The Last Days of Il Duce

by Domenic Stansberry

  “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.

  “You’re going to blackmail Micaeli Romano?” I laughed and filled my mouth with scorn. “That’s a good one.” Then I spit in the dirt and walked back to the car.

  Joe stood outside a long time with his back to me, staring out at China Basin. Then he came back and slid behind the wheel. I pretended to be looking at the city, but of course I could feel his big, thick-shouldered presence in the car beside me, and the air was stuffy with the smell of us. It was the Abruzzi smell, or Jones, whoever the fuck we were, and it was the smell of my mother’s food and my father stewing in his failure. I met my brother’s eyes but just as quickly I looked away.

  “You slept with her, didn’t you, Nick?” he asked. “Right before the divorce?”

  I cracked the window to let in a little bit of air. The glass had misted with our breathing. I thought of the fogged windows of my mother’s kitchen, and I thought about the times Joe and Marie and Anne and I had sat at that table, and how later, after he’d broken with Marie, I’d watched him smash the glass out of those kitchen windows with his fist.

  “You slept with Marie, didn’t you?” Joe asked again. I did not know why this was coming up now. I let the pause lengthen, too long maybe, then I looked him in the eye.

  “No,” I said.

  He turned his head, thinking. “I am going to get that son of a bitch,” he said at last.

  “You do that,” I said.

  Then I went home and got drunk. I wandered the late-night streets with the Chinks and the hobos and the too-drunk tourists, all the nobodies of Columbus Avenue. Hunching under the neon light, they had learned the true secret of life, it seemed to me, and I wanted to be like them, wise as hell, immune from all desire.

  FIVE

  LINDA STREET

  I got a call in the morning. I let it ring five times, six, then figured they wouldn’t let it stop. The call woke me from my dreams, or that’s the way I remember things now. There had not been any people in those dreams, it had just been shades of blue, large shapes that slid past one another in a larger and vaster darkness of blue, gun metal blue, midnight blue, blue fading into black, like the color of this prison cell late at night when my eyes are open and remembering the past is like a plunge into the life of another man.

  “Mr. Jones?” The woman had a sad, official voice. She was with the San Francisco Police.

  “Yes.”

  “Mr. Niccolò Jones?”

  “Yes,” I said again. Then she gave me the news. My brother was dead.

  There had been a shooting, she told me, and the victim’s driver’s license carried the name of Joseph Jones. The incident occurred on the corner of Linda and Nineteenth, a few blocks from his residence. (A drug-dealing corner, I knew, a balmy little alley littered with scraps of plastic wrap. I listened for the innuendo in the woman’s voice. Cocaine. Speed. It was a highballer’s corner.) The department had spoken to a woman named Luisa Jones, but she had become hysterical when it came to identifying the victim. Before homicide released the body from forensics to the mortuary, the department needed definitive identification.

  The lady cop told me this in a sweet, blue-eyed way, like a nurse repeating a cancer diagnosis. I imagined her sitting behind a desk, and I could hear the starched white blouse in her voice and see the forms stacked neatly to the side.

  “I’ll be down in a little while,” I said.

  My voice sounded like somebody else’s, a nice guy’s maybe, somebody’s husband with an errand to do after work. But I was thinking of my brother and those pictures you see of corpses being wheeled into metal drawers at the city morgue.

  I know when someone dies all of a sudden you are supposed to be struck with disbelief. Maybe this is how it struck me. I know I fell back on my bed and clutched at my head and moaned like a gangster in a bad movie, an actor making a ploy for the audience’s sympathy. At the same time though I felt a surge of joy at my core and this same joy caused a misery in my heart, an awfulness. I wretched and I sobbed. I know my pain was not like you are supposed to feel. Rather it was something else, some kind of gangster pain. There was a harsh light coming through the window and I could see the motes of dust floating in its slanted rays. The traffic made an ugly noise outside.

  I had slept i
n my shirt, in the stink and grime of the day before, and I could still smell all that on my body, and I could taste too the smoke and booze in my throat. I went into the shower to wash it off. I spent a long time under the hot, steaming water, lathering myself, washing away the soap then starting again from the top. I washed myself clean maybe a dozen times, even after the water had turned cold and I had begun to shiver under the spray.

