The Night Market

by Jonathan Moore

  His neighbor’s door was closed now, and there weren’t any voices coming from behind it. He went down the elevator and went across the lobby without waking Glenn. He turned left on Grant and left again into the alley, hurrying now because of the rain.

  There were a dozen people sitting at the bar in the Irish Bank. He took a stool at the end, away from everyone else. He looked at the bottles on the back bar and stared at the advertisements on the mirrors. After a while Cathleen came over.

  “Jenner’s on his way?”

  “Not tonight.”

  Her eyes moved past him, to the confessional.

  “It’s open, if you need it.”

  “No one’s coming.”

  “All right—it’s none of my business,” she said. “Pint of Harp?”

  “But first bring me an Oban.”

  “Neat?”

  He nodded.

  He watched her go along the shelves until she found the bottle. She brought it back with an empty tumbler, put it in front of him, and poured.

  “I saw the paper,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  “Did you just get out?”

  He took a sip of the scotch and turned his face away from her as he breathed out through his nose.

  “Left tonight. Jenner brought me back.”

  “He’s okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I close at two. If you can stick around ​—”

  “I don’t know, Cath.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “That came right out of nowhere, didn’t it? And let me fix that—it was a bad pour.”

  The bottle of Oban was still on the bar. She pulled out its stopper and added another finger’s worth of scotch to his glass.

  “That’s on me,” she said. “I’ll go pull your pint.”

  He’d come to the Irish Bank looking for company. But when he’d found it, he’d pulled back. If Cathleen had said anything like that to him a week ago, he was sure he would have stayed until she closed. He didn’t understand what was going on with him. He felt so hollowed out, he could almost hear the rush of the emptiness inside him. It was the blank sound at the mouth of an elevator shaft.

  He had no idea what would fill that hole, no sense of what he was looking for.

  It had stopped raining while he was in the bar, but there were still deep puddles in the alley. He wasn’t drunk but he knew he would be in about ten minutes, when the rest of the whiskey worked its way into his bloodstream. He stopped and leaned against a dumpster and looked at the fire escape. He could climb it, could climb up to the roof and come down to his apartment through the trapdoor to the fire stairs. The thought took shape in his mind, gathered momentum. He stopped himself halfway across the alley when he realized there was no way to catch the last ladder. There was no reason to sneak into his apartment through the fire escape, no reason to even be thinking about it.

  Maybe the whiskey had gone farther than he’d thought.

  From the outside, looking in, he could see Glenn was still asleep. He opened the door and went across the lobby to the mail room. He dug out his key ring, and opened his box.

  The mail pushed out and fell onto the floor, a dozen glowcards lighting up when they sensed the impact. He had to kneel down and gather what had fallen. Then he stood and took the rest of the mail from the brass box. He tucked it under his left arm and went to the elevator.

  Glenn had raised his head. His eyes weren’t tracking together.

  “You okay?” Carver asked.

  “Okay.”

  “You need a doctor?”

  “I’m good.”

  “All right,” Carver said. “You remember my extension?”

  “Six fourteen.”

  “You need anything, you call me.”

  “Okay.”

  Glenn put his head back down and Carver hit the elevator button. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen Glenn like this. By any measure, the man was unreliable.

  In his kitchen, he knelt and took a bottle of bourbon from the liquor cabinet and poured an ounce over an ice cube. He set the bottle on the counter without corking it, and took the stack of mail.

  At the top of the stack was a dimming glowcard. He took a sip of the bourbon and turned the card over, shaking it to wake it up. It began to play a video of the Fairmont Hotel, the entire building wrapped in silk and tied up with red ribbons. Strings of Chinese paper lanterns wound through the gardens, wavering in an invisible breeze. Two words slowly superimposed themselves across the face of the card.

  Black Aria

  He felt it start somewhere inside him, a building wave that had traveled a thousand miles through deep water and was now rising to greet an approaching shore. He set the glass down and held on to the counter to be ready for it. The wave curled and broke, and washed across him. As it receded, there was peace. He stared at the shining lanterns in the boxwood hedges, the glittering lights behind the thin silk wrapping. After a while, he took another sip of the bourbon and set the glowcard aside so that he could look at it later. There was still a whole stack of mail to go through.

  The next in line was a red envelope. The kind of thing you could pick up in Chinatown, ten in a packet. A gold-leaf dragon was intertwined with a phoenix along the bottom edge. The address was handwritten in black ink. A woman’s script. The postmark showed a zip code near Fisherman’s Wharf. There was no return address.

