The Last Days of Il Duce

by Domenic Stansberry

  “The reason for all our problems,” old Guilia said, “is because us, we Italians, we hate ourselves. In North Beach. And in Italy, it is the same, always. North hates South. Sicilian hates Florentine. Brother hates brother.”

  “Mama,” Micaeli raised his voice as if to silence her, but something had been triggered inside his mother and she would not quiet easily.

  Vincenza Romano bent over the old woman and lit her birthday candle.

  “That’s why that man, that communist, why he shot Il Duce. He was jealous of the old man’s mistress and wanted Claratta Petacci for himself. So he shot Mussolini through the heart,” Guilia said. Her eyes gleamed in the candle light. “Yes, those were the great days. Before they killed Il Duce. I remember them well.”

  There was a pause now, everyone regarding old Guilia, who held her head as if she were far away, looking at something else. Her necklace was beautiful about her neck.

  “That’s right,” said Teresa Tollini, but you could tell in her voice she wasn’t going to let it go. She had, of course, her own views on the subject. “But if you ask me, it was all the fault of Claratta Petacci. She coddled up to the Germans—and Il Duce went along—all because she wanted to go to the opera in Berlin. That’s the truth of it.”

  “No!” Micaeli’s voice was firm again. He’d had enough of his sister’s ranting. After all, he had fought in Italy against the fascists and knew the truth of things. “Every time a great man falls, they blame a woman. But sometimes, you have to blame the man himself.”

  “Bah,” said his sister, shooting a sudden, vicious glance at Marie. “Claratta Petacci was a scheming bitch.”

  ELEVEN

  WHITE SAND

  The next afternoon Marie and I left the house, going off through the pampas grass to the white dunes. For me, walking through the sand was thick and heavy business. I tried going barefoot, like Marie, but the sand scorched my feet and I was forced to stumble along in my city shoes. The sand did not bother Marie though; she seemed to float along. She wore a pale blouse that hung loose over her shorts. In the gleam of the sun, underneath the blank and shining sky, her hair no longer was blonde but luminous and white.

  “How do you take the sand?”

  “My feet are callused. From walking on the beach.”

  “There’s no beach in North Beach,” I said. It was an old line but it was true. The name had been given before they filled the flats with slag and concrete.

  “Maybe so. But there are beaches other places.”

  We reached the edge of the water, where I could take off my shoes and mince along in the wet sand. I followed behind Marie and watched her, thinking how she had looked as a girl, her thin legs and her dark eyes and her long hair. I could see the same spirit in her now but there was something else too that seemed a betrayal of that spirit, and that betrayal made me ache for her all the more, for both what she was now and what she had been once upon a time.

  We were still within sight of the house when Marie turned to me without warning, her face troubled. She said my brother’s name.

  “Joe.”

  I stood close to her. I waited for her to say something more, to reveal some memory, some event from their past. Her lips parted but suddenly I did not want to hear his name again. I embraced her, crushed myself against her, and it was a continuation of that other day on Ocean Beach, only with no reserve. My hand loosened the tie on her shorts, they were a gauzy material and opened in front like a sarong, nothing underneath, and I felt her breath against my cheek, and the name she whispered—as I touched her between the legs and she pulled me close—was no longer my brother’s but my own. Then we remembered Romano’s house behind us and hurried to be out of sight of the long porches that faced the sea. I took her by the hand and we went over to the dunes and lay down between them, and she rolled over onto me, and I put one hand under her pale blouse, onto her breasts, and slid the other into the loose wildness beneath her shorts. The sarong fell open again. She pulled at the opening in my slacks and rolled me on top of her, and we went after each other like that for a long time, until at last we were done, and the shadow of the clouds moved over our bodies, and our breath quieted, and we could hear again the cawing of the gulls and the crashing of the waves.

  Now she lay still beneath me. I touched her face. She held the hem of my shirt between her fingers and looked past me at the gulls. I remembered how she had told me, back when I first started up with Anne, how she would get me back one day, she would make it a mission in her life and would not stop until she was done.

  “I’m going to go to hell,” she said.

  “Maybe. But not for this.”

