Chasing the Dragon (24 page)

“You’ve got something else going on.”

“Don’t be so self-righteous. Your father was no innocent.”

“What are you talking about?”

“You think you’re some kind of goddamn saint. You and them. The Brothers Mancuso. They turn their heads, act like it’s all on the up-and-up. Me, just because I’m a little more proactive—”

About this time Alice showed up at the door that led from the garage into the house. She was in her night robe now. It was a frilly, frumpy thing, and she held it closed at the neck.

“Gary,” she said. “What’s going on here?”

Dante let him go. Gary was bleeding from the lip, and he was bent over, but he didn’t look at his wife.

“How do I know there’s going to be a sting?” Gary asked him. “Why should I believe anything you say?”

“Because you don’t have any choice.”

“What are you two doing?”

Gary turned on her. “Shut up, God damn you.”

Dante studied the pair of them, eyes moving from one to the next. “You’re husband’s taking the day off tomorrow,” he said.

Alice looked as if she found them both offensive. “It doesn’t matter to me. I have an hair appointment.” Then she went inside.

“See what I have to deal with?” Gary said.

“Don’t come in tomorrow.”

Dante started away. He got maybe halfway to the garage door before his cousin hissed out at him.

“Dante?”

Dante turned.

“I fucked Marilyn,” Gary smiled. “You thought you were the only one, but I fucked her, too.”

Gary stood with his back to the wall. His fists were clenched. It would have been a pleasure to beat him to a pulp. But instead Dante turned away and headed down the hill.

He had to get up early tomorrow. He needed his sleep.

At 7:30, hungover and sleep-starved, Detective Ying walked through the front doors of the Grove Street building. Inside was a collection of state offices, where birth documents and other records were stored. Ying found the inside stairs and descended into the lower regions of the building, into the labyrinths belowground, looking for Room 67. As the room was not easily found, he had to circle the floor a second time.

Meanwhile, Dante had entered another way, as directed, through the delivery area and down an iron staircase, so he was the one to arrive first. The man who greeted him had an oversized jaw and the practiced handshake of a government dick. He had his jacket off and wore his gun in a leather shoulder strap, out where you could see it.

“Agent Serles. DEA.”

“This all seems to be coming down a bit quickly.”

“It always does.”

There was a knock on the door and Ying entered. Dante and the Chinese Homicide detective regarded each other with surprise, each wondering how the other had come to be there, neither knowing how much the other was tied to this man in front of them, or if they were all being played by some unseen hand.

“I understand you two have already met,” said Serles.

“He brought me in for questioning. After my uncle was murdered.”

Ying nodded tightly.

“Well, that’s the kind of coincidence that happens in our line of work.” Serles sounded oddly cheerful. “Let me give you some background, Detective Ying. I’m with Drug Enforcement, as you know, and Dante here is with another agency.” Serles cracked a thin smile, as if they were all comrades in this business. “He works in a unique capacity—and he came to San Francisco to help with the arrest of two drug traffickers. One of them—Mason Wu—is someone whom you yourself pursued when you were with SI.”

The office in which they stood had a thrown-together look. It was a grim little room in the bowels of the building. There was a window that looked out onto an air shaft but it didn’t let in any light. Someone had put a clean coffee cup on the desk and some fresh sheets of paper, but there was a patina of dust over the desk itself as well as on the folding chairs and a bookshelf in the corner.

“The thing is, Detective Ying,” Serles said, “the DEA would like your help on this.”

“
My
help?”

“During your time with SI, you gathered information on the Wu family. Our intention is to take Mason Wu today, and possibly others. We want you there to help us with the interrogation.”

“After you have them in custody, I’ll give you all the help you need.”

Serles shook his head. “No, we’d like you on-site when we take them in.”

“May I ask why?”

“We’re taking them to a secure location. And we want you on hand. It’s not without risk, I admit. But we’ll keep you out of the line of fire until the apprehension has been made.”

Ying walked over to the window and looked out. The bottom of the shaft was littered with debris. He stared through the smudged glass as if the answer to Serles’s question lay there in that debris.

“All right,” he said. “I’ll come along.”

Dante didn’t know if this was a such great idea. Things got messy when you crossed company lines. Serles presented himself as DEA, but the company had a way of operating in two worlds at once, the official and the unofficial, so that it was hard to differentiate between the two or know precisely what their true intentions were.

Serles produced a map of the warehouse. “We have two parties coming to meet with Dante at the Mancuso warehouse. One is headed up by Mason Wu. And the other by an ex-convict affiliated with the Nation of Islam.”

