The Last Days of Il Duce

by Domenic Stansberry

  The path curved away from the dry bank, through the far edge of the orchard, alongside a copse of willows. Our view to the east was obscured by them, and I saw an old water tower rising in their midst. I wanted to stop and rest under those willows, to lay in the soft grass beside Marie and touch her blouse and taste her lips that would split open like an apricot, and her tongue that was like the soft fruit inside. But Marie kept walking, more furiously. I sensed something bothering her.

  I kept following, catching through the willows an occasional glimpse of the orchard beyond. It had to be an underground spring feeding the willows, I thought, the trees were so lush and green.

  At last we made it around the copse. Marie was maybe fifty yards ahead of me. She paused at the peak of a nearby rise, then disappeared. I hurried forward, then saw Marie below me on a path snaking through the orchard. At the end of the path were houses. They looked to be new houses, built in the last year or so, and the streets were fresh and black. In the orchard you could see the surveyor’s lines: the small sticks and red flags and white string marking out how the street would continue on and join the highway back where we had parked. I caught up to Marie and we looked at the houses, how the street just stopped in the middle of that orchard. Some kids played on the street in front of the houses, a hawk circled overhead, and I wanted Marie more than ever: to take her inside one of those houses and lay with her on the floor and listen to the cry of that hawk and the sound of those children playing. I put my arm around her, gently, and she picked that moment to break down, crying like a maniac.

  “Everything will be all right,” I said.

  “No, it won’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Why did you go to Reno?” she asked again.

  “I told you.”

  She looked up at me, and I looked at her, and it came to me that she knew I had been lying.

  “Why do you ask?”

  “Just don’t leave me alone like that. Please.”

  She buried her head into my chest, and I stood there with my arms around her. The kids took a look in our direction and scampered inside. Overhead, the hawk plunged into the orchard then flew up again, clutching something dead in its beak.

  TWENTY

  MORE LEANORA CHINN

  The next afternoon I lay in the grass in Washington Square contemplating my future and the shape it might take. I could come to no conclusions. Someone from the North Beach Chamber of Commerce had raised an Italian flag from the roof of a nearby building, here in the heart of the old neighborhood, but the truth was you’d be hard pressed to find any of the old faces. The park was full, but not with Italians. Some Chinese kids, dressed in the uniform of the Salesian school, rolled and tumbled beneath the magnolias. A Mexican woman and her daughter mugged for an old man’s camera. A Viet teenager, legs smooth and long, stopped in front of me and bent down, snuffing a cigarette against her heel. A pretty black boy in drag straddled a nearby bench, puckering his lips and complimenting the men who walked by. Soon he was gone and the others were gone too, in and out of the park, and new people came to take their place. The wind ruffled across the grass, and I could see the grass trembling with the inconstancy of it all, and even the buildings seemed to offer but the illusion of permanence. They had shifted and fallen before, then been raised again after earthquakes and fire, so that the park itself was not in the same place it had once been, and over it all was the Italian flag, with no Italians in sight. I dozed in the balmy air, face down on the grass, and in my dreams the shadows and shapes of the world shifted past one another, and I was filled with an intolerable longing, and a sense of approaching calamity. When I woke, the breeze had stopped. The Italian flag hung still on its pole, unrecognizable, and I felt oddly at peace with the world.

  The feeling didn’t last.

  When I got home, Leanora Chinn stood on the stoop out front of the building. She wore the same blue skirt, the same blue blouse, and she held a manila envelope in her hand.

  “You’re looking clear-eyed,” she said.

  She took my hand with a firm shake and glimmered me up and down, partly in the way of a cop, but also in a way a woman looks at you when she has her doubts and wonders how it is a guy like you gets by in the world. I guessed she knew about my line of employment by now. And about my brushes with vice.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “New clothes?”

  “Yeah.”

  I wanted to tell her she was wrong about me. Things were going well, my life was changing around. But I knew cops were suspicious of good news, so I kept my cheery disposition to myself.

