The Big Boom (11 page)

Dante went the other way, up Powell. He needed to work the wildness out of himself, so he kept going, and pretty soon he was at the top, standing in front of the Stanford Hotel, the place where the cable cars crested before plummeting down again.

As he stood there, his cell rang.

It was Jake Cicero. Dante was glad to hear from him. There was something about his voice. The gruffness, the Old World fatalism.

“I got news for you,” said Cicero.

“What kind of news?”

“You sound out of breath.”

“I was just up at Angie’s place.”

“Find anything?”

“No.”

“Then why are you breathing so hard.”

“Ghosts,” he said. “I was chasing a ghost.”

Cicero laughed. Dante could hear the sound of smoke in his throat, like that of some aging nightclub performer. He could hear
tinkling glasses and guessed that Cicero was in the bar by his house where he went sometimes when his wife wasn’t around. Dante could hear the old juke in the background. Tony Bennett, he thought. Or maybe Dino and Frank, some kind of duet. The cell was fading in and out, picking up static, stray conversation, and it was hard to tell.

“How about Whitaker?” asked Cicero. “Did you talk to him?”

“No. He wasn’t there.”

“I thought he was one of the featured speakers.”

“I thought so, too.”

“Well, I don’t know if it makes any difference now.”

“Why not?”

“I just got a call from Antonelli.”

“What’s he doing, replacing us? We going too slow for him?”

Cicero laughed again.

“You got it half right, anyway. He’s pulling us off the case.”

“Did he give a reason?”

“He said it was too hard on his wife,” said Cicero. “He said to let it drop. Let the cops handle it.”

“I thought he hated the cops.”

“Well, you know Antonelli, how he is, but I have to say …” Cicero’s voice started to fade. The reception was breaking up. It skipped in and out, and by some anomaly the background noise was louder than Cicero’s voice. Dante could hear Bennett on the jukebox now, singing the song everyone knew. The one about San Francisco and your heart breaking on the concrete. Cicero faded in.

“And it makes sense. Barbara and Nick want to bury their daughter. They want closure. They want to move on.”

“Yeah,” said Dante.

He was standing there on top of Nob Hill. It was the place in
the city everybody talked about. The place where he’d kissed Angie once upon a time and other girls, too, whose names he could no longer remember. Meantime, Jake was still talking. Sounding a little drunk, saying this was how things went in this business. You followed a trail and then the client jerked the plug and you never knew. All this while the fog was coming in and Dante could see it rolling in over The Beach and up around the high tiers of the Bay Bridge. From this spot he could see down the hill into the gaudy nonsense of Chinatown, or the other way to Union Square, and at the same time taste the fog in his throat and feel the transport cable trembling in its groove under the street as the pulleys strained to bring the car up the hill. The phone was going in and out. He could hear the cable bells ringing and Bennett pouring it on. Then all of a sudden the static went away.

Dante dropped his voice. “I don’t know if I can let this go that easy, Jake,” he said. “I don’t know.” There was no response. “Jake,” he said. And then he realized why the sound was so clear. The connection was broken. The line was dead. He stood there with the cell in his hand. The fog swirled low now, and a cable car lurched over the hill.

O
n a hillside, down the peninsula, a woman cried out, then cried out again. Perhaps her cries did not go unnoticed. It was dark, true, and there was no one on the street, and the neighborhood had, as always, the look of a place deserted. The neighborhood had this look despite the cars in the driveways and the lights in the windows. In the bushes, though, some small creature twittered at the sound of the woman’s voice—a rodent, perhaps, a possum—and a shadow fell across a picture window. Up the road, a car rumbled into a cul-de-sac and disappeared.

It was a serene neighborhood, this hillside in San Mateo. The ranch houses were well tended. The birds-of-paradise were prim and upright. The televisions flickered. An orange dropped to the ground, thoughtless as a rock.

Meanwhile the woman called out.

“Oh, kitty,” she called. “Kitty, kitty.”

She went through a gate into an open area behind the house. She cupped her hand to her mouth and directed her voice up the hill, toward the junca and the oak. Then she went down the berm
along the ravine, following a path behind the houses. She bent down. Calling into the gap under the redwood fences. Into the pink oleander. Into the poppies and scrub.