“Yusef Fakir,” said Dante.

Ying nodded. He knew the name.

“We are going to arrest Fakir as well today, and this is how it will happen,” said Serles. “The Wus will come in by boat, docking at the east end of the building. Fakir and one of his cronies will come in the front entrance. The two groups will meet in Salvatore Mancuso’s old office with Dante. That’s where the transaction will take place. We’ve already wired it for sound and video.

“When they leave, each group will go out the way they came in. We’ll have video of them exchanging drugs for money. And then our people will step in and arrest them. We’ll take Fakir and his sidekick in the parking lot. Our agents will be concealed and ready to move.”

“And on the dock?” Ying said.

“We’ll have our men there as well. When the Wus leave their speedboat behind, we’ll commandeer it—and we’ll block their departure on the dock.”

“And me?” asked Ying.

“We have a role for you. We’ll give you a clipboard and embed you with a loading crew, out of harm’s way.”

Dante had gone over all this with Blonde, but he still wondered at what point the warehouse had been wired—and if everything had been arranged as precisely as Serles explained. There was always something hidden. Even if everything was as it seemed, there were always flaws, little details that went askew.

“One thing,” said Dante.

“Yes?”

“I don’t want my cousin implicated. Whatever you have against him, you let it go. That was part of the deal.”

“We’re not interested in your cousin.”

“And me—this is the last time. I want out clean.”

The man’s smile twisted. “That’s not really under my control.”

“Just pass it along,” Dante said. “This is the last goddamn stunt I’m pulling.”

Outside, Dante and Ying found themselves together.

“I suppose I should thank you,” Ying said, though he didn’t look very grateful. “For telling them to bring me onboard. Giving me a chance to go after the Wus.”

“Don’t thank me,” said Dante. “I had nothing to do with it.”

Later that morning, Marilyn Visconti left her apartment to meet Dante at his grandfather’s boat—down a gangway in the older part of the North Beach Marina. It would be a pleasant walk, down Mason and across Bay, especially on a day like this, with the sun so brilliant and the sky so blue. The weather had changed all of a sudden, an offshore breeze kept the fog away, and you could sense the heat starting to build. It would be pleasant to have a picnic on the boat. So on the way she stopped at Scalia’s Grocery.

The sign said Scalia & Sons, but Dominic Scalia had passed on, and neither of his sons were in the business anymore. One was a dentist and lived in the South Bay. The other had died in Vietnam. That left Mama Scalia to run the store, and she was almost always there, lounging behind the counter in her black smock.

“Ah, the goat girl,” she said.

Mama Scalia had seen Marilyn some twenty years before, leading a goat down the street at the Italian day parade. So Marilyn was forever the “goat girl.”

Scalia’s Grocery was not what it had been. The deli counter had been taken out and restocked with factory-made sandwiches. Mama Scalia still carried the old hard salami, though, and Marilyn found some cheese and crackers in the back. It was too early in the day for wine, but then—feeling reckless—she bought it anyway.

“You going on a picnic?”

“Yes.”

“That is the thing about North Beach. It is always beautiful. It is always a good day for a picnic. You say hello to that good-looking father of yours, too. Tell your mother I will steal him if she’s not careful. I always had my eyes on that big house of yours.”

Mama Scalia had put the same tagline on the end of their conversations since Marilyn could remember, apparently unaware that her mother was dead and her father lodged at St. Vincent’s. Unaware, too, that her family no longer owned the big house at the top of Vallejo.

“I will,” she said. “I’ll tell them both. And I’ll tell my mother to lock the door.”

Mama Scalia laughed. “She better,” she said. “She better.”

Marilyn headed through Lombard flats—the old tule land that had once teemed with the families of fishermen and dockhands and cannery workers. The old shanty town was long gone, of course, replaced by row houses of pink stucco. The day was warming quickly. Ahead of her, she could see the sheen of the bay.

She found the boat docked behind Scoma’s Grill, exactly where it had been seven years ago. Some old fishermen sat on a bench nearby. Old Italians who did not go to sea anymore, but remembered how it had been back in the day. The fisherman sat on the seagull-splattered bench with the wizened faces of their grandfathers, speaking in Italian and somewhere in that stream she heard her family’s name. She knew the kind of talk that went on.
Think they’re better than the rest, her and her Genoese parents. . . . That mother, half Italian, half German, but still a Jew, no matter she sent her daughter to the church. . . . You know the story, the daughter and the Mancuso boys, she was leading them both around by the prick
. She headed away from the old men, toward the tourist pier. The bulk of the fishing fleet had been moored here once upon a time. In the old days, the Italians would reenact the discovery of America. Hundreds of people crammed the docks, the bishop waving his hand over the whole business, blessing the fleet. When it was over they’d dragged the statue of the Virgin up the street. Always the Virgin.

