Chasing the Dragon (28 page)

“I’m going to tell you what I told your father back then, and what I told him again before he died,” the mayor said. “If you look at the information Strehli assembled—it says nothing concrete. It’s a tissue of conspiracy theory with nothing behind it. There’s nothing identifying the people in that container. And there’s nothing verifying the authenticity of that letter.”

“But what about the journal?”

“There is no journal,” said the Mayor, but his voice lacked conviction, and his eyes were on the packet in Dante’s hand. “No one ever found a journal.”

Dante took a last look around the room, and saw again the mayor’s beautiful daughters. He felt a sadness for the girls, and sadness for the mayor, and for the crab fishermen who had come before him and spent their lives pulling the harvest out of the ocean.

“You get started, you’ll get a witch hunt going. And your family, they’re not innocent. That warehouse—how do you think they got the contracts they did, the deals? Everyone else is going broke, and they survive. No one is pure in this world, and you should stop and think—”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean your father, your uncle, they had their dealings, too. How do you think they survived?”

Dante had taken a step forward, and Rossi backed toward the wall. The younger man still had one good hand and there was a certain fury in his hard features, in the dark eyes and drawn cheeks.

“I loved your father and your uncle both. You know that. I wouldn’t have done anything to hurt them.”

Dante loomed over the mayor. He watched the man cower and felt an ugliness pass through his own heart, the desire to push Rossi against the wall and kick him into submission.

“What are you going to do?”

The mayor’s voice was high now. The man trembled, and this made Dante want to kick him all the more, but he saw in the old man’s face all the old men he had even known. He wanted to kick them to death, all those old men. A man like Rossi, though, he would not pull the trigger. Not personally, anyway. There was someone else behind this. Rossi might know, but to get it out of him, he feared, he would have to be merciless. He would have to kick and not stop kicking. Dante took a glance at the wall, at the beautiful daughters. Then he turned and went out into the street.

Mayor Rossi stood in his den, looking through the gauze curtains. The sheers made a kind of film over the glass so that light from the street was filtered. Then a car went by, and Dante was illuminated from behind. His shadow grew large and fell across the glass, and then dwindled again. Then he was gone.

What was in that journal?
Rossi wondered.
Maybe nothing at all. Maybe it has nothing to do with me
.

I have nothing to be ashamed of
, he told himself. In this day and age, though, he knew how it was. One thing led to another, and the next thing you knew, the story was out, it got larger, it twisted this way and that, and all of a sudden you were responsible for all the sinister doings of the world.

It had a been a joint decision, he wanted to tell Dante. Your old man as much as me. I explained to him the situation, the risks in coming forward, and he had agreed to hide it away.

But he didn’t tell me he had kept the copies. And he didn’t tell me about the goddamn journal. Not at first, anyway. Not till years later, when he was in his death throes, babbling.

For myself, I would never have betrayed him.

But I have my wife, my daughters, grandchildren. They are vulnerable.

All I wanted was for this city to be a beautiful place.

There are people more powerful than us to whom we must all bend. Ideas. Institutions. The fabric of the times.

Man is by his nature corrupt. And things in this world do not happen without the touch of man.

He glanced once again at the photos, his life spread out on the wall.

Upstairs, his wife was playing Rossini. Mussolini’s favorite. It had been on the Victrola the day Il Duce had his son-in-law executed.

Rossi closed his eyes. He didn’t like what he had to do, but there was no choice.

He picked up the phone. He dialed the same number he’d dialed seven years ago, when Strehli had started talking about what he’d found in that container, back when all this fuss had started.

Dante stood on Vallejo Street, overlooking the Barbary Coast. He was on the far end of his high now, the rush gone, fading—but despite everything there was still a kind of contentment, a sense of coasting, of imminent arrival. At the sametime he felt the old desire—the ache returning. There was a small hole in his heart that he knew would grow larger sooner enough, and there would be nothing to fill it.

It was a hospital high, without the ugly jerk and punch of street dope. Pure and uncut.

