The Big Boom (24 page)

“I came to offer my sympathies.”

She pursed her lips. A kid stood behind her, and he saw this woman was not so much perplexed by him as wearied, that there was no condolence that he could give because there was none she wanted, and anyway he was here for his own peculiar reasons. Because
he had left two wives behind and a handful of children, and he thought maybe he could get back from her what he had lost. Because he was an old man who wanted to feel young.

She saw all this maybe, but her expression did not change.

“Let me get on with my life,” she said.

Cicero stepped away. She shut the door without looking up.

T
he next day Cicero was in his office. Between the Antonelli case and his obsession with the Whitaker woman, he had let a lot of other things get away from him. Some new cases had come in from the city, from the Public Defender’s Office. It was the usual odd assortment. A woman who’d had an anxiety attack and pushed her neighbor down the stairs. A punkster who’d stabbed his girlfriend in front of Wing Piu Projects. A petty thief facing a felony conviction for stealing a stereo. All of these involved knocking on doors, in neighborhoods where people didn’t want to see you. All required looking for inconsistencies in the cops’ case, things the defense lawyers could use to catch the defendant a break, even if the defendant didn’t necessarily deserve a break. Cicero spent the morning looking over the files. Then he put his feet up on the desk and closed his eyes.

Louise was right.

You only had so much time in this world. It was only so long before your heart stammered in your chest, or your breath caught in your lungs. Before your brain turned to jelly and your dick went soft.

He had come home yesterday from Whitaker’s funeral and Louise had been out. Out with the girls. Out on the tennis courts. Out to Pedro’s by the bay where they could drink margaritas and
flirt with the Mexican waiters. When she had come back, still in her tennis skirt, she’d been in high spirits.

I should live, he thought.

We should go on the cruise. We should get the hell out. Me and Louise. But the cruise was months away, and there was the weekend just ahead. Monterey, he thought. I’ll make reservations. I’ll knock off early and surprise her, and we can beat the traffic the hell out of town.

It was an impulsive thing, but what the hey.

Just as Cicero was about to leave, he got a call from his connection down in records. He had almost forgotten. Dante had left a message the day before, asking him to run a tracer on some names and registrations. Three lowlifes, it turned out, whose names didn’t yield much. Sylvia James. Max Bright. Artie Linden, a.k.a. Arturo Lind, with a hundred variations thereof. He turned the name in his head, paused.

It almost clicked, not quite.

Arturo Lind.

What connection these characters had with the Antonelli case, Cicero wasn’t sure. Dante had been vague, and Cicero hadn’t seen him for days. His gut feeling was the same, there was something else underneath the surface, but Cicero wasn’t sure he wanted to know anymore. The girl had drowned and the old man had killed himself, and that was ugly enough.

He called Dante and left what little information he had about Lind and the others on his cell.

He stopped at the Ligurian Bakery on the way, got a loaf, a bottle of wine. As he came up Mason, it occurred to him Louise might not be home, but then he saw her blue Miata out front. A tennis racket lay in the backseat, and a warm-up jacket, but this did not
trouble him at the time. It was only later that he thought about how Louise never left her racket in the car. She loved her racket.

He went inside. A pair of sunglasses lay on the counter, and another tennis racket leaned against the stool. A spare, he guessed.

Cicero called her name.

“Louise!”

He was not often home this time of day and did not want to startle her and so he called again. The bedroom was at the rear, and he heard someone moving back there. Louise was changing her clothes, he guessed. Always a new outfit, this one.

He put his hand on the knob, but it was locked.

Someone hissed on the other side; someone whispered. He thought of all that had happened lately, and his heart hammered in his chest. He thought of all the dead, of all the private investigators he knew whose lives had been invaded. “Louise!” he called again, and just then she opened the door.

Louise was in her tennis skirt and her polo shirt but she didn’t have on shoes and her hair was mussed. Behind her, on the bedroom deck, stood Frank Strum. Strum was a decade younger than himself, a probate lawyer, recently divorced. He had on a blue polo and a pair of shorts. His shoes were untied and the tongues were all sloppy and untucked. Strum dodged his glance. It was a second-story deck, with no way off except back through the house.

