The Ancient Rain

by Domenic Stansberry

  “Okay.”

  She blew in his ear. The sound of it was like the sound of the ocean inside a seashell.

  “Don’t leave me,” she said. “Promise me.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Promise me you’ll love me forever.”

  “I will.”

  They made love. Afterward, she got up and checked her answering machine. There was a man’s voice on it. Dante thought he heard the faintest wistfulness in that voice, or that’s how he would remember it later. But he could not be sure. Because he was already on the shore again, out on the mudflats. The skies were empty, and the tide was rolling in.

  PART TWO

  The Explosion

  SEVEN

  As of yet, Guy Sorrentino was not concerned with Dante Mancuso. There was no reason why he should be. He had known Dante, from their time on the force, and it was true their paths had intertwined briefly. It was true, too, that they were about to get intertwined again, but neither man knew this yet.

  Whatever violence lay ahead—whatever enmity—neither man was aware.

  Maybe Sorrentino, himself, had felt a flash of recognition when he’d seen the hawk-nosed man milling around in the crowd in front of the Federal Building. But he had not put the face with the name, and had no way of knowing that Dante might have a connection with the Younger case.

  And the Younger case was the only thing Sorrentino was concerned with these days.

  Sorrentino had met Elise Younger three years ago. She was like a daughter to him, and it was on account of her he pursued the case.

  Or so he told himself.

  It was on account of her, on account of the case, that he had been fishing around North Beach these last few months. It was on account of the case that he’d left his apartment in San Bruno this morning and drove down to the Serafina Café. The café was a place from his past, down in the old neighborhood, and he would not have gone there, he told himself, if not for the case.

  * * *

  These days, down at Serafina’s, the television played continuously above the bar. It was an older television, a cathode-ray tube with a convex surface. It had been hooked up to cable somehow, but the color was off, and the picture had a glassy, funhouse look.

  Stella, the owner, had put it up there a few years back.

  Her husband would never have agreed, Sorrentino knew. People didn’t come to watch television, he would say, they came to talk, to eat—but things were different now. Stella’s husband was dead, and it wasn’t the old days anymore. The Serafina’s clientele had always been from the neighborhood, and they were getting old, their numbers dwindling, here on the border of Chinatown and Little Italy. Those who came now were mostly from streets close by—old Italians who lived in the Florence Hotel or the apartments above Columbus. There were some who still came down from Telegraph, but it was not an easy walk down the hill. If you had the money for a taxi, then you would not eat at Serafina’s anymore.

  Stella’s husband may not have approved of the TV, but things had changed. Stella had to compete with the bar around the corner and also with the flophouse lobbies.

  It wasn’t the old days, no.

  It wasn’t like when Rossi was mayor, and people lined up in the streets smoking cigars. Not like when they had fresh tomatoes delivered every day, and you could smell the produce in the trucks as they went by the orchards of San Jose, the cherries and the prune plums, and also the broccoli from San Bruno.

  But people did not grow broccoli in San Bruno anymore. As far as Sorrentino could tell, there was no such thing as prune plums.

  * * *

  When Sorrentino walked in, the regulars did not pay him much mind. Or it did not seem so to him. A couple of old men sat at a table by the wall, and they glanced up at him the way they might glance at anyone. Maybe they paid him some mind, maybe they didn’t. There was an old bastard who kept his eyes on him, and an old woman who whispered to herself, and some shadows at a table in the back, but Sorrentino didn’t recognize anyone, at least not from what he’d seen so far, and he assumed it was similar the other way around. When he sat down, Stella peered across the counter at him.

  “Guy,” she said.

  He started to smile but knew better. There was nothing like joy in her face.

  “Spaghetti.”

