North Beach used to be the place you went when you wanted pasta fino, espresso and biscotti, conversation about la dolce vita and Il patria d'Italia. Not anymore. There are still plenty of Italians in North Beach, and you can still get the good food and some of the good conversation; but their turf continues to shrink a little more each year, and despite the best efforts of the entrepreneurial new immigrants, the vitality and most of the Old World atmosphere are just memories.
The Chinese are partly responsible, not that you can blame them for buying available North Beach real estate when Chinatown, to the west, began to burst its boundaries. Another culprit is the Bohemian element that took over upper Grant Avenue in the fifties, paving the way for the hippies and the introduction of hard drugs in the sixties, which in turn paved the way for the jolly current mix of motorcycle toughs, aging hippies, coke and crack dealers, and the pimps and small-time crooks who work the flesh palaces along lower Broadway. Those 'Silicone Alley' nightclubs, made famous by Carol Doda in the late sixties, also share responsibility: they added a smutty leer to the gaiety of North Beach, turned the heart of it into a ghetto.
Parts of the neighborhood, particularly those up around Coit Tower where Gianna Fornessi lived, are still prime city real estate; and the area around Washington Square Park, il giardino to the original immigrants, is where the city's literati now congregates. Here and there, too, you can still get a sense of what it was like in the old days. But most of the landmarks are gone-Enrico's, Vanessi's, The Bocce Ball where you could hear mustachioed waiters in gondolier costumes singing arias from operas by Verdi and Puccini-and so is most of the flavor. North Beach is oddly tasteless now, like a week-old mostaccioli made without good spices or garlic. And that is another thing that is all but gone: twenty-five years ago you could not get within a thousand yards of North Beach without picking up the fine, rich fragrance of garlic. Nowadays you're much more likely to smell fried egg roll and the sour stench of somebody's garbage.
Parking in the Beach is the worst in the city; on weekends you can drive around its hilly streets for hours without finding a legal parking space. So today, in the perverse way of things, I found a spot waiting for me when I came down Stockton.
In a public telephone booth near Washington Square Park I discovered a second minor miracle: a directory that had yet to be either stolen or mutilated. The only Bisconte listed was Bisconte Florist Shop, with an address on upper Grant a few blocks away. I took myself off in that direction, through the usual good-weather Sunday crowds of locals and gawking sightseers and drifting homeless.
Upper Grant, like the rest of the area, has changed drastically over the past few decades. Once a rock-ribbed Little Italy, it has become an ethnic mixed bag: Italian markets, trattorias, pizza parlors, bakeries cheek by jowl with Chinese sewing-machine sweat shops, food and herb vendors, and fortune-cookie companies. But most of the faces on the streets are Asian and most of the apartments in the vicinity are occupied by Chinese.
The Bisconte Florist Shop was a hole-in-the-wall near Filbert, sandwiched between an Italian saloon and the Sip Hing Herb Company. It was open for business, not surprisingly on a Sunday in this neighborhood: tourists buy flowers too, given the opportunity.
The front part of the shop was cramped and jungly with cut flowers, ferns, plants in pots and hanging baskets. A small glass-fronted cooler contained a variety of roses and orchids. There was nobody in sight, but a bell had gone off when I entered and a male voice from beyond a rear doorway called, 'Be right with you.' I shut the door, went up near the counter. Some people like florist shops; I don't. All of them have the same damp, cloyingly sweet smell that reminds me of funeral parlors; of my mother in her casket at the Figlia Brothers Mortuary in Daly City nearly forty years ago. That day, with all its smells, all its painful images, is as clear to me now as if it were yesterday.
I had been waiting about a minute when the voice's owner came out of the back room. Late thirties, dark, on the beefy side; wearing a professional smile and a floral patterned apron that should have been ludicrous on a man of his size and coloring but wasn't. We had a good look at each other before he said, 'Sorry to keep you waiting-I was putting up an arrangement. What can I do for you?'
'Mr. Bisconte? Jack Bisconte?'
'That's me. Something for the wife maybe?'
'I'm not here for flowers. I'd like to ask you a few questions, if you don't mind.'
The smile didn't waver. 'Oh? What about?'
'Gianna Fornessi.'
'Who?'
'You don't know her?'
'Name's not familiar, no.'
'She lives up on Chestnut with Ashley Hansen.'
'Ashley Hansen… I don't know that name either.'
'She knows you. Young, blonde, looks Norwegian.'
'Well, I know a lot of young blondes,' Bisconte said. He winked at me. 'I'm a bachelor and I get around pretty good, you know?'
'Uh-huh.'
'Lot of bars and clubs in North Beach, lot of women to pick and choose from.' He shrugged. 'So how come you're asking about these two?'
'Not both of them. Just Gianna Fornessi.'
'That so? You a friend of hers?'
'Of her grandfather's. She's had a little trouble.'
'What kind of trouble?'
'Manager of her building accused her of stealing some money. But somebody convinced him to drop the charges.'
'That so?' Bisconte said again, but not as if he cared.
'Leaned on him to do it. Scared the hell out of him.'
'You don't think it was me, do you? I told you, I don't know anybody named Gianna Fornessi.'
'So you did.'
'What's the big deal anyway?' he said. 'I mean, if the guy dropped the charges, then this Gianna is off the hook, right?'
'Right.'
'Then why all the questions?'
'Curiosity,' I said. 'Mine and her grandfather's.'
Another shrug. 'I'd like to help you, pal, but like I said, I don't know the lady. Sorry.'
'Sure.'
'Come back any time you need flowers,' Bisconte said. He gave me a little salute, waited for me to turn and then did the same himself. He was hidden away again in the back room when I let myself out.
Today was my day for liars. Liars and puzzles.
He hadn't asked me who I was or what I did for a living; that was because he already knew. And the way he knew, I thought, was that Ashley Hansen had gotten on the horn after I left and told him about me. He knew Gianna Fornessi pretty well too, and exactly where the two women lived.
He was the man in the tan trench coat I'd seen earlier, the one who wouldn't hold the door for me at 725 °Chestnut.
5
I treated myself to a plate of linguine and fresh clams at a ristorante off Washington Square and then drove back over to Aquatic Park. Now, in mid-afternoon, with fog seeping in through the Gate and the temperature dropping sharply, the number of bocce players and kibitzers had thinned by half. Pietro Lombardi was one of those remaining; Dominick Marra was another. Bocce may be dying easy in the city but not in men like them. They cling to it and to the other old ways as tenaciously as they cling to life itself.
I told Pietro-and Dominick, who wasn't about to let us talk in private-what I'd learned so far. He was relieved
