Peter Maravelis - San Francisco Noir

My father had given me a gun before I left Reno. He had been a figure in North Beach before the war-an editor, a man with opinions, and he used to carry a little German revolver in his vest pocket. The gun had been confiscated after Pearl Harbor, but he’d gotten himself another somewhere along the way and pressed it into my hand in the train station. A gallant, meaningless gesture.

“Take this,” he said.

“I don’t need a gun.”

“You may be a war hero,” he said, “but there are people in North Beach who hate me. Who have always hated me.

They will go after you.”

I humored the old man and took the gun. Truth was, he was ill. He and Sal Fusco had sent me to borrow some money from a crab fisherman by the name of Giovanni Pellicano. More than that, though, my father wanted me to talk with my mother. He wanted me to bring her on the train back to Reno.

Johnny Maglie broke away from his little group-the ex-soldiers with their chests out and the office janes up on their tiptoes, trying to get a glimpse of the prison. Maglie was a civilian now, looking good in his hat, his white shirt, his creases. My old friend extended his hand and I thought about my father’s gun in my pocket.

I have impulses sometimes, ugly thoughts.

Maybe it was the three years I’d spent in the Pacific. Or maybe it was just something inside me. Still inside me.

Either way, I imagined myself sticking the gun in my old friend’s stomach and pulling the trigger.

“So you’re back in town,” said Maglie.

“Yeah, I’m back.”

Maglie put his arm around me. He and I had grown up together, just down the street. We had both served in the Pacific theater, though in different divisions. He had served out the campaign, but I’d come back in ’44-after I was wounded the second time around, taking some shrapnel in my chest. This was my first time back to The Beach. Johnny knew the reason I had stayed away, I figured, but it wasn’t something we were going to talk about.

“We fought the Japs, we win the goddamn war-but it looks like the criminals are going to come back and storm the city.”

I had liked Maglie once, but I didn’t know how I felt about him anymore.

“You going to stick around town for a while?”

“Haven’t decided,” I said.

“How’s your mom?”

“Good.”

He didn’t mention my father. No one mentioned my father.

“You know,” he stuttered, and I saw in his face the mix of shame and awkwardness that I’d seen more than once in the faces of the people who’d known my family-who’d moved in the same circles. And that included just about everybody in The Beach. Some of them, of course, played it the other way now. They held their noses up, they smirked. “You know,” he said, “I was getting some papers drawn up yesterday-down at Uncle’s place-and your name came up…”

He stopped then. Maybe it was because he saw my expression at the mention of his uncle, the judge. Or maybe it was because the cops were herding us away, or because a blonde in Maglie’s group gave a glance in his direction.

“Join us,” he said. “We’re going to Fontana’s.”

I was going to say no. And probably I should have. But the girl in the red cardigan was a member of their group.

For twenty years, my father had run the Italian-language paper, Il Carnevale . He had offices down at Columbus, and all the Italian culturatti used to stop by when they came through the city. Enrico Caruso. The great Marconi. Even Vittorio Mussolini, the aviator.

My father had been a public man. Fridays, to the opera. Saturdays, to Cavelli’s Books-to stand on the sidewalk and listen to Il Duce’s radio address. On Tuesdays, he visited the Salesian school. The young boys dressed in the uniforms of the Faciso Giovanile, and my father gave them lectures on the beauty of the Italian language.

I signed up in December, ’41.

A few weeks later my father’s office was raided. His paper was shut down. Hearings were held. My father and a dozen others were sent to a detention camp in Montana. My mother did not put this news in her letters. Sometime in ’43 the case was reviewed and my father was released, provided he did not take up residence in a state contiguous to the Pacific Ocean. When I came home, with my wounds and my letters of commendation, my stateside commander suggested it might a good idea, all things considered, if I too stayed away from the waterfront.

But none of this is worth mentioning. Anyway, I am an old man now and there are times I don’t know what day it is, what year. Or maybe I just don’t care. I look up at the television, and that man in the nice suit, he could be Mussolini. He could be Stalin. He could be Missouri Harry, with his show-me smile and his atomic bomb. This hospital, there are a million old men like me, a million stories. They wave their hands. They tell how they hit it big, played their cards, made all the right decisions. If they made a mistake, it wasn’t their fault; it was that asshole down the block. Myself, I say nothing. I smell their shit. Some people get punished. Some of us, we get away with murder.

“You on leave?”

Anne had black hair and gray eyes and one of those big smiles that drew you in. There was something a bit off about her face, a skewed symmetry-a nose flat at the bridge, thin lips, a smile that was wide and crooked. The way she looked at you, she was brash and demure at the same time. A salesman’s daughter, maybe. She regarded me with her head tilted, looking up. Amused, wry. Something irrepressible in her eyes. Or almost irrepressible.

“No, no,” I said. “I’ve been out of the service for a while now.”

She glanced at my hand, checking for the ring. I wasn’t wearing one-but she was. It was on the engagement finger, which she tucked away when she saw me looking. What this meant, exactly, I didn’t know. Some of the girls wore engagement rings the whole time their fiancés were overseas, then dumped the guy the instant he strolled off the boat. Anne didn’t look like that type, but you never knew.

As for me, like I said, I wasn’t wearing any kind of ring-in spite of Julia Fusco, back in Reno. We weren’t married, but…

“I grew up here.”

“In The Beach?”

“Yes.”

She smiled at that-like she had known the answer, just looking.

“And you?”

“I’ve been out East for a while,” she said. “But I grew up here, too.”

“But not in The Beach?” I asked, though I knew the answer, the same way she had known about me.

“No, no. Dolores Heights.”

The area out there in the Mission was mostly Irish those days, though there were still some German families up in the Heights. Entrepreneurs. Jews. Here before the Italians, before the Irish. Back when the ships still came around the horn.

“Where did you serve?”

I averted my eyes, and she didn’t pursue it. Maybe because I had that melancholy look that says don’t ask any more . I glanced at a guy dancing in front of the juke with his girlfriend, and I thought of my gun and had another one of my ugly moments. I took a drink because that helped sometimes. It helped me push the thoughts away. The place was loud and raucous. Maglie and his blonde were sitting across from me, chatting it up, but I couldn’t hear a word. One of the other girls said something, and Anne laughed. I laughed too, just for the hell of it.

I took another drink.

Fontana’s had changed. It had used to be only Italians came here, and you didn’t see a woman without her family. But that wasn’t true anymore. Or at least it wasn’t true this night. The place had a fevered air, like there was something people were trying to catch onto. Or maybe it was just the jailbreak.