Acknowledgment
Most of what little I know of Chinese-American culture I learned from Chinatown: A Portrait of a Closed Society, by Gwen Kinkead. It is an informative book, and, even better, a great pleasure to read.
For Joan:
“Whom if ye please, I care for other none.”
•1•
The last time I’d worked in Port City had been in 1989 when an important software tycoon had hired me to retrieve his wife, who had run off with a fisherman named Costa. Her name was, incredibly, Minerva, and I found her okay. She was living in a shack on the waterfront with Costa, who, when the fish weren’t biting, which was mostly, worked as a collector for a local loan shark. This led Costa to believe that he was tougher than he actually was, a point he finally forced me to make. He spent a couple of days in the hospital afterward, and while he was in there Minerva refused to leave his side. I finally concluded that, despite his shortcomings, she was better off with him than she was with the important software tycoon, and I bowed out. The tycoon refused to pay me. And when I wouldn’t tell him where his wife was, he attempted to get my license revoked. I heard that he went down to Port City himself after that and got booted out of town by the Police Chief, an ex-state cop named DeSpain, who as far as I could see ran the town, despite the official presence of a Mayor and a board of Aldermen. I called Minerva a couple of years later to see how she was, and they were gone. I never knew where.
Now, driving with Susan through a hard, cold rain that slanted in steadily against the windshield, nothing much had changed. The city was in a punch bowl, with the land sloping harshly down to the harbor. It had always been a fishing port, and once it had been a textile manufacturing city as well. But after the war, the mills had moved South in search of cheap labor. Now there was nothing but fish processing, and the smell of it hung over the town. In the time of the mills’ flourishing, the Yankees who owned them had lived in handsome federalist houses up on Cabot Hill above the town, away from the smell of fish, and well clear of the fishermen and mill workers, and fish cutters living below them along the waterfront. They had founded a small liberal arts college, with a handsome endowment for the education of their children. They had played golf and tennis and ridden horseback and sailed twelve-meter sloops out of their yacht club at Sippican Point north of the city, where the water was still blue, and on clear days the sunlight skipped blithely along the crests of small waves.
When the mills moved out, Cabot Hill society staggered but didn’t go down. It tightened in on itself, bought into the fish business, continued to be rich, added the Cabot academics to its ranks, and clustered around the college like survivors of a capsized boat clinging to a channel buoy. There was a neighborhood school on Cabot Hill and a brick-and-clapboard shopping center, where you could buy imported Brie and Armani suits. There were two liquor stores, a movie theater, and a private security patrol with blue-and-yellow prowl cars. Who could ask for anything more.
The only reason to go downtown was the Port City Theater Company, of which Susan was a board member. The theater was connected in various ways to Cabot College. Its Artistic Director was on the Cabot faculty. The college subsidized it. And Cabot Hill was the prime source of its audience. The theater, which was in its fifteenth season of putting on plays too hard for me, flourished inscrutably amid the boarded-up store fronts, and the abandoned cars, near the waterfront. Which is where we were heading.
“How’d you end up on the board of a theater up here?” I said.
“Closest one that would have me,” Susan said.
“And you want to be on the board because . . . ?”
“You know I love theater,” Susan said. “It was a way to be involved.”
“You’re not contemplating a career change,” I said.
“No. It may be a little late for that, and I love being a shrink. But it is a great treat for me to be involved, even peripherally, in the theater.”
The rain was driven by a wind from the northeast, off the water. I had always speculated that the conjunction of hills and oceans produced more rain in Port City than anyplace else in Massachusetts. I had never gotten any support on that theory, but I stuck to it. Coming steadily in at us, staying slightly ahead of the wipers, the rain made the windows shimmer between wiper sweeps, and the oncoming traffic seemed a mirage through the sheeted rain water.
“What do you do?” I said.
“As a board member? Give money, raise money, and lend high seriousness to the administrative proceedings of the theater.”
“You don’t make policy.”
Susan smiled.
“This is true.”
We were on the downtown side of Cabot Hill, the city itself below us, packed in along the waterfront looking prettier in the rain than I knew it to be. We passed a Cabot Hill Security vehicle parked at an intersection. I grinned.
“Beyond here there be monsters,” I said.
“The line of demarcation is clear, isn’t it,” Susan said.
“Is it safe coming here to the theater at night?”
“There are always some of those private security people around. If you’re really timid, you can park up on the hill in the shopping center, and the college provides a bus to bring people down from the hill.”
“You probably don’t park up on the hill and take the bus,” I said.
“No.”
“How did I know that?”
“As a . . .” she lowered her voice importantly . . . “board member . . .” her voice returned to normal . . . “I get to park next to the theater.”
“This is a tough town,” I said.
Susan shrugged.
