The Last Days of Il Duce (19 page)

The way was open and I found Micaeli inside, behind his desk. His shoulders were sloped and he moved his lips, muttering to himself like an old man.

“Nick, so good to see you!”

His face brightened as he stood up to greet me, animated now like the Micaeli he had always been, full of energy and light. The perfect Italian father. He put his arms around me, and I felt his old brown-skinned cheek against mine, and he held my shoulders between his hands and looked me in the face. I knew I had to act before my will broke down in the face of his fatherliness and his warm-hearted smile. I took a step back while he still regarded me in that way. I fumbled in my suit coat and pulled out the gun, pointing it at his heart. His smile turned to puzzlement.

“My brother, you had him killed.”

“That's not true.”

He walked away. It unnerved me, him turning his back on me like that, as if he did not take seriously the idea I might shoot him. I had not come to kill him, I told myself. Only to find out the truth. Micaeli, though, he simply strolled away, and this set me off. The one thing I did not want was to be taken lightly.

“Turn around. And keep your hands in front of you.”

My voice, though calm and level, had a bit of the lunatic in it. Enough to get his attention. “You're the one with the gun,” he said. “You don't have anything to fear from me.”

“Maybe that's what Joe thought too.”

“Where do you get this kind of idea?”

“It doesn't take a genius.”

Micaeli eased back into his chair and his hands fell below his waist. I panicked, jutting about with the gun, and he raised them again and lay his palms flat on the desk. His manner suggested he was humoring me but I noticed also a trembling in the way he moved.

“You can kill me if you want, it's no great concern to me. I'm a dying man anyway.”

“I've heard that news.”

“Who told you?”

“Marie.”

“She wasn't supposed to say anything, but I forgive her. The girl has no one to talk to.”

“You're so considerate, Micaeli.”

I said it in a wise kind of way but Micaeli, full of himself as always, did not seem to get the picture. He shrugged away his magnanimity.

“It doesn't matter. The cancer, it's in my blood now. There's no stopping it. But you—why do you ruin yourself like this? How am I going to give you a job, if this is the way you act?”

“My brother was killed by an assassin.”

“Assassins kill important men. Your brother was not so important.”

“The police found the man who did it. He had pictures of his victims and a picture of Joe. They were all people he killed for hire.”

“I had no reason to kill your brother.”

“Joe came to you a couple weeks back, didn't he?”

The old man pursed his lip and chewed on this a little bit. I didn't know how much to believe of what he might tell me, or even if he was as ill as he claimed. He seemed to have lost weight since the last time I'd seen him, true, to be more sallow, his cheeks flushed and red. It gave him a glow, not altogether unhealthy. His eyes were brighter, his lips darker, his features more pronounced, as if he were regaining the wild, handsome looks of his youth. I've heard though that such things happen. That dying people often look more beautiful for a little while, up there at the pinnacle, before the final descent.

“The way your brother came to me, his anger, it saddened me. It wasn't what I wanted. A long time ago, your mother, I was very fond of her. I promised her I would help you boys. That's why I was glad when you came to Pescadore. Who wants to leave the world with someone hating him? Because what are you, when you are gone, but what other people believe you to have been?”

I didn't want to listen to this kind of stuff. He was playing the role I'd seen him play all his life. The good patriarch. Father of North Beach. Lover of women and children. Not a perfect man, no, but kind in the heart. A man, faced with difficult decisions, who'd done the best he could. As he spoke, he made big gestures with his hands. I cut him off.

“What did you and my brother talk about?”

Micaeli looked at the gun. He was suddenly blunt. “The China Basin job. He wanted me to award him the contract.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That it wasn't so easy. The city, the banks, they have their requirements. I told him I would do what I could do. But I am an old man, and no one pays much attention to me. Put the gun down, Nick. I know you're upset, but this.…”

“Joe had been talking to Johnny Bruno. And Bruno told him about that man you had killed.”

“Johnny Bruno's an idiot.”

