The Ancient Rain (7 page)

“What's wrong with sticking a flower up your ass?”

“What's wrong is that stuff is supposed to come out of your ass, not in. You reverse the process, you do things ass backwards, it affects the brains. You get some funny ideas.”

Marinetti shrugged.

“Airplanes start falling out of the sky.”

“I don't get the connection.”

“Poison in your mail.”

Above, the television cut to a picture of Owens in his orange jumpsuit, hands cuffed in front of him, appearing for the arraignment. It had happened several weeks ago now, and the hearing for bail was coming up later this week. Then the image of Owens was gone, off to something else—fighter jets, a girl in fatigues. A car exploding in a market.

Pesci started to cough. Julia Besozi still grinned her black-eyed grin, and there came the sound of running water again, dishes clattering, and in the back, Stella thumping on her cutting board.

Sorrentino lowered his head.

Why am I here?

The old men were right. Everything had gone wrong, but he was going to straighten it out—his own little part. He had a mission.

He glanced down the counter and thought of his son's picture and felt the darkness seize him.

No …

The bail hearing for Owens was coming up, and soon the trial itself. As far as the feds were concerned, the case was their baby now. But Sorrentino did not trust them. Arrogant bastards. Especially Blackwell—a spider in his web. You could never tell who the son of a bitch would bite next.

Regardless, he hadn't come to Stella's to hang around at the counter. To fall into this Italian gloom. He had come for a reason.

*   *   *

Sorrentino got up and walked into the kitchen. Stella stood there pulverizing chicken with a mallet. There was the smell of garlic and of dough, and of tomatoes in the corner, overripe, and of wine that had been spilled a long time ago, and of kitchen smocks dampened by steam and sweat. Of dishwashing soap. All of the smells of this place were stronger here, and stronger the closer you stood to Stella.

She was a tough woman, wide ass, tits like a Cadillac, who backed off from no one. Nonetheless she flinched, maybe, just a little, as Sorrentino moved up closer.

“What do you want, Guy?”

She didn't back off though. He stood up close, and the smell of her was in his nostrils, Stella Lamantia, seventy years old, with hair like a wire brush, unflinching in her flowered dress, with her big breasts and her hands on her hips and sauce on her apron. Ten years ago, one night, after her husband was dead and his own son was in the ground and his wife had thrown him out—that night—he and Stella had had their moment together. He had pulled up her skirt and leaned her against the wall and she'd grabbed his ass with her strong hands.

Their moment had not lasted long.

“This,” he said.

He showed her a picture of someone they both had known some three decades back, a Japanese woman by the name of Cynthia Nakamura—a slight woman with long black hair, maybe thirty-five years old in the picture. She stood with a cigarette in her hand. Next to her was a black man, African American, in a turtleneck. Stella clucked. He had his arm around Cynthia, but his eyes were closed and his head was tilted back. He looked to be in a trance.

“Do you know who she is?”

“That's Cynthia Nakamura. But why do you ask me? You know her already. She lived just down the street.”

It was true, he knew Cynthia's history. She was a war orphan who'd been flown back from Tokyo after World War II, when John Panarelli married Cynthia's aunt.

“Do you know where I can find her?”

Stella walked away from him. She picked up the pulverizer and began beating the chicken again. “It has to be thin,” she said. “All the chickens today, they are too fat.”

“What's wrong with fat chickens?”

“I saw you on the television. I saw you standing in the back while that blonde was talking—there with the prosecutors and all those people. That young woman, the blonde, tell me, is she paying you anything for the work you do?”

“Of course,” he said, but he was lying.

“Cynthia Nakamura, what can I tell you? You know her story. She left the neighborhood a long time ago. Who knows where. Married again, divorced. The last I heard, she had the cancer. But I don't know. No one tells me.”

