The Ancient Rain (6 page)

No doubt there was some truth in what she said. The government wanted a jump on the pretrial publicity—to cast the case in the public eye. It was also true, though, that Owens had gone fugitive in the past.

“Bill is innocent. All of this, it has nothing to do with what actually happened back then. The whole point—it's politics. The government doesn't want anyone arguing with them, past or present. It's a way of disrupting our legal practice. Because we defend certain kinds of people. Because the government wants a free hand … That woman, Elise Younger, she hired an investigator.”

“Sorrentino?”

“Yes, that's the one.”

Dante had met Jill Owens once before—that evening here at the house—and she had seemed like a different person, her hazel eyes full of light and confidence. A bit smug about her politics, self-assured, in love with her husband, her kids, dedicated to her work, obsessive, insistent upon its importance, though admitting, too, that some of the people she helped defend, these days, you wouldn't want to bring home.

Now her face was puffy, her hair in a ruff. Her son gazed up toward her. “I want you to remember this,” she said to him. “It's how they work. It's how they run us down.”

The daughter appeared on the stairs, Marilyn just behind. Kate faltered a moment at the bottom step, her precociousness stripped away: thin and rangy in her nightshirt, only half-awake, regarding them all with a surliness of the type teenage girls usually reserved for their mothers. Then she started to weep. “Come here, darling,” said Jill. “Your father's a good man. We are not going to let this happen. Your father will be home in a couple of days. We are not going to let those people do this to us.” She rocked the girl back and forth and looked up at Dante. “Bill trusts you,” she said. Outside, a car negotiated the turnaround. The passing light rose and fell through the big window overlooking the porch. “When he posts bail, we will have a get-together for the defense. All of his supporters, here. You'll come, won't you? You and Marilyn?”

“Of course,” said Dante.

The car was gone now, the headlights passed. The bamboo rustled in the long shadows by the fence.

*   *   *

When Dante and Marilyn drove home that morning, it was just past dawn. There was extra security at the bridge—police and fire vehicles flanking the sides and emergency workers everywhere in yellow slickers. There was a line at the toll longer than made any sense.

A bomb on the bridge … an abandoned pickup truck … unauthorized personnel on the catwalks …
On the radio, a talk-show host repeated rumors picked up by callers off the citizens band. The rumors were repeated by the men inside the traffic copters, then retracted, and later repeated like words in a dream.

A policewoman in yellow gear waved them through.

It was a damp morning, and on the other side of the bridge, in San Francisco, there was an antiwar vigil going on. Protestors dressed in skeleton suits. Death masks. Angels holding swords. Sheets covered with blood.

Don't fight their war.

Women on their knees, over dead children.

Or these were the images in Dante's head, later, as he tumbled toward sleep, in Marilyn's bed. He nuzzled up close to her. Over the mudflats, the sky was gray. The flocks were diminishing, wheeling away. His grandmother had once told him the story of the fishermen who lived with the pelicans out in the Calabrian rocks … the fishermen, with the big noses, who followed the birds out to sea. Birds who lived in the rocks, birds with brown eyes, beaks in the shape of fish, shoulders hunched like peasants.

Marilyn ran her fingers over his nose. She grabbed his dick.

When she touched him, he forgot about the birds. He forgot about Owens, in his orange suit down at the Hall of Justice. He forgot about the little boy with his raw fingers and his weeping teenage sister, and forgot, too, the woman who'd been shot to death in the bank.

“Let's go somewhere far away,” said Marilyn.

“Okay.”

She blew in his ear. The sound of it was like the sound of the ocean inside a seashell.

“Don't leave me,” she said. “Promise me.”

“I won't.”

“Promise me you'll love me forever.”

“I will.”

They made love. Afterward, she got up and checked her answering machine. There was a man's voice on it. Dante thought he heard the faintest wistfulness in that voice, or that's how he would remember it later. But he could not be sure. Because he was already on the shore again, out on the mudflats. The skies were empty, and the tide was rolling in.

