Naked Moon (20 page)

“Nelson sent me,” he said.

The old woman barked in Chinese. From the way the nurse reacted, and the glance between them, Dante guessed the old woman had said something about his presence. The old woman was mad, no doubt, but only half-mad, not so gullible as she seemed. She was shrewd, a little shaky but strong in the upper arms, the way she spun the wheelchair about all of a sudden.

“Air!” she demanded.

Dante nodded his OK, giving permission for the nurse to help the woman, but at the same time put his hands on his hips in a manner that let her see the holster under his jacket. In this way, this gesture, he was not so different from his friend Angelo. Or from Chin.

“You do not come here to help us,” said the old woman.

“This is your library?” He nodded toward the alcove.

“You do not work for Nelson,” the old woman said. “You are not police. You are not fire.”

“There is a journal, by a man named Ru Shen.”

The young woman took a step backward, the slightest step. His guess, the nurse was not American-born Chinese. Unlike Yin, she spoke both languages, same as the old woman.

“The things back there, they are from the old days.” The old woman glanced at the trail of paper along the floor that led to the darkened alcove. Her glance was not without longing. On the table closer by were stacks of magazines from the new China. “But there is a fashion industry in China,” the old woman said. “Many new things. Someone has to keep track.”

Though it was midday, the chambers were dim and cloistered. The balcony doors were shuttered, with the blinds at half-slant, and there was no breeze. From what he could see, the old woman slept in the room in which they stood, on an adjustable bed in the corner, and there was a small kitchen beyond. The remaining room, from which the nurse had emerged, just past the alcove, was nicer, more carefully furnished, sparser: A large bed stood at the center of the far wall, covered with an intricate silk spread. This room had its own bathroom and an armoire and a vanity against the other wall. Like the young woman, the room smelled as if it had been tinctured with lilac.

Dante stood on the threshold of that room. There was a door at the far end. He would have thought it a closet, except for a dead bolt that latched from the inside.

He unlatched the bolt and peered down a flight of stairs into the darkness.

“What's this?”

“For emergency.”

Like the others, the nurse did not look at him when he spoke. Maybe because she was lying or maybe out of habit. Because a woman in Chinatown did not meet the eyes of a white man passing on the street, let alone those of a stranger appearing in her bedroom.

“Where does it go?”

“No one uses it anymore.”

Dante remembered the sound of her footsteps ascending behind the wall of Yin's office. He had a pretty good idea where those stairs originated. Dante studied her carefully
made-up face. Though her eyes darted away, he studied it anyway. He did not want to get rough with her, but there was only so much time. On the floor, a pair of men's shoes sat by the armoire. He walked back over to where she stood, there on the threshold.

“Lock the wheels,” said Dante.

“Pardon?”

“I don't want her rolling around.”

“I don't understand.”

“Yes, you do. The wheels have a lock, down low, where the patient cannot reach. So she does not roll herself into oblivion.”

The young woman did as she was told. Dante smelled again the sour smell he'd noticed in the hall, and realized it came from the old woman, the smell of urine and perfume mixed together.

“Ru Shen,” he repeated. “His diary—it's here.”

“I am just a nurse. I don't know anything about it.”

“On your knees.”

He did not much like the tone of his voice. He heard cruelty and also a joy inside that cruelty. He bound her wrists behind her back, wrapping them with duct tape. Then he pushed her down on her stomach, face to the floor, and wrapped her ankles. It was for her own good, so she would not be roaming around while he examined the library.

“Nelson will kill you for this,” the old woman said. “With his bare hands.”

He saw the thin smile on the old woman's face, however,
her lips pursed out. The crone enjoyed the spectacle of the young woman lying bound at her feet. She did not much care for her young nurse, and the nurse, he suspected, did not much care for her.

The alcove smelled of paper and dust. The boxes were stacked to the wall, and the shelves were piled with old ledgers, full of Chinese characters, shipments in and out, pages yellow with age, ripped and torn, but from the looks of them, the ledgers had been preserved by happenstance more than anything else. The shelves were poorly arranged. There were boxes of pictures and more pictures, photographs—relatives, he'd thought at first, but there were too many for that—and there were envelopes, too, of figures carefully clipped from their surroundings.