The fact was, Sorrentino had already found Cynthia Nakamura, but he didn't tell Stella. Sorrentino had found her about a month back, living in the South Bay, but now she was in Laguna Hospice. He knew because he had moved her himself, with help from Blackwell's people. She was part of the reason why the original indictment against Owens had failed. She had provided an alibi. Now, after all these years, she was willing to renege. And the government was trying to keep her alive.

Stella hit the chicken again.

“The trouble with fat chickens is that they are stupid. The head is too small for the body. A chicken looks like that, who wants to eat it?”

“Do you remember the man, here in the picture?”

Stella shook her head. “After her divorce—the first divorce—back then, the time of that picture, Cynthia hung around with some different men for a while.” She shrugged. “Black men, white. There was a time she would sleep with anyone.”

Stella looked Sorrentino over, with his fat belly and his bald head. He knew how he looked, but there wasn't anything he could do about it. He thought about what had happened between them here in the kitchen. Probably they both had looked different ten years ago. Or maybe it had just been dark.

“His name was Kaufman,” he said. “Bob Kaufman.”

He could see Stella's bile rise. He could see her irritation. “If you know the name, why do you ask? You can find him on your own.” She spoke loudly, same as when she used to scold her husband in the kitchen, loud enough for everyone to hear. “You come to play the big shot? You want to show everyone in the neighborhood you aren't sitting around in your room drinking anymore? That you have this big case, with this woman on television…?”

“Kaufman's dead. He's been dead since 1986.”

“Then why are you talking to me?”

Sorrentino hesitated, then said, “He was a poet.”

Stella scowled.

“He lived in the neighborhood here. He used to stand on the street corners. He was one of those—”

Stella interrupted—“You know I know nothing about poets.” She spoke with disdain. Stella had never liked the bohos, with their beards and their books and their all-night squaloring. “Those people. You want to know about them, you have to go someplace else. You know that. Go around the corner.”

She made a motion with the back of her hand. The truth was, he had been to those places. He had been to Spec's and Vesuvio and the Sleepy Wheel, all the bars where the old bohos hung out, or used to hang out, because there weren't so many of them anymore.

“So all this, it has to do with your case? Is this why you are poking around?”

For a second, he was tempted to explain, but it would lead into that gray plethora of names that ultimately surrounded anything to do with Owens, so it was impossible to separate the instigators from the sympathizers from the people who had just been standing around. The inability to do that was what had foiled the government's case thirty years ago.

Ultimately, it wasn't Kaufman he was after, but one of Owen's cohorts Leland Sanford. Sanford had been the key, the man the government couldn't find. Rumor was there'd been some kind of association between the Kaufman and Sanford. Sorrentino, out of leads, hoped that the people who'd known Kaufman—if they would talk to him—it might somehow lead him to Sanford: to confirm the identities of those four Elise had seen scampering from the bank.

A goose chase.

Meanwhile, the way Stella watched him now, as if she suspected he had some other reason for being here, something he would not admit to himself …

He thought of his son's picture out there, pressed under the glass countertop.

Stella turned back to her chicken. The Chinaman was humming to himself. Stella was humming now, too, thumping at the chicken.

Sorrentino went back into the restaurant.

The picture of his son was at the other end. He and the boy fishing out at Shasta. Right before the kid had been shipped off to the Middle East. They'd eaten here after they got back from Shasta, him and the boy and a couple of his friends from the SFPD, and he'd given the picture to Stella to slide under the glass countertop. Nine months later, the kid's truck flipped, out there in the desert. Sorrentino hadn't looked at the picture since.

And he wasn't going to look now.

They're all watching me,
Sorrentino thought.
The old Italians
.
They know who I am
.

Marinetti and Pesci. The three dead bastards back in the shadows. Julia Besozi and her teacup, sitting with her knees crossed and her face pinched. Smiling right at him.

She kept right on smiling—at the same dead space, even after he moved.

It had been a mistake to come here. He threw his money on the counter and out he went.

