The Last Days of Il Duce

by Domenic Stansberry

  Such was the case with the Mussos. They were still paying 1950s rent. We couldn’t evict them for that, so I wrote up a damage complaint. When the Mussos went through the roof with the injustice of it and refused to pay, then I drew up the thirty-day notice and served it up, legal as hell, while Ed and Rickie Lee stood on the sidewalk with their arms crossed, just to emphasize the point. It was possible to fight us but that took money and brains, and people with both these commodities didn’t do business with Jimmy Wong to begin with.

  The Mussos’ notice expired today. I knocked on their door. The lace curtains were drawn shut and it was quiet as death inside there, but I had been through this kind of thing before. Jimmy Wong had given me the key to the place. As soon as I stuck it in the lock, Mrs. Musso was all over me. She was about fifty, a small wiry-haired woman with plump breasts and beautiful, imploring eyes. She clasped her hands together, leaning against me, and dropped to her knees at my feet. Meantime her husband stood shame-faced in the middle of the living room, watching. All around us the apartment was filled with the kind of rococo junk that wops love.

  “You can stay, if you just pay the bill. And sign a new lease, with the new rent.”

  My voice cracked a little as I spoke. Maybe because I knew it wasn’t possible. Musso was an electrician, who made his living doing handyman jobs around the neighborhood, but he was getting old and no one hired guys like him anymore.

  When he didn’t answer, I motioned to the Lee brothers out on the street. They were thick-chested Chinese boys, stout like wrestlers, and they tripped a little as they came into the house. Mrs. Musso threw herself at me, her eyes wild and fierce. She pummeled me with both her fists and her body was up against mine too and all the while she yelled in Italian. I grabbed her by the wrists. I felt her breasts against me and felt too an embarrassing stir of desire, then she begin to sob and I let her go. I sat on the porch and lit a cigarette. The Lee brothers came out with a flowered lampshade, a chest of drawers, a ceramic pig from Italy. Then it was the couch draped in black lace, the picture of the Virgin, the stiff-backed chairs, the thirteen cans of olive oil. The stuff accumulated on the sidewalk. All this while I stared down into Chinatown, where the men in their gray suits and the women in their smocks and the little children with their black eyes all filled the streets, more and then more of them it seemed to me, while overhead the Chinese characters filled the signs, neon blinking in the mid-afternoon, all those indecipherable letters rolling and tumbling into an upended martini glass over the liquor store.

  After awhile the Mussos worked up some nerve. They came up next to me and Mr. Musso spit at my feet.

  “Curse you, Nick Abruzzi,” he said.

  “His name’s not Abruzzi.” Mrs. Musso looked at me in disgust. Her eyes were still beautiful. “He’s a fucking Jones.”

  I’d had enough. I walked down to the Naked Moon to get a drink and watch the girls take off their clothes. While I was there I got on the phone to Wong and told him to send a truck over to the Mussos. I had an address for their kids down in the South Bay, and I was sure those kids had a swell place for all this stuff on the sidewalk, and also a couple extra rooms for Mom and Pop.

  THREE

  THE VALISE

  Jimmy Wong’s office was six flights up a building that didn’t have an elevator. At least it didn’t have an elevator the public could use. There was a coded one in the lobby, for office tenants and their employees, but for some reason Jimmy couldn’t find it in himself to let me up that way. So it was the long climb up a dirty stairwell with a steel banister and concrete walls.

  “You need the exercise,” he said. “I walk those stairs every day.”

  Maybe it was true. Jimmy Wong was a fit-looking guy. He was about my age, and he had the smell of success on him and wore suits that were cut in Milan.

  Wong had been born in San Francisco. So had his father and his father’s father before that, but Jimmy had done better than any of them. He had a house over in Marin, and a pretty little wife who decorated the house, and a couple of kids in private school. His office was nothing fancy but it was on the top floor, overlooking the gaudy fronts and tin pagodas of Chinatown, so you could see all the way down to the Oakland bridge and the water beneath its girders. On his walls hung a picture of Chinese coolies building the railroads more than a hundred years ago, their backs all bent and faces weary. Jimmy had the habit of walking over and staring at that picture while you talked to him, then answering back, eyes empty, as if he hadn’t heard a word. The truth was, he didn’t give a fuck what you said, coolie or no. He made his money trading property, leveraging Hong Kong money into the neighborhood. He was pretty good at what he did, I guess, but I wouldn’t want to have him for a landlord.

  “I don’t have your kind of stamina, Jimmy. You make all your clients climb those stairs? Or just the ones with weak hearts?”

  Jimmy was studying his coolies. There was one white man in the picture, an overseer apparently, who seemed to be the only one aware of the photographer’s presence. The overseer, who wore a battered derby hat, had one hand tucked in his waistband, as if posing; the other hand—through some flaw in the photograph, though it was hard to be sure—seemed to disappear into one of the coolie’s skirts.

  “I have something I need for you to deliver.”

  “Another notice?”

  “No. A package.”

  It wasn’t the kind of work Jimmy usually wanted from me. There was a leather valise on his desk, and he walked over and touched it with his fingers.

  “I got a call yesterday. A friend of yours. Micaeli Romano.”

  “I didn’t know you were acquainted.”

  “Our paths cross. Business matters. He asked if it was all right with me if he talked to you. He has some work for you. A job.”

  “He asked your permission?”

  I acted surprised even though I knew it was the kind of thing Micaeli would do. Micaeli was very old-world, full of grace and decorum, the kind of man who did not shrink into himself with age. He seemed to respect others and so people respected him. Or most people did. He had done well as a lawyer, even served as a judge. His adopted son practiced real estate law and the two of them had some investments in that direction now, a holding company, properties scattered about the city.

  “He asked me if it was all right he should talk to you. He wanted to be sure he wasn’t stealing a valued employee.”

  “That’s considerate.”

  My voice betrayed my resentment and I knew that resentment was something a man like Jimmy Wong—who respected his elders and his ancestors, especially the wealthy and powerful—could not understand. But Jimmy knew nothing of my life, how my feelings towards Micaeli Romano were all mixed up with my mother’s admiration of him, my father’s scorn, the meddling he’d done in our lives.

  “He wants you to pay a visit.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  Jimmy held his hand tucked in his waistband. At length he let go of what he was thinking and reached again for the valise. He took out a fat manila envelope that had been wrapped around with tape. Then a second envelope, similar but much thinner, as if there were only a paper or two inside. He examined them both a moment, then clasped them back up inside the valise.

  “You deliver this to the address I give you. A man will answer the door and then you hand in the suitcase. He’ll shut the door in your face but you stick around. In a minute, two minutes, who knows, he’ll hand the case back to you. Empty. You bring the case back to me.”

  “Why don’t I just take the envelopes?”

  “It’s nicer this way. I’ll return the case to the client.”

  “It’s not yours?”

  “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 hav
e 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.”