Chasing the Dragon (14 page)

“You spent too much time in vice.”

“Old habits—they die hard. If they die at all. Anyway, ours is not to reason why. Like the poet says. Ours is to pleasure ourselves. And pleasure ourselves some more.” The crocodile tears were back now. Wiesinski reached out and touched his arm. “Come on,” he said. “Old time’s sake.”

“Sure,” said Dante. “Just let me take a leak.”

Dante went to the bathroom. As he stood there with his cock in his hand, he wondered what the hell Wiesinski was up to. If all this was anything more than the usual shenanigans, a late-night plunge into darkness. Dante washed his hands and thought of Marilyn, and the possibility he had seen in her eyes, there on his cousin’s balcony. He could pursue that possibility, but what was the point of that? The sting would be set soon, and he would be gone, out of her life.

He stepped out of the restroom and stood a minute looking through the blue light and the smoke back at Wiesinski—all the girls were at the table now. Jojo was bringing a fresh round.

The hunger was as fierce as it had been, as fierce as he could remember.

No
, he told himself.

Dante ducked out the rear exit and headed once more toward the little house on Fresno Street.

Dante’s first impulse always was to head toward the kitchen, to where his mother and father had spent their time in the old days, his father leaning backward in his chair, holding forth, a glass of wine in his hand, while his mother stood tending the stove, his dark-eyed mother with her auburn hair, her delirious laugh. Through the windows behind them you could see the flattop roof, where Mrs. Fiora hung her laundry, and beyond that the rusted spires of the Coppola Building. It was an old instinct, heading toward that room, one that persisted even now with his parents gone and the house empty. Tonight, though, he did not take three steps before he pulled up short. He had caught the movement too late. There was nothing he could do—even if his gun had not been confiscated during the warrant search.

A woman faced him from the shadows, and she held a revolver pointed at his chest. He did not recognize her at first, but when he heard that voice, cool and implacable, he remembered it from their encounter in New Orleans.

“You’re sloppy,” said Anita Blonde. “And unarmed. You should be more careful.”

She had changed her looks since the last time he’d seen her. The blonde hair was gone, with its delicate flip, and so was the straw hat. Her hair was cut close now, coal black. She wore a waist jacket and pants that flared at the bottom. Jazz pants, like dancers wore, black and close-fitting. For agility, he guessed. So she would blend easier into the shadows.

“You could announce your arrival in advance,” he said.

“What happened here?” She pointed to the disarray—the clothing scattered by the police in their search.

“My uncle was murdered, and the cops came here with a warrant.”

She holstered her gun in an ankle strap under the flare of her pants. The gun was tucked away nicely, but at a long reach. He could see how it might be difficult to retrieve in certain circumstances.

“Are you a suspect?”

“I’m on their list.”

“That’s not the kind of attention we need.”

“You could replace me.”

She shook her head. “I don’t think that’s possible, at this point. I assume you’ve made the arrangements. With the Wus. And Williams.”

“Yes.”

She strolled over and looked at the family pictures then, contemplating Dante as a young man, maybe nineteen years old, the summer he’d worked at the warehouse.

“Aren’t you going to offer me a place to sit?”

“Sure. Take a seat.”

“Can I move these clothes?”

“I’ll do it for you.”

Some of his mother’s clothes had been taken out of the downstairs closet by the cops and laid over the chair. Dante picked them up and noticed a scent he had all but forgotten. He remembered himself as a kid watching his mother getting ready for church, back when she was still beautiful and both he and his father had taken a special pleasure in strolling with her down to the cathedral. The clothes smelled liked perfume. Like dry-cleaning fluid. Like his mother walking down the street.

“Give me the details,” said Blonde. “Tell me what you’ve been doing.”

He told her then, more or less, about his contacts with Williams and Mason Wu. And about his interactions with Ying down at Columbus Station. Then he drew for her a diagram of the Mancuso warehouse and showed her the positions from which the tactical squads might emerge. The deal would go down in his father’s office, recorded on video by hidden cameras. His notion was to have the Wus come in by boat, then grab them when they left, as they headed out to the dock. Williams and Fakir could be apprehended in the parking lot.