  “I have something I need to discuss with you.”

  “About Joe?”

  “Yes.”

  “He was drugging it?” I asked.

  Chinn cast her eyes away from me. She wore no makeup and I could see the thin veins on her lids and a small puckering mark where she bit into her upper lip. She was silent and I was stupid, reading her silence the wrong way.

  “I guessed it from the first,” I said, “though I didn’t want to admit it. Not right away. You know how it is, after something like this happens, you don’t want to believe it was somehow their fault. The loved one’s. You want to think.…”

  “No. That’s not it.”

  “No?”

  “We have some new information.”

  I felt a small hammer of disappointment beating in my wrists, and in my head. Over the past few days my attitude had changed, and I preferred the cops just slam the door on my brother’s death.

  “We have an undercover man working this case.”

  “You mentioned that.”

  “He’s checked all his contacts in the Mission and listened to all the talk. Your brother wasn’t making change with the dealers down there. A little pot, maybe, but nothing else.”

  “So it was just bad luck. A robbery.”

  “We don’t think that either.”

  “Oh.”

  Maybe she heard the disappointment in my voice, or maybe I was just guilty over the grief I didn’t feel. Either way Lieutenant Chinn looked me up and down again, and I got the sense she knew everything Marie and I had done the last few days, all the details of my past. Standing there on the street in my new pressed slacks and white shirt, I felt there wasn’t anything I could do to hide the small ugliness in my heart. I wanted to say I hadn’t done anything, I was innocent. It was true enough I guess. Unless you counted coveting your brother’s wife. Or taking a job with the man who’d screwed your mother backwards and forwards before the war.

  “How can I help you, Lieutenant Chinn? I’ll do anything to help.”

  “I have some things I want to show you.”

  “Sure. Let’s go up to my room.”

  “Not there.”

  “To the station?”

  My voice trembled. Maybe I was already thinking ahead to that grimy little room under the Hall of Justice.

  “We don’t have to go the station, not unless you want to. I was thinking of a place a little more relaxed. Up here. The other side of Grant.”

  “All right.”

  “Have you had lunch?”

  “I can always have more.”

  I walked with her across Columbus Avenue, past the Ling Wei Hotel and into Chinatown. We jostled down Stockton Street, where the crowds are always shoulder-to-shoulder, and the shop bins are filled with plastic chopsticks and paper fans and nylon kimonos, and the grocery windows are strung with half-cooked chickens, plucked and shiny, hanging from their bright red feet. Up above, in the second story knock-outs, the women were working behind sewing machines, just as they have worked forever, only these days they were competing with sweatshops in Bangkok and Hong Kong, and the little spools of thread spun on their spindles deep into the night.

  I followed her into a small coffee shop where the booths were red upholstery, and an old Chinese woman served dirt-brown coffee in white cups that had a thin film of oil on top and tasted as old-fashioned bad as coffee anywhere in Amer
ica. Leanora Chinn and the waitress spoke loudly and familiarly, some kind of a Cantonese dialect. The old woman managed to pour my coffee without her eyes so much as traveling across my face.

  “We found a man with a connection to your brother.”

  “What kind of connection?”

  “We’re not sure yet. Could be coincidence.”

  “Who is this man?”

  “He’s got half a dozen names. Or had half a dozen names. He’s dead now.”

  “Dead?”

  “They recovered his body about a week back. In an ice box, behind a fish house down on Grant Street. It took us a while to come up with an ID.”

  I felt a small thrill at the notion of this dead man packed in ice, behind a restaurant in Chinatown, and the idea my brother had been involved with him somehow. It seemed to suggest how far wrong my brother had turned, and in that way relieved me of the guilt I felt about moving in on Marie. He’d been up to something stupid, my brother, some dumb-fuck routine.

  “Lee Chow, Mark Nai, Naikon Lee, Minh Ho. Those were some of the dead man’s aliases. Sound familiar?”

