The Last Days of Il Duce (16 page)

“We're not sure yet. Could be coincidence.”

“Who is this man?”

“He's got half a dozen names. Or had half a dozen names. He's dead now.”

“Dead?”

“They recovered his body about a week back. In an ice box, behind a fish house down on Grant Street. It took us a while to come up with an ID.”

I felt a small thrill at the notion of this dead man packed in ice, behind a restaurant in Chinatown, and the idea my brother had been involved with him somehow. It seemed to suggest how far wrong my brother had turned, and in that way relieved me of the guilt I felt about moving in on Marie. He'd been up to something stupid, my brother, some dumb-fuck routine.

“Lee Chow, Mark Nai, Naikon Lee, Minh Ho. Those were some of the dead man's aliases. Sound familiar?”

“No.”

“He was a young man, maybe thirty. Part Vietnamese, part Chinese, scorned by either culture. He did dirty jobs around town. For money, of course.”

“What kind of dirty jobs?”

“He killed people. He was an assassin. Old Chinese profession,” she said. “Italian, too.”

The waitress came with more coffee. The two of them spoke a while in Chinese, exuberantly, as if I were not there. Leanora pointed at my cup for the woman to pour, and the old waitress did so once again without looking at me or acknowledging my existence, as if she were watering a plant.

“I ordered you some chop suey. It's their specialty. The best in Chinatown.”

“Great,” I said. “My favorite.”

The truth was I hated chop suey, I could not even stand to look at it on my plate. When the waitress was gone, Leanora undid the clasp on the manila envelope. She took out a set of glossies, put them carefully on top of the envelope, then slid the whole thing towards me.

“You know him?”

The top picture looked to have been taken after the corpse had been discovered, when the man still lay in the ice box. The face was discolored but his eyes were open and the features discernible. His looks were familiar, but I wasn't quite sure and decided to keep the similarities to myself.

“He was strangled with piano wire before they dumped him in the box.”

“Never seen him.”

I started to slide the pictures back but Chinn shook her head.

“Keep looking.”

I flipped to the next glossy. It was a full head shot of the guy, taken down at the morgue I guessed, and I shrugged at Chinn, and she nodded, and I flipped again. Next was a series of mug shots taken when the guy was still alive. Front profile. Rear. Side. If I had any doubts before, I didn't now. I recognized him all right. He was the man behind the door where Jimmy Wong had sent me to deliver the black leather valise, down the alleyway, the day before my brother's death.

“You recognize him?”

I shook my head.

“Sorry.”

“Look at the last one.”

On the final page, lined up on a single sheet, were several Polaroids, of my brother. They were a few years old and showed him on a deck somewhere, palms and eucalyptus rising in the background. He was smiling, very aggressively, but there was a look of confusion and sadness in his face too. It was a look I'd seen a lot these last few years as he struggled to get control over things that continually slipped away.

“Do you know where those were taken?”

“No. I've never seen those pictures before.”

“Looks like he's somewhere in the city.”

“Those eucalyptus could be anywhere in California,” I said.

“Not that house on the other side of the grove. The yellow Victorian.”

“That's a common style.”

“Not that cornice,” she insisted. “It's very unusual.”

She let the pictures sit there in front of me, the picture of the murdered Indo-Chinese and the Polaroids of my brother. I tried to avoid looking either at Chinn or the pictures. My eyes skittered around the cafe. The old woman moved slowly behind the counter, pouring coffee one customer at a time. The place was quiet except for the mumbling of an old Chinese man who sat alone in one of the booths.

“What are you doing with these pictures of my brother?”

“We found them in the dead man's apartment.”

“The one in the ice box?”

“He had a number of pictures in a drawer in his kitchen. Pictures of different people. We checked around, all these people, they're dead. Murdered.”

“You think he killed my brother?”

“We think somebody paid him to do it.”

