for solicitation. They pulled out my wallet, looking for identification, and one of the cops recognized the name.

“Abruzzi Jones,” he said. “This guy's brother was just shot down in the Mission.”

“Look at those tears.”

“Poor son-of-a-bitch.”

“It's a rotten place, this world.”

“Hey,” protested Suzie. “It's not that rotten. He broke the law.”

“It'll never stick. The judges in this city, they're all soft hearts.”

“Or perverts.”

“Oh, fuck you guys!” said Suzie. “You go in there. See if you like their fat hands on your thighs.”

The men ignored Suzie. Out of the milk of human kindness, or because they were a little drunk themselves, they let me go. They pushed me out of the alley and told Suzie to go back inside, this one was no good, a weeper and a wailer, and please go back and find someone whose brother hadn't just been shot through the heart.

NINE

LEANORA CHINN

The next day I got a call from Lieutenant Chinn. The investigation was ongoing and she needed a few minutes of my time.