Nine Lives Last Forever (5 page)

The featured essay in the volume was one of Mark Twain’s more famous California pieces,
The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
.

DILLA ECKLES HUNG
up the pay phone and nervously scanned the area surrounding the booth. She stood at the edge of a small park tucked in behind the TransAmerica Pyramid building, a few blocks away from Jackson Square.

The outer struts of the Pyramid’s massive concrete base flanked one side of the half-acre park, almost all of which shivered in the perpetual shadow of the building’s cold, lumbering mass. A formation of redwoods ringed the park, their long, straight trunks rocketing skyward, racing against the Pyramid’s pointed skyscraper to reach the warmth of the sun.

The vertical plumes of a fountain caught the few splashes of sunlight that filtered down to the ground level of the park. The statues of a half dozen gangly legged frogs hopped amongst the fountain’s stone lily pads, their bronze, green-tinged legs outstretched, the wide span of their webbed flippers flying through the air.

The fountain’s frogs were San Francisco’s tribute to Mark Twain, who manned a newspaper desk in the downtown Montgomery Block building during the latter half of the nineteenth century. In addition to providing office space, the Monkey Block, as it was affectionately called, also featured bars, restaurants, and, in the basement, a series of steam baths where Twain allegedly met a San Francisco firefighter named Tom Sawyer.

The historic building was torn down in the 1950s; it was replaced first by a parking lot and later by the towering Pyramid structure.

Redwood Park was all that remained of San Francisco’s former downtown artist haven. In modern times, the park was frequented primarily by early morning tai chi practitioners and lunching office workers. The two groups used the space in peaceful, noncommunicative coexistence. Consequently, no one in that day’s crowd of lunchers took notice of the elderly Asian woman using the pay phone near the fountain.

Dilla Eckles shuddered in her oversized ratty wool sweater. The loose-fitting legs of her putty brown pants flapped against her ankles as she shifted her weight back and forth.

It was like splitting glue, Dilla thought, trying to get that woman out of the Green Vase showroom. Oscar had tracked down a sizeable bounty prior to his death. Much of that treasure, Dilla knew, still lay hidden throughout the city. If his niece were to pick up where Oscar left off, she was going to need a little push.

Dilla clapped her gloved hands together to ward off the chill, her mouth firming with resolve. She had assured Oscar that she would look after his niece, and she was determined to make good on that promise—no matter how difficult that vow was becoming to keep.

Dilla stretched her neck to glance down at her watch. She had difficulty reading the time; her eyes were impeded by the thick rubber mask plastered over her face. The slanted oval slits around her eyes cupped as she tried to look downward. She brought her hand up to her face and tugged on the ragged charcoal-colored scarf tied around her neck, using the motion to get a more direct viewing of the watch face. Satisfied that she had waited a sufficient amount of time, Dilla exited the back side of the park, hustled down Sansome Street, and headed toward Jackson Square.

If not inspected too closely, her outer shell emulated that of an elderly Asian woman. The only Dilla-distinguishing feature she wore on her feet: square-toed, ankle-high, neon green go-go boots.

 

 

THE AFTERNOON BREEZE
whipped up my hair as I stepped out the front door of the Green Vase. I hopped off of the semicircular stone threshold and skipped down the two steps to the street. My efforts to tuck the loose strands of hair behind my ear blinded me to the elderly Asian woman in bright green shoes peeking around the corner from the alley behind Frank Napis’s papered-up storefront.

A few minutes later, I rounded the corner of Columbus and began walking down Montgomery Street. The wind barreled through the canyons of the financial district’s tall office buildings, whipping up loose pieces of trash into tiny tornadoes that slapped against the bumpers of passing cars.

I used the wait at the next stoplight to button up my jacket, smiling ruefully at the iced-down pair of optimistically dressed tourists standing next to me on the curb.

A block ahead on the right, a colorful display of flowers could be seen through a clear plastic sheeting, brightening Montgomery’s otherwise cold, gloomy corridor. Wang’s flower stall was tarped up against the day’s wind, but it was still in business.

Mr. Wang had been as obsessed as my Uncle Oscar with San Francisco’s history and folklore. It was an interest the two of them had apparently shared. In the days following Oscar’s death, Mr. Wang seemed to have known more than anyone else about Oscar’s clandestine treasure-hunting activities.

