San Francisco Noir Read Free

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 fiancé—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 fiancé, 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 fiancé 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.