  “Joe.…”

  “Joe’s dead. Besides you two have been finished for years.”

  “That’s not what I mean. We should be quiet, I think, about what’s been happening between us.”

  “Maybe so. It doesn’t look right. Not so soon.”

  “I don’t want Micaeli to know,” she said.

  “What does it matter, old man Romano, what he knows?”

  “He’s dying.”

  “How can that be?”

  “Cancer. It’s all through him.”

  “He looks okay.”

  “But that’s not how he is. And there’s that Inspector Chinn, you know.”

  “What about Inspector Chinn?”

  “She seems to be looking for somebody to blame.”

  “You didn’t seem worried about her before.”

  “I’m not worried.”

  Marie rolled out from under me onto her stomach. She lay there looking away from me, out through the dunes toward the ocean. I wanted to touch her but I resisted. I remembered her dark moods and how she could be, how when she was a kid that darkness was all wrapped up with the father she’d never seen, whom she romanticized one minute and hated the next. So I didn’t say anything. Instead I just watched her, studying the length of her body, the cinch of her waist, the reach of her legs and the arch of her foot. The sarong was still half undone, riding higher up her legs now, and it revealed on her thigh something that had been hidden during our lovemaking. A bruise. Just beneath the buttocks, large as the palm of my hand, ugly and mottled at its center. I reached out to touch.

  “What’s this?”

  “I fell down the stairs.”

  “How long ago?”

  “A couple weeks.”

  “Pretty nasty.”

  “Not so bad as it looks—and it doesn’t hurt much anymore. You should’ve seen the bump on my head.”

  “What happened?”

  “Stupidity,” she said. “I slipped.”

  She reached back to push my hand away, then pulled the sarong over the bruise, and went back to staring at the sea. I thought of what Chinn had told me, about the argument the neighbors had overheard at Marie’s place. I let it go. After awhile she rolled back to me and I felt the warmth of her stomach against mine, and my mouth pressed against hers, and I forgot everything. I told myself there wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do to keep her next to me like this forever. We were like animals that had found each other after years wandering some impossible landscape, and now that we were joined we would tear each other apart rather than be separated. Then she jolted up, headed toward the house, and I followed at a distance, struggling along through the sand.

  I lay in my room and listened to Marie in the shower. When she was done, I went in and soaped myself. Even after I had washed clean I felt no one could look at us without knowing what we had done, without smelling it on our skin. So I changed my clothes again and tried to make myself presentable for the old man.

  The door to his study stood loose, but Micaeli was not there. I edged in anyway. A wood-paneled room, colors dark and masculine, filled with the stuff of his long career. Leather-bound books and yellowing files, handcrank adding machine and laminated ashtrays. Standing brass lamp, shade like a woman’s corset, viper’s tail winding up its spine. Pictures of family, diplomas hanging on the wall. Not hapha
zard but neat and orderly, as his office in North Beach had been. I remembered visiting it when I was a boy. How it had reassured me, the smell of ink and paper, all those books there with the law inside them. And I remembered my mother standing beside me, meek with her love of him, and myself despising her for it, when I was old enough to despise, and despising him too—but at same time I could not help but want to be under Micaeli’s wing, to be an insider, loved by this man who was not my hopeless and stupid father. Glancing around I felt the same now. This should be my life to inherit. Not the adopted son’s, who’d had his taste of everything, even Marie.

  The window overlooked the ocean. I could see down the beach all the way to the lighthouse at Pigeon Point, past the spot where Marie and I had fucked in the dunes. I put myself on tiptoes and placed a hand on the bookcase to get a better look. At my fingertips was a leather valise, like the one Jimmy Wong had given me to deliver down in Chinatown. I noticed it now. I caressed its soft leather just as Micaeli entered the room.

  “Admiring the view?”

  “You can see quite a ways. Down over the dunes.”

  “There’s some binoculars there. Second shelf down. You can see everything with them. Even women on sailboats, out at sea.”

  “How about people on the beach?”

  “Them too.”

