Naked Moon

by Domenic Stansberry

  “Back the way we came,” Dante said, and gave the man Rossi’s address up on Russian Hill.

  PART FOUR

  FIFTEEN

  In the end, it was the Sicilians. Not the Italians from Lucca, with their shops and their restaurants. Not the Calabrians, the peasants from the south. Not the Italian Swiss, the industrious ones, with their chocolate factories and canneries and their bank on the corner of Columbus. These others might have the good life, some of them, but it was not them, in the end, who owned the Beach. Rather it was the old Sicilians in their torn sweaters.

  Old men lounging on the green benches in Washington Square.

  A million dollars in torn sweaters.

  Fish money.

  The former mayor, Joe Rossi, was of this line. He lived in a yellow house at the top of Russian Hill—a gambrel-roofed Victorian with a private yard in the back. It was crab money, fisherman money, a share of the wharf, purchased by Rossi’s own father years ago. The Sicilians had outfished the Luccans and outbullied the Chinese, controlled the bay until the shrimp beds were dry and the sardines fished out, and then they’d made other arrangements. But it was all fish money when you got down to it. Dredged out of the sea and wrestled onto the wharf. It was fish money that had financed Joe Rossi’s career, and fish money now that was financing his daughter’s run. Fish money once removed, but it still had the same smell. You didn’t get rich, unless you were willing to stink, Dante’s father used to say, and you didn’t stay rich if you dressed in anything other than a torn sweater.

  Mayor Rossi had dispensed with the torn sweater part of this wisdom. He showed his money and thought himself a good man, though there were plenty of people who would tell you otherwise. Some of the enmity was personal, and some of it was for convenience’ sake—because everyone had to hate someone—and some of it was over political business from long ago.

  Good man or no, he would do anything for his daughter. Gennae Rossi was the light of her father’s eye. She’d been a teenager when her father was mayor, and her picture had been in the society page when she married. She’d worked in the welfare kitchens after college and given her fish money to the poor. Barely thirty when she was elected to the city council, elegant and modest both at once, so poised, posture like a saint until the multiple sclerosis.

  Rossi himself did not answer the door. Rather it was his wife, dressed in such a way—in a formal dress, sashed at the waist—that suggested they had just returned from the evening’s event. She’d had a mastectomy six months ago, and though you could not tell by looking, rumor among the old ones, down at Serafina’s, claimed the long-range prognosis was not good, and old Mayor Rossi, these days, was sleeping in the study. Whether this was on account of his own trouble getting up the stairs or repulsion at his wife’s cancer—this depended upon whom you talked to, but either way the couple was active in their daughter’s campaign.

  Given the hour, and the fact of his cousin’s outburst, Dante half expected Mrs. Rossi might send him away. Her husband, though, had spent a long time in public life. She had seen people come and go, at all hours, and if she held his cousin’s behavior against him, she did not show it. Mrs. Rossi was, at any rate, affable by nature.

  “We just got back. Gennae was speaking this evening, at Il Cenacolo.” She smiled. “Joe introduced her.” Il Cenacolo was an Italian group that met once a month, businessmen mostly, political types, people with money. Gennae’s candidacy was a long shot, and her father was not loved by everyone, but they’d turned out like in the old days, elbow to elbow around the white table cloths, raising their glasses. “It was nice,” she said.

  “How’s the campaign?”

  “There’s a surge.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s what Joe says. He can feel these things.”

  “I imagine he can.”

  His words came out wrong, too sardonic, and Mrs. Rossi became haughty then. She held her head in profile, nose turned—but he felt no enmity toward her. She was one of the few who’d gone down to visit his mother after she’d been placed in the asylum.

  “It’s good to see you,” she said. Mrs. Rossi turned on her heel, as if to head up the long stairs behind her.

  “Just go in.”

  “Excuse me.”

  “The study. He’s resting in there. Only an idiot would climb these stairs.”

  Mayor Rossi lounged in his study, leaning back in his big chair, feet on the ottoman, shoes off. He lay with the chair tilted all the way back, hands folded on his paunch, eyes closed, shirt open at the collar. His pajamas and a night robe lay draped nearby, and there was a pillow on the sofa, suggesting that might be his later destination. He had not made it there yet, though, into his pajamas and onto the sofa, but instead had wheezed off in his chair. If Rossi had heard Dante come in, he gave no immediate sign.

  The room had that old wop smell.

  Tobacco. Wine. Fish.

  “Mayor?”

  Rossi opened his eyes, taking stock of the younger man, and Dante was aware of the gulf between them. The mayor had been friends with his father, back in the day. He did not look quite awake.

