The Islands of Divine Music

by John Addiego

  Women adored him. Powerful men confided in him. He gave money away, once a twenty to a bootlegger at a speakeasy because the man had just lost his shirt at poker and Ciso had just gotten paid. Two weeks later the racketeer gave Narciso a shiny black Packard. The young man took friends and family on thrilling rides about town until Giuseppe returned from two months working north of the bay. The old man promptly hitched his yard trailer to the beautiful sedan and had his son drive it to his next demolition job.

  By the mid-1940s Narciso and his younger brothers had found their way to the other side of their father’s coin, pouring foundations and filling East Bay swamp with apartments during the war boom years. By the end of Eisenhower and the first year of the Catholic presidency, Narciso met daily with his brothers and their friends for breakfast at a Holiday Inn near the freeway, ostensibly to be in on the schemes and deals they discussed. Then he would wander in his convertible Cadillac, play golf, pick up groceries for his wife or mother, visit a building site, or yak with some guys leaning on shovels. He often drove his wife, Alice Elaine, to stores and forgot her, taking off alone while she was shopping or in the ladies’ room. She would call for a ride, sometimes to Narciso’s brother Ludovico. Lu, she would shout into the pay phone’s mouthpiece, Ciso took off again. Is he at the office? Ludovico would leave his desk, cursing, and give Alice and her groceries a ride home.

  One lovely afternoon in the Kennedy years Narciso took Alice Elaine to the Hink’s department store in Berkeley and left her there while she was trying on pedal pushers. He headed north from the San Francisco Bay on Interstate 80, absorbed in a radio program about Mel Tormé, and by the time he reached the Sierras he was hungry and wondering if he shouldn’t try to get home before dark. He took an exit, unable to read the sign (he’d never actually learned to read), and found a restaurant with a gold mining motif, with old picks and pans and shovels hanging on the walls.

  Ciso was fifty-three, but he looked as if the numbers were reversed to the waitress who kept laughing and squeezing his pinstriped arm and leg. She wanted to know if he had seen that funny colored guy in Reno, Sammy Davis? Ciso offered to drive the waitress there, and soon they were at Donner Pass, winding down the old highway in the dark with the top up because the snow was dancing across the road, Ciso taking the hairpin turns fast enough to make the Caddy’s fins tap the guard rails at the edges of thousand-foot cliffs. By the time they reached Truckee the young woman begged to be let out of the car, her face white as the snow on the peaks around them. Ciso got coffee, consulted the compass next to the Virgin on his dashboard (both desperate gifts from his wife), and took off alone, thinking he was heading toward home.

  Frank Sinatra owned the Cal-Neva Casino on the north shore of Lake Tahoe, and this was where Narciso’s Cadillac found itself late that evening, under a clear and frigid sky. The mountain air and the sweet scent of ponderosa pine needles filled his nostrils. He didn’t mind being lost. Wherever he ended up always seemed an opportunity for some adventure, some flirtation or conversation, something new to see. Ciso’s mind was pre-Copernican: the sun and its planets, the galaxies and constellations, which he thought of as lanterns hanging from a ceiling, orbited the fixed place where he stood. In his geocentric cosmos, mysteries, such as why those candles were snuffed every morning, didn’t bother him. High in the Sierras, in Old Blue Eyes’ parking lot, he could see thousands of them flickering in the heavens, lighting his way to the craps tables.

  It often infuriated Ludovico and the other siblings that Lucky Pants didn’t much care for gambling. He loved casinos, but he rarely played. His brothers and sisters, his sons and nieces and nephews, would lose their shirts and curse. They’d beg him to play and, after an hour or so, he might saunter up to the wheel of fortune, lay a few fivers on a twenty, and win a hundred dollars. Then he’d lend them the hundred to play with, and watch.

  That night Johnny Rosselli, who’d torpedoed for Capone in Chicago and snuffed more victims in LA for Jack Dragna, and who was rubbing elbows those days with Sinatra, the Kennedy brothers, and Ronald Reagan, waved him over. Aren’t you a friend of Joe Bonanno’s in Frisco? Johnny asked.