  She nodded and walked away. Ten years since his last visit, and that’s all it came down to. He was sixty-one now, and Stella was seventy. They had grown up in the neighborhood, and he remembered when she’d been a blousy young woman standing around with her thick brown hair at her father’s produce stand. Sorrentino had known her husband. He’d gone to her wedding and to her husband’s funeral. She’d been there, too, when Sorrentino had put his own son in the ground—and this was what it came down to: Stella walking back to the kitchen wearing a dress like his grandmother used to wear. Then returning with a plateful of noodles and sauce.

  “Wine?”

  “No. I don’t drink anymore.”

  “Some people can’t take it, I guess.”

  “No. Some of us can’t.”

  Sorrentino had left the SFPD not long after his divorce. His wife had said the divorce was on account of his drinking, but the truth was that after their son had died, he didn’t have much stomach for his wife anymore. Nor she for him.

  The boy had been killed when his truck toppled over on some road in Kuwait, some weeks after the fighting had ended, in the aftermath of the First Gulf War.

  There was a photo of his boy along Stella’s counter, under glass on the countertop along with photos of lots of other people from the neighborhood. He knew the exact place where the picture lay, farther up along the counter, but he didn’t glance toward it, and neither did Stella.

  That wasn’t why he had come.

  Very faintly, as if in the distance, he heard Chinese music, a pop song, and also the sound of running water, dishes rattling. Sorrentino wanted to talk to Stella, but she had her back to him now.

  The old ones watched the television. It was way up in the corner and the sound was off, but they watched anyway. On screen, firemen were digging out the rubble at Ground Zero in New York. The World Trade Center had gone down some time ago, a little more than a year now. It looked like old footage but you couldn’t be sure, and anyway the media liked to show it over and over. And the faces had started to become familiar. Like they were people Sorrentino knew out there doing the digging. Then the scene switched and switched again. Other parts of the world, men being held hostage. Then bombs—artillery in the desert. Protestors in a European city, upset over the expanding American retaliation—but then, no, this last scene was here.

  Downtown San Francisco.

  Local jackasses. A-number-one idiots. Wise guys against the war.

  “It’s over.” The man who said this was old, maybe a million years. Maybe a hundred million. He sat with another old man at the table by the wall.

  Sorrentino did not recognize either man at first, but the longer he looked, the more he began to see something familiar about the pair—their faces before gravity had lengthened their chins, before the moles had grown ulcerous, when the skin was still tight and there was not so much hair growing from the nostrils and the ears. The older of the two men wore a black shirt. He coughed and lit a Pall Mall.

  Johnny Pesci, he remembered. And the other one—George Marinetti. Pesci was Marinetti’s uncle, something like that, and the two were always arguing. Together, they looked as if they’d crawled up out of the crypt.

  “It’s over,” Pesci said again.

  At a table nearby sat Julia Besozi. Guy recognized her now as well. She wore a hairnet, with blacking on the scalp underneath, like the old women used to do when their hair thinned. She sat alone, sipping tea, legs crossed, wilting into the wallpaper.

  She smiled. Her eyes were black like pebbles.

  Meanwhile Stella had retreated into the kitchen. You could hear the Chinese dishwasher in the back, laboring in the sink. You could hear him humming along
with the radio and dishes clattering in the background. Then he dropped a dish, and you could hear Stella scolding him in Italian.

  It was an old routine. Stella enjoyed it, yelling at the Chinaman. It went on for a while and then there was silence.

  In the recesses of the café, in a rear booth, one of the shadows moved. Franceso Zito, he thought. Mollini. Ettore Patrizi. Or men who resembled them. Sorrentino remembered obituaries, but maybe he had been mistaken. Or maybe not. Maybe they were dead. They raised the grappa to their lips and grunted, but that didn’t prove anything either way.

  “It’s over,” said Pesci.

  “What’s over?” Marinetti wanted to know.

  “The whole business. America—all of it.”

  “I don’t see how you can say that.”

  “They should beat their heads in.”

  “Whose heads?”

  “All of them. All their heads.”

  “That’s not a thing to say.”

  “Once upon a time, things were not this way.”