The little hammer was beating in my wrists again, harder than before. I could feel it in my chest, too, and in my head. I thought of myself walking down that alley with the black valise in my hand, and I saw again that valise sitting in Micaeli Romano's office, and the empty picture page in Marie's portfolio, and the angle of the landscape behind my brother's head in the picture that lay in front me. Marie's deck, I thought, that's where he's sitting, in the same spot I had been the other night. It was clear to me now, though I did not want it to be clear. I felt the blood rushing from my face, and the hammering, and that pale dizziness that overcomes you when the world seems no longer real. In the background was the strange muttering of the old Chinese man, the shuffling of the old waitress moving infinitely slowly, carrying two plates now, coming toward us. Leanora Chinn, dressed in her crisp blue blouse, leaned forward, regarding me from behind the porcelain mask of her face. There was something in the depths of those almond eyes, a small little window of light.

“Are you all right?” Her voice was soft, full of concern. I was tempted to reveal to her whatever I knew, but I gave it a second thought and held my tongue.

“I'm just trying to take this in.”

“Of course.”

“Is there any connection between the different people this man killed?”

“Not that we can see. They all just had somebody that wanted them dead. A relative maybe, a wife, a business associate.”

“I see.”

“Do you know why anyone would want to kill your brother?”

“No. Have you spoken with Luisa? His widow. She saw him every day. A lot more than me.”

“She took her kids to Sacramento. To live with relatives. But we don't regard her as a suspect. And she doesn't seem to know anything about his life away from the house.”

I could hear the waitress behind me, very close now. Chinn gathered up the photos, making way for the plates.

“We came across some domestic violence reports from a few years back. The first wife and your brother. Police in Redwood City were over to their place a couple times. But nothing with Luisa.”

“They are different women. He was older,” I said. “And that earlier, it was divorce stuff. Posturing for the courts.”

I don't know why I stuck up for him that way, just because he was my brother. Maybe I thought it was true, or what had happened back then had been my fault underneath it all. The waitress put down our food, two plates of chop suey.

“You don't have any idea where the pictures of your brother might have been taken? Or who took them?”

I hesitated.

“No,” I said.

I started in on my plate. It tasted like any chop suey I had ever had. I couldn't stomach it but I ate it anyway, ferociously, as if it were the last food in the world.

“You like it?”

“It's delicious.”

“I've been eating here since I was a kid.”

“It's the best I ever had,” I said. “Makes me want to visit China.”

“I've been. The food isn't as good there.”

“I bet.”

With the arrival of the food, Chinn loosened up. Either that or she was pretending to loosen so as to catch me off guard. She dropped the matter of the pictures and talked instead about the Chinese situation in the city. How the old bachelor society was almost gone now, that class of Chinese men who had labored and grown old in San Francisco, never marrying because Chinese women had not been allowed to immigrate. She talked about those sad old men and about the new immigrants, the poor ones from the mainland and the rich ones from Hong Kong. How the tongs, the old criminal syndicates, were enjoying a revival now, with the trade in heroin and smuggling of illegal immigrants. How the Indo-Chinese tongs were the most violent, made up of Southeast Asians, mixed race, scorned by everyone, and how they brought with them from Cambodia and Vietnam their old rivalries, and their old ways of fighting those rivalries. All these different groups, they had their politics and their figureheads, she said. They had their Maos and their Chiang Kais, their Ho Chis and Madame Ngus. Yes, I thought, they all have their Il Duces, whom they argue over night and day, weeping and hollering, and whose pictures hang on the bedroom walls. Then Chinn told me that the young Indo-Chinese who'd killed my brother had been an informer for the Pathet Lao during the Vietnam War. He'd been killed, she suspected, by a Vietnamese street gang.

“How do you know?”

“They left their mark carved on his body.”

“He was a member of a rival gang?”

“No. He operated independently.”

“They didn't approve of his business?”

“Maybe. Or maybe they just didn't like his color.”

We left the restaurant and as we walked she pointed out little bits of Chinatown history, old opium corners, crib houses, she was full of this kind of thing, then suddenly we were halfway up Kai-Chin alley and she was gesturing down at the old stones.

“This alley here, there is a picture of it, from early in the century. Chinese men in black capes. They called it the Street of Gamblers.”