  Narciso remembered Joe from the old neighborhood all right. Sure. Played boccie with his pop, Giuseppe. The muscle at the table made room, a half-dozen guys without necks, and Rosselli had Narciso’s ear for an hour while the slow-witted dandy nodded and laughed in all the right places. Drinks, pig’s knuckles, pasta, and calamari, all on the house, were brought to Narciso as he listened to Johnny talk about Hollywood and politics. These fucking politicians, Rosselli said, his boozy breath spraying Narciso’s nose, are the biggest whores of all. Worse than any girls we pimped in Long Beach.

  Johnny, I don’t know nothin’ about politics. I don’t even want to know nothin’.

  Hey! Rosselli slapped his back. You’re smart. The old murderer staggered to his feet. You’re smart. He waved a finger, and he and his entourage made their way to some privileged room beyond the lounge.

  Some time later a guy with a big Adam’s apple was beside Narciso in the gents’. He wore a Hawaiian shirt and the kind of checked slacks popular that year on golf courses, iridescent green and orange. Excuse me. I wonder could you give me some advice, the guy said. Narciso nodded and shook himself at the urinal. You see, I fried my engine coming over the mountains, and I can’t get a cab up here in the boondocks, and all’s I need is to go a few miles to this Travelodge.

  You need a ride? Narciso asked.

  Oh, man, that would be fantastic! I got a woman waitin’ for me in this motel, if you know what I mean. He chuckled, and Ciso joined in. Matter of fact I got two women there, couple of showgirls. Can’t keep the girls waiting, can we? Name’s Charlie Fusetti. I sell cars in Omaha. He offered his hand.

  Narciso Verbicaro, Charlie.

  Charlie, whose real name was Mark Hendley, and whose former occupation was special agent for the CIA, on temporary suspension, directed Narciso to follow the lakeshore into Nevada. Hendley had been suspended for using excessive force, and he had a reputation for the same dating back to his years as a soldier of fortune in Latin America, where he and a partner had committed murder and various acts of torture on banana farmers. He was hoping to take the driver to a motel room which he and the same partner had filled with divers instruments of persuasion in order to find out what was in the cigar box Johnny Rosselli had given Narciso, figuring this would put him back in good order with the department, but somewhere in the middle of Hendley’s phony patter about car sales Narciso had made a turn from the lakeshore highway. An hour later they were winding through the mountains, among the flocked pines, and Hendley was giggling nervously.

  You know your way around these woods, Ciso?

  Jesus, these trees just get prettier the higher we go, don’t they, Charlie? His tires hit a patch of snow and fishtailed.

  Think we should maybe turn around? He reached under his garish shirt to touch his .38 revolver.

  Let’s try this. Ciso turned right where the road forked, and the Caddy started winding down the eastern slope. The pines gave way, slowly, to sagebrush.

  Are we lost, Ciso? He laughed. I’m lost, I’ll tell you that!

  Ciso said nothing for a minute, and Hendley’s mind raced with images of desert burial, of his head and hands severed and fed to coyotes while the rest of him was spaded under a creosote bush. I think we’re okay, Ciso said. There’s always some little jerkwater town in places like this.

  Sure enough, a bullet-blasted sign with the name Genoa appeared in the headlights, just as Ciso’s Caddy took its last gulps of gas. The nationality of the town’s name didn’t help Mark Hendley’s stomach. He sat on the edge of the seat as Ciso threw the car into neutral and coasted the last couple of miles to the general store and filling station, as if by some practiced routine. The building was dark. Ciso tapped the horn. Hendley gripped the handle of his revolver.

  A geezer in overalls staggered out of the building. Closed! he yelled.

  Fi
ll her up? Ciso waved a twenty out the window. Hendley slid out of the shotgun seat, saying he’d better call the girls at the motel. Good idea, Ciso said. The agent called his partner and tried to describe where he and the suspect were.

  Didn’t you hear me? The geezer spat and walked up to Ciso’s window. The till is closed. I can’t make no change. Ciso told him to keep the change.

  A couple of hours later the sun was peeking over a range of barren mountains to the east, and the sage desert stretched in all directions around them. They had already passed a DANGER, DO NOT ENTER, ATOMIC TESTING SITE sign, and Hendley had convinced Narciso to turn around. Now the top was down, the frigid air was rich with the scent of sage, the radio was playing show tunes from LA, and Hendley had given up on his partner. He was wondering if he shouldn’t just waste the old greaseball out here in the middle of nowhere and boost his car. Narciso opened the cigar box and offered Hendley a foot-long Cuban Corona.