Dope like this, even on the downslide, there were moments when you felt the boundaries between yourself and the rest of the world slip away. The kind of moments his grandmother used to talk about, more or less.

God sees it all. He sees every thing. He knows what’s in everyone’s heart. And when you die, you will know, too
.

The kind of moments aesthetics had. And lunatics. And people on their deathbeds.

Below him, at the bottom of the Kearny Stairs, a prostitute was weaving her way out of the Hungry I and toward Chinatown. Up the street a tourist turned his head to watch, and a flock of parrots burst from the belfry of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul. Love Wu was sitting in his wheelchair on his tenth-floor balcony, his oxygen tanks beside him. Below him relatives were mourning his great-nephew, Mason, but Love Wu was thinking only of the travels of his youth. The streets of Shanghai. Of Rome. Remembering a brown-eyed Italian girl with whom he had exchanged the briefest of glances, her face suddenly coming very clear to him, not knowing then or now that the same girl had turned down the bedsheets of the room where Salvatore and Regina Mancuso stayed when they adopted Gary. The memory vanished in a blink. Up the hill, Marilyn Visconti rolled in her bed, unable to sleep, and Mayor Rossi put down the phone, and Ying’s grandmother stood on the fire balcony, eyes closed, and let out a low moan that was lost in the sound of the parrots winging by, and Dante watched shadows emerge from shadows down on the Barbary Coast, thinking for an instant he saw all the connections, he understood every goddamn thing—then, just as quickly, his omniscience disappeared, the knowledge temporary, fading from memory as soon as it was grasped, lost in the instant between one reverie and the next, scattered by the force of his desire and the pain that had just now returned, burning like a flame in his shoulder.

On Fresno Street, a cat crouched in a window box, and the alley echoed with rickshaw music, emanating it seemed from several apartments at once. A fresh patina of broken glass littered the alley—a beer bottle smashed and scattered like the
I Ching
. Grandmother Pellicano would have found significance in such things. A reason for saying a prayer. For crossing herself. But these were portents Dante could not read. In his enhanced state, though, he found the alley reassuring in its solidity. It was home, at least. The porch light shone dim as ever. The key stuck in the same clumsy way.

He would not be able to stay long. The police guard had been removed from his hospital room, but he did not know why. He could not trust the company’s intentions.

Inside, the house was quiet and dark, and the air carried—as it did everywhere in The Beach—the faint smell of mold, a fungus flowering deep in the timbers. The place was tidy, though. Dante had gotten his father’s house back in order, straightening out the mess the police had made. So now there was something like serenity here, and the pictures of his relatives looked down with equanimity. He went upstairs to the bedroom to get himself into some fresh clothes. To strap on a holster and load his gun.

A light flashed on the phone machine, but when he played it, there was no message.

He would not stay here tonight. He would go around the corner to the Basque Hotel. He was exhausted, though, and he settled himself for a moment in the big chair that had been his father’s favorite. His father had spent an infinite amount of time in the chair, so the imprint of his body was deep in the cushions, his smell in the fabric, and Dante remembered wandering by the room, seeing his father with his head back while Dante’s mother, downstairs in the kitchen, sang in that high, beautiful voice that was hers alone. She sang those quavering arias of the female nobility: women forsaken, women at the edge of madness—and sometimes his father, too, would raise his voice, answering his mother’s, and their voices would carry up and down the stairs.

He realized now what his father had done. How he had held quiet about Strehli’s photographs and Ru Shen’s journal. Held quiet because he feared what would happen to Dante if he were stubborn enough to push the investigation. And for another reason not quite so altruistic, if the mayor was to be believed. If so, his father must have been tempted at times to destroy that journal, or to translate it, but instead he’d done neither. Nonetheless he must have wondered about its secrets as he grew old, as he padded from room to room, drinking his grappa and eating his meatball sandwiches.

What was in these pages? Dante wondered.

The accounts of a businessman turned activist. A man who knew the smuggling routes, the backdoor deals, the connections between Hong Kong money and the Chinese and the San Franciscans on the other side of the Pacific.