  “‘Once upon a time,’ what does that mean? When was that, anyway, once upon a time?”

  “It’s not now.”

  “When…”

  “They should beat them on their heads.”

  “Once upon a time, they should beat them on their heads. This is what you mean, once upon a time?”

  “Once upon a time, this was not permitted. You have to lay down the law.”

  “Don’t fool yourself, there’s plenty of beating going on now. Everywhere, people are getting beaten.”

  During this, old lady Besozi was sitting there with her tea, her legs crossed, and that pinched face—but sitting upright, upright as could be, with that same vague smile on her face. Looking right at him.

  He smiled back, but she didn’t respond, and when he swiveled away, her eyes stayed fixed on the same spot.

  The old woman was blind.

  Meanwhile, Pesci asserted himself. He did not mean to let it go. “Blah … you let the world get away with murder, you let them stick a flower up your ass, it’s what you get.”

  “What’s wrong with sticking a flower up your ass?”

  “What’s wrong is that stuff is supposed to come out of your ass, not in. You reverse the process, you do things ass backwards, it affects the brains. You get some funny ideas.”

  Marinetti shrugged.

  “Airplanes start falling out of the sky.”

  “I don’t get the connection.”

  “Poison in your mail.”

  Above, the television cut to a picture of Owens in his orange jumpsuit, hands cuffed in front of him, appearing for the arraignment. It had happened several weeks ago now, and the hearing for bail was coming up later this week. Then the image of Owens was gone, off to something else—fighter jets, a girl in fatigues. A car exploding in a market.

  Pesci started to cough. Julia Besozi still grinned her black-eyed grin, and there came the sound of running water again, dishes clattering, and in the back, Stella thumping on her cutting board.

  Sorrentino lowered his head.

  Why am I here?

  The old men were right. Everything had gone wrong, but he was going to straighten it out—his own little part. He had a mission.

  He glanced down the counter and thought of his son’s picture and felt the darkness seize him.

  No …

  The bail hearing for Owens was coming up, and soon the trial itself. As far as the feds were concerned, the case was their baby now. But Sorrentino did not trust them. Arrogant bastards. Especially Blackwell—a spider in his web. You could never tell who the son of a bitch would bite next.

  Regardless, he hadn’t come to Stella’s to hang around at the counter. To fall into this Italian gloom. He had come for a reason.

  * * *

  Sorrentino got up and walked into the kitchen. Stella stood there pulverizing chicken with a mallet. There was the smell of garlic and of dough, and of tomatoes in the corner, overripe, and of wine that had been spilled a long time ago, and of kitchen smocks dampened by steam and sweat. Of dishwashing soap. All of the smells of this place were stronger here, and stronger the closer you stood to Stella.

  She was a tough woman, wide ass, tits like a Cadillac, who backed off from no one. Nonetheless she flinched, maybe, just a little, as Sorrentino moved up closer.

  “What do you want, Guy?”

  She didn’t back off though. He stood up close, and the smell of her was in his nostrils, Stella Lamantia, seventy years old, with hair like a wire brush, unflinching in her flowered dress, with her big breasts and her hands on her hips and sauce on her apron. Ten years ago, one night, after her husband was dead and his own son was in the ground and his wife had thrown him out—that night—he and Stella had had their moment together. He had pulled up her skirt and leaned her against the wall and she’d grabbed his ass with her strong hands.

  Their moment had not lasted long.

  “This,” he said.

  He showed her a picture of someone they both had known some three decades back, a Japanese woman by the name of Cynthia Nakamura—a slight woman with long black hair, maybe thirty-five years old in the picture. She stood with a cigarette in her hand. Next to her was a black man, African American, in a turtleneck. Stella clucked. He had his arm around Cynthia, but his eyes were closed and his head was tilted back. He looked to be in a trance.

  “Do you know who she is?”

  “That’s Cynthia Nakamura. But why do you ask me? You know her already. She lived just down the street.”

