The Last Days of Il Duce

by Domenic Stansberry

  “Yes?” She regarded me warily.

  “My name’s Nick Jones,” I told her. “I’m coming here because my brother, he was up here about two weeks back. Looking for your father. And I was wondering.…”

  “My father’s dead,” she said.

  “I’m sorry.” I bowed my head a little, as sincerely as I could, but it didn’t seem to effect her much. She looked like she’d seen a million guys like me, everyone with a routine, and it was too early in the morning to play along. “Did my brother come here looking for him?”

  “Are you a cop?”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s your game?”

  “I’m trying to find out if my brother spoke to you. Concerning your father?”

  “Don’t you sons of bitches ever let up?”

  I paused a second, taking this in. “Has someone else been here?”

  “Just get the hell out. Let the old bastard rest in peace.”

  She pulled away as if to go inside. I reached out and grabbed her by the arm.

  “Let me go.”

  Her voice was very calm and flat, like she was used to saying this kind of thing to men, telling them to get lost. Up close, I could smell the liquor on her breath and cigarettes. I didn’t let go.

  “Do you have a sister?” I asked, remembering the old man at the table and what he had implied, and how the others had tried to hush him down. “Maybe my brother talked to her?”

  “A sister?”

  “Yes, a sister. Do you have one?”

  “Let’s put it this way,” she said. “I’m the only daughter who changed his stinking pants when he was an old man, I was the only one staring into his grave when he died. I am the one and only child of Mr. and Mrs. Ciprione, both deceased. Their vast estate is all mine. Now let me go. And get out of here. Or I start screaming bloody murder.”

  “Okay, honey,” I said. I let her go.

  “Don’t you honey me,” she said.

  I thought she would slam the door but instead she stayed on the porch watching me, hands on her hips, as I made my way down the walk. She was still standing like that when I cranked up the engine and drove away.

  I had meant to go home that afternoon, back to San Francisco, but I didn’t. I didn’t call Marie either. Instead, I poked around a few days more, trying to prove the old men liars, and wondering about Ellen Ciprione. I phoned her house again, but she didn’t answer. And when I drove by her house, I didn’t have it in me to go up and knock. I couldn’t see how things would be any different a second time around.

  My last night in town I took what I had left of the valise money and moved into one of the large casinos, with the big tables and the free drinks. I felt a little wild, and reckless, and deep inside I felt a pleasure, maybe, that the trip had yielded nothing at all. So I started plugging machines and playing the tables, and I stuck around until I had gambled away all the cash I’d brought with me and half of my account back home. Then I went back to North Beach but I still didn’t call Marie. I wasn’t ready, not yet. Instead I helped Jimmy Wong with an eviction. He needed some Russian refugees tossed out of a place in the Sunset District. I ended up standing in their door with my arms crossed like a Cossack, while Rickie and Eddie Lee carried their junk out into the street. Their name was Rudski, and later I read in the paper how Mr. Rudski had gotten drunk and hung himself with a lamp cord in a Tenderloin hotel. Only the cord had stretched and Rudski wound up in San Francisco General with a burn the size of Nebraska around his neck.

  “Don’t feel bad,” Jimmy Wong told me later. “It’s not your fault. Ever since Stalin died, these Russians, they don’t know what they’re doing. They’re ignorant fools. Dumber than shit. They need someone to tell them what to do.”

  SIXTEEN

  SHOES IN THE CLOSET

  “Where have you been?”

  “Inside.”

  “Your apartment?”

  “The bottle.”

  “That isn’t funny.”

  “It wasn’t meant that way.”

  “I talked to Micaeli. He said you were going to meet with his son this week.”

  “That’s what I told him in Pescadore.”

  “He just means you the best, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. “I want to see you.”

  Marie fell silent. Though we were just a few blocks away, our connection was poor and I could hear chatter on the wire. A man and woman speaking back and forth, yes, no, then both at once, unrestrained, laughing. Their voices were happy, innocent, as ours might be, if we lived on the other side, beyond the pale. Then the connection sharpened and the silence was pure.

  “How about tomorrow evening,” Marie said at last. “Around eight.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  Since returning from Reno, I’d had time to think things over and then think them over again. Maybe my brother believed he had something concrete against Romano, but it seemed he was wrong. The only loose wheel, maybe, was Ellen Ciprione. From this distance, though, she didn’t amount to much, just a slatternly woman, half-drunk, living by herself in a desert far away. So it seemed there was nothing to Johnny Bruno’s story. Even if there was, it all happened too long ago to matter any more. Rather, the truth was what it appeared to be. Bill Ciprione had died an old man’s death in an old man’s hotel. And my brother had died because he’d been standing on the wrong street corner at the wrong time of night with the wrong look on his face. No, Romano was clean, like the snow was clean before it hit the ground. This was what I told myself now. I was free to do as I pleased.