Something like a plan was forming in Dante’s head. A way of insulating himself. Of using the journal to his own advantage.

He thought of his moment with Marilyn, and how she had pressed against him in the doorway of the abandoned storefront. He thought of Jake Cicero, and the offer he had made to bring Dante on as a detective if he stayed in town. He thought of his inheritance, and how his father had paid off the mortgage before he died. And he told himself he could stay here if he wanted. He could put behind him all those lonely nights, sheets bunched beneath his middle. He could forget the Ninth Ward, with its cockroaches the size of mice scuttling along the hardwood. Forget, too, the image of the woman on her bed in Bangkok. He could stay here in North Beach. He could make it up with Marilyn. He could look outside over the kiltered rooftops to see the old Calabrese on the street, all dressed in black, hunched over like crows on the wire.

He was tired, exhausted. The pain in his shoulder had worsened and he remembered the Vicodin in his father’s medicine cabinet. He should get up, grab the Vicodin, go down to the Basque, but there was a puzzle in his head, something he was on the verge of solving, here in his father’s chair.

The journal . . .

Who had the mayor talked to seven years ago? To whom had he given the Strehli file back then?

The company was an amorphous thing, personal intentions collided with the other intentions, not quite visible, and a plan that had started out became something else and emerged with a life of its own. So maybe in the beginning the sting’s purpose had been to get rid of Fakir. To punish him for crimes past, real or imagined, and discredit him in the eyes of his own community. At some point it was decided that they might as well get Mason Wu, too. The way it had gone down, it suggested that there was an intersection of interest. The company and Love Wu.

Fakir was right about one thing: The company had its hands in the drug business. They’d wanted Fakir dead and Mason Wu, too. Then, as the plan came together and Dante started looking into the Strehli business, they’d decided to get rid of Dante and Ying, as well.

The reason had to do with the journal, Dante figured. There was a corrupt operative behind it all somewhere. Working with the sanction of the company, maybe or maybe not, but either way that operative had things he did not want revealed.

Who?

The answer had been hovering before him after he left the mayor’s house and stood at the top of the Kearny stairs, staring down at the Barbary Coast. It hovered again before him now. The answer could be in the journal, but at the moment it seemed as if it were in front of him, in the dream images that tantalized him, in the phantasmagoria between sleep and consciousness, in the carnival parade of masked creatures that moved just beyond seeing in the land of shadows. And as he headed deeper into that world he remembered the basement window, the broken hasp, and he told himself he would get up in a moment, leave his father’s house, but he didn’t. His exhaustion was too strong.

What woke him up, exactly, he didn’t know. Maybe it was the pain flaring in his shoulder. Or the sound of the house settling. Something unusual in the sound. Not quiet right. Dante sat in the utter silence, looking across the room at the bed where his father had died.

Then the phone rang.

The machine clicked over to take a message, then filled with the sound of the wire. Whoever it was, they had rung off.

The medication was fading, and the pain sliced through. Dante groped down the hall and rummaged the medicine cabinet and shook out a pair of his father’s Vicodins.

Then the phone rang again. He heard his father’s voice on the outgoing message, speaking in a mix of English and Italian. And a creaking noise. Not quite like the usual settling.

“Dante, this is Marilyn.”

He might have picked up the phone then—but in the mirror, down the stairs, he saw movement. A shadow, a barest ripple, a quivering in the surface of the glass that suggested someone at the bottom of the stairs. Dante slid his revolver from its holster.

On the phone, Marilyn continued.

“I went to the Marina, to the boat, and you weren’t there. . . . And so I thought . . .” She paused, sounding flustered. “I don’t know what I thought . . . but there’s a rumor going around today. About a shooting at the warehouse. And then on the news . . .”

It was one of those moments when things hung in the balance. Marilyn was on the other end, and if he picked up now there was a chance of reconciliation. Such moments could pass; you could miss them. He kept his eyes on the mirror.