“I suppose I should bring my cousin into the loop.”

“Do you know when the mule arrives?”

“I’m waiting to hear.”

“When you get the date, you call our local contact at the DEA. But not before. In the meantime, he’ll get the squad together. They’ll plant the cameras and make sure everything’s ready.”

“How are they going to get access?”

“That’s not your concern.”

“You have someone else on the inside?”

“Like I said, that’s not you’re concern. And as far as your cousin goes, wait. We don’t want any leaks.”

Blonde picked up a hat that had been his mother’s—a stylish bit of felt with netting that hung over the brim and a feather on the side. His mother used to wear it when she was young, when she and Giovanni still went out in the evenings.

“You grew up in this house?”

He heard the flat midwestern forever in her voice, the prairie reaching across Nebraska, all that corn waving around under the blue sky.

“Sure.”

“Your room was upstairs, and in the morning you came down the stairs—in pajamas with little feet—and ate at that yellow table.”

“That’s right.”

It was the same kind of banter they had done back at the Du Monde, fooling with identity. She got a certain pleasure out of it, he supposed. And so did Dante, up to a point.

“You watched your dad go off to work, and you smelled the clean smell of his aftershave, and though your heart ached when he left, you were glad, too—because then you could just look at Mama. You and her together, both of you, with your big brown eyes.”

“You’ve got it dialed,” he said. The hat looked good on her, he had to admit. Even so, it bothered him. “And you? What are you doing here in our living room?”

“I’m a schoolteacher. From out of town. Someone the little boy used to think about in a certain way.”

“What town?”

She shrugged.

“Chicago?” he asked.

“Sure,” she said. “Chicago.”

“A girl from the Midwest who grew up in the town of slaughterhouses—and moved out here because she couldn’t stand anymore the smell of meat in the air.”

“You’re very perceptive,” she said. “I always wanted to live next to the ocean.”

They were standing close now. “Take the hat off,” he said.

“And the little boy, when his mother turned her back, and he was alone on the couch, he thought of his schoolteacher, imagining her here in his living room, in his mother’s hat. You know how boys are about their teachers.”

“Our teachers were nuns.”

He’d had enough. He reached up now, intending to pull the hat from her head, but instead touched her cheek with the back of his hand.

“The teacher, alone at night, she’s not thinking of the little boy, but of a man she knows. A man in slacks and a white shirt.”

“Is he unshaven?”

She reached out and felt his cheek.

“No. But his father has died, he has an inheritance, and he has promised her a trip to Tahiti.”

They kissed. It was the kind of kiss that people like themselves exchanged. Strangers acting at roles. Lingering between the pulse of this moment and the next. Your mind free to create and fill in the blanks, racing as it did so, as one illusion slipped into another. He had done the same thing, more or less, in other places, with other women—not knowing the degree to which they, too, were acting, though he suspected in a way it was what all people did. There was always a notion out there, an idea unformed, a child racing in the void. And that was what you chased. Because the instant that notion was solidified you were dealing with an object in the world—flesh, bone, a hank of hair—and then everything changed.

It was a paradox, maybe, he didn’t know. All he knew was that his dick was hard, and he was pressed up tight against this woman in the hallway of his parent’s house, in a way that he had dreamed of when he was a kid: like he had dreamed of his mother’s friends and his Italian cousins. Anita Blonde pulled his shirt from his pants, and he found her crotch, reached under the waistband, then jerked her toward him, his other hand over her breast, her tongue inside his mouth, and they slid to the floor, his mother’s and father’s clothes scattered around, and he was thinking of Anthony Mora and his Alfa, and of his dead uncle, and of the smell of blood, and all the time Anita Blonde’s eyes were half shut—as if she too were off in some other world, pursuing some other vision, there on the Persian carpet with all those animals in the fabric. She began to make noises down in her throat, sounds that were guttural and deep. And for a moment it seemed they might consume one another, there on the floor.