PART TWO

The Explosion

SEVEN

As of yet, Guy Sorrentino was not concerned with Dante Mancuso. There was no reason why he should be. He had known Dante, from their time on the force, and it was true their paths had intertwined briefly. It was true, too, that they were about to get intertwined again, but neither man knew this yet.

Whatever violence lay ahead—whatever enmity—neither man was aware.

Maybe Sorrentino, himself, had felt a flash of recognition when he'd seen the hawk-nosed man milling around in the crowd in front of the Federal Building. But he had not put the face with the name, and had no way of knowing that Dante might have a connection with the Younger case.

And the Younger case was the only thing Sorrentino was concerned with these days.

Sorrentino had met Elise Younger three years ago. She was like a daughter to him, and it was on account of her he pursued the case.

Or so he told himself.

It was on account of her, on account of the case, that he had been fishing around North Beach these last few months. It was on account of the case that he'd left his apartment in San Bruno this morning and drove down to the Serafina Café. The café was a place from his past, down in the old neighborhood, and he would not have gone there, he told himself, if not for the case.

*   *   *

These days, down at Serafina's, the television played continuously above the bar. It was an older television, a cathode-ray tube with a convex surface. It had been hooked up to cable somehow, but the color was off, and the picture had a glassy, funhouse look.

Stella, the owner, had put it up there a few years back.

Her husband would never have agreed, Sorrentino knew. People didn't come to watch television, he would say, they came to talk, to eat—but things were different now. Stella's husband was dead, and it wasn't the old days anymore. The Serafina's clientele had always been from the neighborhood, and they were getting old, their numbers dwindling, here on the border of Chinatown and Little Italy. Those who came now were mostly from streets close by—old Italians who lived in the Florence Hotel or the apartments above Columbus. There were some who still came down from Telegraph, but it was not an easy walk down the hill. If you had the money for a taxi, then you would not eat at Serafina's anymore.

Stella's husband may not have approved of the TV, but things had changed. Stella had to compete with the bar around the corner and also with the flophouse lobbies.

It wasn't the old days, no.

It wasn't like when Rossi was mayor, and people lined up in the streets smoking cigars. Not like when they had fresh tomatoes delivered every day, and you could smell the produce in the trucks as they went by the orchards of San Jose, the cherries and the prune plums, and also the broccoli from San Bruno.

But people did not grow broccoli in San Bruno anymore. As far as Sorrentino could tell, there was no such thing as prune plums.

*   *   *

When Sorrentino walked in, the regulars did not pay him much mind. Or it did not seem so to him. A couple of old men sat at a table by the wall, and they glanced up at him the way they might glance at anyone. Maybe they paid him some mind, maybe they didn't. There was an old bastard who kept his eyes on him, and an old woman who whispered to herself, and some shadows at a table in the back, but Sorrentino didn't recognize anyone, at least not from what he'd seen so far, and he assumed it was similar the other way around. When he sat down, Stella peered across the counter at him.

“Guy,” she said.

He started to smile but knew better. There was nothing like joy in her face.

“Spaghetti.”

She nodded and walked away. Ten years since his last visit, and that's all it came down to. He was sixty-one now, and Stella was seventy. They had grown up in the neighborhood, and he remembered when she'd been a blousy young woman standing around with her thick brown hair at her father's produce stand. Sorrentino had known her husband. He'd gone to her wedding and to her husband's funeral. She'd been there, too, when Sorrentino had put his own son in the ground—and this was what it came down to: Stella walking back to the kitchen wearing a dress like his grandmother used to wear. Then returning with a plateful of noodles and sauce.

“Wine?”

“No. I don't drink anymore.”

“Some people can't take it, I guess.”

“No. Some of us can't.”

Sorrentino had left the SFPD not long after his divorce. His wife had said the divorce was on account of his drinking, but the truth was that after their son had died, he didn't have much stomach for his wife anymore. Nor she for him.