There was no response.

The woman was Barbara Antonelli, but she did not know how many of her neighbors recognized her voice, or even heard her at all. She had made a mistake, though, she was certain of that. The people inside the houses would tell you the same. You bring an animal to a new place, you keep it inside a few days. You let it out a little at a time, till it learns its way around. But she hadn’t done that. She’d been foolish. So now the cat had scattered off somewhere, and she would never find it.

“Eccentric!”

Barbara stood at the top of the cul-de-sac. Her voice penetrated the stucco walls, she imagined. The neighbor could hear it in the garage across the way, his kid could hear it in the bedroom. His wife could hear it in the kitchen as she prepared dinner with the television on, the newscaster giving the local report, broadcasting the photos of the missing.

My voice is not just an echo on this empty street, lost in the wind and white noise from 280. Someone is listening, she told herself. Someone hears. There are houses on this hillside. This is not just some canyon, filled with wind and rocks.

Then she called out again.

“Kitty, kitty.”

Barbara Antonelli shivered under the stars in her olive skirt and her sleeveless blouse. She went inside through the sliding door and lay on her bed. She was far above herself now, looking down. She knew how ruthless her husband could be, how self-absorbed. How foolish without thinking. But there was a moment you went back
to, a million years ago, his body and yours, the smell of him as he put his arms around you, your skirt billowing, people looking as you strutted. There was the thrill you felt that first time you slid in the car beside him and the feeling you were safe, under wing, and pretty soon there were pictures in a drawer, furniture, and cloth and silverware, and your daughter racing down the hall “Daddy, Daddy,” and the memory of his hip swaggering next to yours once upon a time, a dress you used to wear, a suit coat still in the closet, all those things that kept you in his bed, bound to him. Now something had happened, and she did not want to admit it, just like she had not admitted a lot of other things. But she knew. She lay in the bed in her olive dress. The pool was blue, and the only sound was that of a woman weeping. Faint at first, then louder. She rolled onto her side, but the wailing only got louder. There was no one listening, she knew that. There was nothing she could do to make it stop.

T
he next day, Dante stopped into Prospero’s Realty. He walked up the long stairs to the second-story office overlooking Stockton Avenue. At the top of the stairs, there was a dirty window that looked out into Chinatown—except it hadn’t been Chinatown back then, when Prospero had thrown out his shingle.

Joe Prospero had founded the agency some forty-odd years ago, when the Italians had started leaving The Beach. It took up the whole floor now, and Joe had an office in the far back: behind the bullpen, behind the deal table and the water cooler—a traditional office with a glass wall and Venetian shades. A lot of the old-timers didn’t much care for Prospero. They liked his handshake and his big smile well enough, but not how he ran his business. Or so they claimed. He hired Chinese agents. He had a branch agency called the Five Happiness that advertised North Beach properties abroad, to the Hong Kong market. He never let up with his leaflets and his smiles. No matter their complaints, Prospero was the one they came to when it was time to sell.

At the moment, though, Prospero was out. On the golf course, like he often was; and in his absence, his daughter Beatrice worked the desk. She was a blousy woman with a mole on her neck and hair the color of a pomegranate.

“Oh, if it isn’t the Pelican,” she said.

It was what the old ones called him, except Beatrice Prospero was not one of the old ones. She was no older than Dante, but she had adopted their manners. Beatrice resembled her father. In fact, she looked more like her father than her father looked like himself. She was thicker through the shoulders and had darker eyes. Her voice was different, though. Not high like his, but thick and throaty, sensual. She was almost attractive. Almost. And she had a way of looking at you, from the side, her eyes flitting from one end to the other like birds in a cage darting from one side to the next.

“I was looking for Marilyn,” said Dante.

“Marilyn Visconti?”

“Sure.”

“Oh, so the Pelican’s looking for Marilyn Visconti? The man with the nose. The nose that knows. The nosey nose.”

Beatrice said it with a wise guy glissando, like she knew everything that was up between him and Marilyn, all the secrets. Maybe she did, Dante thought. Maybe he should ask her and find out a thing or two.

“Yes,” said Dante. “I am looking for Marilyn.”

