Chasing the Dragon (15 page)

Fakir was in his late fifties. He had spent about half his life in jail, where he had read Marcuse and Camus and Marx and Malcolm X, of course, and also the writings of Muhammad. He had always been a good speaker, and when he was young he had worked the soapbox along Telegraph Avenue, then started a community center down in West Oakland under the shadow of the Nimitz Freeway, but the place had been raided a dozen times, no fucking reason. Then a county judge had been murdered and the powers that be came for him. Fakir was on the road for almost a decade before they got their fingers in his collar, and when they dragged him to trial it was not just for the murder of the judge, but for every unsolved murder and robbery in the state.

Fakir had participated in some of those robberies, it was true, and a brother had wounded a cop during a bank heist. As for the murder of the judge, Fakir had been innocent, and in the end the prosecution had been unable to prove otherwise.

For the rest they gave him twenty-five years, and he’d served them all, no time for good behavior, and when he got out he’d started preaching the word of Muhammad, speaking the truth about the society that had badgered him and put him away, and defining, too, his own vision of the struggle, the need for a Third Force, a new union of the oppressed. But the more success he had, the more people who came to hear him speak, the more trouble that lay ahead. Because he knew that behind the scenes the state prosecutors were still at work. The grubs penetrated unseen until the sweet heart was gone and there was only rot. He could all but smell their presence. They had agents everywhere.

This afternoon, Fakir met with some brothers and sisters at the Cole Valley Mosque. Brother Williams, his right-hand man, sat next to him. Brother Williams was soft spoken and clean-shaven, with eyes that seemed to have a natural tenderness—but Fakir knew there was hardness inside Williams, because he had seen that hardness in prison and he had the same hardness within himself. It was what you needed to survive in the prison yard, and maybe on the outside, too: a shell around the heart and a ruthless eye for that which wanted to destroy you.

The subject of conversation was the church’s bakery, which had lost its lease down on Haight Street.

“What about if we move the bakery into one of our houses?”

“Impossible,” said Sister Lakeesha. She was swinging her foot as she spoke. She may have been a sister of Muhammad, but she still had her brashness. (Meantime, Sister Hannah cut a sideways look at Williams—a half-smile that revealed what was up between them. But it was no secret to Fakir. He knew how much time Williams spent in her apartment.)

“Why?”

“The city,” she said. “I’ve explained this already. We can’t operate a commercial bakery inside a residence. It’s against code.”

“Code. Is that the real reason?” Fakir asked.

The others did not answer, but everyone knew his opinion on such things because he’d spoken it clear enough, often enough. The master will cite many reasons, Fakir knew, but in the end the real reason is only one. What the master cannot control, he must destroy. If we make our own bread, then we cease to be his slaves. And our freedom is the one thing the master cannot tolerate.

Sister Lakeesha was still swinging her foot. “All I know,” she said. “We don’t get the bakery started up, this place gonna close down big time.”

“Amen,” said Sister Hannah.

The Nation of Islam might follow in the law of Muhammad, in which the woman follows in the footsteps of man, but in Cole Valley all the economic livelihood was from the bakery, and the bakery was run by Sister Lakeesha.

“How much longer can we go as we are?” asked Imam Harold. He was the old man who had founded the Cole Valley Mosque. It did not follow in the exact precepts of the Nation—and was considered by some to be renegade—but it was nonetheless a member of the tribe. Harold had been a fiery one in his day, and was glad to see the new life brought here by Fakir.

“We are a month behind on our lease here at the mosque,” said Lakeesha. “If we don’t have a find a place for the bakery soon, it isn’t just the business we will lose. Everyone we hire, our bakers, our drivers, they will be in the street. And we will lose this building, too.”

Fakir felt their eyes. Before he had come to the pulpit, this place had been thriving. The ministry paid its way; they had an outreach to the poor and handed out food and clothes. Lately they had been in the papers, and the crowds were larger, but who was in those crowds you could not be sure. Suddenly there were demands from this quarter and that, questions about building safety, permits, lease arrangements. And now the regulars of the church had started to fade away, and it was gawkers in the crowd, and agents, and who knew which was which.