  There was a mirror on the bathroom door, and when I got out of the shower I looked my dripping body up and down. My brother and I have always looked pretty much alike, head to toe, including the extra weight about the gut.

  I studied the face up close. It was the same face, more or less, that I would see again just a few hours later, when the cops pulled back the white cloth and gave me a peek at my brother’s corpse.

  That afternoon I went to the downtown station and met with homicide detective Leanora Chinn. I told her I was a lawyer so she gave me the autopsy report and the pictures and all the details that the voice this morning had been too discreet to mention over the phone.

  My brother had been shot at close range, close enough for powder burns on the chest, and he had been hurled backwards by the bullet, straight back, so he fell onto the pavement with both arms outstretched. It was a small-caliber gun, so he had taken a few minutes to die there on the street, clasping and unclasping his hand while blood gushed up his throat. Technically the medics were unable to determine whether death was due to loss of blood or asphyxiation due to blood in the mouth, but the officer’s handwriting summed it up on the form in the appropriate box. Gunshot Wound to the Heart. There were no suspects in the case, Chinn told me, but police had gone door-to-door and had reason, because of the location, to suspect it was a drug deal gone bad. There were crack vials nearby and the victim’s wallet, riffled and empty of money, lay in the street.

  “At least that’s the way the case stands now,” Chinn said. The formality in her voice, mixed with the sadness, made me realize what had escaped me till that moment. She was the same woman who had called me earlier this morning on the phone.

  “My brother wasn’t buying drugs. Not on Linda Street, anyway,” I told Chinn.

  She did not look like the woman I had imagined. Her shirt was neither starched nor white, but blue—and she wore a badge over the pocket. Her hair was black and she wore it cut blunt.

  “He had problems with coke once, but that was over. I don’t think this had anything to do with drugs.”

  Chinn nodded and jotted the words prior user at the bottom of the form. Then she turned me over to the man in the white coat, the coroner, who took me through several doorways down corridors that smelled increasingly of formaldehyde and at last to a gurney wheeled into a corner against the wall. I didn’t need to look, I knew it was Joe by the shape of his big toe protruding out from under the sheet. I went through the motions anyway and stood there at attention while the man peeled back the cloth.

  The features were slack, lips pale, face drained of color, a short stubble on the cheeks. The man lying there didn’t look any way Joe had ever looked when he was alive, but it was still him, his bones and his face.

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s my brother.”

  I nodded my head and tried to blink the image away, but I saw my dead brother’s face again, or something close, in the window glass as I walked down the hall—and I saw it again when I glanced into the rearview mirror in the station parking lot. I started the car but I didn’t put it in gear. Instead I thought of Joe standing out on the corner of Linda Street and how he’d probably gotten a glimpse of the gun before the killer pushed it against his chest and left him staring at the black sky. I dwelled the moment over, imagining the violent whooze in his head, the plummeting of the stars, the blood rising in his throat. I lit a cigarette, inhaling deep, too deep, feeling first the rise of nausea, then a needling sensation on my skin. I wanted to get back to North Beach and have a drink. As I pulled out of the lot I caught sight of Leanora Chinn sitting on the station steps. Something in the way she sat there made me guess she had been watching me for some time. Watching in the way that cops watch, pretending she didn’t see you at all, with something else on her mind.

  That night I went to visit Luisa. No one was answering the phone at her place, and I knew her opinion of me was not a high one, but there are times when people are bound together, like it or not, and I felt the need to walk into my brother’s house and get a look at the things of his everyday life.

  Luisa was born in a village outside Mazatlán and had two children before she was twenty, then managed to drag both herself and her children north. Who had fathered her children, if it had been one man or two, or whether she had married either of them, these were questions to which I did not know the answer and never asked. I used to think Luisa did not love my brother but had married him when he was at rock bottom, vulnerable, because she was an illegal and wanted permanent residence. Maybe that had been true at first. She’d been only twenty-two then, and my brother had seemed the fool walking about with this young Mexican woman under his arm, especially if you knew about Marie and how Joe had torn up the dirt when she left him. But Luisa had stayed with my brother. She had not run off when her status came through.

  When I knocked on the door now, I saw in the window that she was on her knees before the Santeria shrine in her living room.

