Nine Lives Last Forever (30 page)

Dilla tucked the paper into a pocket of her sweater. “I’ve got to go, dear,” she said abruptly. “Think about that extra essay. It follows the frogs!”

And with that, she stepped out the door and took off at full speed down Jackson Street. I stood on the steps outside, watching until she and her green go-go boots disappeared around the corner.

THE OTHER OCCUPANTS
of the apartment above the Green Vase were still fast asleep Sunday morning when Isabella poked her head above the blankets and looked out across the bedroom. Her pupils stretched wide to catch the thin threads of light dropping through the slats in the blinds on the window facing the street.

In a single graceful movement, Isabella leapt off of the bed onto the floor and paced silently through the room. Noiselessly, she slid her head beneath the blinds and looked down onto Jackson Street.

The rusted-out pickup truck was parked in its usual spot, about a hundred yards up the street, barely visible in the leafy shadow of a short tree. The white blur of a man’s wrinkled face could be seen through the truck’s cracked windshield; the rest of his body hunched behind the steering wheel. His weary, bloodshot eyes looked up at Isabella’s window, and, with the slightest nod of his dingy baseball cap, acknowledged her presence.

Isabella turned away from the window as her person staggered groggily out of bed. Her person hadn’t slept well, even after being out so late. She’d tossed back and forth all night, occasionally murmuring something about a feathery orange mustache. Isabella had kept watch, concerned. That kind of restless sleep, in her opinion, did nothing but numb the senses.

Isabella quickly crossed the room to herd her person toward the bathroom, taking care to avoid the person’s stumbling zombielike steps. Once she was satisfied that her person had found the shower and managed to turn on the water faucet, she returned to the bedroom to roust her brother.

Isabella sidled up next to a Rupert-sized lump in the covers. Flexing her claws, she snagged the edge of the blanket and flipped it up, revealing Rupert’s peacefully snoozing face.

He was still slightly damp from the quick bath he’d received when they returned home from City Hall the previous evening. At least, Isabella thought, he no longer smelled like a frog.

She bent over Rupert’s head, gently licked his ear, and emitted a smooth wake-up growl. There was a faint flicker of recognition in Rupert’s whiskers, but nothing more. Isabella stood up and paced around to the opposite side of his still-buried lump. She crouched down, wiggled her tail back and forth as a warning, and pounced.

A startled white blur shot out from beneath the covers and skidded across the bed. Rupert gripped his front claws into the edge of the blanket as his back end rolled over the side of the bed. He clung on for a short fabric-ripping moment, and then thunked onto the floor.

Mission accomplished, Isabella strolled toward the bathroom to confirm that her person’s shower water was heating up. Her tail stuck bossily up into the air, hooking sideways at its orange-tipped end.

Rupert pounded past Isabella as she made her way across the room. Now fully awake, he was predictably en route to the red igloo-shaped litter box. It was already rocking when she leapt up onto the edge of the bathroom sink.

A moment later, Isabella and her person watched as Rupert burst out of the box and thundered down the stairs to the kitchen. The person sighed sleepily and entered the shower.

Isabella set up her surveillance, enjoying the steam that rapidly built up in the room. It was such a warm, pleasant humidity. She began to clean one of her front paws, dipping it every so often into the drip from the faucet. Once the top fur was thoroughly licked and inspected, she flipped her paw over and started to work on the underside, stretching her toes out so that the rough edge of her tongue could reach the spaces in between.

The sensitive hairs that lined Isabella’s pointed ears pulsed with intensity as they soaked in the early morning sounds. Her sharp mind filtered through the collected data, identifying and categorizing each entry.

A police siren wailed as it chased an errant motorist through the financial district several blocks away. A taxi bottomed out on a pothole on the next street over. A stray dog dug through a Dumpster in the alley behind the Green Vase. A rusty spring creaked in protest as the hidden door above the sixth step on the bottom flight of stairs swung open, and a thudding, froglike plunk squashed against the floorboards in the showroom below.