“We were just talking,” she said. “I was showing Frank the view.”

“There is no view.”

“There’s the yard.”

“It’s a beautiful yard,” said Strum.

“There is no view,” said Cicero.

Then Cicero left. Maybe Louise had her panties on under that
skirt, he thought. Maybe she didn’t. He walked down to the corner store and bought himself a pack of Pall Malls. If I had a gun, he thought, I’d go up and shoot them both. But he didn’t carry a gun anymore. As he stood there, looking back at the house, the name teased at him again,
Arturo Lind,
but he couldn’t quite get it. It’s my age, he thought, everything’s slipping away. Then Louise came down with Frank Strum, carrying a racket. They climbed into her blue Miata and drove away.

It had been Strum’s racket in the car, he realized. He should have figured.

T
he day after the Antonellis’ funeral, Dante went to Serafina’s. Inside, it was the same wine-colored light, and the same tablecloths, and the same pictures under the glass countertop. He had brought the communion photo with him, the original, the one that had been in his mother’s attic all these years. Meanwhile, Pesci sat in the corner with his walker, smoking, and Mollini was by the window. Stella stood in the middle of the room, wiping a plate clean with her apron.

She called out to Mollini.

“So, Mr. Butcher: I see you have been abandoned.”

“You don’t have to yell,” he said. “I can hear you fine.”

“Where’s your buddy? Where’s your friend Marinetti?”

“It’s open house day,” said Mollini. “Open house day, he has other things to do. Marinetti, he has a life. Everything is not about Serafina’s Café, you know.”

“I don’t believe that.” Stella smiled, but it was the kind of smile you could not tell what she meant. “I don’t believe he has anything else to do.”

“He puts on his good suit and his daughter takes him to Palo Alto. To the Olive Garden in the mall.”

“She takes him there instead of here?”

“The Olive Garden is good,” said Pesci. “They are generous with their soft drinks.”

“You should stab me for a soft drink,” said Stella. “You should drain my blood and lay me out in Gucci’s basement.”

“So this means Marinetti has sold the house?” asked Pesci. He emanated cigarette smoke. It was a nasty smell but likely better than the stink he might have emanated otherwise: the stink of an old man who seldom changed his clothes anymore and for the past three nights had slept in his black shirt with the red rose stitched into the collar.

“He has some offers,” said Mollini. “But I don’t know. I think maybe there is a problem.”

Stella went to the kitchen and came back with Mollini’s order. She set it down with the flair of a prison guard. “Those new people don’t have the money they pretend.”

“They’re clearing out. That’s what I hear,” said Pesci.

Stella sneered. “How do you know so much, Mr. Diet Cola? Mr. Pepsi Lite, with a twist of lemon? How do you know anything, an old man like you, who never changes his shirt?”

“I have a cell phone. So I know. I hear things. Yesterday my granddaughter, she calls me from downtown. Granpapa, she tells me, there are rooms full of computers with no one at the terminals. It is a sight to see. People kill themselves, times like these, I told her. People jump out of windows. Just like the old days. First one, then another.”

Stella shook her head. “This is all Prospero’s fault,” she said. “Ever since he started working with the Chinese. Just ask Gucci.
First, his father hires a Chinese undertaker. Now they own his place.”

“You have a Chinese cook,” said Mollini. “He’s right back there, cooking the spaghetti.”

“Only the noodles. Not the sauce.”

“What difference does it make?”

“It makes a big difference. I see people from the old days, they tell me, oh, I should never have left North Beach. So I say to them, I tell them, Come down, I have your picture under the glass. Come down and take a look, I say. But do they come?”

Meanwhile Dante sat at the corner, looking at the communion photo—the old one, the original, before his mother had stripped out the background. It was a group photo, fathers and their children, but also godfathers and uncles. Antonelli stood in the row behind his daughter, and Dante’s own father was in the same row, intermingled with a number of other men, cocky as could be. La Rocca and his Chicago boys, Dante guessed, but he did not know who was who. While he studied the photo, he thought about the three people who’d come after him the day before, out on the cliff. Cicero’s message had revealed little more than he already knew.