  We bantered back and forth a bit and all the while I kept thinking of myself and Marie out there on the dunes, wondering if anyone had seen us. With each moment it seemed to matter less and less, as if it had happened in some distant time, long ago, perhaps in the same universe where the young bachelor Micaeli Romano wandered the streets of North Beach in love with a married woman. My mother. Before the war and my father’s injury. When my brother and I had not yet been born.

  “I don’t know that you will be interested, but I want to offer you a job.”

  “Jimmy Wong mentioned something like that.”

  “I just want you to think about it. You don’t have to answer me now.”

  “What kind of work?”

  “You may have heard about the China Basin Project. It’s a joint venture—and it will require a team of lawyers in several capacities. I want you to be part of that team.”

  “To do what?”

  “Tenant advocacy.”

  He said it without a blink. As if he did not know how far I’d fallen or what kind of work I did for Jimmy Wong. I had a hard time believing that, though it was true Micaeli wasn’t much in touch anymore, and it was possible he didn’t really know, or didn’t want to know.

  “There’ll be some neighborhood groups, you know how the city is these days. Everyone will want their slice. I want you to work with these people, keep them on our side.”

  It seemed crazy at first, given what I had been doing, but reputation is a funny thing, I knew, easy to twist around this way or that. I had worked both sides of the fence after all, the Chinese and the Italian, and there weren’t too many people of any consequence who would step forward and complain.

  “I thought you had retired,” I said.

  “A man like me isn’t allowed to retire.”

  Micaeli said it with Genovesi bravado, a little flourish of his hands, pleased with himself. He puffed out his chest, and it was this type of thing, this vanity and pleasure with himself, that had so irked my brother. “But I’m a figurehead. They don’t allow me to work, they just want my name. Still I ask nice, they listen to me. But I don’t want to rush you. You think about. There are some men from Hong Kong I will be entertaining. You should meet. But first make an appointment with my son.”

  “Michael Jr.?”

  “He runs the office in North Beach, you know that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Go see him. Now—enough of this. Let’s live our lives.”

  He embraced me and I embraced him back, heartily, not thinking about things that I should, maybe, but instead about some other life that I wanted to have lived.

  TWELVE

  PORTAFINO’S

  At dusk I was back on Broadway. It was a busy Sunday night, lonesome, full of laughter, and the door hawks grabbed the collar of every dollar bill strutting by.

  “Come inside,” they insisted. “Come wet your noodle, buddy. Come take a naked peek.”

  “What you got so good for me?”

  “We got a feast for the eyes, Mr. Honey Jam. Guaranteed exhilaration. And a napkin to cover your lap.”

  All over North Beach the lights stung the air with some kind of neon melancholy, and the sidewalks burned with a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand shuffling feet. Marie wasn’t with me. It had all unraveled between us on the way home, in the car, when she asked me how it went with Romano.

  “I can’t take a job with him.”

  “Why not?”

  I didn’t answer this because I didn’t have an answer. The truth was I wanted the job, but every time I decided yes, I’d do it, a lump came into my throat.

  “It’s because of your brother, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “It’s some deal you two made with each other. Maybe you never spoke it out loud but it was a deal anyway. If either of you gets something nice, you throw it away. Just heap it on the trash.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “But you don’t have to pay attention to that deal anymore you know. Your brother’s dead. Offer expired.”

  “Funny girl.”

  “Or did you sign the contract in perpetuity?”

  I let out a harsh little laugh. I wanted to say something nasty. Maybe ask about Michael Jr. and the rumors I’d heard, and just how did she afford that little place of hers up on Telegraph Hill anyway? But I didn’t say a thing. Partly it was the look on her face. I took it as sadness first, but the longer we drove the more I studied that face, the way it responded to the shadows of the road as they fell across her features, how her lip trembled at the passing cars and her eyes widened in the narrowing light. Her fingers tightened on the wheel and her knuckles whitened and the conversation between us all but died.

  “Sometimes you’ve got to have the nerve to do something,” she said. “When it all closes in, you got to have the nerve. You have to take it in your own hands.”

  I didn’t say anything to this. It sounded like words I’d told myself a time or two, and that led to trouble if I bothered to listen.