Isabella stopped midway through a long grooming lick. Nimbly, she leapt off of the bathroom sink, trotted out of the bathroom, and hopped down the stairs to the second floor. Her dainty feet padded across the kitchen’s tile floor, bringing her to the top of the stairs leading to the showroom.

At this early hour, the windowless passageway was void of all but the dimmest reflection of light. Isabella felt her way down the stairs, pausing at the sixth step to look up at the low ceiling. The intuition of her heightened feline senses told her that the secret door had just been re-shut.

A tiny scuttling sound issued from the showroom below. Isabella trod lightly down the rest of the steps, expertly avoiding putting pressure on the areas that would creak under her weight.

As she reached the ground floor, she looked out across the showroom. Hulking bookcases partially blocked the beams of light that had begun to stream in through the front windows, but, to Isabella’s skilled eyes, the room was well lit. Every nook and cranny opened up under her gaze.

From the darkness at the back of the showroom, she saw that the front door was slightly ajar. Two men stood on the sidewalk outside where they appeared to be having a serious discussion.

One of the men wore a pair of baggy ripped overalls. Isabella easily recognized his hunched shoulders and droopy, wrinkled skin.

Harold Wombler reached over to pat the second man on the shoulder. Isabella tilted her head, studying his body language. He seemed to be giving assurances about a small box with airholes that he held in his left hand. Harold finally turned and, carefully carrying the box, gimped off toward his pickup truck.

The second man hobbled through the front door of the Green Vase, walking as if each step took an extreme amount of effort. Leaving the front door slightly ajar, he slowly shuffled around the corner of a bookcase and disappeared behind the cashier counter. The stool behind the counter scraped against the wood flooring as the man hefted his frail body up onto it.

Isabella’s nostrils flared, keying in to his scent. It was imbued with the sweet, succulent fragrance of fried chicken, the signature smell of her secret friend, Mr. Wang. What a wonderful surprise. She hadn’t had breakfast yet.

A floorboard creaked behind her, and Isabella tensed. Rupert suddenly rushed up, his claws scrambling on the slick wood floor. Her eyes narrowed as she prepared for his inevitable retribution pounce. Just as his heavy body leapt into the air, she sidestepped nimbly out of the way. She watched as Rupert landed with a sliding whomp on the floor beside her and then scooted off underneath the dentist recliner to regroup for his next attack.

Unconcerned, Isabella sauntered hopefully up to the front of the store. As she rounded the bookcase next to the counter, her eyes searched for the plate of fried chicken that Mr. Wang usually carried with him on his visits. She didn’t see any sign of the plate, but she rubbed her head affectionately against the leg of his baggy trousers, just in case.

“Miss Isabella,” the man said genially, his voice soft and raspy. “Good morning to you, too.”

As Mr. Wang patted Isabella on the head, she heard the sound of her person entering the back of the showroom from the stairs. Isabella slipped through the legs of the stool and peeked around the corner of the bookcase. Her person was approaching them, but, for some reason, she looked apprehensive.

“It’s okay. Come over here,” Isabella tried to communicate with the tilt of her head. It was sometimes hard for her person to understand these things, but she seemed to have picked up her pace. Isabella turned back to the man on the stool.

“My person’s coming,” she expressed with her sharp blue eyes as she rubbed against him once more. “She’ll be so happy to see you.”

The man smiled down at her and scratched the top of her head.

Mr. Wang was quite accomplished for a human, Isabella thought as her person’s tentative feet slid around the corner of the bookcase. He always seemed to know everything that was going on.

“YOU SEEM SURPRISED
to see me.”

The phrase rocked back and forth in my head as I stared at the man sitting on the stool behind the cashier counter, a living, breathing Mr. Wang.

“I . . . I thought you were dead.” The stunned phrase was all I could spit out.

Mr. Wang grinned, his thin, anemic face straining under the spreading stretch of his lips.

He was alive; it was true. But he looked far worse than he had the last time I’d seen him. I leaned up against the front side of the counter as Mr. Wang scratched the silky top of Isabella’s head.

