Free The Last Days of Il Duce by Domenic Stansberry Page A

smiled and it was that irresistible smile, I remembered it from long ago, and I smiled back, not knowing whether to hate him or to love him; then he reached across and touched me on the arm.
    â€œBut no business now. Tomorrow. In the afternoon. We talk in my office.”
    Marie appeared on the porch and behind her was Vincenza Romano, Micaeli’s loyal wife, tall for an Italian woman and regal, wearing a floral print dress and carrying a tray of bread, a saucer of oil. As they stepped onto the verandah, a car pulled into the drive. It was Micaeli’s only son, Michael Jr. He drove a new sedan, elegant, European, and he and his wife and his kids were like something out of a picture book, the way they raised their heads and sauntered up the walk. Michael Jr. wore a black suit, he had dark curly hair, and though he had been adopted, you would never know so. He looked more like a Genovesi, an Italian of the North, even than his father.
    His wife was an elegant woman, purebred Anglo, thin of bone, sheer blonde hair. I watched her as she came up the stairs to see how she reacted to Marie, but there was nothing there I could see. Either she didn’t know about her husband’s affair with Marie, or that rumor wasn’t true.
    â€œGood to see you, Mike. It’s been a long time.”
    â€œToo long.”
    Michael Jr. lowered his voice in the manner of his father and clasped me at the elbow.
    â€œI’m sorry about Joe.”
    He seemed embarrassed, looking for something else to say but not finding it, and I just shrugged my shoulders. He was ten years younger than me, and I remembered the fuss when Vincenza and Micaeli signed the adoption papers, but the truth was I never really cared for him and maybe resented the life that had been laid out before him.
    Michael Jr. walked over to his mother, embracing her in the way his father had embraced me. He did the same to his father, then Marie, and as he did so I watched Michael Jr.’s wife again, the faces of his parents, of Marie, how she closed her eyes when his cheek pressed against hers, but no one seemed to be paying any attention but myself.
    â€œIt’s wonderful to have the family together,” said Micaeli and he put one arm around his son, the other around Marie, and pulled them close at the same time, clutching them to his Italian heart.
    We ate dinner in the front room, Micaeli sitting at the head, his wife Vincenza beside him. They placed the old matriarch at the end opposite, where she sat perched in her antique dress, lace collar, eyes glazed with cataracts. Guilia was the birthday girl, ninety-seven years old. She wore a thick layer of porcelain-colored makeup, giving her the look of a broken doll whose face had been plastered with mud. I ended up next to her, while Marie was on the other side of the table, next to the Tollinis. Teresa Tollini was Micaeli’s sister, and her husband Ernesto was a restaurateur, a buddy of Micaeli’s from the old days. They had brought a couple of their grandkids with them, and these kids sat together with Romano’s grandkids at a smaller table in the next room, hands and faces immersed in their spaghetti, the thick sauce, color of blood, that was like a drug once you got started eating and couldn’t stop. When I was young I would eat until I was silly, sitting alongside cousins and cousins-of-cousins, all of whom would eat more and more—and eventually I would give up, defeated, because I was only half Italian, after all.
    â€œAh, Nick,” said Ernesto Tollini, leaning across the table. “At least you still live in North Beach. All the other young ones, they have left the neighborhood.”
    â€œI guess I’m the only one not to make it rich.”
    â€œGood for you, my boy, good for you. There are other things besides money. It is nothing but tourists in my restaurant now.”
    â€œIt is not just the young ones who left,” said Mrs. Tollini. “It’s