A Century of Noir

by Max Allan Collins

  The chair didn’t look as though it could support my hundred and forty pounds, but when Ranier perched on a similar one I sat, with a wariness that made me think he had them to keep people deliberately off balance. I leaned back and crossed my legs. The woman at ease.

  “I’d like to make sure we’re talking about the same person. And that I know why you want to find her.”

  A smile crossed his full lips, again not touching the slate chips of his eyes. “We could fence all day, Ms. Warshawski, but as you say, time is valuable to us both. The Gabriella Sestieri I seek was born in Pitigliano on October thirtieth, 1921. She left Italy sometime early in 1941, no one knows exactly when, but she was last heard of in Siena that February. And there’s some belief she came to Chicago. As to why I want to find her, a relative of hers, now in Florence, but from the Pitigliano family, is interested in locating her. My specialty is import-export law, particularly with Italy: I’m no expert in finding missing persons, but I agreed to assist as a favor to a client. The relative—Mrs. Sestieri’s relative—has a professional connection to my client. And now it is your turn, Ms. Warshawski.”

  “Ms. Sestieri died in March 1968.” My blood was racing; I was pleased to hear my voice come out without a tremor. “She married a Chicago police officer in April 1942. They had one child. Me.”

  “And your father? Officer Warshawski?”

  “Died in 1979. Now may I have the name of my mother’s relative? I’ve known only one member of her family, my grandmother’s sister who lives here in Chicago, and am eager to find others.” Actually, if they bore any resemblance to my embittered Aunt Rosa I’d just as soon not meet the remaining Verazi clan.

  “You were cautious, Ms. Warshawski, so you will forgive my caution: do you have proof of your identity?”

  “You make it sound as though treasure awaits the missing heir, Mr. Ranier.” I pulled out the copies of my legal documents and handed them over. “Who or what is looking for my mother?”

  Ranier ignored my question. He studied the documents briefly, then put them on the marble slab while condoling me on losing my parents. His voice had the same soft flat cadence as when he’d discussed the nymph.

  “You’ve no doubt remained close to your grandmother’s sister? If she’s the person who brought your mother to Chicago it might be helpful for me to have her name and address.”

  “My aunt is a difficult woman to be close to, but I can check with her, to see if she doesn’t mind my giving you her name and address.”

  “And the rest of your mother’s family?”

  I held out my hands, empty. “I don’t know any of them. I don’t even know how many there are. Who is my mystery relative? What does he—she—want?”

  He paused, looking at the file in his hands. “I actually don’t know. I ran the ad merely as a favor to my client. But I’ll pass your name and address along, Ms. Warshawski, and when he’s been in touch with the person I’m sure you’ll hear.”

  This runaround was starting to irritate me. “You’re a heck of a poker player, Mr. Ranier. But you know as well as I that you’re lying like a rug.”

  I spoke lightly, smiling as I got to my feet and crossed to the door, snatching my documents from the marble slab as I passed. For once his feelings reached his eyes, turning the slate to molten rock. As I waited for the elevator I wondered if answering that ad meant I was going to be sucker-punched.

  Over dinner that night with Dr. Lotty Herschel I went through my conversation with Ranier, trying to sort out my confused feelings. Trying, too, to figure out who in Gabriella’s family might want to find her, if the inquiry was genuine.

  “They surely know she’s dead,” Lotty said.

  “That’s what I thought at first, but it’s not that simple. See, my grandmother converted to Judaism when she married Nonno Mattia—sorry, that’s Gabriella’s father—Grandpa Matthias—Gabriella usually spoke Italian to me. Anyway, my grandmother died in Auschwitz when the Italian Jews were rounded up in 1944. Then, my grandfather didn’t go back to Pitigliano, the little town they were from, after he was liberated—the Jewish community there had been decimated and he didn’t have any family left. So he was sent to a Jewish-run sanatorium in Turin, but Gabriella only found that out after years of writing letters to relief agencies.”

