The Last Days of Il Duce (10 page)

My usual evening routine was to hit Mama Mia's first, a little slophouse down Columbus Avenue. Then I'd drink for a while in the A-1 Lounge before heading up to Kim's, then back to the joints on Broadway. I followed the same path almost every night and it made a nice little loop.

Only tonight Mama Mia's spaghetti tasted liked the slop it was, and I had no stomach for all those losers, heads down, forever rolling off their stools inside the A-l. Also I had the notion I was being followed. By vice maybe, or Chinn's people—but I couldn't put the spot on anyone definite. I sauntered past the Montgomery Block, where the bohemians used to slouch and smoke their dope, jerking off in the dirty mattresses, then I headed up past the rubble of the International Hotel. An old beatnik squatted in those stones muttering to himself, reciting the names of poets who would be forgotten in the next century. It was a long list and the names were indecipherable in his throat. Overhead loomed the TransAmerica Pyramid. The domino players in Portsmouth Square, the struggling shopkeeps and vegetable men, they all liked to say how at twilight you can see in the windows the ghosts of all the business men who have died of heart attacks inside. All I have seen though are executives emerging from the underground parking garage, faces serene and inviolate behind the tinted windows of their beautiful cars.

I went over to Kim's earlier than usual and found a different crowd. Something had changed over the weekend. At first I thought it was the hour, or I had walked in the wrong door, but no. New management had taken over and the place had gone pastel. The crowd was young and beautiful and Chinese and smiled at one another in their American clothes. The photographs of the Italians had been taken from the wall. Outside an old Chinamen with no place to drink cursed and spat on the walk.

I contemplated that offer old man Romano had made and felt inside my chest a feeling wild and sad. Meanwhile the white fog cascaded down Kearny and the strains of some prerecorded saxophone wailed in Carol Doda's old joint. I thought of my brother in his grave up in Colma, how all he had really wanted was to be let inside the house, where the sauce was being ladled thick and sweet. It was all I wanted too, I suppose, but I couldn't accept the old man's offer, just as I couldn't walk up the street and knock on Marie's door. Marie was right. I didn't have the nerve. That house might be open for me, but no way could I bring myself to walk inside and sit at the table.

I suppose I could have given myself a little bit of analysis about that. How it came to be that me, the man on the outside, was the eviction agent. And who was it I was trying to punish, when I threw those son of a bitches out on the street? I didn't dwell it over though. Instead, I took my feet further down Columbus. In a little while I found myself with nowhere to go, standing in front of Portafino's. Like everybody else I ignored the joint and would not have given it a second glance if Ernesto Tollini hadn't seen my brother inside a couple weeks before.

Portafino's is dark like a cave, a place with tired walls, bare and plain, tables with no cloths, no menus, nothing but bottles behind a bar and old men playing cards. Though the door is always open, few outsiders wander in. Anyone can see at a glance it's no one here but the nobodies of Little Italy, talking about the old country, muttering in their mother tongue. Don't matter that the old country is not what you remember and never was, because the mother tongue, she don't care about details so small and precise. Inside Portafino's there wasn't much to see. Just the long yellow-necked bottles of Gugliano. The red bottles of Toscano. A wall of liqueurs like that behind the bar, sweet and nauseating, inside porcelain bottles that had waists like young boys and smelled of women who had splashed on too much perfume. The air rancid, walls the color of cigars that had turned yellow and stale in the sun. I looked over the old men playing cards, but their faces had the look of old trees, ravaged by the ages—and there wasn't anyone I could recognize. I decided not to interrupt the card game but to wait for the bartender who stood above them, watching the cards go round.

After a while he came to me, though not in any particular hurry, and it was clear that another two bucks in the register didn't matter to him either way. He spoke in Italian. “
Private club.
”

“Chianti,” I said. “A glass of Chianti.”

He went on speaking in his own tongue. “
Sorry, but it is not possible for me to serve you a drink, only people who have membership in the Italian club.
”

Though I had a pretty good idea what he was saying, I didn't want to be given the stiff, so I played stupid. Or maybe Marie had got to me, and I decided to show some nerve.