The boy had been killed when his truck toppled over on some road in Kuwait, some weeks after the fighting had ended, in the aftermath of the First Gulf War.

There was a photo of his boy along Stella's counter, under glass on the countertop along with photos of lots of other people from the neighborhood. He knew the exact place where the picture lay, farther up along the counter, but he didn't glance toward it, and neither did Stella.

That wasn't why he had come.

Very faintly, as if in the distance, he heard Chinese music, a pop song, and also the sound of running water, dishes rattling. Sorrentino wanted to talk to Stella, but she had her back to him now.

The old ones watched the television. It was way up in the corner and the sound was off, but they watched anyway. On screen, firemen were digging out the rubble at Ground Zero in New York. The World Trade Center had gone down some time ago, a little more than a year now. It looked like old footage but you couldn't be sure, and anyway the media liked to show it over and over. And the faces had started to become familiar. Like they were people Sorrentino knew out there doing the digging. Then the scene switched and switched again. Other parts of the world, men being held hostage. Then bombs—artillery in the desert. Protestors in a European city, upset over the expanding American retaliation—but then, no, this last scene was here.

Downtown San Francisco.

Local jackasses. A-number-one idiots. Wise guys against the war.

“It's over.” The man who said this was old, maybe a million years. Maybe a hundred million. He sat with another old man at the table by the wall.

Sorrentino did not recognize either man at first, but the longer he looked, the more he began to see something familiar about the pair—their faces before gravity had lengthened their chins, before the moles had grown ulcerous, when the skin was still tight and there was not so much hair growing from the nostrils and the ears. The older of the two men wore a black shirt. He coughed and lit a Pall Mall.

Johnny Pesci, he remembered. And the other one—George Marinetti. Pesci was Marinetti's uncle, something like that, and the two were always arguing. Together, they looked as if they'd crawled up out of the crypt.

“It's over,” Pesci said again.

At a table nearby sat Julia Besozi. Guy recognized her now as well. She wore a hairnet, with blacking on the scalp underneath, like the old women used to do when their hair thinned. She sat alone, sipping tea, legs crossed, wilting into the wallpaper.

She smiled. Her eyes were black like pebbles.

Meanwhile Stella had retreated into the kitchen. You could hear the Chinese dishwasher in the back, laboring in the sink. You could hear him humming along with the radio and dishes clattering in the background. Then he dropped a dish, and you could hear Stella scolding him in Italian.

It was an old routine. Stella enjoyed it, yelling at the Chinaman. It went on for a while and then there was silence.

In the recesses of the café, in a rear booth, one of the shadows moved. Franceso Zito, he thought. Mollini. Ettore Patrizi. Or men who resembled them. Sorrentino remembered obituaries, but maybe he had been mistaken. Or maybe not. Maybe they
were
dead. They raised the grappa to their lips and grunted, but that didn't prove anything either way.

“It's over,” said Pesci.

“What's over?” Marinetti wanted to know.

“The whole business. America—all of it.”

“I don't see how you can say that.”

“They should beat their heads in.”

“Whose heads?”

“All of them. All their heads.”

“That's not a thing to say.”

“Once upon a time, things were not this way.”

“‘Once upon a time,' what does that mean? When was that, anyway, once upon a time?”

“It's not now.”

“When…”

“They should beat them on their heads.”

“Once upon a time, they should beat them on their heads. This is what you mean, once upon a time?”

“Once upon a time, this was not permitted. You have to lay down the law.”

“Don't fool yourself, there's plenty of beating going on now. Everywhere, people are getting beaten.”

During this, old lady Besozi was sitting there with her tea, her legs crossed, and that pinched face—but sitting upright, upright as could be, with that same vague smile on her face. Looking right at him.

He smiled back, but she didn't respond, and when he swiveled away, her eyes stayed fixed on the same spot.

The old woman was blind.

Meanwhile, Pesci asserted himself. He did not mean to let it go. “Blah … you let the world get away with murder, you let them stick a flower up your ass, it's what you get.”