The Last Days of Il Duce

by Domenic Stansberry

  “Did you talk to Micaeli?”

  “Yes.”

  “I didn’t expect to see you so soon.”

  “It wasn’t a long conversation.”

  We stood in the kitchen now. She was looking at my chest, at my shirt, and I looked too and noticed a dark stain. I touched the stain with my finger and it came away damp. I could not tell the color of the stain but then I lifted the glasses and saw it was blood. Before leaving I had rolled Romano over to take the money out of his wallet, to make the whole thing look like a burglary. His blood had been everywhere and now it was on my shirt.

  I took out the letter from her father and placed it on the counter between us. Marie glanced at the envelope, recognizing it. Then her lips turned in the slightest smile, the kind you get when you know everything has gone wrong and in ways you never anticipated.

  “You changed your clothes. That’s an Italian sweater, isn’t it? Cashmere. Expensive stuff.” I strolled up and touched the fabric, standing close. Her stomach was warm and I could feel her breathing underneath. “Or did you get it on sale?”

  “What are you trying to say?”

  “Just admiring.”

  “The dress was dirty,” she said. “Maybe you should change too. That shirt—I’ve got something in my closet.” She looked at my shirt more closely. “Are you bleeding?”

  “No, sweetie. And watch what you get from the closet. If it belonged to the old man, it won’t fit.”

  “That was three years ago, Nick,” she said. She admitted it quickly, not bothering to argue, like sleeping with the old man was a small thing, it didn’t really matter. She turned away from me though, avoiding the darkness I knew was in my eyes. “It didn’t last but a few months,” she said.

  “Only a little recharge now and then. Right? Paid for your apartment, didn’t he? Put you in his will?”

  “What happened over there?”

  “Everyone thought it was his son you were fucking.”

  “Stop it,” she said. “You sound like your brother.”

  “Joe found out about your father in Reno. About the letter. He knew everything.”

  “Joe was blackmailing Micaeli. I wanted to tell you, but I didn’t know how.”

  “So you arranged to have him killed?” I asked. “Was that Micaeli’s idea? Or yours?”

  Her head jerked a little when I said that, like maybe she’d been slapped, and she walked over to the window, looking at those stairs that wound down to the ravine. Then the clarity was back all of a sudden, white-knuckled, bright as hell. Marie stood in the middle of that clarity, and I felt for a minute as if all the electricity in the city were charging through my heart.

  “Micaeli didn’t have anything to do with it,” she said, and looked up from the ravine.

  Suddenly I didn’t want her to talk anymore. I wanted to run over and put my hand over her mouth and tell her to be quiet. I wanted to shake her hard until the words in her mouth broke apart and there wasn’t anything left for me to hear. But I’d already started her going, and it was too late now.

  “Your brother was never going to let me be” she said.

  “You should’ve locked the door.”

  “I tried that when we were married. It didn’t work. Then, a few weeks ago, he came over here again.” She glanced down at the envelope again, and I glanced, too, and remembered how when we were kids, all those stories she’d told about her father, the war hero, the adventurer, the man who roamed the world. She shivered, shaking hard, like she needed comfort, but I couldn’t go to her now.

  “Joe knew my real name was Dios. It was on my marriage license. He didn’t know about my father, though. I only found out myself a few years ago. About the time of the divorce.”

  “You kept it a secret?”

  “I visited my father once, only once. His other daughter was there, Ellen, from the other marriage—and I guess I just didn’t like the whole thing. I didn’t want to know them, I didn’t want to know the things he had done, or to have other people know. So that was the end of it. There was nothing else between us after that. Except—I did hold onto his letter.”

  “What happened?”

  “A few weeks ago, Joe came across my father’s name in a death notice. He recognized it and he talked to Johnny Bruno and he put things together. He talked to me first, but I wouldn’t say anything, so he went to Reno and sweet-talked Ellen Ciprione. He got her drunk, and she told him everything—and she told him all about the letter too.