Dante could see there had been a logic to it once, scrap-books of the woman's life, pictures of herself, friends, pages from letters and journals, arranged according to the events of her life, the world around her—but at some point, the woman had lost focus.

Along the bottom shelves, yet more. Children's books. A Chinese encyclopedia. A history of silk. Schoolgirl diaries. All of which had been clipped as well, pages removed, dog-eared, sullied, smeared and scribbled, the books themselves filed according to a plan no longer decipherable. Then, against the wall, boxes and more boxes. He went through these, too. In the bottom tier, he found the boxes he'd hoped to find, or so they appeared to be, labeled along the top with the address of the San Francisco Library, and containing more catalogs, collector's items, some of them from an older
time period but now ravaged: items he recognized from the file list of “Across the Water.” He rummaged through them, book by book. The old woman had taken them for herself, clipped and pasted, integrated them into her world. But if Ru Shen's journal had been among the artifacts, it was here no longer.

From the other room, all of a sudden, came a tinny sound, oddly muffled, that reminded him of the Chinese music boxes the shopkeepers used to sell along Stockton Street. He stepped into the main chambers, but there was no music box. The old woman sat in her wheelchair, and the nurse lay on the floor, her face in the carpet. The refrain ended, started again. Dante kneeled over the nurse. Her blouse was loose, and her slacks stopped just below the knees. She stiffened as he searched her, but he did not stop, instead running his hands over her until he found the cell phone in the waist pocket of the cheongsam.

The ringtone ended, started again. He flipped open the cell and looked at the yellow screen.

Nelson Yin.

No doubt there was a scene out on the street: fire trucks and squad cars and tourists with cameras. Among these would be the patrons from the Dragon, Yin among them. He had called on his cell, concerned about his lover's safety. Dante went to the slatted shades. His temptation was to step onto the balcony, to peer down into the street and get a good look at the action below—but if he did so, someone in the square would notice. There would be a stir at the sight of the unknown man appearing on the balcony of Love Wu.

Dante thought about the hidden stairs, the locked passages, the secret passage up, and glanced again at the girl.

He widened the slats and stood there as he had once imagined Teng Wu standing. Dante listened for the whispering of the men down in the square, for the crackling of the magnolia leaves and the sound of the sampan in the Bay, for the sound of the tunnels being dug and the tracks being laid and the short-handled hoe hitting dirt and the pickax in the goldfield and the wheels of the fishmonger's cart rolling down Grant. Of the dice rolling in the brothel. Hearing, too, the rustling of a white dress in a square far away and a squad car door shutting and heels clicking in the alley. His own name whispered. Scissors clipping. Behind him, the young woman grunted on the floor. He had felt the softness of her clothing, the warmth beneath, as he had searched her, looking for the phone.

The nurse knows, he thought.

She is Yin's lover and she knows, and I have wasted valuable time. He touched his gun, wondering how far he would have to go to get her to speak. Then there was the possibility, too, that the journal was not here at all.

“Come here,” said the old woman.

“Why?”

“I want to show you something.”

The old woman had managed to reach one of the scrap-books stacked on the table nearby, an older one assembled years ago, in which the inner logic had not yet deteriorated, its outer cover emblazoned with the symbol of the Wu family. Inside the book were pictures of this room as it had
been in the past, and of a Chinese man, very old, and others who had lived here once upon a time. “That is me as a little girl,” she said. “I was from a good family. They sent me here by clipper, and I never saw them again. They wrote me, though. Teng's wife was old, and he was old, too. I nursed them both.” The woman did not say much else, but he understood, looking at the pictures, that she had been more than a nurse. She had been mistress to Teng Wu, or Teng Wu's son—it didn't matter, it was impossible, ultimately, to tell them apart, and they were all dead now. When she had gotten too old, her place had been taken by a younger woman, who herself had gotten old, but these others, they were all dead now, no trace, only these pictures clipped and scattered, and now there was just her, living with this nurse of her own.

