San Francisco Noir

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.

Maglie came over to my side and put his arm around my shoulders once again. He had always been like this. One drink and he was all sentimental.

“People don’t know it,” he said. “Even round the neighborhood, they don’t know it. But Jojo here, he did more than his share. Out there in the Pacific.”

“People don’t want to hear about this,” I said. There was an edge in my voice, maybe a little more than there should have been.

“No,” said Maglie. “But they should know.”

I knew what Maglie was doing. Trying to make it up to me in some way. Letting me know that whatever happened to my father, in that hearing, it wasn’t his idea. And to prove it, I could play the hero in front of this girl from The Heights with her cardigan and her pearls and that ring on her finger.

I turned to Anne.

“You?” I asked. “Where were you during the war?”

She gave me a little bit of her story then. About how she had been studying back East when the war broke out. Half-way through the war, she’d graduated and gotten a job with the VA, in a hospital, on the administrative side. But now that job was done-they’d given it to a returning soldier-and she was back home.

The jukebox was still playing.

“You want to dance?”

She was a little bit taller than me, but I didn’t mind this. Sinatra was crooning on the juke. I wanted to hold her closer, but I feared she’d feel the gun in my pocket. Then I decided I didn’t care.

I glanced at the ring on her finger, and she saw me looking.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Berlin.”

I didn’t say anything. Frank went on crooning. Some of my father’s friends, I remembered them talking about the Berlin of the old days. About the cabarets and the bigmouthed blondes with husky voices who made the bulge in their pants grow like Pinocchio’s nose.

“He, my fiance-he’s a lieutenant,” she said. “And there’s the reconstruction. He thought it was important, not just to win the war. Not just to defeat them. But to build it back.”

“He’s an idealist.”

“Yes.”

I wondered how come she had fallen for him. I wondered if she had known him long. Or if it had been one of those things where you meet somebody and you can’t escape. You fall in a whirlwind.

At that moment, inside Alcatraz, Bernie Coy and five other convicts were pinned down in the cellblock. None of us in the bar knew that yet, or even knew their names. If you wanted to know what was going on inside Alcatraz, the best you could do was climb up a rooftop and listen to the radio-but it was too far to see, and the radio was filtered by the military. Anyway, prison officials weren’t talking. They were too busy to talk. Later, though, it came out how Bernie Coy was the brains. He knew the guards’ routines. He’d managed to crow apart the bars and lead a handful of prisoners into the gun room. He and his buddies had clubbed the guards, taken their keys, and headed down the hall to the main yard; but the last door in the long line of doors would not open. The keys were not on the ring. They had all the ammunition in the world, but they could not get past that door. Now they were pinned down, cornered by the fire on one side and the guards on the other. So they fought, the way men in a foxhole fight. Our boys in Normandy. The Japanese in those bloody caves. The floodlights swept the shore and the tracer bullets lit the sky, and they fought the way desperate men fight, creeping forward on their bellies.

Sinatra was winding it up now, and I pulled Anne a little closer. Then I noticed a man watching us. He was sitting at the same table as Maglie and the rest. He was still watching when Anne and I walked back.

He put his arm around Anne, and they seemed to know each other better than I would like.

“This is Davey.” Anne said.

“Mike’s best friend,” he said.

I didn’t get it at first, and then I did. Mike was Anne’s fiance, and Davey was keeping his eye out.

Davey had blue eyes and yellow hair. When he spoke, first thing, I thought he was a Brit, but I was wrong.

“London?” I asked.

“No, California,” he smiled. “Palo Alto. Educated abroad.”

He had served with Anne’s fiance over in Germany. But unlike Mike, he had not re-enlisted. Apparently he was not quite so idealistic.

“Part of my duties, far as my best friend,” he said, “are to make sure nothing happens to Anne.”

The Brit laughed then. Or he was still the Brit to me. A big man, with a big laugh, hard to dislike, but I can’t say I cared for him. He joined our group anyway. We ate then and we drank. We had antipasti. We had crabs and shrimp. We had mussels and linguini. Every once in a while someone would come in from the street with news. At the Yacht Harbor now…three men in a rowboat…the marines are inside, cell-to-cell, shooting them in their cots. At some point, Ellen Pagione, Fontana’s sister-in-law, came out of the kitchen to make a fuss over me.

“I had no idea you were back in town.” She pressed her cheek against mine. “This boy is my favorite,” she said. “My goddamn favorite.”

Part of me liked the attention, I admit, but another part, I knew better. Ellen Pagione had never liked my father. Maybe she didn’t approve of what had happened to him, though, and felt bad. Or maybe she had pointed a finger herself. Either way, she loved me now. Everyone in North Beach, we loved one another now.

Anne smiled. Girl that she was, she believed the whole thing.

A little while later, she leaned toward me. She was a little in her cups maybe. Her cheeks were flush.

“I want to take you home.”

Then she looked away. I wondered if I’d heard correctly. The table was noisy. Then the Brit raised his glass, and everyone was laughing.

After dinner, Johnny Maglie grabbed me at the bar. I was shaking inside, I’m not sure why. Johnny wanted to buy me a beer, and I went along, though I knew I’d had enough. There comes a time, whatever the drink is holding under, it comes back up all of a sudden and there’s nothing you can do. At the moment, I didn’t care. I caught a glimpse of Anne. Some of the others had left, but she was still at the table. So was the Brit.

“How’s your mom?” It was the same question Johnny had asked before, out on the street, but maybe he’d forgotten.

“She’s got her dignity,” I said.

“That’s right. Your mama. She’s always got her head up.” He was a little drunk and a smirk showed on his face.

I knew what people said about my mother. Or I could guess, anyway. She was a Northern Italian, like my father, from Genoa. Refinement was important to her. We were not wealthy, but this wasn’t the point. My father had only been a newspaperman, but it had been a newspaper of ideas, and the prominenti had respected him. Or so we had thought. My mother had tried for a little while to live in Montana, outside the camp where he was imprisoned, but it had been too remote, too brutal. So she had gone back to North Beach and lived with her sister. Now the war was over, and the restrictions had been lifted, but my father would not return. He had been disgraced, after all. And the people who could have helped him then-the people to whom he had catered, people like Judge Molinari, Johnny Maglie’s uncle-they had done nothing for him. Worse than nothing.