The Big Boom (19 page)

The mess puzzled him.

He retreated now, crawling backward. Near the hatch, he paused to look through the boxes. After a while, he found what he wanted.

A tin cigar box from years ago.

When he came back down, Lisa was standing in the kitchen. She glanced at the box in his hand. It was the real reason he had come. The picture on Barbara Antonelli’s table had set him to thinking, and he wanted to look at the picture he’d put inside it years ago. He
wanted to see the communion photo before it had been cropped—to look again at himself and Angie, the men in the background, the boy off to the side.

“So?” Lisa asked.

“There’s a vent knocked out. Some things have been disturbed, maybe. There’s a heavy odor. Possums, maybe,” he said. “But I didn’t see anything. So the thing to do, I’ll get somebody out here to replace the vents—and set some new traps.”

“Thank you,” she said. “But to be honest, like I said, we haven’t heard anything, lately, and Tom and I …” She hesitated. “I was wondering. Why don’t you live here yourself?”

“It’s a bit big for me.”

The young woman regarded him a long minute.

“I don’t know how to tell you this. My company, now, they’re having trouble making payroll,” Lisa said. “It’s not just us. Pensare—down in the South Bay. Viacom. Broadband—all of them. Things have slowed down.”

“What about Tom?”

The girl’s face was red now. She had a hard time meeting his eyes.

“It’s just, I know we said a few days… but I don’t when we’re going to be able to pay the rent. The day-trading thing …”

She shrugged.

“What should I do?”

“I don’t know.” Dante walked away. Then stopped at the door. “Pay me when you can.”

D
ante went back to his apartment over Columbus. Apartment, really, was too nice a word. The joint was a flophouse. The walls were thin, and he could hear the Chinese woman talking on
the phone down the hall, not to mention the Spanish language television in the tiny apartment next to his own. Across the hall, the young man in 3G lay with his door open and the radio on; meanwhile the punksters were hanging from the window above Dante’s own, crying out the lyrics of a song they could not quite remember but nonetheless thought funny as hell. And from outside there was the sound of the traffic, the yelps of the tourists, of the Asian gangs, of the skin shop barkers and tattoo artists. And if you could block all this, there was still the noise of the old radiator, pipes contracting and expanding with heat, an incessant banging in the walls.

Lisa’s question was a good one.

Why did he live here?

Dante placed the tin box on his bed and lay down beside it. Now that he had the box, he didn’t know if he wanted to open it. He knew what was inside. The goddamn thing was bottomless.

His father. His mother. Himself. His grandfather with his nose that was the father of all noses. Pictures of the whole family, with their pelican beaks. Lined up like birds on the wire.

It was a little world inside that box. The world of the father and the son and the holy ghost. The world of the old house. The little blue report card and the confirmation book and the book markers blessed by the parish priest.

Dante still didn’t open the box. It was typical of him, Marilyn might say. He didn’t stay, he didn’t go. He couldn’t embrace what was his, but he could not walk away either.

And so he was held captive.

He walked out for cigarettes, down to the place on the corner. It was cold outside and the sky was black now and the red neon shone in the window. He bought himself a pack of Luckies and a small bottle of Jack.

There were a million ways he could go.

He didn’t have to return to the little room up there. He could go see Marilyn. He could go around the corner to the Naked Moon. To the dealers beneath the freeway. He could call up Beatrice at Prospero Realty and sign the house over. Go down to the airport and disappear. But he would not do those things, not yet. There was Antonelli out there somewhere. There was a woman yet to be buried. There was a picture of a little girl inside a box.

A
t that moment, Nick Antonelli came around the corner onto Vallejo, two blocks away. He stopped and pressed himself against the window at Serafina’s. The place was closed, and Stella was not there. Nick hadn’t been inside Serafina’s for years, but he remembered it well, the red-checkered cloths and the metal chairs, the Chianti bottles dripping with wax. He stumbled a little against the glass. He had gone to Gucci’s, he had signed what he needed to sign. He had given the priest a check. Then he had stopped in the Golden Spike, and in Al Capps’, and in a couple of other places along the way. Now he was here, dizzy with drink, face smudged against the windows of the Serafina Café. Inside which his father once upon a time had sat with the Chicago gangster La Rocca, in full view of everyone, with little Nick on his lap.

