Chasing the Dragon (3 page)

The Beach was in his memory again, all of a sudden, and Dante had a sensation that pulled him in two directions at once, a feeling that in some ways he had never left home. The alleys and hotel rooms of New Orleans, Bangkok, Spokane, every passage between here and there, every place he’d been, they were all somehow interconnected, part of the same town; but their streets kept metamorphosing under his feet, so he was always at home and never quite there.

Once things had been simpler. He’d been a native son, a neighborhood kid. Named for his maternal grandfather, Dante Pellicano, a fisherman from Santa Flavia who married a superstitious Calabrian and whose daughter, the beautiful Teresa, had given him a grandson.

“Oh, your nose,” Marilyn Visconti had said to Dante once upon a time, petting him in his uncle’s kitchen. “Your beautiful Italian nose.”

And they had begun to kiss.

The Pelican.

The nickname had been his grandfather’s once, but it passed to Dante, and with the name had come the whole neighborhood, he had thought, like some kind of birthright.

The phone rang. This time, he caught it on the third ring.

The voice on the other end was thick and familiar. He thought for an instant he had his father on the line—but it was Uncle Salvatore.

“Dante,” he said. “I have been trying to reach you. I have some hard news. . . .”

Then Uncle Salvatore went on to tell him what he already knew: His father was dead. As he listened to his uncle, he could not help but hear his father’s voice and feel again the sense of something hidden under the surface. That sense had haunted the conversation between himself and his father these last years, ever since the Strehli case and the argument that had erupted between them.

“We’ll talk when you get here.”

“Yes, we’ll talk,” said Dante.

Part of the argument with his father had had to do with Marilyn Visconti. There was a tangled history. Daughter of Alberto Visconti—with whom Dante’s family had had a bitter fight a generation ago. She had been dating his cousin, but Dante had fallen for her anyway. Wholesome and forbidden both at once. Dark olive skin. Italian on one side, German on the other: German Jew. With her taut lean body and her wild hair. Wide, thick lips. A wide mouth full of laughter. Oh, Marilyn Visconti. Who did not seem so interested in Dante’s cousin as his cousin was in her, and whose body fit so well against his own, there in his uncle’s kitchen.

“Oh, your nose,” she had moaned, her hand drifting to his belt. “Your beautiful nose.”

And Dante was still thinking of her when the jet started its descent into San Francisco later that evening, and the city lay beneath him like some darkening jewel, a smear of buildings, winking palms, a wash of pastel under the fading light.

The old men gathered at the heart of North Beach under the awning of the Diamond Mortuary. They were aware of everything, those old Italians. They watched their old buddies approach in their Cadillacs (and their enemies, too)—and they saw Dante walk around the corner in his funeral suit,
home to pay his regards
—and they made their remarks to each other, not in words, maybe, but in the language of the body: raising their eyebrows, digging their hands a little deeper into their pockets, thrusting forward with their groins, and turning their mouths up in wry smiles that suggested they knew it all. They knew every goddamn thing.

Old fishermen and restaurateurs, real estate men and plumbers, the loyal standbys, neighborhood regulars and the guys who’d sold out—for a place down in Burlingame, maybe, or San Rafael, or Richmond—and who found themselves these days back at the Diamond more often than anyone wanted to think.

All the dirty business, all the gossip. Maybe they were just old men gathered around the hive—but they knew it all.

Cavelli and Marinetti. Scarpetti and Romano. Di Nido and Pesci and Mussolino.

A car pulled into the mortuary lot, and another of the old gang crawled out. Grossi, maybe, or Anteo. Or Rossi, the Lord Mayor himself. It was a small parking lot, and a Chinese attendant commandeered the keys, directing the newcomer toward the entrance, to where the old men stood in their polyester pants, their knit shirts, and their tailored suit coats. Knock-kneed sentries. Guardians to the land of the wise.

There was a time, walking these streets, when Dante had felt all but prescient. As if he could tell at any instant what was happening anyplace in the neighborhood. How the wind had just shifted, and old man Pesci was washing out his felucca—a fishing skiff from the old days, no motor, just a sail and net—and how at the same time Gino Scaparelli was wiping down the bar at the Naked Moon, and the prostitutes were gathering under the blinking neon, and the Chinese man who everyday pushed his fish cart down Grant Street, his hair in pigtails, was just this moment turning the corner, letting out his ancient wail, the fishmonger’s call.