  He couldn’t remember the last time someone had sent him a letter. He took a knife from the rack next to him and used it to slit open the top. When he pulled out the three small sheets of paper, they came with a faint scent of cedar, an even lighter touch of jasmine. He thought of the woods up north he’d gone to as a boy, the oldest trees gathering the fog and sending it down as rain. Those groves were all gone now. Everything was gone.

  He turned the pages over.

  The letter was written on stationery from the St. Francis Hotel. Small, careful handwriting took up both sides of each page. A woman’s writing.

  Dear Ross,

  This letter is my life insurance policy. If you’re reading, it means I’m gone. You’ll only believe it if I show you something first. I know I have to prove my bona fides. So let me tell you what I know. Either you just got out of the hospital, or you woke up in your own bed and there are days you can’t account for. It doesn’t matter which, because they marked you. Reach up and touch the back of your neck. Go ahead and do it, but be gentle. You’ll find three swollen welts there, and when you touch them, they’ll sting—

  He stopped reading, setting the letter on the counter. Slowly, he reached back with his right hand, using the pads of his middle and index fingers to trace the nape of his neck. What he found just above his collar felt no different than the marks he’d seen on Glenn. A triangle of swollen skin, hot beneath his fingertips. Leaving the hospital, his entire body had felt beaten and sore. He hadn’t noticed anything about his neck until he touched it. Now it felt like he was wearing a freshly burned cattle brand. He looked at his fingertips, but there was no blood. Yet all the same, she was right. They’d marked him.

  Turning back to the letter, his eyes caught and held in the middle of the third paragraph:

  —so I told you to put your hands in my hair. I told you to touch me everywhere, to taste me. I couldn’t let you forget me. I knew it wouldn’t work, but I had to try. I was desperate, and I’m sorry. The best I can do is point you in the right direction. We get recruited when we’ve already joined. Henry said that. I hope you remember him. But if you’re the only one left, you’ll have to do everything yourself. It won’t be easy, because you belong to them. And they watch—

  The air had already left his lungs. Now it went out of the room altogether. He hurried into the living room and sat on one of the chairs before he fell down. He brought the pages close to his face, and when he finally got a breath, he could smell her. He had no memory of her face, or her name. No idea when or how he’d known her, or if he’d ever met her at all. But then—


  hold me?

  all right

  —for a moment, he could see the rich spill of her hair and the touch of flowers at her throat, the full length of her body warm against his. The memory was almost close enough to touch, and then it dissolved into the dark.

  He tried to reach for her again, but all he came up with was a flickering image: looking at the dawn sky through a square of rain-beaded glass. He closed his eyes and tried again, and this time he could almost hear the reedy whisper of her voice, beautiful and calm in the pauses as she carefully chose her words.

  Do you ever think there’s maybe something that’s gone wrong with the world?

  He didn’t know where the words came from, or where they went after running across his thoughts. But he knew the answer to her question: Of course there was something wrong. A flood of desire and fear washed into him. It made no sense that he could be so overwhelmed by both feelings at once. And yet he’d never felt so empty. He read the rest of the letter. When he reached the end he slid out of his chair and to his knees. With his eyes closed, he counted slowly and waited for the world to come back.

  When he could breathe again, he read the letter twice more.

  He’d already memorized it, but he wanted to let her words play through his mind, wanted to see what she might set loose. He didn’t know anything about her. Not her name, or where she was born, or how she carried herself when she walked into a room. She said they’d spent one night together, though that could be a lie. Either the letter was full of misdirection, or nothing Hernandez told him in the hospital was true. In the letter, the woman was telling him to find Johnny Wong again. The envelope was postmarked the day Hernandez had told him that he and Jenner shot Johnny dead; but according to the letter, he’d sat across a table from Johnny that same day and made a tacit peace with him. He had no memory of that, or the shooting, or the warehouse fire. It was all a wasteland. More empty spaces than solid structures.

  And if Hernandez was the liar, where did that leave Jenner?

  He tried to think, tried to find some way to make the shattered pieces fit into something he could use. It took him a while before he was ready. He knelt on the rug for ten minutes, but he’d known all along what he had to do. There was something wrong, he was sure of that. He’d been denying it for years, had dismissed Jenner’s doubts just tonight. But he couldn’t go back to that now, not after reading the letter. It would be better if he could forget. Better if he could get back to denial. He’d probably live longer that way. But on the other hand, at least now he had a purpose.

