The Big Boom (2 page)

“It’s good for business, that is one thing I will say,” said Ernesto Mollini.

Mollini lit a cigarette. You weren’t supposed to smoke in restaurants anymore, it was against all the ordinances, but no one paid any attention to that in Serafina’s.

“What are you saying?” asked Stella. “What’s good for business?”

“All these new people.”

“What business you in, you could say such a thing?”

“I have eyes.”

“The sitting-around business, that’s you,” Stella said. “Sit around and blow smoke out your ass.”

Ernesto was used to her talk. He was a butcher, or he had been. His shop was around the corner—but his sons operated it now.

“Let’s ask Dante,” said Stella, turning to Dante. “What do you think here, Mr. Funny Pages? Is it a good time to sell?”

Any conversation with Stella was treacherous ground, but especially this ground. Dante knew what was underneath. After his father died, a rumor had gone around.
Dante is going to sell. He is going to marry Marilyn Visconti. She’s in real estate now, the Visconti girl, working for Joe Prospero. Dante’s going to marry her. They will sell his father’s place and leave for good.

But it hadn’t happened yet, no. He hadn’t married Marilyn and he hadn’t left. Instead Dante had leased out his father’s house on Fresno Street to some couple from back East and was living alone in an apartment over Columbus Avenue.

“Why you ask him? He has no opinion worth listening too,” snorted Pesci. There was something like a gleam in his eye. “Otherwise, why would he be sitting around in here. He would be married. He would have himself a woman on the side, with skin like milk. He would have himself a big car and a house on the moon.”

Outside, the shadows were still passing. It was a steady stream these days—people suffused with the energy of the new prosperity. Dante thought about the corpse in the bay. It was not fair, maybe, but he hoped the body belonged to one of those newcomers, a stranger he had elbowed past on the street without seeing, some face he could no longer remember.

The paper had given few details.

“It’s time for me to sell,” said Marinetti. “Look at all these people. I mean, the tree is heavy.”

“Heavy with what?”

“The fruit is ripe.”

“What kind of talk is this?”

“People need a place to live. Prices are through the roof.”

“You know what happens, Mr. Greedy? You think you sell, you make a million dollars, you move to paradise? That’s what you think?”

Stella had opinions on these matters. If no one had sold, then the neighborhood would be okay. If no one had sold, you would still have the Sicilians down by the wharf and the Luccans in the heights and the Calabrians working out at the cannery. There would still be opera out on the streets, and in the open-air markets you would hear the glorious Italian language, and the streets would be clean, and there would be grapevines growing up the telephone poles and beautiful brown-eyed kids on every corner. Julius Caesar would still be alive, and Mussolini, well …

“My son, he has never sold so many meatballs,” said Ernesto Mollini.

“Meatballs,” said Stella. “Fuck them and their meatballs.”

“Every one of these new people—they want a Sicilian meatball.”

“They will forget in two days. People like that—these new people,
they chase the fashion. And anyway, they don’t come to a place like this.”

Stella said it with a mix of pride and bitterness, but she was right. Once upon a time, Serafina’s had been the place. Back when her husband was still alive—her husband the anarchist, relative to Carlo Tresca—back then the bohemians and famosos had come to hunch around the table with the neighborhood types, the dock-workers and the fisherman and the produce hustlers and all the rest. But those days were gone—and since her husband’s death, Stella’s anarchism had turned reactionary. She had never really liked the bohos anyway.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Marinetti. “Probably I will stay where I am.”

“You will sell,” said Stella.

“What kind of thing is that to say?”

“My son saw you down at Prospero’s real estate office,” said Pesci. “You and your daughter. Talking with Marilyn Visconti. He saw you in there.”

Marinetti said nothing.

“Anyway, it is not your decision,” said Stella.

“What do you mean?”

“You will do what your daughter says.”

“That’s not true,” said Marinetti. “I decide my life.”

The truth, Dante knew, was something different. Marinetti was in a bind. He had signed power of attorney over to his daughter after his wife’s death. The old man put on a front in public, but Marinetti was lonely and wept in the apartment. Also, he was running out of money—and if he sold the house he could afford to move into a home. Meanwhile his daughter and her bum husband needed their inheritance now.