  I stared into my wineglass, as though the claret could reveal the secrets of my family. “There was one cousin she was really close to, from the Christian side of her family, named Frederica. Frederica had a baby out of wedlock the year before Gabriella came to Chicago, and got sent away in disgrace. After the war Gabriella kept trying to find her, but Frederica’s family wouldn’t forward the letters—they really didn’t want to be in touch with her. Gabriella might have saved enough money to go back to Italy to look for herself, but then she started to be ill. She had a miscarriage the summer of sixty-five and bled and bled. Tony and I thought she was dying then.”

  My voice trailed away as I thought of that hot unhappy summer, the summer the city burst into riot-spawned flames and my mother lay in the stifling front bedroom oozing blood. She and Tony had one of their infrequent fights. I’d been on my paper route and they didn’t hear me come in. He wanted her to sell something which she said wasn’t hers to dispose of.

  “And your life,” my father shouted. “You can give that away as a gift? Even if she was still alive—” He broke off then, seeing me, and neither of them talked about the matter again, at least when I was around to hear.

  Lotty squeezed my hand. “What about your aunt, great-aunt in Melrose Park? She might have told her siblings, don’t you think? Was she close to any of them?”

  I grimaced. “I can’t imagine Rosa being close to anyone. See, she was the last child, and Gabriella’s grandmother died giving birth to her. So some cousins adopted her, and when they emigrated in the twenties Rosa came to Chicago with them. She didn’t really feel like she was part of the Verazi family. I know it seems strange, but with all the uprootings the war caused, and all the disconnections, it’s possible that the main part of Gabriella’s mother’s family didn’t know what became of her.”

  Lotty nodded, her face twisted in sympathy; much of her family had been destroyed in those death camps also. “There wasn’t a schism when your grandmother converted?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s frustrating to think how little I know about those people. Gabriella says—said—the Verazis weren’t crazy about it, and they didn’t get together much except for weddings or funerals—except for the one cousin. But Pitigliano was a Jewish cultural center before the war and Nonno was considered a real catch. I guess he was rich until the Fascists confiscated his property.” Fantasies of reparations danced through my head.

  “Not too likely,” Lotty said. “You’re imagining someone overcome with guilt sixty years after the fact coming to make you a present of some land?”

  I blushed. “Factory, actually: the Sestieris were harness makers who switched to automobile interiors in the twenties. I suppose if the place is even still standing, it’s part of Fiat or Mercedes. You know, all day long I’ve been swinging between wild fantasies—about Nonno’s factory, or Gabriella’s brother surfacing—and then I start getting terrified, wondering if it’s all some kind of terrible trap. Although who’d want to trap me, or why, is beyond me. I know this Malcolm Ranier knows. It would be so easy—”

  “No! Not to set your mind at rest, not to prove you can bypass the security of a modern high rise—for no reason whatsoever are you to break into that man’s office.”

  “Oh, very well.” I tried not to sound like a sulky child denied a treat.

  “You promise, Victoria?” Lotty sounded ferocious.

  I held up my right hand. “On my honor, I promise not to break into his office.”

  III

  It was six days later that the phone call came to my office. A young man, with an Italian accent so thick that his English was almost incomprehensible, called up and gaily asked if I was his “Cousin Vitt
oria.”

  “Parliamo italiano,” I suggested, and the gaiety in his voice increased as he switched thankfully to his own language.

  He was my cousin Ludovico, the great-great-grandson of our mutual Verazi ancestors, he had arrived in Chicago from Milan only last night, terribly excited at finding someone from his mother’s family, thrilled that I knew Italian, my accent was quite good, really, only a tinge of America in it, could we get together, any place, he would find me—just name the time as long as it was soon.

  I couldn’t help laughing as the words tumbled out, although I had to ask him to slow down and repeat. It had been a long time since I’d spoken Italian, and it took time for my mind to adjust. Ludovico was staying at the Garibaldi, a small hotel on the fringe of the Gold Coast, and would be thrilled if I met him there for a drink at six. Oh, yes, his last name—that was Verazi, the same as our great-grandfather.