“I
was
dead,” he said ruefully, “for a while.” The scratching rasp of Mr. Wang’s laugh confirmed his poor health. He looked as if the slightest puff of breeze might disperse him into a shattering of dust. A long, wispy beard trailed down from his chin, further enhancing his ghostly, corpse-like appearance.

Following Frank Napis’s attempt to poison me, Mr. Wang explained, he had convinced his wife and daughter to help him fake his death, using the same spider venom toxin and tulip extract recovery potion.

“Not a very pleasant process,” he said wryly with a knowing wink at my concerned expression.

“You look pretty good . . . considering.” I managed to speak the words, but the lie was obvious. Mr. Wang’s arms and legs were skeletal sticks, and his deoxygenated skin was the gray, lifeless color of decay.

“Why?” I asked. “Why did you go through all of that?”

Mr. Wang leaned back on the stool, thoughtfully stroking the wispy tail of his beard. “It seemed like the best way to outmaneuver our friend Frank.” He coughed wheezily. “Frank Napis had too much invested into the history of this place, into your Uncle Oscar’s research, to give it all up. We knew he’d still be around, trying to recoup some of the treasure Oscar unearthed.”

The “we” he referred to, I assumed, included both the Vigilance Committee and the local police department, where Mr. Wang had worked prior to his retirement job running the flower stall.

Mr. Wang tugged on the tip of his beard. “Once Frank was ousted from his antique shop and his latest cover blown, he became much more difficult to keep track of—and, as a consequence, much more dangerous.”

While his law enforcement colleagues were keeping an eye out for Napis, Mr. Wang had set up camp in the loft above the now abandoned antique shop next door to the Green Vase.

“It is, after all,” he said, shrugging his narrow shoulders, “my own building. I rented it out to Frank a couple of years ago—through a real estate agent who kept my ownership interest in it a secret.”

He picked up the black-and-white photo from the counter where I’d left it after my discussion with Dilla the previous evening.

“We thought we’d draw him out of hiding with the VC money,” Wang said, tapping the edge of the photo. “If we hung the right bait, we figured, he’d consider it easy pickings.”

“So that’s why Dilla restarted the Vigilance Committee?” I asked.

Mr. Wang nodded with a polite smirk. “That, and she was really excited about the VC’s latest political project.” He noted my puzzled expression. “Those frogs have a friend in Dilla, that’s for sure.”

He reached down to scratch Isabella’s head. “But, getting back to Frank Napis. You see, only the members of the Vigilance Committee knew where the Sutro fortune was hidden. So, I faked my death, and Dilla began running around in a disguise.” He chuckled. “One that was meant to draw more attention to her, not less—it wasn’t long before Frank found a way to contact her.”

I crinkled my forehead, confused. “I thought Napis was one of the members of the VC. Didn’t he already know where the gold was?”

“Ah, dear, you’ve misunderstood,” he said slowly, the tone of his voice flat and even. “There were only three members of the Committee. We never let Napis join.”

 

 

LESS THAN AN
hour later, I walked out the door of the Green Vase, watched closely by Isabella from the top of the bookcase and Rupert from behind the first row of books on the bottom shelf.

“I’ll be back,” I assured them, trying to sound confident as I locked the door and crossed the street toward Monty’s van.

It was parked in the same spot where he had left it when we’d returned from City Hall the previous evening. I wasn’t sure how Mr. Wang had obtained the key, but I suspected Monty would be concerned when he woke up and saw it missing.

I didn’t see anyone else around as I slid the key into the ignition, started the motor, and headed off down Jackson Street, but Mr. Wang had been certain my movements were being carefully monitored by a number of interested parties. He hoped that Frank Napis would be among those that followed me out to the Cliff House and the Sutro Baths ruins. I wasn’t so sure that I shared that aspiration, but Wang had assured me I would be safe.

I turned the van at the bottom of Jackson Street and, before long, found myself rumbling along through the Broadway tunnel. The wide boulevard of Van Ness was vacant except for the light traffic of churchgoers, the Sunday schedule of MUNI buses, and the morning’s blanket of fog. Most of the citizens of San Francisco were enjoying a languid start to their morning.