  They were doing ninety on a pencil-straight highway which ended in a mountain range, perhaps twenty miles distant, perhaps fifty. To the north was a tiny dust cloud moving slowly toward the highway. Hendley held the cigar and laughed. Cigars, he said.

  The best, Charlie. Ciso reached into his pants and produced a Zippo. The dust cloud got larger over time and grew wheels and vague geometric proportions. It was approaching the highway slowly, on a perpendicular trajectory. These are the very best, Charlie. We gotta enjoy life, right?

  Hendley cupped his hands around the flame, drew on the cigar, leaned back in his seat, and laughed. He laughed with great embarrassment and relief, in great clouds of smoke. Narciso steered with his knees and lit a stogie for himself, laughing along. The vehicle running on a perpendicular track was identifiable now, an ancient flatbed truck, its cargo a flock of dusty sheep, its driver a small fellow in a slouched cowboy hat, bouncing up and down, staring straight ahead. Hendley watched him approach through clouds of cigar smoke, through gasps of laughter. The cowboy never moved his head to right or left, and Narciso never relented on the gas pedal. It didn’t seem possible to the suspended special agent, with a thousand square miles around them, with only two vehicles on that planar expanse of the planet, with the truck creeping along a separate road and Ciso flying across the blacktop to the horns of Jimmy Lunceford’s Swing Band, that there could be a collision, and so his last thoughts were happy ones.

  The truck crept across the highway, and Ciso hit it. Former Agent Hendley flew through the windshield and was killed instantly, as were three sheep. The man in the front of the truck fell drunkenly onto the desert and cursed the bumps and bruises he received. The Cadillac was destroyed, squashed like a grape under an immense foot. Narciso was thrown into the air.

  He hung there for some time, a hundred miles from an atom-bomb crater, a hundred yards from a billboard with the legs of chorus girls and the words Last Chance painted across it. He floated above the frost-rimed sagebrush, the branches aflame with sunrise, and fell to earth among the crying lambs, unhurt, cushioned by the beautiful fleece and the soft flesh of God’s innocent creatures.

  THE DIVINE COMEDY

  Angelo

  Because his mother and the allergist thought he should avoid breathing, because his father rarely took notice, and because he fell dead center in a clan of athletic or adorable siblings, Angelo Verbicaro started making weird noises, squeaky voices slid through the cracks of doors, impersonations of family who’d just stepped off the boat.

  His brother, Paulie, and sister Penny fled when they heard him coming. He was a pest, a raspy adenoidal racket that followed them to the bathroom door. The younger ones, however, wet their diapers for a bark or a Bronx cheer, and his mother, a sad, dour woman with a beautiful face, choked on her Parliaments when he did a line from Caesar, when he stormed like Gleason. He realized that the more embarrassing and heartbreaking the material, the bigger were his mother’s coughing fits and his classmates’ groans. Bathroom humor, embarrassing noises attributed to himself and his obese or nervous teachers, the voices and gestures of his cousins from the old country, were part of a repertoire which always featured himself as the most pathetic creature in the script, the recipient of fortune’s cruelest tricks. In Angie’s shtick he made himself the weakling who got smacked in the chops or fooled by idiots.

  Imitation was his currency. He lacked the physical grace of his older siblings, the sweetness of his younger siblings, the mathematical mind and tenacity of his father, the compassion of his mother and aunts, the strength and optimism of his extended family. To Angie, most of life seemed a hoax, and somehow it helped to imitate it, helped to pay attention to the serious way people said and did things.

  His father, Joe, wasn’t a big man, but he rocked on the balls of his feet and looked people dead in the eye, ever poised to take on the world. He had an easy stride and a big grin for strangers, a ruggedly handsome face punctuated by a broken nose and skin darker than that of a black man who occasionally caddied for him on the golf course. One Saturday Joe dragged Angelo out of bed to caddy with his brother and cousins Gino and Mario. Joe’s leather bag hung easily from Paulie’s broad shoulders like a quiver of arrows and made him look a bit like Robin Hood in his green baseball cap. Gino and Mario, two muscular guys with rolled-up sleeves, carried their clubs like notebooks. Somehow Angie, who had inherited the worst of both grandfathers, the Irish maternal one’s slight frame with the Italian paternal one’s huge schnoz and lack of grace, was given the biggest bag, Uncle Narciso’s ostentatious spumoni-colored Cadillac with the baroque bangles and the many pockets filled with balls, tees, and bottles of Scotch.

