More silence, while he smoked his little cigar.
I said, 'But first tell me. Exactly what happened.'
He shut his eyes; he didn't want to relive what had happened.
'It was me telling you about Bisconte that started it,' I said to prod him. 'After you got home Sunday night you called Gianna and asked her about him. Or she called you.'
'… I call her,' he said. 'She's angry, she tell me mind my own business. Never before she talks to her goombah this way.'
'Because of me. Because she was afraid of what I'd find out about her and Ashley Hansen and Bisconte.'
'Bisconte.' He spat the name, as if ridding his mouth of something foul.
'So this morning you asked around the neighborhood about him. And somebody told you he wasn't just a florist, about his little sideline. Then you got on a bus and went to see your granddaughter.'
'I don't believe it, not about Gianna. I want her tell me it's not true. But she's not there. Only the other one, the bionda.'
'And then?'
'She don't want to let me in, that one. I go in anyway. I ask if she and Gianna are… if they sell themselves for money. She laugh. In my face she laugh, this girl what have no respect. She says what difference it make? She says I am old man-dinosaur, she says. But she pat my cheek like I am little boy or big joke. Then she… ah, Cristo, she come up close to me and she say you want some, old man, I give you some. To me she says this. Me.' Pietro shook his head; there were tears in his eyes now. 'I push her away. I feel feroce, like when I am young man and somebody he make trouble with me. I push her too hard and she fall, her head hit the table and I see blood and she don't move… ah, mio Dio! She was wicked, that one, but I don't mean to hurt her…'
'I know you didn't, Pietro.'
'I think, call doctor quick. But she is dead. And I hurt here, inside'-he tapped his chest-'and I think, what if Gianna she come home? I don't want to see Gianna. You understand? Never again I want to see her.'
'I understand,' I said. And I thought: Funny-I've never laid eyes on her, not even a photograph of her. I don't know what she looks like; now I don't want to know. I never want to see her either.
Pietro finished his cigar. Then he straightened on the bench, seemed to compose himself. His eyes had dried; they were clear and sad.. He looked past me, across at the looming Romanesque pile of the church. 'I make confession to priest,' he said, 'little while before you come. Now we go to police and I make confession to them.'
'Yes.'
'You think they put me in gas chamber?'
'I doubt they'll put you in prison at all. It was an accident. Just a bad accident.'
Another silence. On Pietro's face was an expression of the deepest pain. 'This thing, this accident, she shouldn't have happen. Once.. ah, once…' Pause. ' Morto,' he said.
He didn't mean the death of Ashley Hansen. He meant the death of the old days, the days when families were tightly knit and there was respect for elders, the days when bocce was king of his world and that world was a far simpler and better place. The bitterest of woes is to remember old happy days.
We sat there in the pale sun. And pretty soon he said, in a voice so low I barely heard the words, ' La bellezza delle bellezze.' Twice before he had used that phrase in my presence and both times he had been referring to his granddaughter. This time I knew he was not.
' Si, 'paesano,' I said. 'La bellezza delle bellezze.'
Hotel Majestic, Sixth Street, downtown San Francisco. A hell of an address-a hell of a place for an ex-con not long out of Folsom to set up housekeeping. Sixth Street, south of Market-South of the Slot, it used to be called-is the heart of the city's Skid Road and has been for more than half a century.
Eddie Quinlan. A name and a voice out of the past, neither of which I'd recognized when he called that morning. Close to seven years since I had seen or spoken to him, six years since I'd even thought of him. Eddie Quinlan. Edgewalker, shadow-man with no real substance or purpose, drifting along the narrow catwalk that separates conventional society from the underworld. Information-seller, gofer, small-time bagman, doer of any insignificant job, legitimate or otherwise, that would help keep him in food and shelter, liquor and cigarettes. The kind of man you looked at but never really saw: a modern-day Yehudi, the little man who wasn't there. Eddie Quinlan. Nobody, loser-fall guy. Drug bust in the Tenderloin one night six and a half years ago; one dealer setting up another, and Eddie Quinlan, small-time bagman, caught in the middle; hard-assed judge, five years in Folsom, goodbye Eddie Quinlan. And the drug dealers? They walked, of course. Both of them.
