“Tell me about New Orleans and everything else you know about him.”
“I don't know much about New Orleans, except that he was there and that he had to leave. All the immigrants to this country—the Irish, the Italians, all the people that came here the end of the last century—everyone thinks they all came through Ellis Island and that half of them were given new names because the names they had were too difficult to pronounce in English. But our grandfather—Leonardo Caravaggio—didn't have his name changed and so far as I know never got within a thousand miles of New York. He landed in New Orleans, a boy of five or six, with his parents, from somewhere in Sicily, in the late 1880s or the early l890s. After slavery was abolished, white southerners had to find another source of cheap labor. That's how we happen to be born in America: because our great-grandfather, whose name we don't even know, agreed to do the work the slaves had done in exchange for free passage from Sicily and barely enough in wages to keep himself and his family alive. There wasn't much difference in the way they were treated, either. If they got out of line, did something they weren't supposed to do, there was about as much chance being found guilty of murder for lynching an Italian as for hanging a black man. That's why Grandpa left New Orleans. He did something, or he was suspected of doing something—what it was, I could never find out, but it was something serious. Somebody once told me they thought he had killed someone, but I don't know if that's true or not. All I know is that the night he found out the police were after him, he left New Orleans and never went back. He knew if he stayed, he'd be caught; and he knew if he was caught, he'd be dead.”
Bobby leaned closer, mischief in his eyes. “How does it feel to find out you're the descendant of a runaway slave, chased out of New Orleans by a lynch mob?”
“Do you think he could have killed somebody?”I asked, juxtaposing in my mind the two pictures I had of him: an old man sitting in his chair and a strong, energetic young man filled with fear running for his life.
“Sure, why not?”Bobby replied with a quick, emphatic nod. “I heard a lot of stories about him growing up. He wasn't someone who would have backed down.”
Bobby nodded a second time and gave me a look that seemed to signify he knew it was true about our grandfather because he knew it was true about himself. Certain of his own reaction, he assumed his instincts were inherited and had come to him from at least a generation back.
“If someone had come after him, he would have known what they were going to do before they did. Were you ever in a fight when you were a kid? One that started with an argument, and you knew—just a split second before the other kid knew—that he was going to throw a punch at you, and you hit him first, because it was the only way to defend yourself? That's what he was like, I think. Whoever came after him—I don't think they would have had a chance to do anything. He was too quick, too smart, to give anyone that chance. Yes, he could have killed somebody; but it would have been somebody who wanted to kill him first.”
“I wasn't much of a fighter,”I admitted.
“You were too smart,”said Bobby with a distant smile. “You could see it coming in time to avoid it altogether.”
“That's the kindest definition of cowardice I think I've ever heard,”I said, laughing softly.
Bobby put down the bottle of beer, got to his feet, and stretched his arms.
“I don't know how he got to San Francisco, and I don't know what he did when he got here.”
Bobby stared down at his socks, a pensive expression on his face. “But during Prohibition he controlled most of the liquor brought into the city and he was one of the wealthiest men in San Francisco, worth millions. Then someone tipped off the cops. These guys weren't Elliott Ness. They arrested him, all right, but they gave him a choice: He could go to prison or he could give them the money and they'd leave him alone.”
Bobby picked up the bottle from the table and took a drink.
“If he had gone to jail, he could have kept the money, and we all would have been rich. But he had an old-fashioned sense of honor. He thought jail would disgrace his family, make it more difficult for his children and their children to be accepted. He had a choice between poverty and dishonor.”
Bobby looked at me for a moment, his light-colored eyebrows arched high. “Do you think anyone would have remembered where the money had come from or that he had gone to prison for a while because of it? It might have been interesting to have been part of one of the wealthiest families in San Francisco.”
He started back toward the house, a wry grin on his face, beckoning me to follow. “Don't you ever wonder what it would be like to have your picture on the society page every other week? We might have ended up like Lawrence Goldman,”he remarked as he held open the door.