“No, no. I want Chianti. A glass of red wine.”

Meanwhile the old men at the table kept their noses in their cards, their faces hidden beneath the wide brims of their decaying fedoras.

“I'm looking for my brother,” I said and slid Joe's picture once again across the bar.

“How am I supposed to know your brother?”

He spoke English now and his big brown eyes glimmered at me from behind the bar. He'd known the language all the time, of course, but had been playing the same game with me he played with the tourists, just to keep me out of this hair.

“He was in here about a week ago,” I said. “A few days before he died.”

The man took Joe's picture and studied it more curiously now, his mouth open, his eyes intent. He had on his face that troubled, rapturous look people get when they study the faces of the dead.

“He looks like you.”

“Do you remember seeing him?”

“I am not here everyday.”

“Ask your friends. Maybe they remember.”

The bartender shrugged his shoulders, exaggerating his gestures, and tried to hand the picture back to me. “Please. These are old men, this is their place, do not drag such business into here.”

“My mother was Rose Abruzzi. We lived on Vallejo Street. Surely one of these men knew her.”

“You from the neighborhood?”

“Yeah.”

“I never seen you.”

“I never seen you either. Maybe it's the age difference.”

“You're not so young,” he said.

“Go ask them, will ya?”

The bartender relented and took the picture to the old men. They were stubborn and did not want to look up from their cards, but eventually they did, making a big deal about it, leaning back in their chairs and passing the picture around. I could hear my mother's name muttered about the table, and my father's. At length one of the old men came over to me. His face was as old as the fucking wars.

“You do not recognize me. But I recognize you. The instant you walk in this place, I recognize you.”

I peered into the old man's face but all I could see was his age.

“I knew your mother, your father, I knew all these men on all these streets. Now you young people, you know nothing.”

“I agree. It's a sin, the way we are.”

“No. Sin is for people who know God. No God, no sin. And life is meaningless without sin.”

“I'll commit one soon,” I said. “Tell me your name.”

“I am no one. Only Sammy Lucca the butcher. I sold your mother meat for twenty years. And I watched you and your brother steal hot dogs from my shelf.”

I nodded and peered into his face.

“I remember now,” I said, but it was a lie. I didn't remember Sammy Lucca or his hot dogs.

“I knew you would.”

“Have you seen my brother around this place?”

“A couple weeks back, he was sitting over at a table here, with John Bruno. You know Johnny?
Il Buffone? Il Facsisto?
” The old man smiled a sad smile. Johnny Bruno, with his Black Shirt still hanging in the closet, was a joke around Little Italy.

“
Si,
” I said.

“Your brother was talking to Johnny Bruno. The two of them left together, went to Johnny's place. Now I want you to pay me for those hot dogs.”

I laughed, thinking it was a joke, but Sammy Lucca didn't see anything funny. His friends were watching him from the table, he had his hand out, and it was all a matter of honor now. I'd seen it a hundred million times before. So I gave the old bastard his nickel, plus thirty years interest, then went out to hunt up Johnny Bruno.

THIRTEEN

IL FASCISTO

Johnny Bruno was one of those exiled men Mrs. Tollini had been going on about the other day. One of those San Francisco Italians who had been snatched up and penned inside the Western States Internment Camp during the war. When those men came back to San Francisco, most did not stay long. The streets were wrapped in all that euphoria, confetti tumbling down, and the shame was too much for the
Il Buffone
who had supported Mussolini once upon a time. Shame and then shame again, because how else could it be, all North Beach celebrating and then these men, aliens now, walking about with their heads hanging in everyone else's hoopla. Most gathered their families and scattered soon as they could, and a number ended out in Reno. Johnny Bruno was one of those. He had returned to North Beach after his wife died. His son lived over in Oakland, and this way Johnny could take the subway under the bay once a week and get a look at his grandkids growing up underneath all those eucalyptus trees.