I agreed but it didn't stop me from rabbling on, telling the whole story Johnny Bruno had told me. The story of Pavrotti's assassination that I'd heard and rejected but was now ready to believe. It did not matter for the moment that I did not have all the evidence I needed to prove Micaeli's involvement. Why should it matter? Shame was shame, pride was pride, money, money. If my brother had lived to dredge up the old story, Romano and his son might have lost the China Basin contract. But not only that. With the public attention, the old judge would have lost his dignity in his dying day, and his dignity was what he loved most.

“No.” Romano scoffed and made a little dismissive notion with his hand. “It has already been dragged around, that story. When I was judge, they tried to attack me with it then. The Mussolini business. And that dead fascist in Reno. But nobody believed.”

He raised his head now, taking the posture of a judge. There was something in that posture, in his voice, it would be an insult to challenge and the insult would not be to him but to yourself. I could see why the Tenney Committee had believed him and why, now, I almost believed him too. It was his manner. He had in his face the dignity of the Italian peasant, though in fact he was not a peasant, and you could hear in his voice and see in the turn of his hand a flourish that somehow stung you to the quick of your heart, making you want to weep for all those who had come to America and felt shame over who they were, and you forgave them, those Italians, their Black Shirts and their Il Duce, because they were after all only Italians, and their sons had died, and their daughters had wept, and they had given themselves in the war.

I hesitated. I lowered my brother's gun, pointing it at the floor. I remembered how everyone in North Beach had always admired Micaeli. My mother among them, myself too, looking up at him with a gleam in my eye. In the end, though, he was like all those old Italian men who wanted your admiration. When you gave it to them, they gave you a little pat on the head but nothing else in return.

“No,” I said, mustering myself. “You're lying to me,”

“Why would I lie?”

“My brother went to Reno before he died. He was looking for a man named Bill Ciprione. You remember Billy, don't you?”

Micaeli said nothing.

“Oh, that's right,” I said, playing it up, “you knew him as Dios. Billy Dios. An old
compagno, si
. A man who did you a favor. I'm sure, of course, you paid him well.”

Micaeli kept his tongue in his head. The whites of his eyes looked yellow to me, the color of a dirty sheet on a dirty bed in a prison with walls that reached to the moon.

“Only Dios was dead,” I said. “So Joe searched out the daughter. And Joe and Dios's daughter, they had a conversation.”

Micaeli looked at me hard in the eye, and I looked him back. I thought of Ellen Ciprione, up there on her porch, and how'd she glanced back over her shoulder as I sat in the car, studying her. Micaeli made a little nod, and the yellow in his eyes seemed to brighten.

“You had Pavrotti killed. You paid Dios to make the arrangements.”

Romano shrugged, but he didn't deny it. “The authorities sent Dios away during the war,” Micaeli said. “Afterwards, he came back, here to North Beach. He started a family—but it didn't work out for him. Myself, because of my position in the community, I felt some responsibility. I put some money for the daughter—in a blind trust. I never intended for her to find out where the money came from.”

“But she did find out?”

“Dios was estranged from his family. It wasn't until a few years ago—after his first wife was dead, his brother too—that he made contact with his daughter. He wrote her a letter. And in that letter, he confessed his sins.”

“The killing of Luci Pavrotti?” I asked.

He avoided the question. “The daughter came to me,” he said, “the letter in her hand. On the verandah of my porch in Pescadore.”

Romano's eyes were suddenly teary, full of sentiment. He made a sweeping gesture with his hand, as if he were standing on that porch, studying magnificent vistas. His property. The laborers. The young woman in front of him. His chest swelled out. He went on, telling his story in the curious way old Italians have, referring to people not by their names, but by their place within the family. Father. Daughter. Lover. The Forgotten One. Throughout it all, he went on gesturing, operatic, as if he stood on a balcony raised above a stage.