  I bustled through my business with greater efficiency than usual so that I had time to run the dogs and change before meeting him. I laughed at myself for dressing with care, in a pantsuit of crushed lavender velvet which could take me dancing if the evening ended that way, but no self-mockery could suppress my excitement. I’d been an only child with one cousin from each of my parents’ families as my only relations. My cousin Boom-Boom, whom I adored, had been dead these ten years and more, while Rosa’s son Albert was such a mass of twisted fears that I preferred not to be around him. Now I was meeting a whole new family.

  I tap-danced around the dog in my excitement. Peppy gave me a long-suffering look and demanded that I return her to my downstairs neighbor. Mitch, her son, had stopped there on our way home from running.

  “You look slick, doll,” Mr. Contreras told me, torn between approval and jealousy. “New date?”

  “New cousin.” I continued to tap-dance in the hall outside his door. “Yep. The mystery relative finally surfaced. Ludovico Verazi.”

  “You be careful, doll,” the old man said severely. “Plenty of con artists out there to pretend they’re your cousins, you know, and next thing—phht.”

  “What’ll he con me out of? my dirty laundry?” I planted a kiss on his nose and danced down the sidewalk to my car.

  Three men were waiting in the Garibaldi’s small lobby, but I knew my cousin at once. His hair was amber, instead of black, but his face was my mother’s, from the high rounded forehead to his wide sensuous mouth. He leapt up at my approach, seized my hands, and kissed me in the European style—sort of touching the air beside each ear.

  “Bellissima!” Still holding my hands he stepped back to scrutinize me. My astonishment must have been written large on my face, because he laughed a little guiltily.

  “I know it, I know it, I should have told you of the resemblance, but I didn’t realize it was so strong: the only picture I’ve seen of Cousin Gabriella is a stage photo from 1940 when she starred in Jommelli’s Iphigenia.”

  “Jommelli!” I interrupted. “I thought it was Gluck!”

  “No, no, cugina, Jommelli. Surely Gabriella knew what she sang?” Laughing happily he moved to the armchair where he’d been sitting and took up a brown leather case. He pulled out a handful of papers and thumbed through them, then extracted a yellowing photograph for me to examine.

  It was my mother, dressed as Iphigenia for her one stage role, the one that gave me my middle name. She was made up, her dark hair in an elaborate coil, but she looked absurdly young, like a little girl playing dress-up. At the bottom of the picture was the name of the studio, in Siena where she had sung, and on the back someone had lettered, “Gabriella Sestieri fa la parte d’Iphigenia nella produzione d’Iphigenia da Jommelli.” The resemblance to Ludovico was clear, despite the blurring of time and cosmetics to the lines of her face. I felt a stab of jealousy: I inherited her olive skin, but my face is my father’s.

  “You know this photograph?” Ludovico asked.

  I shook my head. “She left Italy in such a hurry: all she brought with her were some Venetian wineglasses that had been a wedding present to Nonna Laura. I never saw her onstage.”

  “I’ve made you sad, cousin Vittoria, by no means my intention. Perhaps you would like to keep this photograph?”

  “I would, very much. Now—a drink? Or dinner?”

  He laughed again. “I have been in America only twenty-four hours, not long enough to be accustomed to dinner in the middle of the afternoon. So—a drink, by all means. Take me to a typical American bar.”

  I collected my Trans Am from the doorman and drove down to the Golden Glow, the bar at the south end of the Loop owned by my friend Sal Barthele. My appearance with a good-looking stranger caused a stir among the regulars—as I’d hoped. Murray Ryerson, an investigative reporter whose relationship with me is compounded of friendship, competition, and a disastrous romantic episode, put down his beer with a snap and came over to our table. Sal Barthele emerged from her famous mahogany horseshoe bar. Under cover of Murray’s greetings and Ludovico’s accented English she muttered, “Girl, you are strutting. You look indecent! Anyway, isn’t this cradle snatching? Boy looks young!”

  I was glad the glow from the Tiffany table lamps was too dim for her to see me blushing. In the car coming over I had been calculating degrees of consanguinity and decided that as second cousins we were eugenically safe; I was embarrassed to show it so obviously. Anyway, he was only seven years younger than me.

