The Last Days of Il Duce (15 page)

We both got a little laugh out of that. Then Michael Jr. got down to business, telling me more or less what his father had told me the week before in Pescadore. Various parties were coming together to swing the China Basin deal, along with the main backers from Hong Kong, and my job would be to work with a team of lawyers trying to keep the deal from blowing up because the people in neighborhoods didn't like the design, or the city didn't like the contractors, or any one of a thousand other reasons. He went on with the details, and I remembered for the first time in a long time why I had lost interest in the pursuit of the law. I gave him the wide-eyed look, nodding my head like a junior partner, but the truth was I was still thinking about his shoes and wondering if he had lied.

“Several of the principals will be in Sausalito in a couple of days, at my father's place. I'm going to be out of town, but he wants you there. Shake hands with the Hong Kong money.”

“What time?”

“About eleven, on Tuesday. It'll be brunch. You don't have to say much, just take it in.” He checked me over for a second, up and down. “Go to Stephano's, have yourself outfitted. We have an account there. You should wear a suit.”

“I'll even take a bath.”

“Same old Nick.” He laughed, strained as hell, patting me on the back. “A million laughs.”

For an instant the mask cracked and I could see beneath his charm, which after all was not really his charm but his father's, and it wasn't hard to tell he had reservations about the whole damned thing and thought the old man was crazy for letting a man like me inside the family door.

NINETEEN

EXIT PARADISE

The next morning I dandied on one of the new shirts I'd picked up from Stephano's, crisp and white, and a new pair of slacks. I met Marie on a corner at the edge of the neighborhood and drove south. We kept the windows open. I had not drunk anything the night before, and the morning air was invigorating. I caught Marie regarding me, enjoying my unrumpled and healthy look, and as we moved out of the fog down the peninsula I felt the weight of Little Italy fall away.

We headed down 101, driving through all the little towns that had become one big town. Milbrae and San Bruno and Daly City. Sunnyvale and Mountain View. Sweeping past the ragged little stuccos that sat hunched alongside the freeway. Past the bowling alleys and motels on one side, the mudflats on the other, where dozers shoveled concrete fill for new industrial parks. We kept going further south, away from the bay, off the peninsula and into the valley, past more of the same stucco houses, the same hotels and industrial parks, then past them all one more time, then yet once again, before the landscape broke open and the road narrowed as in some not-so-distant past and there were orchards to either side. The city was gone behind us, we had left the freeway, but the traffic was still fast. The cars ahead set the pace, the ones behind made sure you did not falter, and the oncoming traffic came at us through some skewed geometry.

“Where did you go when you left town?” Marie asked. “You never told me.”

“Reno,” I said.

I caught a glimpse of another driver, like myself, straining for a look at the countryside, wanting to enter it but unable to do so, driven forward by some inner energy over which he had little control. Marie flinched. “What were you doing in Reno?”

“Client work,” I lied. “Divorce.” I didn't want her to know what I'd been doing. There was no sense to it, and it had all led nowhere anyway.

“I didn't know you were doing that kind of work.”

“Sometimes,” I said.

She turned her head away from me, and looked out at the landscape. We were still hurtling forward, propelled by the traffic.

“I'd like to take a walk,” she said.

“Me too.”

“Then let's get out of this damned car.”

“I'm doing my best.”

There were no turn outs and I had to thrust the car forward onto the shoulder, fishtailing through the gravel and the high yellow dust. I killed the engine when we hit the scrub on the side of the road.

We were somewhere south of San Jose, in an old valley tucked between the hills, overgrown with oak and grass. Beyond the scrub was a creek with a path running alongside. The creek was dry and to one side stood an apricot orchard and on the other lay wild land.