“I had feared an ugly scene. That the daughter, she would be full of the bitterness of her father. This girl, though, she began to weep. In my arms, there on the porch. There was no ugliness, only tenderness between us.” Micaeli paused again, his eyes full of innuendo, as if there were something he wanted to be sure I understood. I didn't get it at first. “As time went on, things became more tender between us. Much more tender than you would think, between an old man such as myself, and a young woman. But then.…”

He broke it off here, but I saw the vanity in his eyes, and I knew then what he was trying to tell me. Even with one foot in the grave, these old Italians, they were full of themselves. They wanted you to know they were not tied to their wives' apron strings, and that young women still desired them. Don Juans, Casanovas unto their dying breaths, forever holding the mirror up to their own faces, whispering passionate good-byes.

“That letter, the one Dios wrote his daughter?” I asked. “My brother found out about it, didn't he?” It was a guess, but I knew suddenly it was the right guess. Joe must have had something concrete against Micaeli, or none of this made any sense. “The daughter, she told him.”

“He bullied that letter out of her,” Micaeli said. His voice was fierce. “She did not intend to give it to your brother. He took it.”

I was still missing something though, something terrible and obvious, and maybe I was just not letting myself see. Meanwhile, Micaeli held his head in the old way, regal, full of confidence. In that moment he looked as he used to look, not so long ago really, the older man with the young man still in his eyes. He had about him the look of success, of wisdom, but of a certain charm too, one of those people whose presence is like a steep precipice, where age and youth and beauty all exist together in a single facade, and that intermingling is, in some way, irresistible. I pictured him then, standing on the verandah in Pescadore, and for a moment I could almost imagine it, the embrace, the tenderness between the young woman and the old man who had been her secret provider. I could see that embrace, maybe, the sweetness of it, and the ugliness of it too, and I could see my brother bullying that letter. There was still something wrong though. I could not picture Ellen Ciprione on that porch. Another woman, maybe, but not her.

“I didn't kill your brother,” he said.

“Maybe you didn't pull the trigger—but you had it arranged.”

“No. I don't know why you say that. I gave him his money, that boy. I promised him I would talk to some people. To see if he could run a crew at China Basin. I give him everything he wanted.”

“Why should I believe you?”

“Your brother gave me the letter. I gave him the money he wanted. He was satisfied. I was satisfied. I had no reason to do him any harm.”

“Where is this letter?”

“In my case.”

“Your valise?” I asked. My heart started to beat harder now, thudding like a machine.

“Yes.”

“Get it.”

I wanted to see that valise, to touch it, to feel it in my hands, to know if it was the same black leather case, with the same gold zipper, that I had delivered for Jimmy Wong. Because if it was, it would prove to me what I'd already guessed. That Romano had decided to get rid of my brother—and that he used me to do it.

“It's right here. On the mantle.”

He turned and picked it up and when he laid it down on the desk for me to see, all the blood seemed to rush up to my head at once, scattering my thoughts so they disappeared like flies into a damp cavern.

It was not the same valise.

Not even close. Brown leather. Old and battered. Held shut with a buckle at either end.

“I've had this for ages. It's as old as me.” He fumbled with the buckles. “And opens about as easy.”

“That's your case?”

“Yes.”

“I have a question.”

“Shoot,” he said, then laughed, overhard, like this was a tremendous joke. My finger itched.

“A black valise, Italian leather. I saw it up in your office in Pescadore?”

“Oh, that.”

“Who does it belong to?”

“Marie.”

He smiled again, shrugging. A shadow crossed his face, as if he realized the significance of what he'd just told me, how it tied Marie to my brother's murder. Then the shadow passed and it occurred to me that perhaps he was setting Marie up the same way he'd set me. He wanted me to think she was the one who'd sent the valise to Jimmy Wong, with the money inside, to pass along to the killer.

“How did it get to Pescadore?”

“After your brother died, she came to visit. The two of you came together. Remember? One morning, she and I, we talked a while in my office—before you went down to the beach. She left the case behind. You know women, so forgetful.”