The truth was this.

A few weeks ago, Smith had told him there was trouble at Solano. It was internal trouble, people who had a grudge and were going to take their grudge public. If they did so, it would ruin everything.

Nick had not hesitated.

“I know someone. I’ll make a call for you,” Nick had said. “I’ll
put you in touch. Then you handle the rest. All the details. Leave me out of it. I don’t want to know who or what. I don’t want to know a thing.”

Inside the windows he saw all their shadows. There was Stella when she was still beautiful. There was Barbara, his young wife, and Angie in baby shoes clutching her mother’s hand. There were his father’s friends, back in the shadows. The Mancuso boy in short pants. There they all were, back in 1968, inside of Stella’s, big cars parked out front and the future just around the corner.

He picked up the phone again, dialed his wife.

“Yes?” Her voice was cold, indifferent.

“It’s me.”

She said nothing, but he could imagine her in their house on the San Mateo hillside, sitting on the white couch, legs crossed, her face turned to the side, unapproachable as ever, in her sleeveless blouse, her slacks.

“Forgive me.”

She didn’t say anything.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s my fault.”

If she heard him, she didn’t respond. He could hear the sound of the wire, but if she was still there, if she heard him, if anyone was listening, he could not tell.

T
he Pacific Stock Exchange was on Pine Street, in a gray building with stately columns. The old trading floor inside, like the one in Los Angeles, had been shut down. It was gone now, but it was not gone. The floor where the traders had shouted out their bids, working the spread—that physical place was no longer inside the big building. The flashing board with the million numbers was gone. But it was not gone. It was in a million desks in a million houses, ten million. But it was nowhere. In the old days the brokers would come down here early in the morning, to be in tune with that other board in New York, and stand in the hurly-burly of the floor until the trading day was over. Now the board never shut down. The people who had worked the spread and arranged the trades down in the pit were no longer confined to the pit. They were here, but they were not here. Information flowed down the network. It came in fits and starts. Enron has signed a new deal. Qualcomm has split. Oil is up. The pope is dying, and the flu is loose in Beijing. The numbers rose, they fell. A new boom. New rules. Everyone will be rich. The market has its own logic, its own
genius, infallible, the network subject to its own rules, sudden blocks, surges, mysterious delays, orders withheld, then suddenly placed—and behind it the mysterious force that moved it all.

Impulses in the system. Synapses. The echoes of which showed up on TV screens while in the gym. In the little handheld devices. On computer screens.

Broadcast through satellite and transformed into voice. Echoed in car radios. On CNN. In prerecorded voices that read bank statements over the telephone.

In the little voice that greeted you in a whisper, first thing in the morning, as your feet touched the carpet.

Give me more.

It was a voice you could hear all over the city, but suddenly it was in a panic. The market was on a slide.

T
he next morning, Dante went first to Antonelli’s office. It was just around the corner from Serafina’s, not far from Mollini’s butcher shop. This part of the neighborhood in here, the Italians had used to call Little City, full of greengrocers and tradespeople. Antonelli’s office was a five-story building his father had bought in the early sixties, Dante knew, and which Antonelli had sold during the Hong Kong boom—but not without first securing a long-term lease for himself to the top floor. There was a Chinese greengrocer in the ground floor these days, and some T-shirt shops, and upstairs was an herbalist and podiatrist and also a travel agency of questionable legality.

Dante had gone home yesterday and spent the evening going through his cigar box, looking at the old photos. He recognized some of the people in the background of the communion photo, but not all; the old ones at Serafina’s could help, but Serafina’s was not open yet. In the meantime, he wanted to find Antonelli.

Antonelli’s office door was locked, and there was no answer. The window at the end of hall was open. Dante considered the
fire escape. Antonelli’s office was a couple of windows down, with a narrow iron balcony overlooking the street, but its escape ladder was up. He could probably get there, working balcony to balcony, but he didn’t want to get caught for breaking and entering.

