The Last Days of Il Duce (20 page)

He paused, as if having second thoughts, and looked at me with concern. “You should forget all this. Your brother was hell-bent for destroying himself—but you need not do the same. There is no reason to get all tangled up in the past.”

“It's too late now.”

“Just turn away and go. You can have your job. We'll pretend this didn't happen. I'll be dead in a few months, and none of this will matter. There's no sense in embarrassing everyone in the community.”

“It's not the community I'm worried about.”

“Marie's in my will. I know about the two of you. You have my blessings. She's a young woman after all, and there's no reason for me to be jealous.”

“Jealous?”

It did not make sense to me. He's losing his composure, I thought, babbling. What cause did I have to be jealous of him? Then I saw the vanity in his face again, the bit of smugness. I felt a spear of panic in my heart, and there was a wave of blackness, a moment of not seeing.

“Give me the letter,” I said.

Micaeli sensed the change in me, as if he had said something he shouldn't. He struggled with the buckles, grunting and wheezing. He was nervous now, looking at the gun in my hand, and I wondered if he had the letter with him at all, or if he were stalling, and this was some kind of ruse. He hurried, as if reading my mind and knowing I didn't believe him, and when he reached inside the bag, he paused a moment, and there was that look, those soft eyes, the fatherly smile on the old brown face, and as he fixed me with those eyes, a gun, I thought, he's reaching for a gun, and I was torn, not knowing what to do, or whether to believe anything he had told me.

“Don't move,” I said but he didn't listen. He moved anyway. Or I thought he moved. I pulled the trigger and shot him through the heart. He went on looking at me, with that wide open expression, blood started to come up out of his mouth, an infinity of time passed, in which it seemed he would never die, and so I pulled the trigger a second time. His body made a wild jerk and he was dead.

I rummaged around in the case. There was no gun. Only the letter he had mentioned. I put it my pocket. Then I glanced down and saw his shoes.

They were the same shoes I had seen in Marie's closet.

Then I realized the truth. It had not been Ellen Ciprione on that porch with Micaeli. Of course not. Ellen Ciprione was not the old man's type. And I remembered something else. Billy Dios had two daughters. The daughter I wanted to talk to—the one who had come to Romano with her father's letter in her hand—that daughter was not Ellen Ciprione. No, she was a different woman altogether, and that woman lived much closer to home.

I had known it all along, I told myself. Or I should have known.

TWENTY-FIVE

INTERLUDE

I left the way I had come, through Giannini's garden. The old woman in the flowered dress sat as before, under her umbrella, still absorbed in her book. The Asian couple had sauntered off and there was no one else to recognize me. On Main Street I tried to control my gait, slowing down, more casual. It did not matter though because no one paid me any mind. At the last corner a young woman smiled and I smiled back. That was all the attention I got. In my car I fumbled for a while, searching for my shades on the dash, dropping my keys, until finally I hit my rhythm and disappeared from Sausalito, anonymous behind the wheel.

It was a beautiful day, the kind in picture books. As I sped over the bridge, the high pylons towering in front of me, the cables looping in the rearview mirror behind, the air seemed scented with possibility and I felt a delirious calm of the sort I've only read about in books, experienced by ascetics and priests. I had a fleeting thought I should get rid of the gun somewhere on the Marin headlands. Stand on a cliff, hurl it in the water. I didn't do it though; I didn't want to call attention to myself. It would be easier in the city. Then I could simply wipe the gun clean, drop it down an iron grate, into the sewers of Chinatown. When that was done, despite everything, Marie and I could escape all that had happened and make our way into the future.

That unexplainable feeling of clear-eyed well-being, of relief and calm, stayed with me until I was over the bridge and into the city. It disappeared as I drove down Bay Street into North Beach. My chest tightened. I thought of the Asian couple in the courtyard. I thought of the old woman with her book. I thought of the young woman who had smiled at me on the corner and even the toll-taker at the bridge. Any of them might identify me. And there were others too who knew I had gone to visit Micaeli that afternoon. Romano's son. His wife. Probably my name was even written inside his appointment book, alongside his business buddies from Hong Kong.

I found a parking place on Broadway, and pulled out the envelope, and when I glanced at it, my heart began to race all over again. The letter had been mailed from Billy Ciprione at the Alta Hotel. It was addressed, of course, to Marie Donnatelli.

Billy Dios was Marie's father. No war hero, dead in Korea. Rather he was one of those petit fascists, as they called them, men exiled during World War Two.

The letter told Dios's story. How he'd come back to North Beach after the war, tried to start a little family, but the old ghosts haunted him. Everything like Micaeli had said, only with names provided now, places. The woman Dios had abandoned was Marie's mother, six months pregnant. Then there was the part Micaeli wouldn't talk about. “In my younger days, when I first come to Reno,” Dios wrote, “I did some things maybe a man shouldn't do.” One of those things had been to arrange the murder of Pavrotti. He'd done it at the request of Micaeli Romano. It was a horrible thing to do, maybe, Dios admitted, but then Pavrotti was a horrible man. The fascists had turned out to be rotten, stupid to the core, betraying everyone, and that stupidity had ruined his life. So he'd been happy to help out his old friend Micaeli, who in turn helped out Dios's estranged family in North Beach.

After Pavrotti's death, wrote Dios, he went straight. He went into the foundation business, started a new family, always with his old family in mind. He told his story quickly and simply. As the letter approached its end, the handwriting grew more slanted and crude, barely legible.

Now, my first wife, your mother, she is dead. My second wife too, and it will not be too long before I follow. But I want my daughter in North Beach to know her father did not forget her. He thought of her all these years. She was his little girl, and it broke his heart, everything, the way it happened. Now he wants nothing more than her forgiveness
.

Forgive me, please
.

Your father
,

Billy Dios

The letter had been postmarked several years back. It had taken Billy Dios a while to die, in his little room in the Alta Hotel. Whether he'd gotten his forgiveness or not, though, that was something I didn't know.

I put the envelope back into my pocket and got out of the car. In the afterglow of the shooting, so close to the death, I had felt as if anything could be accomplished. I had liberated myself, Marie, all of us. Now, standing on the corner of Columbus and Grant, looking down into the giant maw of the past, that street where all the old Italians had strolled and strutted and fought their battles with one another over who were the real Italians, it seemed escape was impossible. I put one foot in front of the other and hurried my way up those concrete stairs toward Marie's apartment on Telegraph Hill.

TWENTY-SIX

THE FINAL CHAPTER

I thumbed the buzzer six times before she answered, three quick bursts, then three more, with no patience inbetween. Her hair was damp and she looked unraveled in the heart and pale in the face, disturbed at the sight of me. I still had the revolver in my pocket and my sunglasses on. The lenses were cheap, the inside of the apartment dark as steel.

“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.”