Except this young woman, lying on the floor, was not like her. She had come from that new China, and Nelson Yin, he went back and forth from the suburbs, and all the pictures and letters were all meaningless now.

So this is what is left of Teng Wu's library, he thought.

“Nelson pulled some strings,” the old woman said. “He got these for me. Missing pieces. Lost relatives.”

The old woman gestured at the recent clippings. These were older pictures, and Dante realized the source. They had come from the historical exhibit, “Across the Water,” secured so that the old woman would have more pictures for her endless project.
Ru Shen,
he thought, and something came clear to him, almost, but then the phone rang again. Dante went to the woman on the floor.

“Speak in English,” he said. “Tell him everything is okay. That there is no hurry.”

He flipped open the phone and held it so the woman could speak to Yin. She did as she was told. The conversation did not go on very long, but Dante worried Yin would notice the fear in her voice.

He heard at the same time a noise in the corridor below, as of footsteps ascending.

“Where is he?”

“He is going home to his wife.”

Dante realized, no, with this woman waiting, so soft to the touch—with her wide eyes, her childlike pout … No, Nelson Yin had not gone home to his wife. Yin knew the building well. Yin could get past the firemen easily enough if he wanted. He undoubtedly had access to that locked passage on the other side of the blocked stairwell. It also occurred to Dante that the man had called his mistress not from below, but from inside, as he climbed up the hidden stairwell. Then, as if to verify his suspicion, there came more clearly the sound of ascending footsteps in the wall behind the adjoining room, and of keys now, rattling in the bolted door. The old woman fell silent and the younger woman on the floor lay still. They realized, too, what was happening. It was Yin, on the other side of that door, opening it now, in the bedroom, calling out his lover's name as he came across the floor.

“Pi Lo.”

The young woman stirred, as if to respond, but saw the gun in Dante's hand, and out of wisdom, or self-preservation,
or the paralysis of fear, she checked her impulse. At that moment, Yin appeared at the threshold, a Chinese businessman in his dust-colored suit, his red tie, a bead of perspiration on his forehead, exhausted from climbing the stairs. His eyes met Dante's, darting from him to his sweetheart on the floor. Something transpired between them then—himself and the nurse and Yin—or so Dante imagined. The so-called blind hunch, communicated not by logic but by the flashing of the eyes, the wrinkling of the brow, the kind of thing that did not stand up in a court of law, but which was revealed in the circumstance of the moment. Ru Shen's journal had been stashed away in the historical society, unread, forgotten, just as the mayor said. It had been brought here, with the other items, a plaything for the old woman, a distraction, discovered, perhaps, by the young woman, thumbing through the articles in the box. The nurse had shown it to Yin, and whatever was inside, Yin had decided to make use of it. Blackmail—of whom, exactly, Dante did not know—but he had seen the mask fall away from Yin that day in his office, the desire underneath—just as he saw now the look of a man undone by his foolishness, realizing he had been found out, though by what mechanism, exactly, Yin could not know. Yin raised a hand in confusion, wanting to know, perhaps, why it was this particular man who had found him, but there was something else in his expression as well, a quickening. Dante heard the old woman fussing behind him, but he did not turn his head. He focused on Yin. He stepped forward. Behind him, the old woman lunged. She was strong, despite everything. Aiming
at the small of his back, he would think later. At his kidneys. But Dante had already started in motion, so the arc of her arm as it came down, the descending thrust, entered lower than she intended. Still, it was a good thrust. She jabbed the scissors deep into his thigh.

In that instant, Yin bolted back the way he had come.

Dante felt the pain, as of something tearing inside, his leg giving way, but this did not prevent his reaction. He came around with his right elbow, knocking the old woman in the face. Then stumbled toward the threshold. He propped himself against the door frame lest his leg give way. If Yin had not closed the stairwell door behind him earlier on his way inside … if that door were open now … if he had attacked Dante instead of running at the instant the old woman thrust the scissors into his leg … then things might have been different. As it was, Yin had to pause to open the door. He flung it open recklessly, at the top of the stairs, but that small delay was too much.