We followed the path up the dry bed, Marie first, myself just a few steps behind. She wore a white blouse and red slacks and big silver earrings. Now that I'd come to see my brother's death as an act of fate, not part of conspiracy, I didn't see much reason to hold back anymore. He'd been a son of a bitch to her anyway, I told myself, and a burden round my neck. The sun was hot overhead, the insects chuttered in the grass, and I felt my desire more fiercely the further we walked. Some Mexican families worked under the apricot trees ahead, splitting the harvested fruit with long knives. A young boy smeared the apricots with sulfur, then lay them to dry in a wooden tray. I could hear the flies swarm from a hundred yards down the path.

The Mexicans watched as we walked by, pretending to still be at their labor, but I could see in the men's eyes they were regarding Marie, and I could see, too, the women regarding me, and I imagined that the heat and desire between Marie and me was such that other people could not help but notice and desire us too. I cursed myself for all the time I had allowed to pass bound up and tied by filial loyalty.

“Let's keep going,” I said. “Away from the people.”

Her blouse was damp, and there was sweat on her brow. There was sweat too on my clean shirt, and I felt good walking under the sun, and strong and young.

The path curved away from the dry bank, through the far edge of the orchard, alongside a copse of willows. Our view to the east was obscured by them, and I saw an old water tower rising in their midst. I wanted to stop and rest under those willows, to lay in the soft grass beside Marie and touch her blouse and taste her lips that would split open like an apricot, and her tongue that was like the soft fruit inside. But Marie kept walking, more furiously. I sensed something bothering her.

I kept following, catching through the willows an occasional glimpse of the orchard beyond. It had to be an underground spring feeding the willows, I thought, the trees were so lush and green.

At last we made it around the copse. Marie was maybe fifty yards ahead of me. She paused at the peak of a nearby rise, then disappeared. I hurried forward, then saw Marie below me on a path snaking through the orchard. At the end of the path were houses. They looked to be new houses, built in the last year or so, and the streets were fresh and black. In the orchard you could see the surveyor's lines: the small sticks and red flags and white string marking out how the street would continue on and join the highway back where we had parked. I caught up to Marie and we looked at the houses, how the street just stopped in the middle of that orchard. Some kids played on the street in front of the houses, a hawk circled overhead, and I wanted Marie more than ever: to take her inside one of those houses and lay with her on the floor and listen to the cry of that hawk and the sound of those children playing. I put my arm around her, gently, and she picked that moment to break down, crying like a maniac.

“Everything will be all right,” I said.

“No, it won't.”

“Why not?”

“Why did you go to Reno?” she asked again.

“I told you.”

She looked up at me, and I looked at her, and it came to me that she knew I had been lying.

“Why do you ask?”

“Just don't leave me alone like that. Please.”

She buried her head into my chest, and I stood there with my arms around her. The kids took a look in our direction and scampered inside. Overhead, the hawk plunged into the orchard then flew up again, clutching something dead in its beak.

TWENTY

MORE LEANORA CHINN

The next afternoon I lay in the grass in Washington Square contemplating my future and the shape it might take. I could come to no conclusions. Someone from the North Beach Chamber of Commerce had raised an Italian flag from the roof of a nearby building, here in the heart of the old neighborhood, but the truth was you'd be hard pressed to find any of the old faces. The park was full, but not with Italians. Some Chinese kids, dressed in the uniform of the Salesian school, rolled and tumbled beneath the magnolias. A Mexican woman and her daughter mugged for an old man's camera. A Viet teenager, legs smooth and long, stopped in front of me and bent down, snuffing a cigarette against her heel. A pretty black boy in drag straddled a nearby bench, puckering his lips and complimenting the men who walked by. Soon he was gone and the others were gone too, in and out of the park, and new people came to take their place. The wind ruffled across the grass, and I could see the grass trembling with the inconstancy of it all, and even the buildings seemed to offer but the illusion of permanence. They had shifted and fallen before, then been raised again after earthquakes and fire, so that the park itself was not in the same place it had once been, and over it all was the Italian flag, with no Italians in sight. I dozed in the balmy air, face down on the grass, and in my dreams the shadows and shapes of the world shifted past one another, and I was filled with an intolerable longing, and a sense of approaching calamity. When I woke, the breeze had stopped. The Italian flag hung still on its pole, unrecognizable, and I felt oddly at peace with the world.