I had no idea who Lawrence Goldman was, which, as I was soon to discover, meant that I understood next to nothing about the way things worked in San Francisco. There were those who believed that without Lawrence Goldman, San Francisco would not work at all.
“I wanted you to see the house,”Bobby remarked as we pulled out of the driveway. It was almost dark out. The long line of eucalyptus trees, sheets of bark peeling away from their trunks, stood like cutouts against the blue-black sky. High overhead a low wind rustled through the dry brittle leaves. “I hoped you'd change your mind. Why don't you stay with me? I could use the company.”
He'd invited me as soon as I told him I was going to take the case and was disappointed when I declined on the ground that, at least at the beginning, I thought I had better stay in the city. I was a little surprised, and a little touched, when he offered again. We were cousins, and we had not seen each other very often since we were boys, but I felt closer to him than to any of the uncles and aunts whose names, if pressed, I could still remember, but who were barely more to me than identifiable strangers. Bobby and I had shared secrets together, sometimes without knowing until much later in life what the secret had been.
“Thanks,”I replied, watching the cars fly by me as we merged into the freeway traffic. “Maybe after I get used to what I'm doing here. But I think I better stay in the city for a little while, anyway.”
We passed through the tunnel we had come through before and spiraled along the sweeping curves of the highway that led down from the hills. Straight ahead, across the churning black waters of the bay, the lights of San Francisco lit up the sky like some exotic midnight sun.
Bobby knew what I was thinking.
“I drive this every day. I've been doing it for more than twenty years, and I never get tired of it: the bay, the bridge, the city. It's never the same and it never changes. It's like staring into a fire.”
He drove along, lost in his thoughts. He did not speak again until we had passed through the short white-tiled tunnel that cut through the rock summit of Yerba Buena Island halfway across the Bay Bridge.
“Remember when that was the biggest thing you saw?”he asked, gesturing toward the clock tower on top of the Ferry Building.
I don't know why I said it. Something about his question brought it all back to me, as clearly as when it had happened years ago, that summer when we were still both small boys.
“Remember the night when we sneaked out of the house and followed those two sailors and the two women they had picked up in the bar and we were going to pound on their car door and then run like hell?”
Bobby kept his eyes focused straight ahead. “When did you figure out who they were?”
“As soon as I saw the look on your face after you looked through the window.”
“Did you ever say anything about it?”he asked, still staring straight ahead.
“No,”I replied, “never.”
He looked across at me, a sad smile on his face. “How did it make you feel?”he asked.
I started to shrug it off, make some glib, superficial remark. Then I changed my mind.
“Alone,”I confessed, as I looked away. “Completely alone.”
A somber, melancholy look came into Bobby's eyes. The lines at the edges of his eyes spread out, cutting into his temples, and for the first time I noticed weblike traces at the corners of his mouth as he pressed his lips together, concentrating on some private and, as I thought, painful reflection of his own. It did not last very long, a few seconds at most; then, as he batted his lashes like someone waking up from a bad dream, his mouth stretched into a grin and he glanced across at me, eager to tell me about the restaurant he thought I was going to like.
It was a small, crowded Italian restaurant in Columbus Circle, one of those places where everyone looks familiar and the waiter sometimes knows more about some of your relatives than you do. After we had eaten a little, Bobby moved away from the table far enough to cross his legs and drape his arm over the back of his chair. For a moment, he studied me, an ambiguous smile on his mouth.
“You sure you want to take this case?”
“The money is pretty good,”I replied, starting to laugh before I could quite carry off the cynical shrug with which I had hoped to impress him.
“You like that feeling, don't you?”he asked, trying to taunt out of me a confession of self-importance. “The million-dollar case. It wouldn't be the same if it were nine hundred ninety-five thousand, would it? Seven figures: That's what makes all the difference—doesn't it? I almost don't have the heart to tell you that around here serious money doesn't start before you hit eight.”