We stood in front of the door where I had dropped off the valise Jimmy Wong had given me, and I looked at the door, and Leanora Chinn looked at me, and I saw it was no accident that she had guided me down this alley. She was studying my reaction to see if I knew this place. I kept my face as empty as I could.

“Something else,” Chinn asked. “Did your brother know anyone in Reno?”

“Not that I know of.” I avoided looking her in the eye. She was coming at me from too many angles. “Why do you ask?”

“We found some ticket stubs in his room. Credit card reports. It seems he went there not long before he died.”

“I don't know anything about that,” I said. “I have to get hurrying. There's things I have to do.”

As we walked out of the alley, Leanora Chinn was quiet. I felt burly alongside her. She was a small woman really, delicate, in her midnight skirt and her dark blouse, and as we emerged out of the alley into the pagodas and glitter of Grant Street, I was tempted again to divulge to her all the things I knew, to make a breast of it before it was too late. Instead I shook her hand at the corner and disappeared as fast as I could into the crowd along Columbus Avenue.

TWENTY-ONE

THE ENEMY WITHIN

It was sunset and an orange light filled the sky. I sat in the graying shadows of that light, at my desk, and studied my wall of ancestors. My mother's Aunt Angela in her peasant dress. Her uncle Tony, arms crossed in front of his belly, legs big as tree stumps. My grandparents and great grandparents standing in a wheatfield in the middle of the Abruzzi nowhere, back home in Italy. I had pictures of these people but no memories because they'd never come to America. They were the ancestors I had never known, and their images hung on the wall alongside pictures of yellow fields I had never seen, and postcards from Italian cities whose names I could not pronounce.

Among them hung photos of myself and my brother and my parents too, standing in front of our Chevys and Fords, hands on the door handles, as if ready to launch ourselves into that sun whose reflected light was fading this minute from the windows of the TransAmerica Pyramid. Only in those pictures, we did not yet seem convinced we were ready for any such journey.

They had no advice for us then, those ancestors, and no advice for me now.

The way Chinn had taken me down that alley, reading my face the whole time, it was no coincidence. The longer I thought about it, the more I figured the cops had gone up and down Kai-chin alley not just with my brother's photo but with mine too, looking to see if anybody recognized me. Maybe someone had. Maybe someone had seen me walk up to that yellow door and hand the valise inside. If so, it would look to the cops like I had arranged the murder.

Maybe that's the way it was supposed to look. I told myself the Romanos were behind this. From what Chinn had told me, I knew my brother had gone to Reno. Joe had been onto something after all, I guessed, and he had tried to use it, to make sure he got a piece of the China Basin deal. Only the Romanos wouldn't be blackmailed. Michael Jr. had lifted the photos of Joe from the album in Marie's apartment during one of his visits, I guessed. Then he and the old man had sent the money and photos to Jimmy Wong, who'd passed them along to me. They'd managed it so I'd delivered the hit message on my own brother, handing the whole package to the assasin, and now there was nothing I could do.

If I went to the police with this story, how would I prove it? Romano had his valise back and all the evidence pointed to me.

So I couldn't go to Chinn. And I didn't feel like I could tell Marie either, because she wanted me to take Romano's job, and I didn't want to bring everything crashing down around us. The easiest way would be to play dumb. Just take Micaeli's offer. Act like I thought it came from the goodness of his heart. It was tempting, I had to admit. Because Marie would be mine and the old man was dying anyhow, and I could get my revenge against him the easy way, by going back later and spitting on his grave.

Even so, I didn't know if I could keep the truth balled up inside me like that, knowing that Romano had been the one behind it. How he'd arranged my brother's death and made it so the blood was on my hands too, carrying that money down the alley.

I didn't know what to do. So I studied my wall of ancestors for a while, then I searched out the old article I'd lifted from Johnny Bruno's place, the one about Pavrotti's death. I found nothing in it I hadn't already gone over in my head, so I went back to the clipping from the real estate section and tried to decipher the figures my brother had scrawled on the other side over the obituaries. The writing was in pencil, barely legible, and I copied the figures over onto a fresh piece of paper, one letter at a time, one number, but they still did not mean much to me.