Instead, Dante knocked again, and listened. When no one came, he headed out to see if he could find the secretary at home.

B
arbara Antonelli had given him the woman’s address. Dante didn’t guess this was information Nick had passed along to his wife. More likely Barbara had found it on her own. Dante imagined Barbara out here, following her husband, watching from her car as Nick and his mistress walked up the flagstone path. He couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps there was something else going on, something obvious he had missed. Barbara had put up with her husband a long time, and though she appeared resigned, jealousy had a way of weighing on you.

He pushed the button. There was a delay, but after a minute or two he heard a woman’s voice over the system. It was a husky voice, a bit weary.

“Anne Marie?”

“Yes.”

“My name is Dante Mancuso. I’m a friend of the Antonellis. A family friend.”

There was a pause.

“Nick’s friend?”

“Yes. It’s important that I talk to you.”

He heard her sigh then.

“What’s this about?”

“It’s about Nick. We can talk in the lobby. Or outside on the benches—if you would be more comfortable there.”

“Is he all right?”

“I think it would be better if we talked face-to-face.”

She didn’t say anything else, but he saw the response light go dead, and in a little while she showed up in the lobby, on the other side of the glass door. Her lips turned in a wry grimace at the sight of him, worried about Antonelli, maybe, but skeptical of the man in front of her. It was easy to see she hadn’t slept, and her beauty had been rubbed raw by a hard night.

She walked with him out to the bench.

“So you’re a friend of the family?”

“Yes,” he told her. “But I’m also a private investigator. The Antonellis hired my firm about a week back.”

“I thought you guys hung around in bedrooms with video cameras.”

“Not during working hours.”

Anne Marie did not laugh. “Listen, if Barbara’s looking to get something over on Nick, that doesn’t make any sense. She’s the one who’s fighting the divorce.”

She looked away then, as if she knew the dubious nature of what she had just said. As if she knew Nick had no intention of getting a divorce.

“This has nothing to do with that.”

“Who hired you?”

“Antonelli did.”

She stared. “That asshole. He doesn’t trust anyone. Is he spying on me?”

“No. I’m looking into his daughter’s death.”

She lowered her head, and Dante could see a little bit of a tremble in the lip. He studied her more closely. She was dressed simply at the moment, cotton shirt, slacks. Either way, he could see she was a good-looking woman—with a certain intelligence in her eyes—and he could understand Antonelli’s attraction to her.

“What do you want?”

“Basically, I’m trying to find Antonelli.”

“I thought he hired you.”

“He did. But he hasn’t been returning my calls. And his wife—She said you might know where he is.”

“Why should I know that?”

“His daughter is dead. And another man as well, up in Tahoe. So I have some concerns for Mr. Antonelli’s safety.”

Anne Marie pushed out her lip. It was a big lip. There were tears in her eyes, and he could see that she was fond of Antonelli, that she didn’t want to let him go.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Last night. But he didn’t stay long. He was upset about his daughter …”

“Do you know where he went?”

She shook her head.

He pressed for a little while—on Solano Enterprises, on the Waterhouse Building—but she didn’t tell him anything he didn’t already know. Another thing occurred to him.

“Could he have gone back to his wife?” he asked.

“How would I know?” she all but shouted, and Dante saw the same thought had occurred to her as well. “Sometimes he sleeps at the office. He’s done that before, once, when we had a fight. There’s a daybed.”

“I went there earlier. I knocked, but no one answered.”

“Maybe he ignored you,” she said. “He likes to do that sometimes. To lie there and brood.” She was quiet a moment, then she swore. “Fuck,” she said. “I told myself this wasn’t going to happen. That I wasn’t going to go to bed with that son of a bitch. But I did, and now this happened, and now I’m out of my fucking job.”

“He fired you?”

“No, but I know his history. He always goes back to his wife. Then he finds someone else.”

“Do you have a key?”