The Last Days of Il Duce Read Online Free Page A

case those eyes looked me over, up and down, in a way that made me feel already as if I did not exist. Out in Kearny Street, the Midwestern girl was taking a picture of her boyfriend in front of the Buddhist temple. Some monks were beating drums on a balcony overhead and an old woman was crying. All these lives were going on, each one ignorant of everyone else, and none of us safe.
    I returned the empty valise to Jimmy Wong, but it wasn’t until I got inside Kim’s Bar and drank my first beer that the feeling of impending danger began to fade, receding in the face of those Italian ancestors whose photos looked back at me from across the bar.

FOUR
    JOE ABRUZZI, ON THE EVE OF HIS DEATH
    My brother lived down in the Mission District now, with Luisa, his second wife. That Friday I met him, as I often did, at one of the old Irish bars on upper 24th Street; then we drove to Dolores Park. We stopped the car underneath a palm tree and passed the weed back and forth between us, like we’ve done ever since we were kids. I had pretty much given it up but my brother, even coming onto middle age, he still liked his dope.
    From Dolores Park you can see over the high yellow palms to the pastel streets of the Lower Mission, which were all swamp and tule land before the Franciscans came and put the Indians to work. The Ohlone learned Christianity and then died with the anguish of the Franciscans in their hearts. Many of the Indians still lie buried beneath the park. The Mexicans in the neighborhood say you can see the souls of the Ohlone jolt loose, into the sky, each time we have a quake.
    â€œIt’s still swamp down there,” Joe said, nodding his head toward the barrio. “Don’t let anybody fool you. It’s a swamp and it’s a slum. And I’m going to get the hell out.”
    Like my father, Joe was a carpenter, but unlike the old man he was restless by nature. He liked to be outside swaggering about under a blue sky, a hammer strapped to his belt. He always smelled of the sun, my brother, and of sawdust, and when he was a young son of a bitch, and strong, the girls would squat on the stoop across from ours and watch him unload his truck. One of those girls was Marie, though she never dated my brother until after I’d gone down to school, in southern California. By the time I came back she and Joe were a regular thing. I had taken up with a USC girl named Anne; she was pretty and smart and had parents who lived in a big house in Pacific Heights. The four of us double-dated. Marie was a wild one then, and I remember smelling the wildness of her as she draped herself around my brother in the front of the car and glanced battingly back at me and Anne. She wanted the car to go faster, she said; she wanted—like an Aztec princess—to dip herself in gold; she wanted to touch herself and feel the thrill of her young body, like the thrill of reeds rustling in the high grass. Marie would say these things, or things close enough, and I would take Anne’s hand and later, when we were alone, I would kiss Anne wildly about the lips. But in the end it was not Anne whom I loved and my brother could not hold on to Marie.
    â€œI’ve got it figured,” Joe said. “I’ve got a way out. I’m going to make a lot of money.”
    â€œHow’s Luisa?”
    â€œLuisa’s fine. Her kid’s a crankster, a guy was knifed down the street, the house stinks of dry rot, but Luisa’s fine. She whistles a happy tune.”
    Joe had married Luisa a couple years back, a Mexican woman with two kids of her own. Sometimes Joe could be pretty funny talking about their life together but he was a moody guy, who could swing from one emotion to the next without warning.
    â€œI told you I’m putting together my own crew again, Nick. And I’ve got a job. A big job. Right here in the city. And the best part is the way I got it. I just reached right in there and took it out of that son