“We will find a new place for the bakery.”

Fakir wanted to say more, but the prayer siren went off. In these matters, they followed the old practices, as adapted by Imam Harold. The women separated themselves and the men gathered in line on the pillows and bowed toward Mecca. To the place where the ancestors had come out of Africa and gone into the desert and rebelled against the slave traders, where the True Prophet had spoken his words about the redemption of the black tribes and the corruption of the white, and as you kneeled there and felt the outside crushing in on you, you knew it was universal, this corruption. How else the owner of the bakery building suddenly enact the renegotiation clause? How else the city forbid them to operate the retail booth on the church property? How else the tax audit and the parking tickets? How else the projects and the drugs on every corner and the scattering of the tribe while the gentiles of every foreign land and color were given succor here and his own people tormented? How else himself put into jail for a crime he had not committed—and now these rumors spreading through the congregation that he himself was an agent, a dealer, spreading the poison even as he spoke against it?

How else?

When the afternoon prayers were over, Fakir walked down Fillmore with Williams at his side. He felt again the bond between them. It was the bond of all brothers who had spent time in the yard: time doing push-ups and watching your ass and keeping the Hispanics and the whites away from you with their sharpened spoons, their drugs, their stubby little cocks.

Williams’s face was set and quiet and at such moments there was something relaxed and ordinary-looking about him, but Fakir knew about the underneath. There were times in prison where you glanced into a man’s eyes and you saw the veil, and you realized there were things beneath the surface you could not know, and you knew better than to ask. He saw that look on Williams’s face now, but then Williams gave him a sudden grin.

“We will find a bakery, God willing,” said Williams.

“That’s right,” said Fakir, “God willing,” and he was glad to have his prison buddy by his side.

When Dante had been working on the Strehli case, collecting evidence for the prosecution, there’d been a PI on the other side, doing the same thing for the defense. That investigator’s name was Jake Cicero. After seeing Strehli’s photos, Dante had made arrangements to meet with Cicero Wednesday afternoon down at the bocce courts in Columbus Gardens.

Once upon a time the old men used to hang around Columbus Gardens all day, rolling the bocce and sitting on the benches, eating their hard-crusted bread, and drinking their wine. There was hardly any hour, day or night, when you couldn’t find the old-timers there, passing the time. Eventually the city had put a fence around the court and planted ivy, and now the ivy had grown up along the fence, but the bocce courts were still there, on the other side of the cyclone gate, with weeds growing through the unraked gravel. Dante found Jake Cicero alone in the middle of those weeds, rolling the bocce.

Cicero was in his midsixties. He’d been in the business some thirty years, and he knew most of the undercurrent, the truth that swam below the surface. A good deal of Cicero’s work when Dante knew him had been contract work for the city—digging up alibis and mitigating circumstances for the public defender’s office. Seven years ago he’d been doing grub work on behalf of Caselli, the man accused of murdering Strehli. Though Dante and Cicero had worked the opposite sides of the line, things were friendly enough between them. At one point, Cicero had even offered him a job.

“So you like bocce.”

“I’ve played a couple times.”

“No one around here gives a shit about this game anymore.” Cicero took out the pallino and handed it to him. “Here, you start.”

The pallino was a small round ball, smaller than the bocce balls themselves. Dante tossed the pallino down the court, past the midline. The pallino acted as the stake, the center point, more or less, and the goal was to roll your bocce as close to it as possible.

Dante’s first put was no good. His second was better, a foot or so off the pallino.

Cicero cradled the bocce in his palm, judging the distance.

“Why you coming to me?”

“I was just hoping to pick your brain.”

“What about?”

“The Strehli case.”

“Strehli’s dead and Caselli’s dead. And I think even the PD who handled the case is dead, too.”

“How?”

“Heart attack. Nothing sinister, if that’s what you mean.”

Cicero tossed his ball. It was an easy toss, smooth and fluid, and it rolled in front of Dante’s into the lead position.

“I was wondering if you might know where Angie Caselli is these days?”

