The Last Days of Il Duce (3 page)

“No.”

I did not like the sound of this. I'd heard Jimmy Wong rummaged up and down the social ladder, at least for money, and there were other rumors too but I kept my ears closed to those kinds of things. So as far as I knew, Jimmy kept himself on the legal side of things, except for safety and fire code violations. (And some questionable evictions, too; though these last were my business, you might argue, and no one's sin but my own.) Still, Wong paid my retainer and if he wanted me to deliver the valise, then that's what I'd do.

“You don't have to worry, Jimmy. I'd kiss every whore in Chinatown for you.”

I laughed but Jimmy did not think it was so funny. He was a family man. “It's not for me. It's a client delivery. From my point of view, it never happened.” Then he handed me eight hundred dollars payment for delivering the package. I wondered how much had been Jimmy's cut.

“Come on, Jimmy. What's in the package?”

Jimmy Wong did not justify this with an answer. In his eyes was that sad expression I've seen before, when people wonder why it is I've thrown my life away. I reached over and touched the valise. Soft leather, very smooth, nice to the touch. As I examined it, Wong went on examining me, with more or less the same look, like that of a lamenting parent, a small gleam of hope in the eyes. I wondered if he really saw me, or if for him it was not so much different than studying that ancient picture. I unclasped the valise and bounced the big envelope around in my hands. It felt like more cash in there, all bundled up. Then I took the other, thinner envelope, and ran it between my fingers.

“A love letter in here? A picture of the Golden Gate Bridge?”

Jimmy said nothing. Instead, his eyes were reproving, as if more concerned about my foolishness then the contents of the envelope. His eyes were suddenly ancient, regarding me as a child. It could be a drug deal, I guessed, or blackmail money. Or maybe just some peculiar Chinese business, documents from Hong Kong, paper lanterns, it didn't matter. I picked up the envelopes and stuffed them back into the case.

“All right. I could use the eight hundred.”

Jimmy nodded. There was the barest trace of a smile. He walked me out to the elevator and punched in the code. He put one hand on his waist-band, and with the other hand he slid a piece of paper into my coat pocket. His cheeks glistened under the white light.

“This time, Mr. Jones, you go down in style,” he said.

Inside the elevator I took out the piece of paper and read the address he had written there. It was a few blocks away, down Kai-Chin Alley. Nearby were the Friendship Housing Projects, a vast yellow building scrawled with Vietnamese graffiti. Street punks lounged on the doorsteps, sharp-looking youngsters who hunched their shoulders as they smoked and cast long looks down the alley. They acted as if they did not see you, as if a white man carrying a black leather case were invisible to their eyes, but I knew the people to whom you are invisible are the most dangerous of all. I had a friend who thought he was invisible like this during the fall of Saigon and ended up a sorry GI, drunk, pants down, disemboweled in Ho Chi Minh Alley.

I walked past the Viet punks, thinking maybe they were the same ones who'd asphyxiated the graying Chinaman the night before down at the Ching-Saw Hotel. When I looked back the Viets were gone and this bothered me more than if they had still been there. I felt like bolting but I was only half way down the alley. So I walked it slow, like a man who had business here, and found the number I was looking for. It was a dirty white door with a peephole in the middle. I knocked and waited. The alley smelled like piss.

I could feel my heart beating inside my head and I did not like the sensation. I glanced toward the safety of Kearny Street, where some young Midwestern girl was walking by with a camera. I knocked again, perhaps sooner then I should have, then the door burst open. The man who looked at me had the eyes of one to whom the whole world is invisible. His skin was paler than Wong's and the room behind him smelled of fish. His eyes were the eyes of a killer, I thought, and when he took the leather case those eyes looked me over, up and down, in a way that made me feel already as if I did not exist. Out in Kearny Street, the Midwestern girl was taking a picture of her boyfriend in front of the Buddhist temple. Some monks were beating drums on a balcony overhead and an old woman was crying. All these lives were going on, each one ignorant of everyone else, and none of us safe.