Dante could still hear that call now, he imagined, though in fact the old peddler had been dead for years.

In the same way, once upon a time, Dante had known when something was out of whack in The Beach.
La Saggezza
, his grandmother had called that knowledge. The Wisdom. The ability to know something without knowing. To feel it in your bones.

Now, approaching the old men under the awning, he feared he had lost that wisdom. He knew nothing anymore.

Dante pitched his cigarette into the gutter and stepped off the curb. He glanced over his shoulder, scanning the alley behind, the second-story windows, a fire escape that snaked the wall. An old habit. He wore a gun holstered beneath his jacket. A .40 caliber Glock. The same as he had carried when he was with the force.

Old man Marinetti, the schoolteacher, held out his hand. “Dante Mancuso,” he said. “It’s good you came all this way. From New Orleans. You are a good son.”

“What son would do anything different?” Dante said.

Marinetti nodded his head up and down, as if in agreement. The other men nodded, too, his father’s cronies stepping closer now, lips pushed out, getting a good look at him.

“He was a
paisan
, your father,” said Ernie Mollini, the butcher.

“A true Italian,” said Scarpetti, the broker.

“Yes,” said one of the others. They were all chiming in now.

“A Sicilian of the first class.”

“You could count on him the way you can’t count on anyone anymore. Where you live now, my boy—New Orleans, is that right?”

“Yes.”

“What’s your line of work?”

“I’m in the export business.”

Dante did not elaborate. He looked up at the awning. Underneath the name of the mortuary was the name of its new proprietor:
DENNIS YANG
. Then a string of Chinese characters. The old men looked up, too, following his gaze, and shrugged their shoulders.

“Gucci, the mortician, he sold out,” said Mollini. “Sold his contracts with the business. All the special deals, the combination packages. So if you bought your service long time ago from Gucci, then today you get buried by the Chinese.”

Meanwhile, another car pulled into the mortuary lot. An attendant helped the driver out.

Uncle Salvatore.

And along with him, Aunt Regina—using a walker now. Then cousin Gary.

“The Chinese are not so bad,” said Marinetti. “They do their job. It’s no disgrace.”

“No. No disgrace.”

A couple of the men shrugged again, big clownish gestures, lugubrious, sad—as if to say, truth be known, it was a disgrace after all, but what could you do? Men were fools. Born to be disgraced. So it was only natural to be disgraced in death, buried by strangers, because your own kind had retired to San Bruno, sold your funeral contract to the Chinese down the street.

“What difference does it make?” Cavelli said, the old bookstore owner, the philosopher of the bunch.

“No difference,” responded Mollini.

“Dust to dust.”

“Italian, Chinese, Jew—Lady Death, she don’t care. She loves everyone all the same.”

“She come into your bed at night, she give you a big kiss.”

“She smooch you all up.”

“That’s right. A big smoocher, that lady.”

“I kiss her right back,” said Mollini. “Hell, I stick it right in her mouth.”

Now Uncle Salvatore and his entourage were all but upon them, and at last Dante saw the light in his uncle’s eyes, a fierce light that was alarmingly like his father’s had been, full of some dark joy.

They embraced.

He was outgoing, his uncle, an appetitive, warm-hearted man who when Dante was young would pick him up and crush him to his chest so tightly Dante felt as if he might vanish inside him; Dante still remembered the smell of his cologne, how his white shirt was damp with sweat. Aunt Regina, though, was more reserved. She’d been a startling beauty in her day, but age had taken her beauty along with her disposition. She was palsied, and her skin was so crinkled and papery it looked as if wasps had built a nest inside.

Aunt Regina teetered on her walker. Dante moved to press his cheek against hers.

Behind him, a red Alfa Romeo turned into the mortuary lot. Dante caught it from the corner of his eye and for a second was conscious of the street, and the weight of the gun beneath his jacket.

Cousin Gary came forward, hand extended. His smile was crooked. Salvatore and Regina’s only son, adopted. He and Dante had been like brothers once but that had all changed—and now Dante saw a sudden uneasiness in his cousin’s eyes. The driver of the Alfa had gotten out. A well-dressed man, very sharp, close to Dante’s age, but no one he recognized. He held open the passenger door and the woman who climbed from the leather seat was Marilyn Visconti.

