Chasing the Dragon (4 page)

Salvatore had a decision to make regarding his nephew and the circumstance of his brother’s death.

And the truth was, he was fearful for himself.

A silly fear, an old man’s fear. Passed along to him by his brother on his deathbed. All that hysterical talk.

He was sitting alone in the limo, behind the mortuary, waiting. There was a breeze outside but in the car it was hot and he could smell his own sweat. Three funerals in the last two months, all in this same suit. And he had an envelope in his pocket. The envelope had been given to him by his brother on his deathbed. Inside the envelope were three strips of film—negatives. Salvatore had held them up to the light but the images were difficult to read. But what difference did it make? The doctor had told them death was coming. His brother’s hysteria, there at the end, it was because of the tumor, maybe, the deterioration of the brain, the trauma of death itself.

I will drop this envelope in the grave
, Salvatore thought.
Let it all be buried. Lay my brother to rest
.

Now his nephew appeared. Dante emerged from the funeral parlor with that odd lope of his, headed toward the limo. Salvatore’s wife and his son were in another car, farther up the caravan, riding with the daughter-in-law and the grandkids. Giovanni’s old buddies were occupied with their prostates and would be along in a moment.

Alone with his nephew, Salvatore found himself unable to hold his tongue.

“Your aunt, she has a tendency to spit things out,” Salvatore said. “You know how she is.”

“She says what she thinks.”

Salvatore smiled then. He couldn’t help himself because it was true.

“Was there an autopsy?”

Dante wasn’t going to let it alone, he could see. He had his father’s shrewdness, his nephew, the dog-headed persistence—but his mother’s looks. His brother’s wife had been a beautiful woman in the old-world way, with that high head of hers and the long nose and the eyes that tore you apart with a glance.

“No. There was no need for an autopsy.” Salvatore shook his head. “The cancer was painful. The doctor fixed your father up with one of those medication implants. Demerol, morphine. I don’t know. Your father overdid it—he overdosed, a heart attack. Maybe it was better though, all things considered.”

“He thought someone was trying to kill him?”

“Delirium.” Salvatore shrugged. “It happens.”

He felt his nephew studying him, peering into him. If they sat here much longer, Salvatore feared, he would change his mind and come forward with the specifics of his brother’s rantings—how he’d started going on about Strehli there at the end. Mark Strehli, who’d worked out at the customs yard in Oakland. Who’d been shot in the head and whose murder investigation Dante had challenged—to ill effect. Himself, he didn’t quite understand. His brother’s rantings were tangled with memories of business deals, arrangements that had seemed reasonable at the time but had a certain stickiness about them now. Much of that stickiness, though, was due to Salvatore’s own son, he had to admit. Pushing the boundaries. Looking for the easy dollar.

Now Ernesto Mollini and George Marinetti appeared on the sidewalk, old buddies, his brother’s die-hard friends.

Uncle Salvatore greeted them enthusiastically.

“Come in,” he said. “Into the big, black car. We are waiting for you.”

The two men had hung out with Giovanni almost everyday these last years, down in Paesano’s card room, and they would be pallbearers—or titular ones, anyway, walking behind the casket while younger men did the carrying—so it made sense for them all to be together.

Before the limo could pull away from the curb, Joe Rossi hustled up to the car. “Let me ride with you?”

The former mayor was a thickset man with luminous eyes and absolutely no hair. His head was a bald dome that showed off the dents in his skull. Though he was past seventy, the mayor was still the same old glad-hander he’d always been.

“I thought you were going with Di Nido. In his Cadillac.”

“That Di Nido, he’s blind as a monkey. My heart can’t take it.”

“Mine neither,” said Marinetti. “Jesus himself wouldn’t ride in that car.”

Uncle Salvatore relented. Ordinarily, he liked the mayor well enough. But Giovanni and his Lordship had had some kind of squabble in the days before his brother died. Rossi had gotten an odd manner about him, bullish in that way he could be, nosey as hell, as if somehow all this had something to do with him.
And maybe it did
, thought Salvatore. The mayor had directed a thing or two their way in difficult times, back when it looked like the warehouse would go under.