  “No.”

  “He was a young man, maybe thirty. Part Vietnamese, part Chinese, scorned by either culture. He did dirty jobs around town. For money, of course.”

  “What kind of dirty jobs?”

  “He killed people. He was an assassin. Old Chinese profession,” she said. “Italian, too.”

  The waitress came with more coffee. The two of them spoke a while in Chinese, exuberantly, as if I were not there. Leanora pointed at my cup for the woman to pour, and the old waitress did so once again without looking at me or acknowledging my existence, as if she were watering a plant.

  “I ordered you some chop suey. It’s their specialty. The best in Chinatown.”

  “Great,” I said. “My favorite.”

  The truth was I hated chop suey, I could not even stand to look at it on my plate. When the waitress was gone, Leanora undid the clasp on the manila envelope. She took out a set of glossies, put them carefully on top of the envelope, then slid the whole thing towards me.

  “You know him?”

  The top picture looked to have been taken after the corpse had been discovered, when the man still lay in the ice box. The face was discolored but his eyes were open and the features discernible. His looks were familiar, but I wasn’t quite sure and decided to keep the similarities to myself.

  “He was strangled with piano wire before they dumped him in the box.”

  “Never seen him.”

  I started to slide the pictures back but Chinn shook her head.

  “Keep looking.”

  I flipped to the next glossy. It was a full head shot of the guy, taken down at the morgue I guessed, and I shrugged at Chinn, and she nodded, and I flipped again. Next was a series of mug shots taken when the guy was still alive. Front profile. Rear. Side. If I had any doubts before, I didn’t now. I recognized him all right. He was the man behind the door where Jimmy Wong had sent me to deliver the black leather valise, down the alleyway, the day before my brother’s death.

  “You recognize him?”

  I shook my head.

  “Sorry.”

  “Look at the last one.”

  On the final page, lined up on a single sheet, were several Polaroids, of my brother. They were a few years old and showed him on a deck somewhere, palms and eucalyptus rising in the background. He was smiling, very aggressively, but there was a look of confusion and sadness in his face too. It was a look I’d seen a lot these last few years as he struggled to get control over things that continually slipped away.

  “Do you know where those were taken?”

  “No. I’ve never seen those pictures before.”

  “Looks like he’s somewhere in the city.”

  “Those eucalyptus could be anywhere in California,” I said.

  “Not that house on the other side of the grove. The yellow Victorian.”

  “That’s a common style.”

  “Not that cornice,” she insisted. “It’s very unusual.”

  She let the pictures sit there in front of me, the picture of the murdered Indo-Chinese and the Polaroids of my brother. I tried to avoid looking either at Chinn or the pictures. My eyes skittered around the cafe. The old woman moved slowly behind the counter, pouring coffee one customer at a time. The place was quiet except for the mumbling of an old Chinese man who sat alone in one of the booths.

  “What are you doing with these pictures of my brother?”

  “We found them in the dead man’s apartment.”

  “The one in the ice box?”

  “He had a number of pictures in a drawer in his kitchen. Pictures of different people. We checked around, all these people, they’re dead. Murdered.”

  “You think he killed my brother?”

  “We think somebody paid him to do it.”

  The little hammer was beating in my wrists again, harder than before. I could feel it in my chest, too, and in my head. I thought of myself walking down that alley with the black valise in my hand, and I saw again that valise sitting in Micaeli Romano’s office, and the empty picture page in Marie’s portfolio, and the angle of the landscape behind my brother’s head in the picture that lay in front me. Marie’s deck, I thought, that’s where he’s sitting, in the same spot I had been the other night. It was clear to me now, though I did not want it to be clear. I felt the blood rushing from my face, and the hammering, and that pale dizziness that overcomes you when the world seems no longer real. In the background was the strange muttering of the old Chinese man, the shuffling of the old waitress moving infinitely slowly, carrying two plates now, coming toward us. Leanora Chinn, dressed in her crisp blue blouse, leaned forward, regarding me from behind the porcelain mask of her face. There was something in the depths of those almond eyes, a small little window of light.

