The Last Days of Il Duce Read Online Free PDF

bitch,” he said at last.
    â€œYou do that,” I said.
    Then I went home and got drunk. I wandered the late-night streets with the Chinks and the hobos and the too-drunk tourists, all the nobodies of Columbus Avenue. Hunching under the neon light, they had learned the true secret of life, it seemed to me, and I wanted to be like them, wise as hell, immune from all desire.

FIVE
    LINDA STREET
    I got a call in the morning. I let it ring five times, six, then figured they wouldn’t let it stop. The call woke me from my dreams, or that’s the way I remember things now. There had not been any people in those dreams, it had just been shades of blue, large shapes that slid past one another in a larger and vaster darkness of blue, gun metal blue, midnight blue, blue fading into black, like the color of this prison cell late at night when my eyes are open and remembering the past is like a plunge into the life of another man.
    â€œMr. Jones?” The woman had a sad, official voice. She was with the San Francisco Police.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œMr. Niccolò Jones?”
    â€œYes,” I said again. Then she gave me the news. My brother was dead.
    There had been a shooting, she told me, and the victim’s driver’s license carried the name of Joseph Jones. The incident occurred on the corner of Linda and Nineteenth, a few blocks from his residence. (A drug-dealing corner, I knew, a balmy little alley littered with scraps of plastic wrap. I listened for the innuendo in the woman’s voice. Cocaine. Speed. It was a highballer’s corner.) The department had spoken to a woman named Luisa Jones, but she had become hysterical when it came to identifying the victim. Before homicide released the body from forensics to the mortuary, the department needed definitive identification.
    The lady cop told me this in a sweet, blue-eyed way, like a nurse repeating a cancer diagnosis. I imagined her sitting behind a desk, and I could hear the starched white blouse in her voice and see the forms stacked neatly to the side.
    â€œI’ll be down in a little while,” I said.
    My voice sounded like somebody else’s, a nice guy’s maybe, somebody’s husband with an errand to do after work. But I was thinking of my brother and those pictures you see of corpses being wheeled into metal drawers at the city morgue.
    I know when someone dies all of a sudden you are supposed to be struck with disbelief. Maybe this is how it struck me. I know I fell back on my bed and clutched at my head and moaned like a gangster in a bad movie, an actor making a ploy for the audience’s sympathy. At the same time though I felt a surge of joy at my core and this same joy caused a misery in my heart, an awfulness. I wretched and I sobbed. I know my pain was not like you are supposed to feel. Rather it was something else, some kind of gangster pain. There was a harsh light coming through the window and I could see the motes of dust floating in its slanted rays. The traffic made an ugly noise outside.
    I had slept in my shirt, in the stink and grime of the day before, and I could still smell all that on my body, and I could taste too the smoke and booze in my throat. I went into the shower to wash it off. I spent a long time under the hot, steaming water, lathering myself, washing away the soap then starting again from the top. I washed myself clean maybe a dozen times, even after the water had turned cold and I had begun to shiver under the spray.
    There was a mirror on the bathroom door, and when I got out of the shower I looked my dripping body up and down. My brother and I have always looked pretty much alike, head to toe, including the extra weight about the gut.
    I studied the face up close. It was the same face, more or less, that I would see again just a few hours later, when the cops pulled back the white cloth and gave me a peek at my brother’s corpse.
    That afternoon I went to the downtown station and met