The limo headed for the cemetery. Mollini and Marinetti began to banter, the way they often bantered these days, taking sides in an imaginary debate, mocking the rituals they had grown up with.

“The way you tell me, Marinetti, I take the rites, there on my deathbed, the priest waves his cross, then I go straight to heaven?” asked Mollini. “No time in purgatory?”

“That’s the truth. Approximately.”

“Who told you that?”

“It’s an article of faith. Like the virgin birth. You don’t believe it, so far as God’s concerned, you don’t exist.”

“I have to believe it my whole life, or just then, at the last minute?”

“If there’s no priest around, you can imagine him. You confess your sins, it’s an easy ride.”

“What’s the deadline on this?”

Marinetti hummed around. They could be maddening, these two, a distraction to whatever you had on your mind, and at the moment Salvatore was trying to sort through how much of his brother’s agony to pass along to his nephew, who slouched sideways in the seat in the same manner as his father used to do.
Should I give him the film
? he wondered.

“There’s a little time—after you stop breathing, after your heart stops beating—when you’re alone there inside the dark of your head. That’s the deadline,” Marinetti said. “Right then, before your soul leaves your body.”

“I don’t believe it.”

“You will, the time comes.”

“How long I got before the soul leaves the body?”

“Three seconds. Isn’t that right, Lord Mayor? Three—that’s the holy number?”

Mayor Rossi did not answer this question. He was not comfortable with the wry tone, Salvatore knew, with the suggestion that there was something ludicrous at the heart of things. Rossi turned to him then.

“Did your brother take the last rites?”

Salvatore nodded, but he did not like the question. As if Rossi wanted to know what his brother—in his deluded state—had told the priest.

The truth was his brother had no doubt overdosed, like the doctor said. Died from a heart failure, technically, head buried in his pillow. If it hadn’t been the heart, then it would have been the cancer. He was an old man, going to die anyway, so who would bother to kill him?

It was ludicrous.

Even so, Salvatore had been itching to talk to his nephew alone. Not about this necessarily, he told himself, but about the estate, the family business. There were lots of issues, even the possibility—though his son Gary would not like this—that Dante would want an active stake. They must schedule a time—but he did not want to do so now, with the mayor in the car.

Finally they pulled into Cemetery Drive, and made their way down into the part of the graveyard known as Little Italy because of all the Italians buried in the dirt. Marinetti and Mollini got out of the limo, and looked rather grimly ahead. A Chinese from the funeral parlor stood by its open door, waiting for the pallbearers. Behind the cars lay the open grave and an endless line of stones.

“I want to believe,” said Mollini. “But I don’t. For this, you tell me, I’m going to burn in hell?”

“Nonbelievers, they get nothing, no heaven, no hell.”

“Nothing?”

“Nothing,” insisted Marinetti.

“No walking through eternal fires, my body covered with sores?”

“None of that for you.”

“No pustules? No buckets of shit?”

“I told you, you miss out on the whole business. You don’t believe, it’s an empty picture. God forgets all about you.”

“I still don’t believe.”

“You will change your mind, those last three seconds. I can already hearing you crying out.”

“Nothing?”

“Absolutely.”

“Mama Mia!” shouted Ernesto.

He made a motion as if tearing at his hair, frightened by all that nothing stretching out in front of him. The two men laughed and patted one another on the shoulders. But in a little while the joke was over. They stood by the grave, all of them. Mollini and Marinetti submitted, too, heads bowed. Teary-eyed, sentimental, they watched their old buddy disappear into the abyss. Salvatore touched the envelope in his pocket, walked toward the grave.
Throw it in
, he told himself. He fingered the negatives. Then he hesitated. He didn’t know what the hell to do.

Ben years ago at his mother’s funeral, Dante had stood in this same spot, more or less, and watched as his father cast in a red rose after his mother. It was a tradition, to throw something into the grave. That day, while he and his father stood by, neighbors and friends had come forward, tossing thimbles and wine glasses, figs and old photographs, holy cards, a plastic statue of the Virgin Everlasting. Today, by his father’s grave, Dante stood alone. His father’s friends came up and tossed in a little bit of this and that. A red poker chip and the ace of spades. A rosary. A Molinari salami and a Cuban cigar. A snort of grappa. Meanwhile, Uncle Salvatore lingered nearby, his hand in his pocket—hovering in such a way that Dante thought for a minute he might fall in after his brother.