  “My newfound cousin,” I said, too abruptly. “Ludovico Verazi—Sal Barthele, owner of the Glow.”

  Ludovico shook her hand. “So, you are an old friend of this cousin of mine. You know her more than I do—give me ideas about her character.”

  “Dangerous,” Murray said. “She breaks men in her soup like crackers.”

  “Only if they’re crackers to begin with,” I snapped, annoyed to be presented to my cousin in such a light.

  “Crackers to begin with?” Ludovico asked.

  “Slang—gergo—for ‘pazzo,’ ” I explained. “Also a cracker is an oaf—a cretino.”

  Murray put an arm around me. “Ah, Vic—the sparkle in your eyes lights a fire in my heart.”

  “It’s just the third beer, Murray—that’s heartburn,” Sal put in. “Ludovico, what do you drink—whiskey, like your cousin? Or something nice and Italian like Campari?”

  “Whiskey before dinner, Cousin Vittoria? No, no, by the time you eat you have no—no tasting sensation. For me, Signora, a glass of wine please.”

  Later over dinner at Filigree we became “Vic” and “Vico”—“Please, Veek, no one is calling me ‘Ludovico’ since the time I am a little boy in trouble—” And later still, after two bottles of Barolo, he asked me how much I knew about the Verazi family.

  “Niente,” I said. “I don’t even know how many brothers and sisters Gabriella’s mother had. Or where you come into the picture. Or where I do, for that matter.”

  His eyebrows shot up in surprise. “So your mother was never in touch with her own family after she moved here?”

  I told him what I’d told Lotty, about the war, my grandmother’s estrangement from her family, and Gabriella’s depression on learning of her cousin Frederica’s death.

  “But I am the grandson of that naughty Frederica, that girl who would have a baby with no father.” Vico shouted in such excitement that the wait staff rushed over to make sure he wasn’t choking to death. “This is remarkable, Vic, this is amazing, that the one person in our family your mother is close to turns out to be my grandmother.

  “Ah, it was sad, very sad, what happened to her. The family is moved to Florence during the war, my grandmother has a baby, maybe the father is a partisan, my grandmother was the one person in the family to be supporting the partisans. My great-grandparents, they are very prudish, they say, this is a disgrace, never mind there is a war on and much bigger disgraces are happening all the time, so—poof!—off goes this naughty Frederica with her baby to Milano. And the baby becomes my mother, but she and my grandmother both die when I am ten, so
these most respectable Verazi cousins, finally they decide the war is over, the grandson is after all far enough removed from the taint of original sin, they come fetch me and raise me with all due respectability in Florence.”

  He broke off to order a cognac. I took another espresso: somehow after forty I no longer can manage the amount of alcohol I used to. I’d only drunk half of one of the bottles of wine.

  “So how did you learn about Gabriella? And why did you want to try to find her?”

  “Well, cara cugina, it is wonderful to meet you, but I have a confession I must make: it was in the hopes of finding—something—that I am coming to Chicago looking for my cousin Gabriella.”

  “What kind of something?”

  “You say you know nothing about our great-grandmother, Claudia Fortezza? So you are not knowing even that she is in a small way a composer?”

  I couldn’t believe Gabriella never mentioned such a thing. If she didn’t know about it, the rift with the Verazis must have been more severe than she led me to believe. “But maybe that explains why she was given early musical training,” I added aloud. “You know my mother was a quite gifted singer. Although, alas, she never had the professional career she should have.”

  “Yes, yes, she trained with Francesca Salvini. I know all about that! Salvini was an important teacher, even in a little town like Pitigliano people came from Siena and Florence to train with her, and she had a connection to the Siena Opera. But anyway, Vic, I am wanting to collect Claudia Fortezza’s music. The work of women composers is coming into vogue. I can find an ensemble to perform it, maybe to record it, so I am hoping Gabriella, too, has some of this music.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t think so. I kept all her music in a trunk, and I don’t think there’s anything from that period.”

  “But you don’t know definitely, do you, so maybe we can look together.” He was leaning across the table, his voice vibrating with urgency.