  “Are you all right?” Her voice was soft, full of concern. I was tempted to reveal to her whatever I knew, but I gave it a second thought and held my tongue.

  “I’m just trying to take this in.”

  “Of course.”

  “Is there any connection between the different people this man killed?”

  “Not that we can see. They all just had somebody that wanted them dead. A relative maybe, a wife, a business associate.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you know why anyone would want to kill your brother?”

  “No. Have you spoken with Luisa? His widow. She saw him every day. A lot more than me.”

  “She took her kids to Sacramento. To live with relatives. But we don’t regard her as a suspect. And she doesn’t seem to know anything about his life away from the house.”

  I could hear the waitress behind me, very close now. Chinn gathered up the photos, making way for the plates.

  “We came across some domestic violence reports from a few years back. The first wife and your brother. Police in Redwood City were over to their place a couple times. But nothing with Luisa.”

  “They are different women. He was older,” I said. “And that earlier, it was divorce stuff. Posturing for the courts.”

  I don’t know why I stuck up for him that way, just because he was my brother. Maybe I thought it was true, or what had happened back then had been my fault underneath it all. The waitress put down our food, two plates of chop suey.

  “You don’t have any idea where the pictures of your brother might have been taken? Or who took them?”

  I hesitated.

  “No,” I said.

  I started in on my plate. It tasted like any chop suey I had ever had. I couldn’t stomach it but I ate it anyway, ferociously, as if it were the last food in the world.

  “You like it?”

  “It’s delicious.”

  “I’ve been eating here since I was a kid.”

  “It’s the best I ever had,” I said. “Makes me want to visit China.”

  “I’ve been. The food isn’t as good there.”

&n
bsp; “I bet.”

  With the arrival of the food, Chinn loosened up. Either that or she was pretending to loosen so as to catch me off guard. She dropped the matter of the pictures and talked instead about the Chinese situation in the city. How the old bachelor society was almost gone now, that class of Chinese men who had labored and grown old in San Francisco, never marrying because Chinese women had not been allowed to immigrate. She talked about those sad old men and about the new immigrants, the poor ones from the mainland and the rich ones from Hong Kong. How the tongs, the old criminal syndicates, were enjoying a revival now, with the trade in heroin and smuggling of illegal immigrants. How the Indo-Chinese tongs were the most violent, made up of Southeast Asians, mixed race, scorned by everyone, and how they brought with them from Cambodia and Vietnam their old rivalries, and their old ways of fighting those rivalries. All these different groups, they had their politics and their figureheads, she said. They had their Maos and their Chiang Kais, their Ho Chis and Madame Ngus. Yes, I thought, they all have their Il Duces, whom they argue over night and day, weeping and hollering, and whose pictures hang on the bedroom walls. Then Chinn told me that the young Indo-Chinese who’d killed my brother had been an informer for the Pathet Lao during the Vietnam War. He’d been killed, she suspected, by a Vietnamese street gang.

  “How do you know?”

  “They left their mark carved on his body.”

  “He was a member of a rival gang?”

  “No. He operated independently.”

  “They didn’t approve of his business?”

  “Maybe. Or maybe they just didn’t like his color.”

  We left the restaurant and as we walked she pointed out little bits of Chinatown history, old opium corners, crib houses, she was full of this kind of thing, then suddenly we were halfway up Kai-Chin alley and she was gesturing down at the old stones.

  “This alley here, there is a picture of it, from early in the century. Chinese men in black capes. They called it the Street of Gamblers.”

  We stood in front of the door where I had dropped off the valise Jimmy Wong had given me, and I looked at the door, and Leanora Chinn looked at me, and I saw it was no accident that she had guided me down this alley. She was studying my reaction to see if I knew this place. I kept my face as empty as I could.