The Last Days of Il Duce (7 page)

“Odds and ends,” she explained.

“Should I come down?”

“No. I'll be out in the neighborhood today. Your place, I'll stop by.”

I thought Leanora Chinn arranged it that way to be polite, to spare me a trip to the station. After she knocked on my door, though, I realized the other reason; she wanted to get a peek at me in my native habitat, to see what she could see. I sensed she was disappointed. The place was clean, or at least clean enough, and there wasn't any blood smeared on the walls.

She looked over some old photographs hanging by my desk. Relatives from Italy. The neighborhood in the old days. Marie and Joe and I, leaning against that car down at Ocean Beach, in that photo I'd swiped from my brother's place the day after he died.

“Family?”

“Yeah. My wall of ancestors.”

Chinn peered into a shot of my mom and dad out on a Sunday stroll, striking a pose in front of Stephano's Garment Shop.

“That building's been torn down.”

“Yeah, but Stephano's still going strong. Down on Union Square.”

“I remember him. Needle and thread, cuffing everyone's pants.”

“You from the neighborhood?”

“Yes,” she said. “I live in the same house I grew up in.”

I gave Lieutenant Chinn a second look. She had hard eyes, it was true, but she had small delicate lips, with a faint gloss on them, and she wore a straight skirt and a simple blouse, each one a different shade of blue. If you saw her on the street you might just think she was a Chinatown working girl, with her wholesome face and her quick walk, but the truth was, her clothes were police colors, even if they were not police uniform, and her eyes were black as her hair and unforgiving.

“This woman, Marie Donnatelli?” Lieutenant Chinn pointed to Marie in the picture.

“You know Marie?”

“I stopped by her apartment day before yesterday. Day of the funeral. I was parked in my car, across the street, when you dropped her off.”

“Oh.”

Chinn looked at me with those eyes of hers and I felt my chest tighten. Because before Marie climbed out of the car, she'd given me a quick sisterly kiss—as if to change the meaning of everything that had gone before—but I'd reached out and put my hand under her coat, fumbling, and Marie had let out a sweet little moan and buried her head in my shoulder.

“What was your relationship with Marie?”

“She was my brother's first wife.”

“That part, I know.”

“To be honest I haven't talked to her, nothing but a hello on the street, not for years. Then after the funeral, we took a drive around. We talked a little bit.”

“You used to be lovers, didn't you?”

“Marie tell you that? Or Luisa?”

“Does it make any difference?”

“Probably not. Anyway, it was a long time ago. We were kids. It was before she married my brother.”

“Before she married your brother?”

“Yes. Before.”

“What kind of relationship did they have?”

“What do you mean?”

“Was it violent?”

“They had Latin tempers, if that's what you're asking. But it was only shouting and fuss. Nothing serious. Anyway, it was over between those two. There wasn't any reason for them to be fighting now.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah.”

“A neighbor in the complex told us there was an argument at Marie's apartment. Between a man and a woman, a couple of days before the murder.”

“I wouldn't know anything about that.”

“It got loud and ugly.”

“Maybe it came from a different apartment.”

I walked to the window and glanced down into the street, past the Naked Moon to Zirpoli's Books, where in the days before my time the neighborhood men would gather, smoking their cigars, and listen to Mussolini on the radio. Some hipsters hung out front now, posturing in their black sweatshirts and black jeans, tossing jibes at the tourists, mocking their polo shirts, their Midwestern pastels. Beyond them the gaudy lanterns of Chinatown receded up the hill.

Leanora Chinn stood behind me. She put something soft into her voice. “I grew up on this side of Grant, just a few blocks up.”

“What school?”

“Galileo.”

It was the same school as mine, only Leanora was a few years younger, one of those Chinese girls who clustered at the edge of the asphalt, back when the streets were Italian and the playgrounds too and God stuffed every piece of ravioli with a dollar bill. Two separate worlds, the Chinese and the Italians. Though we lived side by side, we kept our distance. The Chinese spoke their own language, or at least the old ones did, but they fell silent at your approach. I remember swaggering into that silence, but the longer I swaggered, the deeper that silence and the more I feared it would overwhelm me.