She had the same bewildering beauty. Her eyes caught his, and he realized everyone was watching, and it occurred to him everyone knew everything that had happened between himself and Marilyn and his cousin. Or thought they knew. There were times he was not so sure himself.

Aunt Regina, hovering on her walker, cut the moment dead.

“Let’s go inside,” she said. “Before I fall on my face.”

“Yes, yes,” said Uncle Salvatore.

Behind the mortuary doors, in the viewing room, there were more people than he expected. His father’s sister, a great-uncle, an old business partner—Grazzi, from the days when his father had run the grotto down at the wharf. Others, too. Judge Molinari. Gino the bartender. Max the sandwich maker. Alfonso the doorkeeper at the Naked Moon. Big shots and nobodies. Joe DiMaggio’s cousin. Wendy Amato, niece of the famous film director.

And Mayor Rossi. Son-of-a-bitch. A family friend who’d been in office back during the Strehli murder—when that whole business had exploded in Dante’s face—but the good mayor had done nothing to help him.

No one from his days at the SFPD was here, though. No one except Jim Wiesinski that is, the vice cop who’d left the force and gone onto to security operations in the private sector.

The Big Why, they’d called him.

Known for his love of the sleaze bars—for the open-handed way he worked the streets, questionable tactics, working both sides against the middle. Dante had run into him, oddly enough, at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, not long after he’d left town. A few days later, Dante had been recruited by the company. A coincidence, maybe, he’d never been sure.

But whatever Wiesinski’s motives, or his flaws, he was here, head bowed. You could say that for him.

Dante sat down in the front row, reserved for family, next to his Uncle Salvatore. He whispered to Dante, “I want you to know your father died peacefully.”

Aunt Regina coughed, then leaned over her husband.

“It’s a lie,” she said. “No one dies peacefully.”

Father Campanella stood up now in front of the casket. In the old days, they’d dragged the caskets down the streets to the church—and people wept and wailed and threw flowers—but today the priest said his bit here in the mortuary chapel. His father had not wanted a funeral mass.

“Twenty years ago we buried Giovanni Mancuso’s father,” said Father Campanella. “Ten years ago, we buried his wife. Today, we bury the man himself.”

The priest had a formula for such occasions, a kind of litany. He started in with the names of the deceased’s ancestors, relatives beyond the pale, and as he went on he would inevitably name the streets of the neighborhood here on which the dead man had stood; events at which he had been seen; the names of friends, still living, who had once stood beside him—so that by the end everyone in the audience had been mentioned, and people were mourning not just the dead but themselves as well, and the slow disappearing of the world as they had known it.

His aunt leaned over again.

“Your father—he thought someone was trying to kill him.”

“Hmm?”

“At the end, the cancer was in his brain.”

“Hallucinations,” his uncle said, and he put his hand on his wife’s arm, as if to make her be still. She paid him no attention.

“A policeman came to the house,” Aunt Regina said. “A Chinese.”

It was time for the viewing of the body, the last farewells. Dante knew how it would go. The visitors would walk by, one at a time, looking down into the old man’s face, verifying that it was indeed Giovanni Mancuso inside that casket, checking to see if Yang’s handiwork was as good as Gucci’s.

Before long it was just Dante and his uncle, the blood relatives. Father Campanella led Dante and his uncle up to the casket, and Dante knelt under the pressure of the priest’s hand. Then the others left and Dante was alone with his father. He gave the old man a long look, from head to toe; then he got up himself, knowing that when he’d left the room, Yang’s footmen would come out from behind the curtains—or wherever it was they waited—then close the lid on his father and wheel that heavy box down the corridor, through the padded doors, into the waiting limousine.

Whatever wisdom there was in the world, Salvatore Mancuso didn’t know anymore. He had known once maybe, or thought he knew, but he did not know now. He’d lived in North Beach all his life, seventy-two years, and he was a big shot, more or less—at least on this hill of dirt—but he still didn’t know what to do. They’d made their share of money, he and his brother. They’d raised their sons. They’d eaten a million meatballs and smoked a million cigars—but in the end he was as ignorant as at the beginning, and now his brother was inside that black box, and his own hands were shaking.