  He took the fire stairs to the top floor and then climbed the ladder and went through the trapdoor to the roof. It was raining a little, but not enough to stop him from doing what he’d come for. He went to the corner of the building and stood at the balustrade, looking out across the intersection of Grant and Bush. The sky was dark in patches where the clouds were too thick to catch and burn with the city lights. Where it was brighter, he could see the silhouettes of drones darting past.

  The letter and the butane lighter were in his jacket pocket, and he took them out.

  She hadn’t signed her name on it. Not her real name, nor whatever name he’d known her by. It was too dangerous for him to know either one now. In a weak moment, he might search for her. Then they would know what he knew, and that would end it. He had to be silent, and he had to be strong. He had to bury her deep, and carry her in secret.

  He tried to picture her. It was too dark to see her face. But he could feel her hands on his shoulders, could feel the curve of her back as she arched forward to meet him. He had been with her, let her undress him in the dark and lead him to bed. But why could he remember that, when everything else was gone? Everything up until he’d woken in the hospital, floating through a halfway haze, carried along by Hernandez’s voice.

  How many people had been whispering to him in the dark, and for how long?

  He opened the lighter’s hinged lid and struck a flame. Then he held the corner of the envelope over it and watched it catch. He kept it below the level of the balustrade, where the flames would be safe from the wind. When his phone began to vibrate, he took it from his pocket and checked the screen.

  It was Lieutenant Hernandez.

  He thought of smashing the phone against the stone rail, throwing the pieces into the street. The flames had half the envelope now. He tilted it so they would spread up toward his fingers. He had to answer. That was the way it worked, the way it would have to be from now on. He swallowed once, to calm his voice. Then he brought the letter up and let the wind take it. He stood against the rail and watched it twist through the air, burning as it fell. High above the street, the letter had broken into four pieces. One of the sheets made it almost all the way to the Dragon Gate before it dissolved into ash and flickered out. There was nothing left but the dark city spreading out beneath him, and Hernandez waiting for him to pick up.

  He couldn’t let her hear any doubt in his voice. She had to think he believed the world had no problems so great they couldn’t be fixed with a badge and a gun, and a stiff drink at the end of the day, standing alone in the kitchen with the mail spread out and glowing in front of him. All the shining things that blinked and promised and glittered in the dark—then moved out of grasp like sparks dancing away on the wind.

  He brought the phone to his ear.

  “Carver,” he said. “Homicide.”

  Acknowledgments

  I have always thought of The Poison Artist, The Dark Room, and The Night Market as a three-panel painting of San Francisco—a single work, loosely connected. So with this last book, which completes the story of a city and an interrelated group of characters, you’d think I might have something to say about it. But I finished this book almost a year before I finished The Dark Room, and so I said most of what I have to say about this series (if series is the right word) in the acknowledgments to that book.

  Speaking of acknowledgments, there seems to be a long-standing tradition on the last page of novels (at least those written by male authors) in which the author thanks his wife for typing the manuscript—something you could get an enterprising kid to do, for a reasonable fee. Maria doesn’t type my manuscripts. What she does do is talk to me about my stories, read them and critique them, and give me insights and guidance. I’d be afraid to send something out without her comments, and I don’t think I could find anyone, for any fee, who could do what she does.

  For the last four years, I’ve been blessed to have Alice Martell as my agent. She has opened doors for me that I wouldn’t have even knocked on, has gotten my books published in seven languages, and has somehow managed to sell every single thing I’ve sent her, including short stories. Thanks to Alice, I also have some truly fine editors. Naomi Gibbs and Alison Kerr Miller at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and Bill Massey and Francesca Pathak at Orion have been superb.

  I live in Hawaii now, and I often write at outdoor bars that are close approximations of paradise. I’m not kidding: it’s eighty degrees in the sunlight, the wind smells like plumeria, the waves lap on the beach with Diamond Head in the background—and my head is in a San Francisco fog. I used to live there, in the late nineties, and after the turn of the millennium. At the time, I had a writing teacher named Thomas Cooney. He and I have stayed in touch, so that he has given me something like nineteen years of encouragement in my writing. To say that I am grateful—to say that he has taught me a lot—would be an understatement.

  Visit www.hmhco.com to find more books by Jonathan Moore.

  About the Author

  JONATHAN MOORE is the author of five books. Before completing law school in New Orleans, he was a teacher, a bar owner, a counselor at a wilderness camp for juvenile delinquents, and an investigator for a criminal defense attorney in Washington, D.C. He lives in Honolulu.

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  Jonathan Moore, The Night Market