  “Then Joe came back, looking for the letter. I told him no, he couldn’t have it. We had a fight, a big one. Loud. Noisy. He gave me a push, and he kicked me; he all but knocked me cold on the stairs. Then he locked the door—and by the time I got in, he’d torn the place apart.”

  I didn’t say anything. I was thinking about the bruise on her thigh, and the fight the neighbors had overheard. And I was imagining my brother, masquerading himself to Ellen Ciprione, drinking with her in some casino, hustling her, maybe even sleeping with her, leaving her to wake up alone in that harsh desert light. No wonder, when I showed up a few weeks later, she was suspicious. Another man, a cop, a thug, insurance agent, it didn’t matter, each one a brother to the other, full of the same crap. So she’d sent me packing.

  “I realized he was never going to stop, “Marie said, “he was always going to be here banging on my door. And now—he was after Micaeli too.”

  “I thought Micaeli paid him off.”

  She laughed. “Joe had a copy of the letter. He wasn’t going to let anyone off so easy.”

  “So Micaeli had him killed?”

  “I told you—Micaeli didn’t have anything to do with it.”

  I knew what she was saying, but I didn’t want to believe her. I wanted to think it was the old man’s doing. “You did it for Micaeli’s money,” I said. “To keep it coming your way.”

  “No” she said. Her voice was angry. “I did it to get your goddamn brother out of my life. Or that was part of it. Then, at the funeral, I saw you. And I realized something else.”

  I sighed deep, then put my hand in my pocket and felt the gun. I remembered Micaeli and the awful look on the dead man’s face as I knelt over him, rummaging his pockets.

  “How did you arrange it?”

  “J. Ferrari’s.”

  And she didn’t have to say anything else, because I could picture the rest. Marie walking inside that pitch-dark room, handing over to that ugly little man her valise, the money, the pictures for the assassin. Then that monkeyfaced bastard had passed it through another pair of hands into Chinatown. Of course he wouldn’t have handled it himself. What route that package then took to Jimmy Wong’s desk, I didn’t know and probably never would. Maybe Wong handled such things continually, or maybe he owed J. Ferrari a favor, but either way that valise had made its way over into Chinatown, moving down those alleyways where desire attaches itself to every coincidence, so that Wong handed the valise to me, not knowing, maybe, that he delivered into my hands the instrument of my brother’s death.

  I pulled Joe’s gun out of my pocket now and brandished it in a broad, stupid way, so Marie could see. “This was Joe’s. I found it in his house, in that old jacket he used to wear.”

  “You took that to Micaeli’s?”

  “I killed him.”

  “You son of a bitch,” she said. Her eyes were filmy and she put her head in her hands. “We could have been together. You and me. Now you’ve ruined everything.”

  I felt the distance rolling in between us now, like fog on a dense and forgotten street, and the longer we stood there the further apart we seemed, until everything in the last few weeks seemed to have happened on some shrouded corner in a city I would never see again. I wanted to lose myself in that fog.

  “You were blackmailing the old man,” I said. “Blackmailing him and fucking him. To keep the money rolling in. You even got yourself into his will.”

  Maybe it was true, or maybe her feelings toward the old man were sincere, but either w
ay it was a son-of-a-bitch thing to say. Marie turned her head, one hand on her cheek, hurt, maybe, resigned, as if I had touched some naked place no one was supposed to touch. I regretted my words, almost. Marie closed her eyes, her mouth was parted, her face flushed, and she seemed to be studying something in the darkness inside, as a child might, then she opened her eyes. She looked as if she wanted to tell me something, only there were no words for the thing she wanted to say. In that instant she seemed—I don’t know the words either—she seemed suddenly luminous and innocent but sluttish too, as if the innocence and its corruption were all mixed together, and she had brought them out of the dark. I imagined then how things had really been between Romano and her. The old man, the younger woman. The moment between them on the porch. The need to protect and be protected, tender, almost fraternal (I didn’t see lust, I told myself, I didn’t see lust) and then my brother threatened to batter all that down. To expose her father and ruin Micaeli. In the end, Marie had acted to protect Romano—and to protect herself, of course—and she’d acted in the same manner her father had acted so many years before. Then she and I had seen each other across Washington Square, that day in the fog, and before long Joe was in the ground, and we were in each other’s arms, where we’d both wanted to be all along. It was me that she loved.

