San Francisco Noir (2 page)

Like nineteenth-century Frenchman Comte de Lautréamont’s surrealist anti-hero, Maldoror, the characters that populate our collection traverse a landscape that is compelling and infernal. Sex-crazed bag-men, framed public officials, disillusioned prostitutes, psychotic kidnapping victims, and desperate ex-cons inhabit a realm where actions are governed by an algebra of desire. Beauty and treachery walk hand in hand. Welcome to a peninsula of broken dreams, shattered lives, and deadly liaisons. These are depictions of San Francisco the local visitors’ bureau hopes will recede along with our fading memories. Meanwhile, the man with the violin continues to play his tune. We hope you’ll enjoy the fare.

Peter Maravelis
San Francisco, July 2005

PART I

Edge City

THE PRISON

BY
D
OMENIC
S
TANSBERRY
North Beach

I
t was 1946, and Alcatraz was burning. I had just got back into town and stood in the crowd along the seawall, looking out toward the island. The riot at the prison had been going on for several days, and now a fire had broken out and smoke plumed out over the bay. There were all kinds of rumors running through the crowd. The prisoners had taken over. Warden Johnston was dead. Capone’s gang had seized a patrol boat and a group of escapees had landed down at Baker Beach. The radio contradicted these reports, but from the seawall you could see that a marine flotilla had surrounded Alcatraz Island and helicopters were pouring tracer fire into the prison. The police had the wharf cordoned off but it didn’t prevent the crowds from gathering. The off-duty sailors and Presidio boys mixing with the peace-time john-nies. The office girls and Chinese skirts. The Sicilians with their noses like giant fish.

In the crowd were people I knew from the old days. Some of them met my eyes, some didn’t. My old friend Johnny Maglie stood in a group maybe ten yards away. He gave me a nod, but it wasn’t him I was looking at. There was a woman, maybe twenty-five years old, black hair, wearing a red cardigan. Her name was Anne but I didn’t know this yet. Her eyes met mine and I felt something fall apart inside me.

My father had given me a gun before I left Reno. He had been a figure in North Beach before the war—an editor, a man with opinions, and he used to carry a little German revolver in his vest pocket. The gun had been confiscated after Pearl Harbor, but he’d gotten himself another somewhere along the way and pressed it into my hand in the train station. A gallant, meaningless gesture.

“Take this,” he said.

“I don’t need a gun.”

“You may be a war hero,” he said, “but there are people in North Beach who hate me. Who have always hated me.

They will go after you.”

I humored the old man and took the gun. Truth was, he was ill. He and Sal Fusco had sent me to borrow some money from a crab fisherman by the name of Giovanni Pellicano. More than that, though, my father wanted me to talk with my mother. He wanted me to bring her on the train back to Reno.

Johnny Maglie broke away from his little group—the ex-soldiers with their chests out and the office janes up on their tiptoes, trying to get a glimpse of the prison. Maglie was a civilian now, looking good in his hat, his white shirt, his creases. My old friend extended his hand and I thought about my father’s gun in my pocket.

I have impulses sometimes, ugly thoughts.

Maybe it was the three years I’d spent in the Pacific. Or maybe it was just something inside me. Still inside me.

Either way, I imagined myself sticking the gun in my old friend’s stomach and pulling the trigger.

“So you’re back in town,” said Maglie.

“Yeah, I’m back.”

Maglie put his arm around me. He and I had grown up together, just down the street. We had both served in the Pacific theater, though in different divisions. He had served out the campaign, but I’d come back in ’44—after I was wounded the second time around, taking some shrapnel in my chest. This was my first time back to The Beach. Johnny knew the reason I had stayed away, I figured, but it wasn’t something we were going to talk about.

“We fought the Japs, we win the goddamn war—but it looks like the criminals are going to come back and storm the city.”

I had liked Maglie once, but I didn’t know how I felt about him anymore.

“You going to stick around town for a while?”

“Haven’t decided,” I said.

“How’s your mom?”

“Good.”

He didn’t mention my father. No one mentioned my father.

“You know,” he stuttered, and I saw in his face the mix of shame and awkwardness that I’d seen more than once in the faces of the people who’d known my family—who’d moved in the same circles. And that included just about everybody in The Beach. Some of them, of course, played it the other way now. They held their noses up, they smirked. “You know,” he said, “I was getting some papers drawn up yesterday—down at Uncle’s place—and your name came up…”

He stopped then. Maybe it was because he saw my expression at the mention of his uncle, the judge. Or maybe it was because the cops were herding us away, or because a blonde in Maglie’s group gave a glance in his direction.

“Join us,” he said. “We’re going to Fontana’s.”

I was going to say no. And probably I should have. But the girl in the red cardigan was a member of their group.

For twenty years, my father had run the Italian-language paper,
Il Carnevale
. He had offices down at Columbus, and all the Italian
culturatti
used to stop by when they came through the city. Enrico Caruso. The great Marconi. Even Vittorio Mussolini, the aviator.

My father had been a public man. Fridays, to the opera. Saturdays, to Cavelli’s Books—to stand on the sidewalk and listen to Il Duce’s radio address. On Tuesdays, he visited the Salesian school. The young boys dressed in the uniforms of the Faciso Giovanile, and my father gave them lectures on the beauty of the Italian language.

I signed up in December, ’41.

A few weeks later my father’s office was raided. His paper was shut down. Hearings were held. My father and a dozen others were sent to a detention camp in Montana. My mother did not put this news in her letters. Sometime in ’43 the case was reviewed and my father was released, provided he did not take up residence in a state contiguous to the Pacific Ocean. When I came home, with my wounds and my letters of commendation, my stateside commander suggested it might a good idea, all things considered, if I too stayed away from the waterfront.