I already knew most of his story but Johnny told it to me again, sitting in his room at the Ling Wei Hotel. The Ling Wei was a pensioners' hotel, formerly the Hotel Colombo, one of the few places around not owned by Jimmy Wong, but that didn't make it any more pleasant. Johnny Bruno sat slumped in a chair under the window, smoking one Pall Mall after another, stinking out the place.

“I read about your brother in the paper. Terrible, the way they kill him.”

“Yeah.”

“But no one pays any attention these days.”

“No.”

“Meanwhile, Molini, two hundred years old, he gets an obituary the size of the moon. But what do you expect?”

“I don't know.”

“A Genovesi like him, big shot delicatessen owner, he buys himself flowers in advance, pays the newspaper. Goddamn Genovesi think they can buy everything. When I was a kid, we Sicilians.…”

He would've gone on it with, I know, but the Pall Mall got to him and he started to choke. The people in the Mission might lock you out, tell you nothing at all, but these Italians loved nothing better than to intertwine you in their familial wars, so that any slight had precedent in a feud generations old and ultimately pertained to their own grievances more than your own.

“Why did my brother come to visit you?”

“We just talk, that's all.”

“What about?”

“The old days, he let me reminisce. But my reminisce, you know, is no sweet stuff. I have some stories to tell and nobody wants to listen. Your brother, I guess, he had his own reasons. But I have my life in boxes all around me. It's the way I am.”

It was true. Johnny Bruno's apartment was a cluttered mess, pictures everywhere, Sicilian fishermen, haggard women, Johnny as a young man hanging out in Washington Square, slouching around, curly-headed, arm hanging over some girl's shoulder. He wore his Black Shirt and a cigarette hung from his lips.

“That's what gets me in trouble. I joined the Fascio Umbrile. We met every week. The truth is, some people did not want me in. A Sicilian. But the group, it was paid for by the Italian Consul. And the Consul says everybody gets in. That's the word from Rome. From Il Duce.

“Some people say why you keep this picture in your house? You were no fascist. You were just a young man, you didn't know what the words mean. I say, I have nothing to be ashame.”

He stopped here to catch his breath. He wheezed and coughed a little, then pointed at me with his cigarette.

“Your father, they called him to the stand. 1942. Mr. Snitch, he told the USA a list of names. Supposed fascists.”

“He wanted to protect my mother.”

“No. He did it because your mother was in love with that son of a bitch Micaeli Romano. Your father wanted to punish all the Italians at Fugazi Hall. But I don't blame him, no. The Committee knew his weakness, they had him by the balls.”

I was getting tired of Johnny Bruno. He'd a sly look on his face, a bitter old man up to no good in the world.

“Is that what you talked about with my brother?”

“A little bit.”

“That all?”

“I'm telling you now. Everything. There were rumors you know, when you were born.…”

“The rumors are wrong.”

I knew what was coming and cut him off hard. I had heard this story before, when I was about sixteen years old. I didn't believe it then and didn't believe it now, but I had computed out the years once, adding them up in my head to see if it were possible Micaeli Romano was my father. It wasn't. I had been born after the war, my brother two years after that, and all this while Micaeli had still been overseas, serving on the American mop-up crews in Italy. Anyway I had my father's short nose, his Anglo eyes, his Irish feet. I do not look anything like Micaeli.

“The day the Japs hit Pearl Harbor, all that smoke was coming out the radio, so the police buzzed North Beach. They rounded us up. Took us to Sharp Park, we could see the Japs and the Germans the other side of the chain fence. Six weeks before there's even a hearing. But Micaeli, they let him out in two days. His father's money.

“Papa Romano, he was the biggest fascist of them all. Visited Italy and kissed Il Duce's ring. So we were glad when his son, young Micaeli, the lawyer, gets himself sprung. We figure it won't be long before he springs us too.”

“Papa Romano renounced fascism. Micaeli.…”

“It was a lie. We got messages all the time in jail. ‘Romano is still with you. Long live Il Duce!' This kind of shit. Only Micaeli never helped us. He was playing it both ways. Just seeing how the war would go.”