Cleveland

Cleveland is where Cliff Booth’s unsettled postwar wandering converges with a violent encounter that reveals how readily he can turn danger to his advantage. In a neighborhood pizza parlor, he kills Pat Cardella and Mike Zitto after they approach his table, then gives police an account they find plausible. The episode makes Cleveland more than a stop on his travels: it is the place where Cliff gets away with murder for the first time, aided by the reputation he earned in World War II.

Cliff Booth’s Arrival

After deciding that he was not suited to the French profession of pimping, Cliff returned to the United States and spent several years bumming around the country. Eventually, he found his way to Cleveland, Ohio. The book gives no broader account of his life in the city; instead, Cleveland is introduced through a particular reunion and the chain of events that follows it.

There, Cliff looked up Abigail Pendergast, an old chum from high school. She was a peroxide blonde and one of the mistresses of Rudolfo “Patsyface” Genovese, a hoodlum with Mafia connections. Their meeting places Cliff in a precarious social orbit, but the immediate scene is domestic and unhurried: the two old acquaintances sit down to eat in a pizza joint. The shift from Cliff’s years of drifting to this ordinary meal gives the encounter its quiet starting point; danger enters through people who recognize Abigail, not through any plan Cliff has announced.

The Pizza Parlor

The restaurant is described as a Gay Nineties-style pizza joint, with sawdust on the floor and checkered tablecloths. A player piano supplies the music, while a 16mm Charlie Chaplin movie plays on the wall. These details establish a crowded public setting where the violence that follows will be visible to other diners. Cliff and Abigail are eating together when she turns in her chair to ask the waiter for a napkin. In doing so, she spots Pat Cardella and Mike Zitto at the bar, drinking beer and making faces toward their table.

The encounter divides around Abigail’s recognition. Cliff remains at the table as the two men approach. At his command, Abigail stands, excuses herself, goes into the ladies’ room, and locks the door. Once she has left the dining room, the men take the vacant chair beside Cliff: Mike sits in Abigail’s place, and Pat brings over another chair from an unoccupied table. Cliff is eating pizza and looking toward the Chaplin film when they settle in. The ordinary meal, the public audience, and the men’s deliberate occupation of the table all contribute to the scene’s tension without changing its confined setting.

Shooting and Self-Defense

The confrontation becomes lethal when Mike begins to insult Cliff and Cliff interrupts him. He snatches his snub-nose .38 from the table and fires one bullet into each man’s skull. The shots send blood across the tabletop and onto Cliff’s shirt and face. Female customers scream; male customers hit the ground. Pat and Mike topple from their chairs onto the sawdust-covered floor, and Cliff shoots each of them twice more after they are down.

The sequence is explicit about both the immediate threat and Cliff’s decisive escalation. The two men have approached the table after Abigail leaves, but Cliff does not wait for the conversation to reach a further outcome before firing. The restaurant’s scattered diners become witnesses to the aftermath, while Abigail is out of the room. Cleveland thus holds the whole turn from apparent social intimidation to a double killing within one public space: the table at which the three men sit, the nearby bar, and the floor where the gangsters fall.

The Police Account and Cleveland’s Significance

When the Cleveland Police Department questions Cliff, he says that the men tried to kidnap him and Abigail. He claims that the heavier man threatened to shoot him and throw acid in her face as punishment, and presents himself as frightened. The book does not establish that every detail of this account is true; it emphasizes that Cliff’s version did not need to be convincing so much as plausible.

The police know who Pat Cardella and Mike Zitto are. In the book’s account, Cliff’s standing as a World War II hero helps make his explanation acceptable: the officers are willing to let him shoot the two men in a pizza parlor and even pay for the meal. Cleveland is therefore connected not simply with Cliff’s violence but with its immediate consequence—he avoids punishment. The narrator marks this as the first time Cliff gets away with murder, a distinction that makes the city a turning point in his history rather than a passing address.

The episode also places Cliff’s self-presentation alongside the response of the authorities. He invokes fear when questioned, while his earlier confidence that he could get away with the killing rests on being a war hero and on his victims’ criminal reputations. The result is an account in which reputation and plausibility shape the aftermath as powerfully as the shooting itself. Cleveland’s narrative importance lies in that outcome: a public double killing ends not in arrest or trial, but in Cliff’s successful escape from consequences.