“We lived in Winter Alley,” she said at last. “My family was one of the first to move across Broadway. 1965. The street was full of bougainvillea then.”

“It was also full of Italians.”

“Yes.”

“They didn't like seeing you then, moving onto their street.”

“They don't like seeing me now. A Chinese cop.”

“Well, they've been here a long time. My parents came in the '30s. The old ones, before that.”

“Mine came during the Gold Rush.”

I did not want to get into this because I knew there was no way of getting out. Nobody forgets anything in this world. Because even if the mind forgets, the blood remembers. Just as the children of the long-dead Genovesi do not forget how the Sicilians drove their grandparents from Fisherman's Wharf, the Chinese do not forget how Sbarboro's Italian dragoons torched Chinatown, nor do the granddaughters of pigtailed fishmongers forget the faces of Italian kids who threw rocks through their windows late at night. I was one of those kids, I guess, just as I was a kid who stood on the corner and watched the Chinese girls, all dressed up, plaid skirts and skinny legs, disappear down alleys I'd been warned never to go.

“A plainclothes saw you down in the Mission at the El Corazón,” said Leanora Chinn. “I don't think that's a great idea.”

“The man in the blazer?”

“He said you were putting yourself at risk.”

“Someone has to find my brother's murderer.”

“Not you. Not in the Mission.”

“I showed his picture around. No one recognized it.”

“They're not going to tell you that. Besides, that picture looks as much like you.”

“They'll think I'm his ghost,” I said.

“They'll think you're a cop. You keep wandering around, you'll stumble into something, nothing to do with your brother, and someone will think you're after something that you're not, and you'll get hurt for no reason you care about, and it won't do anybody any good.”

“It wasn't a drug deal. That wasn't why Joe was killed.”

“Then why?”

“I don't know.”

“Let me ask me you some other questions.”

Then Lieutenant Chinn went down her list, reading off a little pad, all the while sitting with her knees close together, her feet crossed at the ankles. Who were my brother's enemies? Was he sleeping with anyone besides Luisa? What were his business contacts? She went on like this more or less and I answered her questions. I don't think I helped her much. Then finally she stood up to go and told me I should leave the investigation to the police. I took that to mean they were writing it off as a street homicide, drug-related, or a robbery. I was almost relieved. I didn't want to think about it anymore.

Before she left, just before I took her hand to say goodbye, Leanora Chinn asked me another question.

“Where were you the night your brother was murdered?”

I should have known it was coming but I didn't, and now I felt a hard little noise in my chest, thumping out of tune.

“I was with him earlier that day. We had some drinks, drove around. I left him about seven.”

“Where did you go after?”

“Here, to North Beach.”

“Where were you between 10:00 and 10:30?”

“That the time of death?”

“Pretty close.”

“I was here.”

“Did anybody in the neighborhood see you?”

“The clerk down at the Corner Smoke. I went in for cigarettes. Before that I had dinner down at Jojo's Place. About nine. You can talk to the owner. Or his wife. They both saw me.”

“Good,” she said.

I could see how she was piecing the times together, the chronology, and that it was okay with her, airtight, but then she smiled, a smile that wasn't a cop smile but a woman's smile, and it confused me because there was something about it of the girl next door, that American glance over the fence mixed in there alongside the Chinese. After she was gone I lay there thinking about her, and I thought about Leanora Chinn more that night and about all the boundaries that are never crossed. Whether I contemplated crossing those boundaries, I don't remember, and it wouldn't have mattered anyway because as I lay there the phone rang. It was Marie.

“Micaeli Romano called me today,” she said. “His mother's having a birthday this week and he's having a small party. Down in Pescadore. He asked me to come.”