  When we hit the neighborhood I had her drop me off at the base of the hill. I brushed her lips with mine but the kiss was furtive and cold, and I told myself I had no idea if I had the kind of nerve she meant.

  Down Broadway I felt again as if everything between us on the beach had been an interlude. Now I walked the everyday streets, and the distance between us was the same it had always been, just a few blocks, but really much more than that, a kind of perennial twilight in which we circled one another, our hands outstretched but never touching, like the man and the woman whose distraught images were painted in velvet on the walls of the Naked Moon.

  My usual evening routine was to hit Mama Mia’s first, a little slophouse down Columbus Avenue. Then I’d drink for a while in the A-1 Lounge before heading up to Kim’s, then back to the joints on Broadway. I followed the same path almost every night and it made a nice little loop.

  Only tonight Mama Mia’s spaghetti tasted liked the slop it was, and I had no stomach for all those losers, heads down, forever rolling off their stools inside the A-l. Also I had the notion I was being followed. By vice maybe, or Chinn’s people—but I couldn’t put the spot on anyone definite. I sauntered past the Montgomery Block, where the bohemians used to slouch and smoke their dope, jerking off in the dirty mattresses, then I headed up past the rubble of the International Hotel. An old beatnik squatted in those stones muttering to himself, reciting the names of poets who would be forgotten in the next century. It was a long list and the names were indecipherable in his throat. Overhead loomed the TransAmerica Pyramid. The domino players in Portsmouth Square, the struggling shopkeeps and vegetable men,
they all liked to say how at twilight you can see in the windows the ghosts of all the business men who have died of heart attacks inside. All I have seen though are executives emerging from the underground parking garage, faces serene and inviolate behind the tinted windows of their beautiful cars.

  I went over to Kim’s earlier than usual and found a different crowd. Something had changed over the weekend. At first I thought it was the hour, or I had walked in the wrong door, but no. New management had taken over and the place had gone pastel. The crowd was young and beautiful and Chinese and smiled at one another in their American clothes. The photographs of the Italians had been taken from the wall. Outside an old Chinamen with no place to drink cursed and spat on the walk.

  I contemplated that offer old man Romano had made and felt inside my chest a feeling wild and sad. Meanwhile the white fog cascaded down Kearny and the strains of some prerecorded saxophone wailed in Carol Doda’s old joint. I thought of my brother in his grave up in Colma, how all he had really wanted was to be let inside the house, where the sauce was being ladled thick and sweet. It was all I wanted too, I suppose, but I couldn’t accept the old man’s offer, just as I couldn’t walk up the street and knock on Marie’s door. Marie was right. I didn’t have the nerve. That house might be open for me, but no way could I bring myself to walk inside and sit at the table.

  I suppose I could have given myself a little bit of analysis about that. How it came to be that me, the man on the outside, was the eviction agent. And who was it I was trying to punish, when I threw those son of a bitches out on the street? I didn’t dwell it over though. Instead, I took my feet further down Columbus. In a little while I found myself with nowhere to go, standing in front of Portafino’s. Like everybody else I ignored the joint and would not have given it a second glance if Ernesto Tollini hadn’t seen my brother inside a couple weeks before.

  Portafino’s is dark like a cave, a place with tired walls, bare and plain, tables with no cloths, no menus, nothing but bottles behind a bar and old men playing cards. Though the door is always open, few outsiders wander in. Anyone can see at a glance it’s no one here but the nobodies of Little Italy, talking about the old country, muttering in their mother tongue. Don’t matter that the old country is not what you remember and never was, because the mother tongue, she don’t care about details so small and precise. Inside Portafino’s there wasn’t much to see. Just the long yellow-necked bottles of Gugliano. The red bottles of Toscano. A wall of liqueurs like that behind the bar, sweet and nauseating, inside porcelain bottles that had waists like young boys and smelled of women who had splashed on too much perfume. The air rancid, walls the color of cigars that had turned yellow and stale in the sun. I looked over the old men playing cards, but their faces had the look of old trees, ravaged by the ages—and there wasn’t anyone I could recognize. I decided not to interrupt the card game but to wait for the bartender who stood above them, watching the cards go round.