  Marie’s building was ordinary enough on the outside. Stucco walls, white trim, a doorway edged with glass blocks. Inside her place had more glitz. The walks and tiles had been redone not so long ago, and a pair of glass doors looked out to where the steamers came into the bay. On the other side of her apartment a deck came off the kitchen and a set of stairs led down to Telegraph Gardens, an old grove full of palms and bougainvillea and wild flowers, all tumbling into a canyon at the edge of Telegraph Hill. When we were kids it had been a ragged place hung with laundry and frequented by old drunks. Now the gardens were tended and the old Victorians along here—brightly painted with elaborate cornices—these houses were worth plenty. I wondered again how Marie got her money. Maybe she had inherited a little bit when her uncle died, but it couldn’t have been enough to keep her going long, not here.

  “Nice place.”

  “It is.”

  “You got this in the settlement?”

  “Don’t be silly. Joe didn’t have anything. And if it were mine, I’d sell it fast.”

  “Where would you go?”

  “Away from North Beach.”

  “You’ve had plenty of chances for that. Why haven’t you gone already?”

  “You should know the answer.”

  We lingered in the darkened parlor. A car crawled up the hill outside, and its lights shone up through the slanted blinds, casting a shadow on Marie’s face. The light was like a cold hand touching her cheek. She closed her eyes and her lips trembled and I could see the distress in the crooked turn of her neck.

  “You upset about Joe?”

  “You didn’t really know your brother.”

  “I think I knew him pretty well.”

  “Before he died he started coming up here.”

  “What did he want?”

  “To talk. And the way your brother talks, people see him, they think he’s goddamn Christopher Columbus, that swagger. But you get him alone everyone’s responsible for his problems but himself.”

  “What did he say?”

  “He wouldn’t leave me alone. He was obsessed.”

  “With you?” I asked.

  She brushed her hair away with her hand, pulling it back, and I could see the dark roots underneath the blonde. “Let’s not talk about this anymore. Pour us some wine.”

  “Just a minute.”

  We still stood in the parlor and I wanted to kiss Marie there, in the spot where th
e light had poured through the blinds. She resisted but I put a hand on each shoulder and pulled her near. Then she kissed me hard, a kiss that was angry and cold. Our bodies touched, leaning into one another below the waist, but we did not embrace. Marie yanked her head back and I saw the cold flash in her eyes, and she must’ve seen something in mine too because we both looked away as if frightened by what had just risen between us. Anything could happen, I realized. I was capable of anything. And so was she.

  “There’s a sauce on the stove,” she said. “It needs stirring.”

  So I poured the wine and Marie set the table and together we brought out the food. It made for a nice scene at the table, domestic and pretty, and we both smiled and acted at ease, ignoring that moment in the parlor.

  “I wanted to marry you. When we were kids.”

  “Then why didn’t it happen?” I asked.

  “Joe, he was the reason.”

  “You didn’t have to take up with him.”

  “Maybe not. But Niccolò Jones, he told me he wanted some other kind of life.”

  “I was pie-eyed those days, I admit it, but you were wild. The second I left town.”

  “What was I supposed to do?”

  “I heard stories.”

  “I was never going to be any college girl. I was never going to be long and slender. Not like that other one. Pearls and a silk skirt.”

  “You mean Anne?”

  “Whatever her name. I didn’t have her virtue. Or her money.”

  “You told me you would do anything to get me back.”

  “I did what I could. With what I had.”

  “Like marrying my brother?”

  “You should’ve stopped me.”

  “I couldn’t. Not once it started.”

  Marie reached over and lit the dinner candles on the table between us, and they reminded me of the candles a long time ago at the Church of Saints Peter and Paul.

  “Let’s eat this food,” Marie said.

  I was not comfortable in this domestic scene and neither was Marie. It was an echo of an old dream, something out of skew. Maybe because we wouldn’t be sitting here like this if not for my brother’s death. But then I had another drink and I ate a little bit more. The food was good and soon I was suffused with a combination of guilt and joy, exquisite stuff, and I forgot the earlier ugliness between us.

  After dinner we took some air on the deck. It was a warm day for the city and we sat a long time above the ravine talking about things unimportant and inconsequential, like couples talk. At the end of the deck were the stairs that wound down into Telegraph Gardens, steep steps, with heavy metal edging. If Marie had slipped here, she was lucky not to have been hurt any worse. I glanced a moment more at the stairs and Marie glanced too, but neither of us said anything about them. Instead, we drank the wine and rocked in our chairs. Somewhere into the second bottle, I stood up and leaned against the back wall, then Marie came and leaned beside me, and we interlaced our fingers. Then I turned her around so her back was to me, and I slid my hands over hers, holding them at the wrists like manacles, and I kissed her on the neck. She arched around, her back still to me, and we kissed again one of those ferocious and forbidden kisses, the flat of my hand running down her soft blouse and into her skirt. Such embraces, dark and unwholesome, always excited us. Though Marie moaned and reached to touch me, she did not seem to want to take the moment any further, not now.

  “Do you remember a conversation we had, before you went to law school? The night before?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We talked about what we would do when you got back.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “We would get a little house. It would be in a line of houses alongside all the other houses, and in the back there would be some fruit trees. Our child would play in the yard behind the sliding glass door. A little girl, running in the grass.”