He was badgering me, the way he had when we were kids, letting me know, whatever I did, not to think too much of it. He was what I always imagined an older brother was like: ready to put you in your place, and ready to beat the hell out of anyone else who tried to do the same thing.
Satisfied with what he had done, Bobby again picked up his fork. Suddenly his expression became more serious. For a moment, he hesitated, as if had not quite made up his mind about something. Then he slowly put down the fork and lifted his eyes.
“I meant what I said before: about the way you reminded me of our grandfather. I know you wouldn't take this case for the money. It might be better if you did,”he said with an enigmatic look. “When Fullerton was killed, it was like everyone held their breath, waiting to see what would happen next. When the police announced they had the killer in custody and that it was some black kid who had tried to rob him, you could almost hear the sigh of relief. No one cares if the kid is guilty or not: They only care that their reputations and their secrets are still safe. You start looking around, trying to find out who was really behind his murder, the one thing you can be sure of is that no one is going to tell you the truth or anything close to it. And if you start to get too close to what really happened, then … well, let's just say there are some fairly ruthless people around here—and if any of them were involved …”
He stopped for a moment, and from the distant look in his eyes I could tell he was thinking of something else, something that made him shake his head from side to side, as an expression, first of sorrow, then of disgust, crossed over his mouth.
“Fullerton really was extraordinary. He was like that nursery rhyme we learned as children, the one about the little girl: 'When she was good, she was very, very good, but when she was bad, she was horrid.' ”
Half embarrassed by the allusion to childhood things, he looked at me as if he should have been able to think of a better way to describe what he meant. He struggled to find another way to put it and then with a bashful grin gave it up.
“Nope. He was like that. I was there, the night he was killed, at the Fairmont Hotel. I'm not much interested in politics, but Craven bought a table and insisted I come along. It was one of the greatest speeches I ever heard. There must have been a thousand people there, and by the time he was finished I think every one of them would have done anything he asked them to do. Hell, they would have marched on the White House if he had told them to. The odd part, though,”he added, still puzzled by what he had witnessed, “is that he was a candidate for governor but he spent most of his time attacking the president. Afterwards, I asked Albert about it. There's no such thing as a straight answer with him, at least not before he has exhausted all the possibilities for humor or exaggeration. In fact, instead of an answer, he asked me whether I remembered the line Fullerton had used—something about how the administration reminded him of a famous British government of the nineteenth century. Then, before I could answer, Albert's eyebrows shot straight up. He quoted exactly what Fullerton said: 'Not the one called the Administration of All the Talents—the one called the Organized Incompetence of the Country.'
“Albert thought that was one of the greatest things he had ever heard. Then he told me that he didn't think Fullerton could find Britain on a map and that he was certain he could not have named a single British prime minister from any century, not even Winston Churchill, much less the name given to a particular British government.
“You've met Albert,”he said, rolling his eyes. “So you know how he is. We were standing there, at our table, as the dinner was breaking up, and he's just chattering away, taking me 'round and 'round in circles until I had forgotten what I had asked him in the first place. 'Do you know who wrote that speech?' he asked me out of the blue. 'Ariella Goldman, Lawrence Goldman's daughter. She works for Fullerton—writes most of his speeches. She's extremely good. Fullerton is extraordinarily lucky. He has that knack—being lucky. He gets the talent of the daughter and the considerable financial support of the father. Lawrence can raise more money than anyone in California,' he explained. 'It's really a double advantage for Fullerton. Lawrence has always been the governor's principal financial backer, so every dollar he now raised for Fullerton is also a dollar that Augustus Marshall is not going to get. Half the people here tonight were here because of Goldman, maybe more. He pretends it's only because of his daughter, but that's not the real reason at all.'
“Albert likes to do that: make you guess instead of just telling you what he knows. It's his way of letting you know that what he's about to tell you is something hardly anyone else knows, either. If no one had any secrets, I don't know what he would find to talk about. He's the biggest gossip I've ever known.”