“Yeah?”

“And he asked me to ask you.”

I hesitated. I remembered how Wong had said Micaeli Romano had work for me—but there was all that tangled family history to contend with, and my brother's dislike of the man, and other things I could not remember. Then I thought of Marie, and of the drive to the coast with her, and I said yes, of course, because it was in my blood to say yes to her, and how could you resist your blood.

TEN

PESCADORE

We drove down to Micaeli's place in Marie's white convertible and thrilled along with the top down, winding through Devil's Slide, the stark hillsides above and below us the plunging ocean. Marie wore sunglasses, her hair tied in a bandanna, and I rode in the passenger seat crouched beneath the wind. I was not sure I wanted to see Romano but I wanted to be with Marie, and when we reached the long stretches of open road below Half Moon Bay, and the sun burned through the fog, it seemed this was what I had been meant to do, ride beside my dead brother's wife in a foreign convertible, whipped about by the heat and the cold.

“Lieutenant Chinn came to your apartment, the day of the funeral?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“What did she ask you?”

“Just questions.”

“About us?”

“About if I'd seen Joe lately.” Marie flashed her hand through her hair, and there was something in the gesture that said she did not want to talk about this anymore. I continued anyway.

“Did she ask about us?”

“It was so long ago, I didn't think it mattered,” she said. “Anyway, she already knew.”

“From Luisa?”

“I guess.”

“Did she ask your whereabouts the night of the murder?”

“Yes.”

“What did you say?”

“The truth. Can we talk about something else?”

“Where were you?”

“You too?” she asked. “Are you a cop now too?”

“Just asking.”

“All right. I was out to dinner.”

“Where?”

“The Flower of Italy.”

She didn't have to tell me anymore, or even tell me who she'd been with, because I knew. Or at least I had a pretty good idea. The Flower of Italy was a favorite with the old school Italians, Micaeli Romano in his day—and now Michael Jr.

On the hills above San Gregorio the fog closed in over us, and I could feel again the ocean chill a bit fiercer than I liked, and the sound of the wind whistling past grew louder, isolating Marie and me from one another, too loud to hear one another talk.

Micaeli Romano's farm was off the road south of Pescadore, between the ocean and the highway, an old estate that had been built some hundred years ago in the manner of an Italian villa, ornate trim and high porticos, painted in colors that had long since begun to fade and peel. The house sat in a valley warmer than the surrounding country, where the artichokes grew in long rows and Mexican laborers worked with knives to remove the thistle from the plant. All of it was Romano's land, bought by his father some fifty years before, allowed to degenerate to a kind of European indolence. I had been here once when I was a child, and I knew Marie and my brother had spent some weekends down here, back when they were still married and Joe had wanted the old man to invest in one of his building ventures. I knew too that Marie had returned here after her divorce with Joe, and that's where she'd met up with Michael Jr., though I didn't know if that last part was true or whether the old man had any idea of the rumors that tied Marie to his adopted son.

We pulled into the gravel drive. Some ocean-beaten date palms lined the way, and the pampas grass grew thick and wild all the way to the house. The old man himself came out to meet us, dressed in his baggy pants and his white shirt and his suspenders, clothes he had taken to wearing in his older years, as if now that he were an old man he wanted also to look as if he lived in an earlier century.

“Nick.”

He said my name all by itself, as if it were a magic charm, and I saw something like tears in his eyes. He gave me the embrace old Genovesi give to one another—though in fact I am not Genovesi—pulling me close and putting his cheek against mine, once on each side. I felt the old complicated emotions I always felt toward Micaeli and broke away from him as soon as I could. He embraced Marie the same way, only for a little longer; then he stood back to look us both over the way old people like to do. Then, nodding his approval, he led us into the house.

“This place, it was built by Marco Fontana. In a certain tradition,” said Micaeli. “There are not so many places like it. Not here. Not in Italy anymore either. It loses me money but I don't care.”