And now Eddie was out, had been out for six months. And after six months of freedom, he'd called me. Would I come to his room at the Hotel Majestic tonight around eight? He'd tell me why when he saw me. It was real important-would I come? All right, Eddie. But I couldn't figure it. I had bought information from him in the old days, bits and pieces for five or ten dollars; maybe he had something to sell now. Only I wasn't looking for anything and I hadn't put the word out, so why pick me to call?
If you're smart, you don't park your car on the street at night south of the Slot. I put mine in the Fifth and Mission Garage at seven forty-five and walked over to Sixth. It had rained most of the day and the streets were still wet, but now the sky was cold and clear. The kind of night that is as hard as black glass, so that light seems to bounce off the dark instead of shining through it; lights and their colors so bright and sharp-reflecting off the night and the wet surfaces that the glare is like splinters against your eyes.
Friday night, and Sixth Street was teeming. Sidewalks jammed-old men, young men, bag ladies, painted ladies, blacks, whites, Asians, addicts, pushers, muttering mental cases, drunks leaning against walls in tight little clusters while they shared paper-bagged bottles of sweet wine and cans of malt liquor; men and women in filthy rags, in smart new outfits topped off with sunglasses, carrying ghetto blasters and red-and-white canes, some of the canes in the hands of individuals who could see as well as I could, carrying a hidden array of guns and knives and other lethal instruments. Cheap hotels, greasy spoons, seedy taverns, and liquor stores complete with barred windows and cynical proprietors that stayed open well past midnight. Laughter, shouts, curses, threats; bickering and dickering. The stenches of urine and vomit and unwashed bodies and rotgut liquor, and over those like an umbrella, the subtle effluvium of despair. Predators and prey, half-hidden in shadow, half-revealed in the bright, sharp dazzle of fluorescent lights and bloody neon.
It was a mean street, Sixth, one of the meanest, and I walked it warily. I may be fifty-eight, but I'm a big man and I walk hard too; and I look like what I am. Two winos tried to panhandle me and a fat hooker in an orange wig tried to sell me a piece of her tired body, but no one gave me any trouble.
The Majestic was five stories of old wood and plaster and dirty brick, just off Howard Street. In front of its narrow entrance, a crack dealer and one of his customers were haggling over the price of a baggie of rock cocaine; neither of them paid any attention to me as I moved past them. Drug deals go down in the open here, day and night. It's not that the cops don't care, or that they don't patrol Sixth regularly; it's just that the dealers outnumber them ten to one. On Skid Road any crime less severe than aggravated assault is strictly low priority.
Small, barren lobby, no furniture of any kind. The smell of ammonia hung in the air like swamp gas. Behind the cubbyhole desk was an old man with dead eyes that would never see anything they didn't want to see. I said, 'Eddie Quinlan,' and he said, 'Two-oh-two' without moving his lips. There was an elevator but it had an out of order sign on it; dust speckled the sign. I went up the adjacent stairs.
The disinfectant smell permeated the second floor hallway as well. Room 202 was just off the stairs, fronting on Sixth; one of the metal 2s on the door had lost a screw and was hanging upside down. I used my knuckles just below it. Scraping noise inside, and a voice said, 'Yeah?' I identified myself. A lock clicked, a chain rattled, the door wobbled open, and for the first time in nearly seven years I was looking at Eddie Quinlan.
He hadn't changed much. Little guy, about five-eight, and past forty now. Thin, nondescript features, pale eyes, hair the color of sand. The hair was thinner and the lines in his face were longer and deeper, almost like incisions where they bracketed his nose. Otherwise he was the same Eddie Quinlan.
'Hey,' he said, 'thanks for coming. I mean it, thanks.'
'Sure, Eddie.'