  “I remember that little girl.”

  “And I would wear a blue dress, the color of the sky.”

  I caught the slightest touch of mockery in her voice. Directed at herself or me or both of us, I was not really sure.

  “We were kids when we talked like that.”

  “But then you fell in love with Anne. She looked more like the woman in that picture.”

  “Marie, I didn’t know what you were going to do next back then. And Joe.…”

  “Don’t talk about your brother. Why don’t you take the job Micaeli wants to give you? It could make all the difference with us.”

  “Why?”

  “You don’t want a real living?”

  She was right of course. Especially if we wanted to return to that moment when we could imagine those houses all in a line, the fruit trees and flowers so nice, everything bright as cellophane. Marie pulled away and went into the kitchen. I needed to piss. My dick was still hard and took a while to soften, but when the piss came out it was in a fierce golden arc. I zipped up. I turned the wrong way down the hall, my steps faltering outside her bedroom, and I could not help but glance in. The sheets were turned down, the room scented. I wondered if I would stay the night and I wondered too what would happen between us now that my brother was dead. I regarded the bed, the pillows, the open closet, the bookstand. On that bookstand, a photo album. I stepped in the room. Though it was none of my business, I picked up the album and flipped through.

  The pictures went back to her early years with Joe. The kind of pictures you might expect. The two of them in the backyard patio, at home in Redwood City. On vacation, leaning against their car. Sitting on the stoop at my mother’s place in North Beach. And there was my mother, her hair in a topknot, wearing one of those long dresses she’d taken to in her later years, still beautiful. And my father, leaning on his aluminum crutch, and myself too, hanging around, clowning at the fringe of things. Then landscapes, no people at all, Micaeli’s house in Pescadore. The old man and his wife had opened their doors to her, not suspecting what was on everybody else’s tongue. As time went forward, the color in the photographs changed, the images became more focused, sharper, and in that sharpness stood Joe again, looking lost and battered, during that time a few years back when they’d attempted to reconcile. Then two pages with missing photos, just black corners where the pictures had been.

  Who had been on those missing photos? What images removed?

  I turned the page. Marie alone. Places exotic and remote, Acapulco, maybe, or Hawaii.

  Who was behind the camera, taking those pictures of Marie, traveling with her?

  The possibilities irked me. I put the photo album away. And while I was doing that, bending down, I happened to see in her open wardrobe a pair of men’s shoes. Italian loafers, pointed toes, dress leather, flouncey as hell, and expensive.

  Michael Jr., I told myself. A hot dresser, the man behind the camera, they were the kind of shoes he would wear. Despite everything, nothing had changed. She was the same old Marie.

  We ran into each other in the hall. She smiled but I did not give the smile back.

  “The rumors, about you and Michael Jr., you know about those?”

  I put my hand on her face and held her by the chin. A car passed on the street and its lights careened up the blinds.

  “When was the last time you were with him?”

  “I was never with him.”

  “Then whose shoes are those in your closet?”

  “Shoes?”

  “Men’s shoes. I saw them in your closet.”

  “You’re not so different than your brother. He always came up with wild ideas.”

  “Those shoes.…”

  “Screw the shoes. You never been with anyone else, these past fifteen years? They never left anything in your apartment?”

  “No,” I lied.

  She knew better. A small smirk turned on her lips, a matching one turned on mine, and that was the way it was between us. A draft of cold-came through the sliding doors, all the way from Alcatraz.

  “I’m sorry. It’s jus
t my brother’s death, being here with you, all this. I’m not sure how to act. So I act some other way than who I am.”

  “Your brother was a louse. He wanted me because he knew that you were in love with me. And I was mad enough and bitter enough to let him do it. I paid like hell for that. I don’t want to pay anymore.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “You’re not your brother. You don’t have to act like him.”

  “My brother and I, we’re like men in the mirror. He moves his right hand, I wiggle my left. He dies, and blood comes up my throat.”

  “Don’t talk like that.”

  “I should go home. It’s too soon for us.”

  But I didn’t move. She leaned her head against my chest and I pushed my fingers through her hair.

  “It doesn’t have to be this way. We can live together. I’ll wear that blue dress.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I meant what I said a long time ago. I’d do anything.”

  “How long do we have to be a secret?”

  “I don’t know. A year, six months. A decent time, so no one will talk. We owe ourselves that, a decent time.”

  “I don’t care who talks.”

  “Only a little while. Till after Micaeli dies.”

  “What does he have to do with us?”

  “He and Vincenza were good to me. And this, you and me, it would only confuse them. I don’t want to hurt the old man.”

  Part of me balked, but I nodded my head. “All right.” Though I still didn’t understand what she was getting at, I told myself it didn’t matter.

  “There was never anything between his son and me.”

  “I believe you,” I said.

  The truth was I didn’t know whether to believe her or not. At the moment it didn’t much matter. Because we stood underneath the window now, another car was making the long climb, and I took Marie’s face between my hands, kissing her violently in that falling light.