Across the intersection the other Port City began. Three-decker houses lined the streets, so close together that you could barely squeeze down the tiny alley between them. On the steep hills the water in the gutters tumbled garbage along before it. Where the hills eased, the gutters were clogged and the rain water made deep puddles in the street, which overflowed onto the sidewalk. The rain had people off the streets, though occasionally I could see elderly Chinese people sitting on a roofed front porch, bundled in gray clothing, smoking and staring at the rain. We passed one of the empty mills, surrounded by gnarled and rusty chain link, the loading platforms sagging with decay, fork-lift pallets rotting on the frost-broken parking lot, surrounded with broken beer bottles and empty beer cans whose labels had faded into a uniformly faint yellow. There had been attempts to transform the vast brick hulks into other uses. The money had come from the hill, and the investors had put their money into things they would have liked if they had lived downtown. The peeling signs of artisan shops and blouse boutiques and yogurt shops and stores that sold antiques hung lopsided with age and weather, over the dysfunctional doorways. The mills remained empty.
“Isn’t it ghastly,” Susan said.
“Where late the sweet birds sang,” I said.
Every few blocks there was a tiny store, dimly lit, with Chinese characters in the window. On another corner an old man in black pajamas huddled under an umbrella, selling something from a cardboard box between his feet. He had no customers as we passed. There were no dogs on the street. No toys in evidence. No children. No school buses. No automobiles parked by the curb. Once in a while a vacant lot, occasionally the rusting skeleton of an abandoned car, stripped of anything saleable. Everything sodden, under the downpour, narrow, bitter, and wet. Everything cooking sullenly with the slow fire of decay.
“Why such a big Chinese population?” Susan said.
“I don’t know how it started, but they began to arrive here to work the fish plants. And others followed, and it grew like that. They work hard. A lot of them are illegal, so they don’t complain about anything. They’re suspicious of labor organizers and safety inspectors, and they take the wage you give them.”
“A factory owner�
��s dream,” Susan said.
At the waterfront we turned left onto Ocean Street. Here there were no Chinese. Here the fishermen lived. There were more one-story homes, more room between them. But here too there was no sense that the rain was engendering. That it would bring forth fresh life. Here too the rain seemed almost pestilent as it bore down on the cluttered and makeshift homes that crowded against the slick ocean, where the greasy waves swelled against the waterlogged timbers of the fish piers. Almost the only color I had seen since I left the hill was the jewel-red stop lights gleaming through the murk at irregular intervals.
•2•
Demetrius Christopholous, the Artistic Director of the Port City Theater Company, was waiting for us, nursing a Manhattan, in the lounge of a Chinese restaurant called Wu’s, a block from the theater. Susan introduced us. Christopholous glanced around the lounge, which featured a miniature bridge over a minuscule pond in the middle of the room. Muraled on the back wall was a painting of a volcano.
“The owner is on our board,” he said.
“Is that a Chinese volcano painted on the wall?” I said.
Christopholous smiled.
“I think that’s Mount Vesuvius,” he said. “This used to be a pizzeria.”
“Thrift,” I said.
A disinterested waiter brought me a beer and Susan a glass of red wine.
“You’re joining us tonight?” Christopholous said.
“Yes,” I said. “Susan tells me you’re being followed.”
“Yes, of course, right down to business. It’s quite distasteful, but that is why you’re here, isn’t it.”
“I’m here because Susan asked me to come.”
“Well, it’s been a couple of weeks,” Christopholous said. “At first I thought it just hypersensitivity on my part. One reads so much in the papers about these perilous times. But it soon became apparent that a person was stalking me.”
“Can you describe him?”
“Always in black, at night, some distance away. He appeared to be medium height, medium build. Face was always shadowed by a hat.”
“What kind of hat?”
“Some sort of slouch hat.”
“Ever approach the shadow?”
“No. Frankly, I’ve been afraid to.”
“Don’t blame you,” I said. “Person threaten you in any way?”
Christopholous shook his head.
“Approach you?” I said.
“No.”
“Any harassment? Letters? Phone calls? Dirty tricks?”
“No.”
“Any reason you can think of why someone would follow you? Disgruntled actor? Embittered dramaturge?”
Susan glanced at me. The “dramaturge” was showing off, and she knew it.
“The Artistic Director of a theater company has to make decisions that some people strongly feel are wrong,” Christopholous said. “It is the nature of the work. But I can’t imagine that anyone is acting out an artistic disagreement with me. Even if he were, why would he do this?”
“A lot of stalkers get a feeling of power,” I said.
Christopholous raised his eyebrows and shrugged.
“Is that all they usually want? That feeling of power? Or do you think I’m in danger?”
“I can’t say you’re not. I can say that there has been no threat so far, which is good. But there’s no way to say what will come. Have you talked to the cops?”
“No.”
“Maybe you should.”
“What can they do?”
“Depends on their manpower and their efficiency. They should have a stalker file, for instance. You might recognize a name. They probably could offer you some protection. They might be able to apprehend the guy.”