  That’s what she wanted to tell me, more or less (or so I tell myself now, here in this prison); that’s what I saw in her eyes as she turned to speak. Then the moment passed and I saw it the other way. She had murdered my brother. She and the old man. And they had tried to put it on me.

  “I can’t go to jail,” she said. “I can’t live, not like that.”

  She arched away from me and I watched her as I’d watched so many times before, how her body moved beneath her clothes, her cashmere pullover, her black skirt, as she pushed up close to the sliding door and peered out over the houses to the blue water of the bay. “There’s no going back once it’s over. I should’ve known that. Everything’s finished.”

  “We could run,” I said. “The two of us, we could get out of town before they find Micaeli’s body.”

  She didn’t say a word but she didn’t need too, because we both knew this would never work. We could never get away. We didn’t have any plans, and she’d given all her money to Ferrari, and if we ran they would find us sooner or later, in a motel in Tucson or San Diego or some damned place, and our hair would be dyed and I would have on a cheap suit and maybe seventy dollars I’d heisted from a liquor store along with the vague notion of escaping over the border. If we stayed here in North Beach, I’d be in jail before the day was out and Marie would end up in the women’s prison across the bay for arranging my brother’s death. So the best it could be for us now was long gray days and romantic little notes on prison stationery. Marie let out a moan, thinking these same thoughts maybe, and I had the urge to comfort her, to touch her, to tell her I would lie to Chinn so she could stay free. Instead, I thought of her in Romano’s arms and of my brother lying dead and I glanced down at the gun in my hand. The anger rose in my heart.

  “Go ahead,” she said, like she was reading my mind. “Everything’s over.”

  She didn’t mean it, maybe, like people never mean such things, and in a moment or so, her courage would’ve faded. Still, she arched her spine, waiting. And when I saw the soft hollow of her back, revealed there beneath the cashmere, I desired her more than before and hated her more too. I pointed the gun at her back and she just stood there straight as a corpse. I only wanted her to say something, to hear again how she’d loved me all along and risked everything for me, it was all for me. I wanted to capture that moment again. A fog horn called out in the bay, a melancholy noise. No, I thought, it’s all a lie. She set me up. Then she moved, turning her head just a little.

  “Nick,” she said.

  I heard the plaintiveness in her voice, the desire, all the things I wanted to hear, and when I heard them I felt a tug at my heart and I pulled the trigger.

  She lurched forward into the glass, her face flat into it and her hands raised, palms against the window. She slid slowly and as she did blood blossomed at the back of her cashmere sweater, then she tumbled the rest of the way, all at once, crumpling at the knees, twisting as she fell. She ended on her back, one hand flung out dramatically and her eyes still open. She was looking at me. I was looking back. I could see inside her to that dark place suddenly full of light. Then something changed in her eyes and I knew she was dead. The blood came through the front of her sweater now. There was a bullet hole in the sliding door.

  (Marie told me once that I had no nerve. That I let myself be carried away in the moment, but could not take action of my own. Even so, I pulled the trigger. I did it because I loved her, I tell myself now, to save her from jail. To keep for myself that moment when I had seen how she was, and how things might have been. Because if she lived I knew what would happen. How they would sequester us, then turn us against one another in court. How—to save herself—she would say that I was the one who had planned it all. Her attorney would point at me. Jack-n-ape, he would say, jealous bastard. Murderer. And the jury would look at me, and Marie’s face would go slack, as if she believed it herself, and I would have no choice but to pull her down too. We would be at each other’s throats, a charming spectacle. I didn’t want to be part of that. So I pulled the trigger. That’s what I tell myself. Though when I go back to that moment and remember and look down, it isn’t my own hand pulling the trigger but someone else’s, a moment out of another man’s life.)