During the night Dante woke up twice. The first time Anita Blonde still lay on her back next to him, asleep. Her skin was almost pearlescent in the dark room. She seemed a bit beautiful to him, and a bit ugly, her black hair too ragged and short, her skin too white, her features too sharp for a person at rest, too harsh. The second time he awoke it was just after dawn—and she was no longer in bed.

He heard the creak and sigh of the house, and he realized she was downstairs, rummaging.

For what?

She had been searching the place when he walked in the door last night, he was pretty sure. She had seduced him, maybe for the fun of it, but maybe to buy herself a little more time, another look around. He thought about the broken window hasp in this father’s basement, and the two figures he had seen out on the street on his first night he returned: the man ducking into the shadows and the woman strolling by in the close-fitting clothes and the dark jacket, and it occurred to him that woman had been Anita Blonde. Now he heard her coming up the stairs. She tried to be quiet about it, but the old redwood had a considerable amount of give and he could hear her footfalls. Then she came into the room. He lay on his side, eyes partly closed. She went to the dresser and opened the drawer.

“What are you looking for?”

She regarded him in the mirror. “I wondered if you were awake.”

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Just seeing if there’s any perfume around.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“My, my. Aren’t we the suspicious one?”

He moved toward her. Outside the dawn was breaking and the room filled with its half light.

“What were you doing?” he asked again.

“We all have our jobs to do.”

She tried to brush past him, but he grabbed her by the forearm and saw something cold in her eyes. The ankle holster was out of reach. He held her an instant longer, wanting to frighten her—and maybe he saw the fear for a second, naked inside of her.

“I’ll see you in Tahiti,” he said, then let her go.

Later, Dante had a hunch, one of those hunches people who have worked Homicide are supposed to have, though perhaps he should have had it a week earlier at his father’s funeral, when his uncle had nervously handed him some film. Family pictures, he’d assumed. A roll of sentiment that had been stashed away and forgotten. Dante had dropped the film off at the local pharmacy, then he’d forgotten it, too.

Now he wondered.

His uncle’s office had been pretty well torn apart. And Anita Blonde’s visit had not been without ulterior motive.

Dante returned to Cassinelli’s Drugs and picked up the pictures. As it turned out, they were not family photos. They had been taken out at the Oakland waterfront. The subject was a large freight container, the kind sent over on container ships preloaded with merchandise, then picked up with a crane and placed on a tractor trailer. The next photo showed the interior of the container—a makeshift living quarters of the type inhabited by stowaways, illegals looking for a way into the country. Then came the ghostly images, taken with the flash: the family intertwined on a pile of rags—a man and a woman and two children—girls, most likely, if you were to judge from the hair and clothing. The corpses had decomposed considerably, enough to suggest they had died early in the voyage. Other photos showed what looked like scratch marks on the interior of the trailer, and a broken tube on the outside—both of which, when combined with the posture of the corpses, suggested death by asphyxiation. It was not uncommon. Sometimes, when the containers were being loaded one on top of the other, the tubes providing air would snap or become otherwise obstructed.

His father had given this film to his uncle; he’d wanted Dante to see it. It didn’t seem his uncle had known what the pictures were, but Dante couldn’t know for sure. He did know that Strehli—his father’s friend—had been a customs inspector down at the shipyard. An amateur photographer.

Strehli.

Dead of a gunshot wound to the head.

Strehli had gone over to the dark side, or that’s what the cops had said. Murdered by Caselli over a drug deal gone bad. Dante hadn’t believed it then—and he wasn’t any more inclined to believe it now.

All his life, the ex-convict Yusef Fakir had been the target of investigations, and in his dark moments he feared the Cole Valley Mosque had been infiltrated, too. The white man was a parasite. Bite into the sweetest fruit and you would find him there, multiplying himself, wriggly and wormy. There was no garden that was safe, no sanctuary. At least not for Yusef Fakir. The blunt truth of it was that the government was after him; Fakir had no doubt of this. There were people who wouldn’t be satisfied until they had seen him laid into the ground. Until they had squatted down and shat upon his grave.