I returned the empty valise to Jimmy Wong, but it wasn't until I got inside Kim's Bar and drank my first beer that the feeling of impending danger began to fade, receding in the face of those Italian ancestors whose photos looked back at me from across the bar.

FOUR

JOE ABRUZZI, ON THE EVE OF HIS DEATH

My brother lived down in the Mission District now, with Luisa, his second wife. That Friday I met him, as I often did, at one of the old Irish bars on upper 24th Street; then we drove to Dolores Park. We stopped the car underneath a palm tree and passed the weed back and forth between us, like we've done ever since we were kids. I had pretty much given it up but my brother, even coming onto middle age, he still liked his dope.

From Dolores Park you can see over the high yellow palms to the pastel streets of the Lower Mission, which were all swamp and tule land before the Franciscans came and put the Indians to work. The Ohlone learned Christianity and then died with the anguish of the Franciscans in their hearts. Many of the Indians still lie buried beneath the park. The Mexicans in the neighborhood say you can see the souls of the Ohlone jolt loose, into the sky, each time we have a quake.

“It's still swamp down there,” Joe said, nodding his head toward the barrio. “Don't let anybody fool you. It's a swamp and it's a slum. And I'm going to get the hell out.”

Like my father, Joe was a carpenter, but unlike the old man he was restless by nature. He liked to be outside swaggering about under a blue sky, a hammer strapped to his belt. He always smelled of the sun, my brother, and of sawdust, and when he was a young son of a bitch, and strong, the girls would squat on the stoop across from ours and watch him unload his truck. One of those girls was Marie, though she never dated my brother until after I'd gone down to school, in southern California. By the time I came back she and Joe were a regular thing. I had taken up with a USC girl named Anne; she was pretty and smart and had parents who lived in a big house in Pacific Heights. The four of us double-dated. Marie was a wild one then, and I remember smelling the wildness of her as she draped herself around my brother in the front of the car and glanced battingly back at me and Anne. She wanted the car to go faster, she said; she wanted—like an Aztec princess—to dip herself in gold; she wanted to touch herself and feel the thrill of her young body, like the thrill of reeds rustling in the high grass. Marie would say these things, or things close enough, and I would take Anne's hand and later, when we were alone, I would kiss Anne wildly about the lips. But in the end it was not Anne whom I loved and my brother could not hold on to Marie.

“I've got it figured,” Joe said. “I've got a way out. I'm going to make a lot of money.”

“How's Luisa?”

“Luisa's fine. Her kid's a crankster, a guy was knifed down the street, the house stinks of dry rot, but Luisa's fine. She whistles a happy tune.”

Joe had married Luisa a couple years back, a Mexican woman with two kids of her own. Sometimes Joe could be pretty funny talking about their life together but he was a moody guy, who could swing from one emotion to the next without warning.

“I told you I'm putting together my own crew again, Nick. And I've got a job. A big job. Right here in the city. And the best part is the way I got it. I just reached right in there and took it out of that son of a bitch's hands.”

“What son of a bitch?”

“It's a done deal. I know it.”

“You sign the papers?”

Joe's eyes gleamed and he waved his arms as if to embrace the world, but there was a darkness beneath his exuberance. They knew my brother up here in the park. Sometimes he would buy a joint or two and sit on one of the benches, sharing the dope with whoever walked by, old hippies or gangbangers or ex-cons tattooed with the image of the Holy Virgin, the air around them thick with the smell of that sweet blue smoke. Though some people might think such low-lifing would get him in trouble, I didn't have much objection. Because it was not too long ago when Joe frequented the other end of the park, under the pepper trees, where the coke dealers liked to hang out, and he'd about ruined himself there. He'd been running his own crew then too, highballing it on luxury homes out in Woodside; then the money got out of control, and it all came crashing down. He'd even gone to Micaeli Romano for help but the old judge had been unable, or unwilling.

Joe handed me the joint and I took another hit and the sky seemed suffused with both beauty and danger. Dolores Park is in the shadow of the city's biggest hill so the fog rolls to either side and overhead there is that clear and startling blue. The sky today was calm in an ancient, dreamy way but I could feel too the violence in that dreaminess.