  “Don’t you knock when you come in?”

  “I did knock.”

  “That’s what they all say.” Rossi rubbed his eyes with his fists. “What brings you, this hour?”

  “Business.”

  The old man grimaced up at him and struggled on the recliner, forcing the chair upright. “Your asshole cousin was here.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes.”

  “My asshole cousin is dead.”

  The mayor didn’t know how to take this. He laughed, or started to, a guffaw really, an odd chortle, cut short in the throat. Then he coughed. There was an ugly rattle in his chest. “You’re not joking?”

  “No.”

  The mayor leaned forward. The far wall, the other side of the room, chronicled Rossi’s career—starting some sixty years back, just after World War II, black-and-white photos of a thick-chested man smiling into the camera, gung ho for the world. Closer by, on the desk itself, were pictures of the old man and his wife, at some lake in Italy, on their second honeymoon, wandering down the medieval streets. It was the kind of street on which Marilyn imagined herself, wearing a gown like the one Gennae Rossi wore in the wedding picture out in the hall.

  “I’m sorry,” said Rossi. “I had no idea.”

  “He came to see you?”

  “The other day. We …” He shook his head. “What happened?”

  Dante told him about the murder, and as he did so, he studied Rossi’s face. He studied it the same way Chin had studied his own, looking for what lay beneath the surface. There was always something hidden, but whether it mattered, whether it meant anything, that was harder to tell.

  “What do the police think?”

  “Gary was up here to see you, wasn’t he?”

  “Did you tell the police that?”

  “What did he want?”

  Rossi told him then, pretty much the same story Dante had gathered from Gary. Different in some particulars, but not the important ones. From the sound of it, his cousin had come up here, grabbing at straws, hoping the former mayor could somehow use his influence to squelch the investigation. “As if a word from me, his problems would go away. I wish people would listen to me like that.” Rossi laughed dryly. “When I told him no, well … You know how he could be sometimes.”

  “Ugly.”

  “Yes.”

  “The police have already talked to me,” said Dante. “Sooner or later, I guess, they will talk to you as well. But there’s no reason for the media to come along.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I know how much you love your daughter.”

  “Don’t play that card on me.”

  “A story like this—a time like this—the candidate’s father, the ex-mayor, questions concerning the murder of a man seeking a favor in regard to a criminal investigation …”

  Mayor R
ossi had suffered a million accusations in the past, charges of corruption, of playing his connections for financial benefit, and though some of them were true, at least in part, he’d walked the line and fended them all off. He glared at Dante with the old wop defiance, but at the same time his countenance was creased with exhaustion. He had pulmonary problems and his wife was dying of cancer, but none of that was what bothered him. He didn’t want the campaign coming apart on their daughter.

  “What, then, do you want?”

  “Ru Shen’s diary …”

  The mayor shook his head. “What does that have to do with your cousin?”

  “Someone’s been leaking information.”

  “Your cousin?”

  “You tell me.”

  During a trip to China, Ru Shen had disappeared. This was common knowledge. It was not widely known, however, that his body had been found in the cargo hold of a container ship, by the immigration authority. It had gone unidentified at first, and Ru Shen’s effects—including the journal—had been bagged and stored, then subsequently destroyed. The mayor’s fear of the journal back then, three years ago, had had little to do with the company. Rossi’s concerns were more prosaic. He had been involved in a number of questionable deals over the years, but what worried him most was what had happened on a particular junket. Small stuff, ultimately, regarding a couple of girls in a Hong Kong hotel room.

  “No,” Rossi said. “Your cousin said nothing about the journal.”

  There was a tremor in the old man’s voice. Near the picture on the desk, of himself and his wife in Italy, there stood a photo, Gennae, in her bright blouse, gold earrings. She smiled a big smile. Her father’s smile.

  “She did good tonight,” said the old man. “She can move a crowd.”

  “I’ve seen.”

  “She has a light about her.”

  “The diary,” Dante interrupted. “Is there another copy?”

  Joe Rossi put his head into his hand. “I’m sorry. It’s just, this campaign is important to Gennae. And she doesn’t need some nonsense in the paper. I don’t need this.”

  “No one cares about fifteen minutes you spent with a girl in a hotel room twenty years ago.”

  “Then what?”

  “Is there a copy?”

  Rossi walked over to his wall, the one with all the photos of the old days, showing how he’d started as a young lawyer, out there in front of the crab house, smelling of fish, standing in the midst of the men with the torn sweaters. From there he’d worked himself up to judge, then mayor, surrounded by every businessman in town. His daughter, in her wheelchair, was trying to follow the same path behind him. From Rossi’s posture, the way he stood now, Dante understood that the old man knew she wasn’t going to make it. She was too far behind. Even so, he did not want some tawdriness spoiling her campaign.