The gossip was partly true. Her mother had regarded herself as superior; she’d grown weary of the Italians and their endless preening. And maybe herself, she had taken up with Gary Mancuso on a lark. But she’d fallen in love with Dante, and she’d paid the price. Because after Gary found out, he had come over to her apartment. She’d been unable to stop what happened next. Or maybe she was lying to herself. Maybe she could have stopped him. Maybe she had felt sorry for him. Maybe she’d loved him a little. So when Gary pushed her against the wall, she put her hand in his curly hair, trying to calm him, and he misread that gesture. Because then he’d lifted her skirt and she had been unable to push him away.

She had not told Dante. She did not know a way to explain such a thing. And so she had run off.

At the end of the pier, the seals were making a god-awful noise. The tourists were tossing bread. A little girl hollered at her mother. The seagulls skimmed along the water, looking for food, something to scavenge.

Dante should be to the boat by now.

She headed back. The old men were still there. And a couple of women. One of them she recognized.

Mrs. Romero.

“I hear you’re going to Italy on your honeymoon,” said Mrs. Romero. “Your mother would be proud. Such a nice boy.”

“Oh, so this is Marilyn Visconti. We saw her walk by a few minutes ago,” said one of the old men. “We wondered who she might be.”

“It is such a wonderful thing, marriage.”

“And Tony Mora is such a charming man,” said Mrs. Romero. “Quite a catch.”

“What does she have in that bag?” said one of the others. Mussolino, maybe, or Scarpetti. She had a hard time telling the old men one from the other, and anyway they talked as if she wasn’t there. “Looks like she’s going on a picnic.”

The old woman smiled. It was not so sincere. The old men sat there with their Italian smirks. They’d seen her hanging near the Mancuso boat. Knew the stories. Knew who she was waiting for. These old Italians, they knew it all.

She walked away. Felt them watching. Glanced one last time over her shoulder at the boat. An hour late now. He wasn’t going to show. Dante’s revenge. Her lips turned in a hard smile.
Slut
. She kept on walking.
Whore
. Swinging her bag.
Goat girl, no one will marry you
. And the sound of the old ones was like the cawing of the gulls, miserable birds scrabbling with each other over some small bit of debris—a piece of flesh to tear apart and devour.

The Mancuso warehouse was out past Third Street, at the east end of the city. It sat at the front end of the Potrero Pier, and you could hear the water whisper as it brushed against the pilings. Railroad tracks ran up to the pier—old tracks, no longer in use—but if you put your ear to the steel you could nonetheless hear the moaning of the rails. Across the bay you could see Oakland, the giant container ships and the towering cranes, and you could hear the white noise of the freight trucks on the Nimitz Freeway.

In the concrete pipe across from the warehouse a homeless man sat, gumming an apple, and the wind whistled through his toothless head. On the bench, a couple of fishermen cast their lines into the contaminated water. They coughed and hacked and spit, and the sound of their talk filtered across the water. But the sounds of those individual men were lost in the white noise, in the slap of the water, in the moan of the rails and the traffic on Third Street. All the sounds blurred together to become one sound, and that was the sound of the dying waterfront. It was the old song, the familiar complaint. How the people downtown had sold out the working man. How the Port Authority had got together with Hong Kong and the New York Jews and Alioto’s Sicilian buddies to sell the waterfront down the tubes. After that it was the hippies and the faggots and those sons of bitches with their computers. But these complaints were nothing new. The big-chested Irish and the unionist Harry Bridges and the anarchist Carlo Tresca had seen it coming, the industrial conspiracy that would take away all the jobs and replace everyone with machines. But they were silenced by the war, by the navy and General DeWitt and his operations to move all unnaturalized aliens away from the waterfront, to round up the Japs and the Wops and the Krauts and in the process shut up anyone else who dared to speak. Sons of bitches had been at it from the beginning. Once it had been little coves and beaches and hollows all along here, finger piers that extended out to Chinese junks filled with silk and tea and opium. Then came the seawall, all around the city. The coves and inlets were backfilled with mud, with debris, with the corpses of Indians and Negroes—and with the rotting hulks of abandoned ships. They filled up the wet lands between the seawall and bedrock with anything they could find, then crisscrossed the whole business with roads that ran helter-skelter to the docks. It was all cemented over now, but you could know the truth of things if you only lay upon the ground and listened to what lay beneath the concrete.