  Joe was a serious golfer, and Uncle Ludovico was serious to the point of a heart attack on the greens, but Uncle Narciso was always out in the rough without a care in his heart. He had an elaborate ritual to perform before each shot. He’d stretch his arms, roll his head on his shoulders, then shake his butt like a rumba dancer, rattling the change and keys and nail clippers in his baggy trousers before slowly cocking his arms. His swing was wild, and he occasionally hit the ball squarely, but usually he sliced it into another fairway or chased snakes thirty yards away, and as often as not he swung and missed altogether. Steeeerike one! Angie growled. Ciso laughed, and Lu fumed.

  Long drive down the third base line, right between Davenport’s legs! Angie’s voice, behind his cupped hands, had the timbre of Russ Hodges’s on a transistor radio speaker. It’ll stay fair if it doesn’t hit that catalpa tree!

  Ciso’s ball hit the tree and bounced onto the fairway, then rolled another fifty yards down the asphalt caddy-cart trail. Joe laughed. Lucky Pants strikes again, he said.

  Angie followed his uncle with the enormous bag, off the fairway, into the eucalyptus trees and the gopher dirt. His little alien voices and radio commentary didn’t faze Ciso a bit, even as balls ricocheted off trees and landed at their feet. Oops, Ciso would say. That was a close one.

  On the green Uncle Lu raged and beat the ground with his putter. Joe was killing them, but what killed Lu most was that Ciso, after twelve strokes out in the forest, would sink a putt from thirty yards right after Lu had missed a five-footer. Son of a goddamned blue baboon’s ass! Lu yelled. He snapped his putter in half over his knee and tossed it into a briar patch.

  Hey, Lu, Ciso called.

  What the hell do you want? Lu paced around the next tee.

  Lu, this boy’s a natural. He’s like that goddamn guy in Reno. What the hell’s his name?

  Ciso, don’t talk to me right now. While Lu paced, Joe grinned and elbowed Ciso. The boys grinned as well, but Lu’s sons knew better than to laugh aloud. Joe crooned like Sinatra and teed his ball. One of those bells that now and then rings, Joe sang. Just one of those things.

  We gotta take this boy to Reno, Ciso said. Joe, Joe, Joe. He’s a natural. He’s like that goddamned guy at Harrah’s.

  You can’t take a kid to the casino, Joe said. It’s against the law. He smacked the ball beautifully, a straight, lofty drive that disappeared a moment
in the blade glitter of the eucalyptus beyond the green and then reappeared on the fairway, and as Angie watched it and heard the clapping and hoots of approval he saw himself under the flickering marquee lights of Reno. His lips, an inch from the head of a nine iron, mouthed the words: Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I love you, you’re beautiful. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

  Two weeks later Angie climbed from the temperate bay and the steamy valley over the granite spine of California, then dropped to the Nevada desert. His ears and sinuses popped and shrank until it seemed the geography of his face might change as much as the terrain out the window. He listened to the guys talk about gambling strategies, Lu and Bobby Rich, the highway patrolman, in the front seat of Ciso’s Cadillac, with Ciso adding his two bits from the back with Angie. He watched the desert surround them like a wilderness of certain death. He rubbed his sweaty palms together.

  It was Ciso’s cockamamy idea to let his nephew join their routine junket. The guys drove up here twice a month on a Friday morning and came back sometime Saturday or Sunday. They always took Ciso’s car and never let Ciso drive it. Their wives gave them a set amount to lose or win, and every few months the ladies came, too, and insisted on motel rooms. Rich, the cop, always lost everything, got drunk, and begged money off Ciso, who always gave him some. Lu would come out ahead about one time in five, just enough to make him agonize over every card or number. Ciso would watch the shows, flirt and talk, and occasionally play and win or lose. He’d get corralled by real estate schemers, religious fanatics, and transparent con men with dead eyes. He’d run into mobsters whose fathers knew him from the old neighborhood in San Francisco. He’d laugh and nod to everybody.