EIGHT

After the arraignment, Dante had gotten a call from his boss, Jake Cicero. Cicero was on vacation, on a cruise boat somewhere off the coast of Italy—one of those small liners that worked the port towns. It was high season, but the occupancy was low, on account of the terror threat and the American buildup in the Middle East. He and his wife, Louise, had taken the trip anyway.

“How's the cruise going?”

“Wonderful,” said Cicero. “I'm having the time of my life.”

“And Louise?”

“Everyone should take a trip like this.”

The truth was, Dante knew, Cicero had not wanted to go at first, but he and his wife, Louise—his third wife—had been on the brink of divorce. Cicero had taken a second mortgage in order to afford the trip. And in the time leading up to the journey, his boss had changed.

Cicero started playing tennis. His skin was tan. He bought a sports car.

Meanwhile, the business slid downhill.

“I've been talking with Moe Jensen,” said Cicero. His boss had known Jensen for years and done work for his firm in the past. “They want me to put you on this.”

“My impression, they're going to be strapped for cash.”

“I don't know about that,” said Cicero. “We've got a retainer, for now.”

“What do they want?”

“Someone to shadow the prosecution case. To go back through the witness list, the discovery material.”

“And Sorrentino?”

“Yes, they'll need to know what he's been doing. And Elise Younger, too. Apparently she's a little off in the head.”

“I saw her speak.”

“What do you think?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't sound excited about this.”

“The bail hearing—it's still pending.”

“Bail or no bail, they are going to need legwork.”

“Unless Owens cops a plea.”

“I don't think that's going to happen. You don't like this case?”

“Who's going to take care of our other work?”

“I have other investigators for that. I would think you would jump at this. You have trouble with Owens?”

Dante had his doubts, but there were always doubts. Half your job in a case like this—any case, if truth be told—involved undermining the attacker, maligning the accuser, impugning not just the evidence, but the person who brought it forward. In this case, that would mean going after Elise Younger, and probably Sorrentino as well.

“Marilyn and I were thinking of going away for a while.”

“Are you getting married?”

Dante hesitated.

“Okay,” said Cicero. “You don't have to answer that. But listen, this isn't a good time to travel, anyway.”

“I thought you said it was beautiful.”

“All the saber rattling … It's not a good time.”

“That's not what you said earlier.”

“I'm just making the best of it. You're better off where you are. There on the home front.”

“You're lying.”

“Of course I am.”

There was a pause, and in that pause Dante imagined the blue sea slapping up against Cicero's boat. He saw the coastline out there, and all those little pastel houses falling down to the sea, and the goats higher up the hills. He thought of Marilyn. He thought of Owens in jail. He heard the clink of cocktail glasses on the other side of the line, maybe, and a tennis ball bouncing on the deckside court.

“But I like these European cell phones,” said Cicero. “They're cheaper—and they don't ever go dead.”

“I didn't know that.”

“Besides, I already told Jensen yes. My understanding, this case, there's deep pockets in the wings.”

NINE

On the second day of Owens's bond hearing, between sessions, Guy Sorrentino went with Elise Younger out to Judah Street. The bank itself had been torn down five years back, and a construction site now stood in its place, with a wooden fence ringing the block. Every year, on the anniversary of her mother's death, Elise built a sidewalk memorial here. The anniversary had passed several weeks ago now, but Elise maintained the sidewalk memorial on account of the coming trial. The shrine had grown quite ornate with the publicity, strangers adding bits of ribbon, notes of appreciation, pictures of their own deceased. While Elise replaced the flowers, Sorrentino walked over to the wooden fence, gazing through a hole at the construction.

Elise's mother had been wearing a checkered blouse and black slacks, Sorrentino knew, because he'd seen the evidence bag, still intact after all these years. According to witnesses, she'd been standing in the queue when the gang rushed in through the glass doors at the side of the building. She'd turned abruptly, too abruptly, purse sliding from her shoulder, and one of the gunmen had let loose. She'd crumpled then, shot in the stomach.