But none of this is worth mentioning. Anyway, I am an old man now and there are times I don’t know what day it is, what year. Or maybe I just don’t care. I look up at the television, and that man in the nice suit, he could be Mussolini. He could be Stalin. He could be Missouri Harry, with his show-me smile and his atomic bomb. This hospital, there are a million old men like me, a million stories. They wave their hands. They tell how they hit it big, played their cards, made all the right decisions. If they made a mistake, it wasn’t their fault; it was that asshole down the block. Myself, I say nothing. I smell their shit. Some people get punished. Some of us, we get away with murder.

“You on leave?”

Anne had black hair and gray eyes and one of those big smiles that drew you in. There was something a bit off about her face, a skewed symmetry—a nose flat at the bridge, thin lips, a smile that was wide and crooked. The way she looked at you, she was brash and demure at the same time. A salesman’s daughter, maybe. She regarded me with her head tilted, looking up. Amused, wry. Something irrepressible in her eyes. Or almost irrepressible.

“No, no,” I said. “I’ve been out of the service for a while now.”

She glanced at my hand, checking for the ring. I wasn’t wearing one—but she was. It was on the engagement finger, which she tucked away when she saw me looking. What this meant, exactly, I didn’t know. Some of the girls wore engagement rings the whole time their fiancés were overseas, then dumped the guy the instant he strolled off the boat. Anne didn’t look like that type, but you never knew.

As for me, like I said, I wasn’t wearing any kind of ring—in spite of Julia Fusco, back in Reno. We weren’t married, but…

“I grew up here.”

“In The Beach?”

“Yes.”

She smiled at that—like she had known the answer, just looking.

“And you?”

“I’ve been out East for a while,” she said. “But I grew up here, too.”

“But not in The Beach?” I asked, though I knew the answer, the same way she had known about me.

“No, no. Dolores Heights.”

The area out there in the Mission was mostly Irish those days, though there were still some German families up in the Heights. Entrepreneurs. Jews. Here before the Italians, before the Irish. Back when the ships still came around the horn.

“Where did you serve?”

I averted my eyes, and she didn’t pursue it. Maybe because I had that melancholy look that says
don’t ask any more
. I glanced at a guy dancing in front of the juke with his girlfriend, and I thought of my gun and had another one of my ugly moments. I took a drink because that helped sometimes. It helped me push the thoughts away. The place was loud and raucous. Maglie and his blonde were sitting across from me, chatting it up, but I couldn’t hear a word. One of the other girls said something, and Anne laughed. I laughed too, just for the hell of it.

I took another drink.

Fontana’s had changed. It had used to be only Italians came here, and you didn’t see a woman without her family. But that wasn’t true anymore. Or at least it wasn’t true this night. The place had a fevered air, like there was something people were trying to catch onto. Or maybe it was just the jailbreak.

Maglie came over to my side and put his arm around my shoulders once again. He had always been like this. One drink and he was all sentimental.

“People don’t know it,” he said. “Even round the neighborhood, they don’t know it. But Jojo here, he did more than his share. Out there in the Pacific.”

“People don’t want to hear about this,” I said. There was an edge in my voice, maybe a little more than there should have been.

“No,” said Maglie. “But they should know.”

I knew what Maglie was doing. Trying to make it up to me in some way. Letting me know that whatever happened to my father, in that hearing, it wasn’t his idea. And to prove it, I could play the hero in front of this girl from The Heights with her cardigan and her pearls and that ring on her finger.

I turned to Anne.

“You?” I asked. “Where were you during the war?”

She gave me a little bit of her story then. About how she had been studying back East when the war broke out. Half-way through the war, she’d graduated and gotten a job with the VA, in a hospital, on the administrative side. But now that job was done—they’d given it to a returning soldier—and she was back home.

The jukebox was still playing.

“You want to dance?”

She was a little bit taller than me, but I didn’t mind this. Sinatra was crooning on the juke. I wanted to hold her closer, but I feared she’d feel the gun in my pocket. Then I decided I didn’t care.

I glanced at the ring on her finger, and she saw me looking.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Berlin.”

I didn’t say anything. Frank went on crooning. Some of my father’s friends, I remembered them talking about the Berlin of the old days. About the cabarets and the bigmouthed blondes with husky voices who made the bulge in their pants grow like Pinocchio’s nose.

“He, my fiancé—he’s a lieutenant,” she said. “And there’s the reconstruction. He thought it was important, not just to win the war. Not just to defeat them. But to build it back.”

“He’s an idealist.”

“Yes.”

I wondered how come she had fallen for him. I wondered if she had known him long. Or if it had been one of those things where you meet somebody and you can’t escape. You fall in a whirlwind.

At that moment, inside Alcatraz, Bernie Coy and five other convicts were pinned down in the cellblock. None of us in the bar knew that yet, or even knew their names. If you wanted to know what was going on inside Alcatraz, the best you could do was climb up a rooftop and listen to the radio—but it was too far to see, and the radio was filtered by the military. Anyway, prison officials weren’t talking. They were too busy to talk. Later, though, it came out how Bernie Coy was the brains. He knew the guards’ routines. He’d managed to crow apart the bars and lead a handful of prisoners into the gun room. He and his buddies had clubbed the guards, taken their keys, and headed down the hall to the main yard; but the last door in the long line of doors would not open. The keys were not on the ring. They had all the ammunition in the world, but they could not get past that door. Now they were pinned down, cornered by the fire on one side and the guards on the other. So they fought, the way men in a foxhole fight. Our boys in Normandy. The Japanese in those bloody caves. The floodlights swept the shore and the tracer bullets lit the sky, and they fought the way desperate men fight, creeping forward on their bellies.