“You are interested in selling your father’s place?”

“Not today.”

“The market—it’s so hot, the multiple listings burn my fingers.” It was one of her father’s lines, and she smiled when she said it. “These kind of opportunities don’t come everyday.”

“Where can I find Marilyn?”

“I’m an agent, too, you know.” Beatrice eyed him provocatively, reared back her head. “Did you try her cell?”

“No,” he lied. He had tried the number, but Marilyn wasn’t answering. Screening him out. “This is something I want to talk to her about in person.”

“Real estate’s always personal. It’s one of the most personal things I know.”

“You’re right,” he said, and smiled despite himself. The Prosperos wore you down. “It’s very personal.”

“I mean—those people living in your house. Being a landlord. How long can that go on?”

“I don’t know.”

“I mean, is that you? A landlord? And that place you’re living—with all that equity tied up in that house—does this make sense?”

“Probably not.”

“Marilyn’s a new agent. She’s good, don’t get me wrong—and of course, you two, well, you know each other. So there’s a trust. But sometimes, with an agent, a little distance, it’s a good thing. Better not to mix love and business.”

“It’s not the house. I’m not selling.”

“Maybe not now.” She shrugged. “But someday. How come you two don’t get married?”

Her eyes were very bright now.

“That is a personal question.”

“They’re all personal sooner or later. But you know this, your line of work.”

“Sure, I know.”

“She’s up at Marinetti’s. There’s a broker’s open.” She glanced at her watch. “Ends at three—but it’s the first open. People linger.”

“Thanks.”

“You know where that is, Mr. Pelican?” Her voice was husky and sly. Beatrice Prospero looked at him directly then. She reminded him—with her floral blouse, her lipstick, her jewelry—of one of his cousins, big girls whom he used to fantasize about at night. She eyed him, reading his face. “Sometimes you move on. Sometimes, you just have to let go.”

“Sure,” said Dante. “I know.”

“I don’t think you do.” Her eyes were very earnest. “Marilyn, maybe she knows—but I don’t know about you.”

Dante said nothing. Probably she was right.

“You want to sell that place,” she said, and her smile was licentious, “you call me. I’ll help you. I’ll do everything I can.”

She handed him the card then, though there was no reason. He had walked past Prospero’s office most everyday of his life.

M
arinetti’s flat was on Weber Alley. In many ways, it was not the sharpest of locations. When Dante was growing up, these had been small flats for working-class families: plumbers, teachers, cops. Dante had been in them often enough. No views except the laundry lines across the airspace and a concrete patio three floors down, at the bottom of the fire well. There had always been plenty of noise, though: hollering kids and slamming pots and the guy across the way having some kind of tantrum against the wall. The narrow street was different now, at least on the face of it. The old lead-paint facades, gray and green and mustard brown, had been sandblasted and painted up in pastels. Also there was a phalanx of cars out in front of Marinetti’s, double-parked. Mercedes and Jags and the big sports vehicles. The cars of Realtors all lined up, in the mute tones of silver and gold. An agent just now emerged from one
such car, her heels clicking on the cobbled walk. She pulled on her skirt and gave Dante a small smile as she headed up.

The hours for the broker’s open were all but over, but Dante could see people in the windows above. The door was open and at the top of the stairs he caught sight of Marilyn. Her dark hair was pulled back, and she was engaged in conversation with a man in a gray suit. The pair disappeared inside.

Dante had been up Marinetti’s stairs before. He used to play here with Marinetti’s twin boys. And he had climbed the stairs again, years later, when the daughter Gina Marinetti was married, and then again when the twins were killed in a car accident.

Upstairs there were maybe twenty, thirty agents, all lingering.

It was on account of the boom. Buyers outnumbered sellers. There was a shortage of inventory and plenty of money. On the fireplace, hundreds of Realtors had left their business cards.

Marilyn had dressed the place up, stripping out all of Marinetti’s junk. The stacks of magazines were gone. So were the Italian knickknacks, the old photographs, the crucifix in the bedroom, the family heirlooms. The place had been made spare and relatively modern. There were flowers on the tables and a hundred colored pillows on the bed. It was hard to imagine Marinetti hanging around in here.