With his pallid skin, constant cough, and unchecked cigarette habit, it shouldn’t have been a surprise when Mr. Wang himself passed away a few weeks after Oscar. But somehow, I still expected to see his frail, skeletal hand waving at me from the rows of flowers.

Instead, the jarring sight of an impatient female figure in a trim yellow pantsuit dominated the flower stall. The front lines of her slacks were ironed into perfect pleats; the silhouetting outline of a tight black knit sweater was visible beneath her fitted jacket. The woman’s thick auburn hair curled neatly under a black headband and bounced smoothly out the back into a perfect bob. Heavy black liner etched the boundary of her eyes; a thick coating of bloodred lipstick glazed her lips.

I watched as Miranda Richards glowered threateningly at Mr. Wang’s demure but defiant daughter, Lily.

“I won’t be put off any longer,” the voice of Oscar’s attorney sliced through the crisp, chilly air. “You must know where she is.”

My legs instinctively curled beneath me as I slipped behind a conveniently located blue metal mailbox. I had no desire to draw Miranda’s attention, particularly if she were already fired up into her barracuda lawyer mode.

I nosed over the humped lid of the mailbox as an unfortunate shopper approached the dueling pair with a bouquet of fluffy daffodils. From his defensive hand gestures, it appeared that the man was trying to make a purchase. Sulking testily, Miranda stepped aside while Lily rang up the sale.

The long, curved claws of Miranda’s expertly manicured nails clicked against the counter while she waited for the flustered man to count out the total from his wallet. Her pouty red lips spouted out a slew of inaudible curses as I grimaced behind the mailbox.

One of the most powerful attorneys in San Francisco, Miranda Richards worked in a prestigious glass-walled office on the top floor of one of the taller buildings in the financial district. I had never figured out why she had agreed to represent my Uncle Oscar—or, for that matter, how he had managed to pay her exorbitant fees.

Despite the verbal bruising and diminished self-esteem I suffered each time we interacted, Miranda had turned out to be an ally, of sorts. She had tried to warn me about Frank Napis and his collaborator, and, in the end, it was Miranda who had saved my life by providing the tulip extract antidote to the hallucinogenic poison.

That history notwithstanding, I didn’t intend to interrupt Miranda and Lily’s heated discussion, which had resumed upon completion of the daffodil transaction.

The nearest traffic light turned, releasing a small herd of pedestrians. This seemed like the best moment to relinquish my mailbox screen and slip past the flower stall unnoticed. I fell in amongst the crowd, carefully avoiding Miranda’s direct line of sight. As I passed the main entrance to the flower stall, Miranda’s venomous voice seared the sidewalk.

“Tell me where my mother is.”

Gulping in panic, I increased my pace, almost running over an amorous couple strolling hand in hand in front of me.

Although other limbs of their family tree were still a mystery to me, the strained relationship between Miranda Richards and her mother was well-known in Jackson Square.

Miranda’s harsh, driven, frequently barbed personality marked a sharp contrast to her mother’s fluttery, eccentric one. Dilla Eckles seemed to enjoy tormenting—and embarrassing—her daughter at every turn.

I hadn’t thought to ask Dilla if she was still wearing her elderly Asian woman disguise. Surely that precaution was no longer necessary, I mused. I was trying hard to convince myself that Frank Napis must have moved on to another city and a new alias by now.

Since meeting Mr. Wang, I’d only caught a couple of glimpses of the woman I presumed to be his wife, but Dilla’s mask, I thought as I scurried down the street away from the flower stall, had made her a dead ringer for Mr. Wang’s widow.

After I’d cleared a safe distance, I glanced back toward the flower shop, searching the rest of the inside for the elderly Asian woman who sometimes helped Lily out with the flower stall—the woman I’d always assumed to be Mrs. Wang—but I didn’t see any sign of her there that day. I dismissed the thought and hurried the remaining blocks to the BART station.

 

 

IT NEVER OCCURRED
to me that Dilla had been the
real
Mrs. Wang all along.