The feeling didn't last.

When I got home, Leanora Chinn stood on the stoop out front of the building. She wore the same blue skirt, the same blue blouse, and she held a manila envelope in her hand.

“You're looking clear-eyed,” she said.

She took my hand with a firm shake and glimmered me up and down, partly in the way of a cop, but also in a way a woman looks at you when she has her doubts and wonders how it is a guy like you gets by in the world. I guessed she knew about my line of employment by now. And about my brushes with vice.

“Thanks,” I said.

“New clothes?”

“Yeah.”

I wanted to tell her she was wrong about me. Things were going well, my life was changing around. But I knew cops were suspicious of good news, so I kept my cheery disposition to myself.

“I have something I need to discuss with you.”

“About Joe?”

“Yes.”

“He was drugging it?” I asked.

Chinn cast her eyes away from me. She wore no makeup and I could see the thin veins on her lids and a small puckering mark where she bit into her upper lip. She was silent and I was stupid, reading her silence the wrong way.

“I guessed it from the first,” I said, “though I didn't want to admit it. Not right away. You know how it is, after something like this happens, you don't want to believe it was somehow their fault. The loved one's. You want to think.…”

“No. That's not it.”

“No?”

“We have some new information.”

I felt a small hammer of disappointment beating in my wrists, and in my head. Over the past few days my attitude had changed, and I preferred the cops just slam the door on my brother's death.

“We have an undercover man working this case.”

“You mentioned that.”

“He's checked all his contacts in the Mission and listened to all the talk. Your brother wasn't making change with the dealers down there. A little pot, maybe, but nothing else.”

“So it was just bad luck. A robbery.”

“We don't think that either.”

“Oh.”

Maybe she heard the disappointment in my voice, or maybe I was just guilty over the grief I didn't feel. Either way Lieutenant Chinn looked me up and down again, and I got the sense she knew everything Marie and I had done the last few days, all the details of my past. Standing there on the street in my new pressed slacks and white shirt, I felt there wasn't anything I could do to hide the small ugliness in my heart. I wanted to say I hadn't done anything, I was innocent. It was true enough I guess. Unless you counted coveting your brother's wife. Or taking a job with the man who'd screwed your mother backwards and forwards before the war.

“How can I help you, Lieutenant Chinn? I'll do anything to help.”

“I have some things I want to show you.”

“Sure. Let's go up to my room.”

“Not there.”

“To the station?”

My voice trembled. Maybe I was already thinking ahead to that grimy little room under the Hall of Justice.

“We don't have to go the station, not unless you want to. I was thinking of a place a little more relaxed. Up here. The other side of Grant.”

“All right.”

“Have you had lunch?”

“I can always have more.”

I walked with her across Columbus Avenue, past the Ling Wei Hotel and into Chinatown. We jostled down Stockton Street, where the crowds are always shoulder-to-shoulder, and the shop bins are filled with plastic chopsticks and paper fans and nylon kimonos, and the grocery windows are strung with half-cooked chickens, plucked and shiny, hanging from their bright red feet. Up above, in the second story knock-outs, the women were working behind sewing machines, just as they have worked forever, only these days they were competing with sweatshops in Bangkok and Hong Kong, and the little spools of thread spun on their spindles deep into the night.

I followed her into a small coffee shop where the booths were red upholstery, and an old Chinese woman served dirt-brown coffee in white cups that had a thin film of oil on top and tasted as old-fashioned bad as coffee anywhere in America. Leanora Chinn and the waitress spoke loudly and familiarly, some kind of a Cantonese dialect. The old woman managed to pour my coffee without her eyes so much as traveling across my face.

“We found a man with a connection to your brother.”

“What kind of connection?”