  My brother and Luisa’s place was one of those damp little Victorians in the Mission, painted a bright yellow on the outside, but inside it smelled of dry rot. Like houses up and down the street, it had been built on backfilled marsh, so the land was inherently wet and nothing could be done. The rooms inside the house were lined up shotgun style, one behind another, a long hall to the side. Light did not penetrate to the end of that hall. There was a little concrete yard in the rear where some bougainvillea grew, and beyond this was a cyclone fence strung with concertina wire to keep out the crackheads who lived in the house behind. A radio blasted a Mexican polka two doors down, some kids wailed, and the evening carried with it the smell of night jasmine and cooking grease.

  I knocked on the door. When no one answered, I pushed the door open and peered in. Luisa still knelt in front of her shrine. She had covered its altar with candles, placing among them a picture of my brother and a doll fashioned into his likeness. At the feet of this doll were bits of sawdust, glue, old nails, the tools of Joe’s profession, a candle melted into the shape of a devil—its purpose being to scare away the devil, I guess—and feathers and trinkets and a statue of Jesus with His arms spread like Joe’s arms had been spread when the cops snapped his photo on the pavement. Luisa rocked and moaned, oblivious to me, carrying on in the fashion of old Italian women I had seen in my childhood. Though whatever superstition those old women may have practiced, they did so alone and out of sight because this was America and that was 1956 and they’d been ashamed of their ignorance even if they could not help themselves and had no desire to change.

  I went quietly past Luisa, upstairs to my brother’s room. Though everything in the police report pointed otherwise, I did not want to believe he had been down on Linda Street chasing that cheap rock. He was an impulsive son of a bitch, Joe was, but he was no crackhead. Or at least that’s what I wanted to think right then. The evidence of his good intentions seemed all around me. In the shape of his clothes hanging in his bedroom closet. In the angle of his shoes there at the foot of the bed. In the papers and paraphernalia scattered over the top of his dresser.

  I shuffled through my brother’s papers, thinking I might find something to tell me what he’d been doing on Linda Street. All I found were some old pictures, and also some newspaper clippings from the real estate section. They were the type of things he was always clipping, advertisements for developments in progress, sketches of custom homes, the kind of jobs he’d run in the old days. On the back of one of those ads—over the local obituaries—he had scrawled some figures. They made no sense to me, and I pushed the papers away.

  I was more in
terested in one of the photos, a picture taken twelve, maybe fifteen years back. Joe and Marie and myself down at Ocean Beach, before Playland was torn down, so you could see the amusement center in the background and the Ferris wheel spinning around. Marie was in the center. She held each of us by the hand and we all leaned back together against Joe’s convertible. Joe and I looked awkward as hell but Marie looked triumphant. It must have been Anne who took the picture, I guessed. There was no evidence of her anywhere but that’s the way it would be.

  In the picture Joe wore a jacket of mine, a blue corduroy thing that he had worn a lot then because Marie liked the looks of it on him. I had seen it on him lately, when he was in a reminiscent kind of mood. I put the picture in my pocket and went back to his closet, hunting for the jacket. It had been mine before it had been his, after all, but more than that I liked being in his closet, heavy with the smell of him. It was the same reason maybe that Luisa had gathered bits and pieces of him to put downstairs on her altar. I found the jacket in his closet and put it on. It was a little heavier than it should have been, with a lilt to one side, but I did not take much notice of this at first. I looked in the mirror and decided, yes, I would take the jacket. It was a bit worn and it fit badly but I would take it. Then I put my hand in the pocket and came out with a gun.

  It was a small revolver, its barrel rubbed with blueing so it was the color I have told you about in my dreams.

  I did not know much about guns, but I spun the barrel and could see it was loaded. I knew Joe kept a gun for self-protection but at that moment I thought other things too. Maybe someone had been after Joe. He had been in trouble, and the police were wrong about everything. My ideas were half-formed and contradictory and so were my emotions. I shoved the gun back in the jacket pocket and started downstairs.

  As I left the room, though, I noticed Joe’s papers. I’d left them scattered over the top of his dresser. I started to put the newspaper clippings back where I’d found them; but—at the last moment—I grabbed and took them too.