“Children,” he said suddenly. “They are nothing but a heartache.”

The room went quiet. A wine-colored light intoxicated the air. Marinetti thinking about the two sons he’d lost, maybe. Ernesto about the family butcher shop that was slowly going under, meatballs or no. Stella about the son who’d moved to Italy, and the other who wouldn’t speak to her, and a third who’d vanished, no one knew where. And Pesci reaching for his Pall Mall, thinking of nothing but his cigarette. For a minute Dante was tempted to look for all of their pictures under the glass, to see if they had ever been young. To look for himself and Angie as well. Then he remembered the corpse down at the morgue, and the task that lay ahead of him. He could turn down the case. He didn’t have to go if he didn’t want to, he told himself. He didn’t have to do anything.
I’m selling.
He lit another cigarette. When he stood up, the others were looking at him, and he wondered if he had spoken aloud. Then Dante threw some money down on that counter glass, on all those fading photos, and went out to join the parade.

U
nlike the living, who held their secrets within, the corpse had no shame. It no longer spoke in the language of the tongue, with all its limitations, but in the language of putrescence. Of stench and gastric fluids. Of unexpected gurgles and gaseous discharges.
Did you love me?
The medical coroner, as well as the detectives who had grappled the body from the bay, were familiar to some degree with the language of the dead, but their transliterations were not precise. They had their evidence kits, their test reagents, their sliced organs in plastic sacks, and their mass spectrometers—but these only told the investigators so much. There was too much noise in the field, so to speak: the rattle of their own lives, the hollering of spouses and children, the flushing of toilets, the sound of their own rumbling bellies. With so much interference, it was all but impossible to filter the noise from the message.

No, no. Look at me.

Nonetheless, there were things that could be determined. A woman in her early thirties. Four days in the water, maybe five. Traces of aspirated foam in her airways. Lungs bloated, chest distended.
The medical examiner suspected death by drowning, though it was hard to be definitive in such instances. It was possible, too, the young woman had been dead before she went in. There were wounds to her head and extremities, but it was hard to tell what these meant. The corpse typically got battered as it was dragged along the bottom by the currents.

Don’t let me go.

The skin was macerated on the finger pads, and her face and nose looked as if they had been abraded. The soft parts of the face had been eaten by crabs and bottom fish. The translucency was gone from the skin. The lividity was blotchy about the head and the chest—pink in places but already gone dusky and cyanotic in others. Decomposition had been slowed somewhat by the coldness of the bay, but the putrefaction advanced quickly once the body was in the open air. The clothes, sodden with water, were stripped away and placed in evidence bags.

A pleated skirt, label from Dazio’s.

Black hose.

A pair of pumps. Purple.

A silk blouse.

Pearl necklace.

A scarf.

No wallet, though. No purse. No source of identification. The stripping of the clothes revealed more maceration, bloating of the limbs. Also bruises on the thighs and forearms—though again, whether these had occurred before death, or after, as the corpse thudded against the pier, was hard to tell. Examination of the vulva showed no signs of sexual penetration. Though again, this was hard to ascertain.

Fuck me.

All these details were written down, recorded in cramped forms to be followed by more reports from the pathologist. Whisperings of the dead, duly noted. If you read the hieroglyph correctly, it led to other documents, to a Missing Persons report, maybe, and eventually to an address. And inside that address were rooms, drawers filled with bills, papers, more scribblings, phone messages, all of which led to friends and family, if there were any, hence to conversations with the living, more hieroglyphs transliterated through memory and dreams.

Don’t forget me.

In the morgue now, there was the sound of the refrigeration unit: then footsteps—and a long metal drawer sliding open on its rusted hinge. The bag was zippered opened and a man sighed, peering into the bag.

And maybe there was some vibration in the mass of cells there on the metal slab. Maybe there was something that connected the nerves to the cells to the fiber to the atrophying mass inside the plastic bag. Something that animated the swollen brain and the optic nerve and whatever was still sentient in that mass.