“I'll show you the property,” my brother said.

We drove into the flatlands of the barrio, where the Indians used to hide from the Franciscans, and now the cranksters and the young gangbangers postured up and down Mission Street. Meanwhile, the sisters and mothers of these boys wandered through the zapaterías and grocerías, the streets boomed with the staccato rapping of the lowrider's radios, the sidewalks blossomed with color, the stench of overripe fruit, perfume, urine and feces, cinnamon rolls in outdoor booths where a little boy held a toy gun in one hand and with the other clutched at his mama's skirts, hiding himself in her giant haunches.

“We stopping by your place?”

“No. Do you want to stop by my place?”

“It doesn't matter.”

“Then why do you ask?”

“We seem to be going that direction.”

“Do you want to see Luisa, the kids?”

“No. It's okay.”

“I want to show you this property. It will get dark if we don't go now.”

“That's what want I to do. Let's see the property.”

“You don't like my house? You don't like Luisa, the kids?”

“Stop it.”

We made a joke out of it but the truth was I was glad not to go by his house. Luisa had been good to my brother but she gave me the cold shoulder anytime I walked through the door. I did not know why, but this was the way she'd always been to me—and Joe seemed to take pleasure in her rudeness. So we drove toward the bay into an industrial district that had been built upon sludge and landfill and through which the Southern Pacific had run line after line of railroad tracks, a switching yard wider across than the Bayshore Freeway. The tracks were still there, though rusted orange with disuse.

The place was called China Basin because of the coolies who had laid those tracks and lived in shanties nearby.

“This is it.”

“There's nothing here.”

“You have no vision, Nick. Can't you see? They're gonna build condos here, up and down. Office space, housing projects, playgrounds, all up and down. I've got a bid on the framing contract, for the residential end. And I'm going to get it. I know.”

“How do you know?”

“Micaeli Romano's behind this deal. His law firm, the holding company, they're arranging the financing.”

“I didn't know you two were friendly.”

“We're not. But I've got some leverage.”

“What kind of leverage?”

“The old man's done something he's not proud of. He doesn't want people to know.”

“What are you trying to say?”

“Just what I said. Three-story condos, little boxes one on top the other. Redwood deck on the back. Garage underneath. It's as easy as they get. I can make myself some real money, then I can get out of here. Get myself something in Los Gatos, Monte Sereno. Nothing fancy. Just a place.”

“You taking Luisa with you?”

“Sure,” he said, but I did not think this had anything to do with Luisa. I could see the dreamy glint in my brother's eye, the kind of look men get when they think about what their life might have been. For my brother, Joseph Abruzzi Jones, it was those dry hills south of here where you could sit on your porch and all but imagine the ocean and the palms somewhere behind you and an Orchard that rolled down the peninsula all the way to the bay. Of course there weren't any orchards anymore, and even the little stucco bungalows were being torn down for bigger homes, on land that sold for a million bucks an acre. My brother knew all this but it didn't matter. He still had that look in his eye.

“Eldorado Condominiums,” he laughed. “That's the ticket. And I got the goods.”

I laughed too but I felt a chill in my heart. Though I hadn't admitted it to myself, I'd seen a little door open in my life the day before at Jimmy Wong's. Standing on the other side of the door had been Micaeli Romano and the job Jimmy talked about. And maybe there had been other things behind that door too. Maybe in that land behind the door it was no longer true that what was good for me was bad for my brother. Maybe Micaeli Romano was the man everybody thought he was, and a sweet life awaited me. But none of that mattered either. Because to open that door and walk through and stand on the other side with Micaeli Romano, that was the stuff of betrayal.

“He's quite the stud, that Micaeli,” said Joe.

“You mean his son?”

“I mean Micaeli.”

“In his day, maybe. He's an old man now.”

“A rich son of a bitch like him, it's always his day. But not anymore.”

I turned my back on Joe and walked down the old railway track. The twilight was coming on, the skyline darkening, and I could see fog rolling in over North Beach.