  It was true, he knew Cynthia’s history. She was a war orphan who’d been flown back from Tokyo after World War II, when John Panarelli married Cynthia’s aunt.

  “Do you know where I can find her?”

  Stella walked away from him. She picked up the pulverizer and began beating the chicken again. “It has to be thin,” she said. “All the chickens today, they are too fat.”

  “What’s wrong with fat chickens?”

  “I saw you on the television. I saw you standing in the back while that blonde was talking—there with the prosecutors and all those people. That young woman, the blonde, tell me, is she paying you anything for the work you do?”

  “Of course,” he said, but he was lying.

  “Cynthia Nakamura, what can I tell you? You know her story. She left the neighborhood a long time ago. Who knows where. Married again, divorced. The last I heard, she had the cancer. But I don’t know. No one tells me.”

  The fact was, Sorrentino had already found Cynthia Nakamura, but he didn’t tell Stella. Sorrentino had found her about a month back, living in the South Bay, but now she was in Laguna Hospice. He knew because he had moved her himself, with help from Blackwell’s people. She was part of the reason why the original indictment against Owens had failed. She had provided an alibi. Now, after all these years, she was willing to renege. And the government was trying to keep her alive.

  Stella hit the chicken again.

  “The trouble with fat chickens is that they are stupid. The head is too small for the body. A chicken looks like that, who wants to eat it?”

  “Do you remember the man, here in the picture?”

  Stella shook her head. “After her divorce—the first divorce—back then, the time of that picture, Cynthia hung around with some different men for a while.” She shrugged. “Black men, white. There was a time she would sleep with anyone.”

  Stella looked Sorrentino over, with his fat belly and his bald head. He knew how he looked, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. He thought about what had happened between them here in the kitchen. Probably they both had looked different ten years ago. Or maybe it had just been dark.

  “His name was Kaufman,” he said. “Bob Kaufman.”

  He could see Stella’s bile rise. He could see her irritation. “If you know the name, why do you ask? You can find him on your own.” She spoke loudly, same as when she used to scold her husband in the kitchen, loud enough for everyone t
o hear. “You come to play the big shot? You want to show everyone in the neighborhood you aren’t sitting around in your room drinking anymore? That you have this big case, with this woman on television…?”

  “Kaufman’s dead. He’s been dead since 1986.”

  “Then why are you talking to me?”

  Sorrentino hesitated, then said, “He was a poet.”

  Stella scowled.

  “He lived in the neighborhood here. He used to stand on the street corners. He was one of those—”

  Stella interrupted—“You know I know nothing about poets.” She spoke with disdain. Stella had never liked the bohos, with their beards and their books and their all-night squaloring. “Those people. You want to know about them, you have to go someplace else. You know that. Go around the corner.”

  She made a motion with the back of her hand. The truth was, he had been to those places. He had been to Spec’s and Vesuvio and the Sleepy Wheel, all the bars where the old bohos hung out, or used to hang out, because there weren’t so many of them anymore.

  “So all this, it has to do with your case? Is this why you are poking around?”

  For a second, he was tempted to explain, but it would lead into that gray plethora of names that ultimately surrounded anything to do with Owens, so it was impossible to separate the instigators from the sympathizers from the people who had just been standing around. The inability to do that was what had foiled the government’s case thirty years ago.

  Ultimately, it wasn’t Kaufman he was after, but one of Owen’s cohorts Leland Sanford. Sanford had been the key, the man the government couldn’t find. Rumor was there’d been some kind of association between the Kaufman and Sanford. Sorrentino, out of leads, hoped that the people who’d known Kaufman—if they would talk to him—it might somehow lead him to Sanford: to confirm the identities of those four Elise had seen scampering from the bank.

  A goose chase.

  Meanwhile, the way Stella watched him now, as if she suspected he had some other reason for being here, something he would not admit to himself …

  He thought of his son’s picture out there, pressed under the glass countertop.