“What is that you have there?” Stella asked.

Dante showed her the picture.

“Your mother was right,” Stella said. “The picture is better without them. Who needs those kinds of people in your communion photo?”

“Let me see,” said Pesci.

“Nobody to see. Just some Chicago nobodies.”

“Oh, Chicago,” said Pesci.

Then the old man launched into the story Dante had heard a hundred times. It was a story the old North Beach Italians loved to
tell. It proved how they were both tough customers and legitimate Joes. Straight-ahead guys, but also nobody’s fool. It was the story of how the Chicago mob had tried to get a foothold in San Francisco. The story changed every time Dante heard it, but the gist was the same. The Chicago mob had sent a couple of their top men down on a scouting expedition, but the North Beach locals had caught word and met them at the station. “Those Chicago boys went back on that same train—but they didn’t go first-class,” said Pesci. “We sent them freight. And when those meatpackers opened the door to that railroad car, back home in Chicago, well, put it this way … That’s why we got no mob in San Francisco. That’s why Italian North Beach, it’s clean as a whistle.”

How much truth was in the story, Dante had no idea, but he knew the same old men told other stories. They liked to have it both ways. Sure, they were independent, on-the-level, up-and-up guys, but they knew people, had friends. In Chicago, Italy, New York. And if anyone stepped on their toes, well, just try it, just go ahead and try …

Dante handed Pesci the photo.

“Which one is La Rocca?”

Pesci peered. He looked a long time. “This one in the back. And this one over here, that’s his son.”

Dante glanced over the old man’s shoulder. The older La Rocca, standing there in his fedora, would have to be long dead. The younger one would be in his sixties by now. It occurred to him these were the same men he’d seen in the photo at Barbara Antonelli’s house, there on the table.

“The son, he moved the business over to Vegas.”

“What were they doing in North Beach that day?”

“La Rocca and his family, they came down for the weekend. A
godson was getting his confirmation that day. So they came down, and Antonelli’s father, he has a photographer. He likes to show off who he knows.”

“I remember La Rocca’s godson,” said Stella. “He was a problem, that one.”

“Maria Mateo’s boy. Who was that Polack she married?”

“The priest, he could do nothing. I don’t want to tell you what that boy did.”

“Which one?” Dante wanted to know.

Pesci put his thumb on the boy who stood at the edge of the frame, the kid just on the verge of motion.

“They sent him off to the country. That boy.”

“Lindowski. That was the name. Maria Mateo married him, and they moved out to the Excelsior.”

“It was a cocker,” said Stella. “A little cocker spaniel. The priest gave it to the boy, a little puppy. And the boy dropped it in a rain barrel and watched it drown.”

“Went to work for La Rocca, I remember.”

“What did you say his name was?” Dante asked.

“Lindowski,” said Pesci. “Arturo Lindowski.”

“No, no,” said Stella. “It was something else. When the Polack married Maria, he shortened his name. Lind. That was it.”

Arturo Lind.

“He was no good,” said Stella. “Sick in the head.”

Dante understood now. Almost. His guess, from the way she’d been behaving, was that Barbara Antonelli understood, too.

“You see why your mother trimmed those people out,” said Stella. “You see why she didn’t want them in the picture.”

D
own at the Solano Enterprises, there was no longer a receptionist. There was a foosball table still in the lobby, but no one was playing. There were no more croissants on the sideboard, no more muffins, and the latte machine had vanished. Lifted from its place, carried off by a disgruntled employee. In the offices themselves, there stood a number of unattended monitors: computers animated by screen savers—nature scenes, flying toasters, randomizers that broke into color, into city shapes, a shimmering message that read:
FUCK YOU, SAN FRANCISCO
.

Dante got the feeling the equipment wouldn’t be here long. There weren’t too many people around, but those who were here, they worked with a fevered, anxious air. In the accounting offices, behind the glass windows, a woman was taking a painting off the wall. Payroll was closed. And in the cubicles themselves, people were stripping their desks, uncabling equipment, carrying it down the hall.

Dante found Solano in his office, standing at the window, looking down Jackson Street toward the Pyramid.