  I stumbled from the apartment. I was almost to the bottom of Filbert Street before I realized I still held the gun in my hand. An old woman was coming around the corner and I got rid of it as fast as I could, wiping the prints in a half-ass way and tossing it in the bushes.

  As I walked, I felt none of that elation I’d felt driving across the bridge, only a dumb awareness that fate had worked itself out and was in some way satisfied. I was dead calm, my head empty. Maybe someplace inside I thought ahead to the court case and the stories that would appear in the papers. How in the end it would read like one of those stories you hear happening in these little corners of town, where the people have known each other too long and lived too close together. Maybe that’s what I was thinking. Or maybe I was thinking ahead to how they would put me here in this gray room, on an endless series of appeals, with another gray room waiting down the hall, and another beyond that, while meanwhile I dreamed about a day that would never come, when I would be released and walk the long hills on my way to a little bungalow where my true life would begin. Or maybe none of this was what I thought, and I was simply walking down the street, wondering what I would do when this calm left me, as surely it would, and I would have no choice but to fight the shaking inside.

  I know, as I turned toward the wharf, onto lower Columbus, I had no notion of escape. I only wanted a drink, that was all, and there was Gino’s place on the corner up ahead.

  It was small place, built in the ’50s, a cottage cheese ceiling overhead and a space-prow for a bar, and behind that bar there was Gino mixing drinks. A Chinese couple sat in the far back, a pair of fags closer up, a beatnik at the counter. Gino was in his fifties somewhere and he did resemble his father. He had his hair shoe-blacked and a big handlebar mustache and a sign on the counter that read:

  God is an Italian.

  I pointed at the sign. I gestured largely, like a man on stage, and spoke too loud. “Tell God to give me a drink. A scotch. With plenty of ice, and no water.”

  Gino got out his bottle and poured. He slid the drink across the counter.

  “God sends you his blessings,” he said. “Where you been keeping yourself, Nick?”

  “In the neighborhood.”

  I took the drink down fast. I could feel Gino’s eyes sliding over me but if he noticed the blood stain on my shirt, it didn’t mean anything to him, at least not yet. I felt like weeping.

  “Another one.”

  “Sure, sure,”
he said and poured it up for me.

  Then the phone started ringing in a little room just behind the bar. There was no door on that room, and Gino answered the phone in that accent he’d inherited from his father, loud and bursting with its own importance; then all of a sudden he dropped his voice and turned his back on me. The hunch in his shoulders deepened. In a little while he hung up and dialed another number on his own.

  When he returned, he tended to me quick, pouring another drink. His eyes passed over me again. Remembering the stain, I glanced down at myself, then back at Gino, and in that glance it passed between us what had happened on the phone. (I didn’t realize then, of course, exactly how it had happened. I couldn’t know that the old woman on the street had seen me throw down the gun: that she’d followed me at a distance and watched me go into Gino’s. An Italian woman, of course. Now she would have another story to tell the old ones out on the bench in Washington Square. A story to tell in between those others they told over and over. This one about that nobody eviction agent. How she’d tracked me down. Called Gino from the phone booth on the corner, warning him, and Gino had called the cops.) There was an instant of fear in Gino’s eyes now, maybe he’d sensed my suspicion, but then that was gone. His eyes passed over me once more, and he nodded, and I nodded too. He gave me a look like I was a paesano, like we were brothers in this blood. Then he moved away.

  I was alone at the counter.

  I swiveled on my stool, looking through the thick blue light at the patrons in Gino’s bar: the Chinese couple up from the suburbs, so demure and sweet, the gays whispering into one another’s ears, the poet scribbling in his endless little book. Meanwhile a Mexican girl washed dishes in the back, and Gino stepped out of sight somewhere behind her. I finished my drink and heard a siren nearby. The station wasn’t far. I could’ve run, I guess, but there was nowhere for me to go and my gun was back in the bushes.