“I’d . . . I’d rather this were a private matter.”
“Why?”
“I . . . well, I’d like to protect the theater.”
“Un huh.”
We all were silent. I waited.
“And, ah, I, well I don’t have much confidence in our police force.”
“DeSpain still Chief?” I said.
“You know him?”
“I ran into him a couple times before,” I said. “Once when he was a state cop, and once about five years ago when I was up here working.”
“Yes, he’s still the Chief.”
It clearly made Christopholous uncomfortable to talk about DeSpain. I let it go.
“Any unresolved romantic complexity in your life?” I said.
Christopholous was glad to talk about something else. He smiled.
“No, most of that, for better or worse, is pretty well behind me.”
“No ex-lovers that might want to follow you around?”
Christopholous smiled more broadly.
“No.”
“Jealous spouses?”
Christopholous chuckled and looked at Susan.
“He’s quite delicate for a man in his profession,” Christopholous said. “He has phrased his questions without prejudging my sexual inclinations.”
“Tough but sensitive,” Susan said.
“Any jealous spouses?” I said.
“No. I wish there were.”
“You owe money?”
“Just car payments. I make them regularly.”
“What would you like me to do?” I said.
“Catch the shadow,” Christopholous said.
“Okay.”
“Do you think you can catch him?” Christopholous said.
“Sure,” I said. “Him or her.”
No sexist, I.
•3•
The Port City Theater Company was housed in what had once been the meeting hall of a church at the east end of a disgruntled avenue called Ocean Street. Behind it was a parking lot and beyond the parking lot the harbor where the water was iridescent with oil slick, and the loud gulls clustered to harvest the fragrant effluvia of the fish-packing plants. The church now housed some sleazy boutiques and cafés and places to buy theater memorabilia, and the hall, where once there had been bake sales, had been renovated by Cabot into a 350-seat theater. Christopholous left us in front and went around to the stage door.
“We gotta see this?” I said.
“Of course,” Susan said. “I’m on the board. I can’t come up here, have a drink with the Artistic Director, and not see the play.”
“I can.”
“But you love me,” Susan said, “and you want to be with me.”
“Of course,” I said. “What’s the play about?”
“Nobody seems to know.”
“What do the actors say it’s about?”
“They don’t know,” Susan said. She was as close to embarrassed as she gets.
“The actors don’t know what it’s about?”
“No.”
“How about the Director?”
“Lou says that a play is not required to be about anything.”
“And it runs how long?”
“Four and a half hours with an intermission.”
Susan smiled encouragingly.
“It’s very controversial,” she said.
“Excellent,” I said. “Maybe a fight will break out.”
She smiled at me again, a smile perfectly capable of launching a thousand ships and very likely to burn the topless towers of Ilium. We got to the box office, collected our tickets, and went into the theater. The theater was full of people who lived on Cabot Hill and could trace their lineage back to the British Isles. It looked like a Cabot College faculty meeting. In a town fifty percent Chinese, the theater was a hundred percent neither.
“I haven’t seen so many Anglo Saxons in one place since the Republica
n Convention,” I said.
“You’ve never been to the Republican Convention,” Susan said.
“I’ve never been asked,” I said.
The houselights dimmed. The play began. On stage there were men dressed as women and women dressed as men, and white people in blackface and black people in whiteface, and a rabbi named O’Leary, and a priest named Cohen. I knew the names because they were printed on a big sandwich board which each of the actors wore throughout the first act. There was someone in a dog suit who kept saying meow. There was very little dialogue, and the actors moved slowly about the stage with angular gestures, stopping periodically in frozen tableau, while an offstage voice recited something ominous that sounded like a hip-hop adaptation of Thus Spake Zarathustra.
After an hour of this Susan leaned toward me and said, “What do you think?”
“It’s heavy-handed but impenetrable,” I said.
“Not an easy achievement,” Susan said.
The lead actor was in fool’s motley, divided in two vertical halves. One side was explicitly female, the other side explicitly male. He/she came downstage and began to speak directly to the audience.
“I am Tiresias,” he/she said. “An old man with wrinkled dugs.”
He/she half turned and looked at a figure in some sort of triangulated costume downstage left. The orchestra suddenly began to play up tempo and he/she began to sing.
“Lucky in love, lucky in love,
what else matters if you’re lucky in love?”
The actor stopped. Simultaneously there was a flat crack from the back of the theater. I recognized the sound. The orchestra continued to play the accompaniment. The actor took a silent step backwards and a red stain began to soak through the costume. I got up and started for the stage as the actor sank to his knees, and then fell backwards onto the floor, his legs bent partially back under him. Still the audience didn’t get it. The other actors were motionless for a moment, and then one of them, a tall actress in blackface, lunged forward and dropped to her knees beside the actor just as I reached them.
Robert B. Parker: The Spencer Novels 1?6 Page 86