The man who peered in had a long nose and a sorrowful face and compassionate eyes. His looks had excited the corpse once upon a time, when it was not a corpse, when the bacteria that inhabited the animal were different bacteria and the energy congregated in a different way. The memory of him, or its chemical remains, lingered inside the flesh, and so his presence was recognized in some way. Or so the man imagined. He imagined the corpse peering out from the bag as he peered in.

In another minute he went away.

His footsteps receded, and then the corpse was slid back into the wall, into the cold and the dark.

Dante,
the corpse whispered.

The voice was in his head, Dante told himself. It wasn’t real. But such distinctions didn’t matter.
Take me home.
Once it got inside of you, there it was. You had no choice but to listen.
Don’t abandon me. Don’t leave me here.

A
ll his life, Dante’s job had been to follow, to put his nose into things, and there were times when he felt he was being followed in turn—that he was being watched in the way that he himself watched others. It was a feeling not uncommon in his profession.

He had one of those feelings now—at the 280 merge, heading south, eight lanes of traffic coming together at once—and he watched the rearview all the way to San Mateo. There was no one there.

Truth was, the feeling never really left him. Habit. Survival instinct. Or the family paranoia, his mind coming loose at the hinge.

L
ate that afternoon, Dante met with Barbara and Nick Antonelli at their house down on the peninsula. Fifteen years ago, the Antonellis had sold their place on Russian Hill, and now they lived on a hillside in San Mateo, in a ranch house with colored gravel out front and a giant pumice rock in the courtyard. Dante recognized the rock; it was made of some volcanic material with a surface like
cut glass. He had leaned against it, a long time ago, and the microscopic edges had sliced his palms.

Barbara Antonelli met him at the door. She was an elegant woman in her midfifties, a small-boned woman whose presence was in some ways more striking than her daughter’s.

“Come in, Dante,” she said. “Nick’s on the phone. Some business thing. I—Can I get you something?”

Barbara had always liked him, Dante knew that. The same wasn’t necessarily true of her husband. It had been a while since Dante had seen her, and though she had aged, of course, and it was apparent she was anxious, hollow-eyed with worry, she was still well dressed and had about her an air of glamour. She had the air of a woman who had a secret life and passionate feelings.

“Would you like a drink?”

There was something incongruous about the offer, but the everyday routines often seemed so at such times. The Antonellis had always been big on cocktails, Dante remembered. Given the circumstances, and the fact that he was on the job, Dante figured he should turn her down. But he didn’t.

“What are you having?” he asked.

“What I always have,” she smiled dimly. It was a vague smile, a little twist. Angie’s smile. “A little gin, a little tonic. Lots of ice.”

“Okay,” he said. “That would be fine.”

She went to the ice bucket they kept at the bar, and rattled around. Out in the back, behind her, were the swimming pool and the landscaped yard and the outdoor kitchen.

“It’s been a long time,” he said.

“Two weeks.”

“No,” he said, then realized his mistake. He had been making small talk, but she was thinking about how long since she’d last seen
her daughter. When Barbara glanced at him now, he saw all the grief and the worry. Her gaze skittered away.

“I have to get some ice. We’ve been going through it lately.”

She left the room, and he had a chance to look around. Grass mat wallpaper. An overstuffed coach. Slate on the fireplace, gray slate, gray and black—and in the corner a baby grand that no one played. On the grand was a photo of Angie. It was one of those studio shots, the kind that make people look stiff and fat-cheeked, but there were other pictures in the room, too. Angie on the porch of the old place on Russian Hill. Angie in high school. Angie, a few years back, at a friend’s wedding. Angie with her mother’s dirty blond hair and her freckled skin and those piercing eyes.

There’d been a moment fifteen years ago, when Dante had been in this same room—and Barbara Antonelli had come upon him unexpectedly. Her face had been raw with anger, but when she came upon Dante, the anger had dropped away, and there’d been something naked in the air between them, something that he could not put a name to, even now. Then her husband had walked in behind her.