THE DOORS OF
the BART train slid open, releasing a stream of passengers into a mammoth concrete cavern that formed the lowest level of the Civic Center Station. I fell in line behind the crowd, hopping over the short gap between the frame of the train and the lip of the platform. Echoes of voices and footfalls followed me up a maze of escalators to the street.

The subway probably wasn’t the most direct means of public transportation from the Green Vase to City Hall, but I had yet to master the bus routes that passed through Jackson Square.

On my last ill-fated attempt, I had inadvertently boarded a bus headed straight into the middle of Chinatown—which, on that particular day, happened to be celebrating one of its larger festivals. Each stop had brought an endless line of would-be riders patiently pushing their way inside the bus until the driver managed to staunch the flow and clamp the door shut.

The bus had quickly packed beyond capacity. I’d found myself squashed onto a bench seat next to an elderly gentleman with a battered cane and a wide, toothless smile. A worn, wild-haired woman of indeterminable age crammed in behind me. Without apology, she shoved a cloth-covered cage into the nonexistent space between us. Every so often the animal inside emitted a loud, protesting squawk, causing the toothless man to burst into giggles at my disconcerted expression.

It took several blocks and two more stops before I could maneuver close enough to the door to burst free from the melee. I had been walking through the financial district to the Market Street BART stations ever since.

The last limb in the Civic Center Station’s tree of escalators rose out of a slanted, concrete-walled pit and deposited me onto the United Nations Plaza, a couple of blocks away from City Hall. The day’s breeze had only strengthened while I’d been underground. The wind blasted my head as soon as it rose above street level.

I proceeded down a red brick walkway, littered with the scattered, leafy remnants of broccoli, cabbage, and bok choy. It was just after midday on Wednesday, and the Civic Center’s weekly farmers’ market was about to wrap up.

At a nearby table, a few stragglers haggled over the last remaining hunks of daikon root. Across the way, a worker packed up a small pile of green onions, neatly tying their slender green stems into two-inch round bunches. At this point in the day’s trading, the tented makeshift stalls were nearly depleted of the fresh-picked produce that had been unloaded on the plaza earlier that morning—a verdant array of fruits and vegetables tailored to the recipes of the market’s predominantly Asian shoppers.

As I passed the last food stall, the red brick pavement merged into a wide asphalt corridor populated by an army of hungry pigeons. The birds swarmed in around me, strutting fearlessly toward my feet, their beady black eyes eagerly assessing my snack-dropping potential. One of the leaders cocked his head and swiveled it sideways, giving me the leering, one-eyed ogle of a bird confident in his own machismo.

Stepping timidly through the pack of aggressively cooing birds, I approached the backside of a monument to the Latin American icon Simon Bolivar. His bronze figure was depicted seated astride a rearing horse. One of Bolivar’s arms stretched out in a grand gesture, as if to beckon me on toward my destination, Civic Center Plaza.

The long width of City Hall fenced in the far side of the sweeping plaza. The main branch of the city’s library, the Civic Auditorium, and several state and federal buildings flanked the other edges of the square. I crossed the windswept common, passing more statued monuments as my feet pointed toward City Hall’s gilded dome.

The building had sustained extensive damage during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, but top to bottom renovations had recently been completed, outfitting the building with state-of-the-art seismic fortifications.

The project was one of the most lauded accomplishments of our previous Mayor. He had meticulously ensured the restoration of the original building’s grand structure, down to the last flourishing detail—with one bright and gleaming exception.

The building’s original dome had been plated with copper. Over time, the copper had corroded, tingeing to a greenish hue. To provide a more permanently glamorous exterior, the newly renovated dome was covered in a special 23.4-carat gold-infused paint. The proud pigeons of City Hall now roosted on a gold roof worth nearly half a million dollars. Perhaps that explained the bravado of the pigeons I’d encountered.

As I approached the front entrance to City Hall, my eyes were drawn to its center second floor balcony, which fronted the curtained glass doors of the Mayor’s office suite. From the far end of the square, the balcony was dwarfed by the mammoth Corinthian columns rising up from its terrace. As I grew nearer, my attention focused in on the abundance of leafy gold scrolling that wound in and around the balcony’s front railing. From my spectator’s distance on the pavement below, it appeared as if a multitude of gilded octopus arms were swarming into the Mayor’s office.