Dante had nothing with him. His gun. His wallet. He kneeled to the ground then and dug his hand into the thick loam the gravediggers had mounded at the edge of the grave. He threw in a handful of dirt, and his uncle sobbed.

There were other traditions as well. One of them had its roots in a sentimental tradition of the fading Italian nobility, who in their waning years would paste photographs and remembrances of themselves into scrapbooks.
Il Libro di Vita Segreta
, these were called, remembrances of a secret life, and at some point this tradition had migrated to the middle class, then to the peasants, and they had brought it with them over the sea. Usually these books were entrusted to a family priest who passed them along to the deceased’s children after death.

At the end of the service, Father Campanella walked up to Dante. Like his friends, Dante’s father had mocked the religion—with all its smoke and its hand waving and its embroidered vestments—but in the end they all succumbed. Or the people who were left behind succumbed for them, submitting the corpse to Father Campanella.

“Your father had a final gift for you,” said the priest. He smiled wanly, and Dante realized his father had put together an
Il Libro
. Dante was surprised. It was not the kind of thing his father would do—but then Dante knew how it went. When the end was coming, the priest would stop by. He would ask to see some old pictures. He would listen to your old stories. And the next thing you knew, there you were with a pen in your hand and a bottle of glue.

“I’ll stop by the church, Father,” Dante said.

He knew the routine, how the priest used it as a chance to get you on your knees, to pray for the soul of the deceased, and for your own soul, too. He was curious about his father’s book, maybe, but he did not know if he could submit himself to the old priest.

The mourners came, pressing close. All of North Beach, it seemed. They embraced him. They kissed his cheeks. The old men in their dry-cleaned suits. The shopkeepers and the hangers-on. People whose names he no longer remembered. Old women with their perfumed smell and their cigarette stink, their teary eyes and rouged-up cheeks. There were some young ones, too, mixed-bloods, children of children, thin kids with freckles and yellow hair. And somewhere among them all was Marilyn Visconti, who brushed against him in her black skirt, her eyes lingering a moment as she took his hands between her own.

Then there was Wiesinski. The only representative from Dante’s days at the SFPD.

“We’ll get together.”

“Sure.”

“The Naked Moon.” He winked. “We’ll tie one down. For old times’ sake.”

After the funeral was over, while walking back to the limo, Salvatore had a second alone with his nephew. Or he thought they were alone. He didn’t realize until later that the mayor had been a few steps behind him, within earshot, though it was also true he did not know exactly when the mayor had appeared, or what he had heard, or whether or not it mattered. This is my brother’s paranoia, he told himself, not my own.

“You and I, we need to talk.”

“Yes.”

“Come to my house. Thursday afternoon—twelve. There’s some family business. Your father . . .” he hesitated. “You and I, we’ll talk. We’ll have a glass of wine.”

Dante nodded. “Who’s handling the estate?”

“Tony Mora.”

“Mora?”

Salvatore explained. Mora was the man who’d been standing with Marilyn, back at the Diamond Mortuary. An attorney. And as Salvatore explained, he watched Dante’s eyes go dark.

“Here,” said Uncle Salvatore.

He reached into his pocket. In the end, by the grave, he had done nothing—and now he handed Dante the envelope, as his brother had wished him to do. “Take this. Safekeeping. You never know what’s going to happen.”

The second he gave Dante the pictures, he regretted the action. The mayor was behind them and had seen, maybe, but then he told himself it made no difference.

“Family pictures?”

Salvatore hesitated, nodded. “Sure,” he said, speaking loudly, though the truth was he did not know what the photos might be. “Me and you, your dad. From the old days.”

“I’ll get them developed. Copies for us both.”

“Sure. You and me, we’ll talk things over on Thursday. Family business,” he said. “But today, we grieve.”

Then he embraced his nephew. As he did, pulling him close, his hands clutching the boy’s side, he felt something beneath the jacket.

A gun.

He looked his nephew in those eyes of his, dark like the shaft of a mine, and he wondered what the hell was going to happen next.