“The wife?”

Dante nodded.

“My part in the case ended when Caselli decided to cop a plea.”

“The wife disappeared before that, didn’t she?”

“A couple days,” Cicero said. “At first she was her husband’s primary alibi. Then I found a couple of other witnesses to back her up. Given all that, it looked like we were in good position to undermine the prosecution case. But all of a sudden Caselli rolled over.”

“You have any idea why she left town?”

“There were rumors.”

“What kind of rumors?”

“A million kinds. Let me ask you a question.”

“Okay.”

“After Caselli confessed, why didn’t you let it go?”

“My father knew Mark Strehli. The idea he’d been killed in a drug deal, it didn’t make sense to me.”

“So even now, you can’t give it up?”

“I guess not.”

Dante took his turn. His form was bad but his aim was good and he knocked the old man’s ball out of the lead position. His own ball rolled after the kiss, within inches of the pallino. It would be hard to beat.

“My advice: Unless you’re getting paid, let it go.”

Dante didn’t say anything.

“I know what they did to you years ago. Rossi gave you the old pat on the back and fed you to the wolves. So you come back after these many years, it’s still in your craw. You want to vindicate yourself.”

“Maybe.”

“Well, drop it. I just lost a detective. You want to stay in town, I’ll give you a job. Same job I promised seven years ago. Long hours. Lousy pay.”

Cicero held the bocce in his hand. The detective had two puts remaining. Dante remembered how he’d used to come here when he was a boy and watch the old men play. They’d be grilling the Italian sausages, and talking in Italian, mocking the man with the bocce, trying to laugh him off his throw. And they’d drag out the family pictures here, too, and the letters from Italy, and one time, after Marinetti’s twin boys had died in a car crash, he remembered seeing the father out here weeping and wailing, hurling the bocce into the fence.

Cicero took his pitch then. The form was perfect but there was no force behind it. The ball rolled short.

Dante reached in his pocket and took out the pictures of the dead family in the container ship.

“What are these?” asked Cicero.

“Not long before Strehli was murdered, there was an incident at the port. Some Chinese immigrants. Illegals, trying to get into the country. They were found dead in a container ship. Suffocated.”

“And so?”

“Strehli took these pictures, or I think he did.”

“Okay, so he took the pictures. What if he did?

“He sent the pictures to my father. Before he was killed. My father hung on to them all these years. Then at the end, my father got the idea someone was after him. He thought someone was trying to kill him.”

“I heard he died in his sleep.”

“Before he died he gave the pictures to my uncle—and now my uncle’s dead, too.”

“So you think somebody’s after those pictures?”

“Maybe.”

“Well, then, maybe you better get rid of them.”

If Cicero meant this as a joke, he couldn’t tell. The man had his eyes on the pallino and was judging the distance. Then he backed off. “There are a lot of mysteries in this life,” said Cicero suddenly, “and you can’t solve them all. You chase and chase. You spend your time looking for the little nugget, the secret at the heart of things. But the truth is, that nugget, sometimes, it’s better not to find it. Sometimes, it’s better not to know.”

“You sound like my father.”

“Your father was a wise man.”

“Do you know how I can find the Caselli woman?”

“You can’t.”

“Why not?”

“She’s dead. Caselli was killed in jail. The wife died in a car accident. Nevada, maybe a year later.”

“Another coincidence?”

Cicero shrugged. “You want to know the rumor, I’ll tell you. Caselli was paid to confess. To take the fall for Strehli’s murder. He made a deal. He would serve some time—but then he would get out. Assume a new identity, meet up with his wife. Except Caselli decided to renege. So, he was stabbed to death in the county jail. And his wife—it just took them a little longer to catch up with her, that’s all. But it’s all rumor, like I said. A theory.”

“But who’s behind it all?”

“It’s all a goose chase on that one. You’ll end up chasing your own tail.”

“You don’t have any ideas?”

“None worth repeating. I can tell you this, though. You want to know more about those bodies in those containers, you might start with your buddy down there in Homicide.”

“I don’t follow.”