  “The Chinese Historical Society, maybe.”

  “What?”

  “It’s possible,” Rossi said.

  The mayor explained how, before Ru Shen’s body was identified, the Chinese Historical Society had been involved in a special project, gathering the effects of stowaways. It was possible, Rossi supposed, they’d rummaged Ru Shen’s effects as well, not knowing who he was, not caring, simply gathering artifacts of stowaways to be stored as part of their collection. Immigration had allowed them to make facsimiles of such documents, but so far as Rossi knew, whatever they’d found sat in a box, in the basement of the Historical Society.

  “You never checked.”

  “It seemed best, you know, to leave well enough alone. And like you said, who cares now, what an old man did in a hotel room.”

  “It was never cataloged?”

  “The grant ran out.” The mayor shrugged. “Then recently, they got some money. For ‘Across the Water’—that exhibit.”

  It was the kind of thing that happened in the city. Projects were initiated, papers gathered, then left to gather dust. Then, sooner or later, someone came along and stirred it all up. Dante had seen the workers, just the other day, dismantling the last phase of “Across the Water” down at Portsmouth Square.

  “The Wus financed that?”

  “In part. There was a fuss in the paper.”

  That, too, was the kind of squabbling that happened after those sorts of things, mutually funded, in which the parties disagreed as to where the items should be permanently housed. In this case, some of the artifacts had disappeared, and there were allegations back and forth.

  “My wife …”

  The old man’s eyes went soft, and Dante saw Rossi’s concern, worried that all of a sudden, his old indiscretions would become public.

  “Don’t worry,” Dante said.

  Rossi nodded his head, not quite convinced. Once, he could have interfered, but Rossi didn’t have the resources or stamina anymore.

  Dante put his hand on the old man’s shoulder. “Go to sleep,” he said.

  Dante left. The fuss regarding “Across the Water” had died down as quickly as it started, he remembered, the allegations withdrawn. Even so, the insinuation had been clear enough at the time. The artifacts had been taken by the Benevolent Association itself, for its private collection, carried across the square, up into the chambers of Love Wu.

  SIXTEEN

  He woke up later, alone in his bed with the image of Marilyn in that velvet dress, in her black wrap, crossing the road, Lake beside her, heading to the opera house at dusk. He lay sleepless, thinking of her and of his dead cousin, and of Dominick Greene, in residence at the Sam Wong.

  He and Marilyn were supposed to meet later today, midmorning, down at the marina, at the slip where he docked his grandfather’s boat. Only Marilyn called, just past nine.

  “I’m going to be late,” she said.

  “Oh.”

  “My couple.”

  “What about them?”

  “They called me up just a few minutes ago. There’s a place they want to see.”

  For the past week or so, Marilyn had been showing a couple around North Beach, some newcomers with money, looking for a place to buy but staying meantime in the Stanford Court, halfway up Nob Hill. They had cash, they claimed, having just sold their place in Barcelona. Meantime, today, just before lunch, there was a two-bedroom they wanted to see, over in Noe Valley, on the other side of the city, so Marilyn wouldn’t be able to meet him till almost one.

  “All right?”

  “Of course.”

  There was something in her voice, subdued, and something in his own voice, too, when he responded. Things between him and Marilyn, they had reached a tipping point, and maybe that was a good thing, given the circumstances. He needed to cut her loose. For her own safety, if nothing else. He worried, though, that he had waited too long.

  “I’ll see you at one,” he said.

  Jake Cicero had been running his investigative business for almost thirty years, out of a third-story office in a brick building that stood on a terrace over the Broadway Tunnel. Dante had been working for Cicero for some time, and he knew the man’s habits well. The front office looked out into the neighborhood, and that was where Jake sat when he talked on the phone, at that window, his Italian loafers up on the metal desk.

  “Someone has been making us,” said Cicero. “Either that, or we got a fish.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “A gray sedan, out front.”

  “Now?”

  “Yesterday. Twice.”

  Dante had called to check the book on Dominick Greene, but Cicero was more concerned with the come-and-go outside the building. It was a hobby of Cicero’s, trying to figure the business of passersby, and he indulged that hobby when his own business was slow. There was the apartment building across the way, and an accounting firm on the floor above, and a marijuana dealer around the corner, and over the years, he’d gotten pretty good at guessing who was going where. Private investigation wasn’t exactly a walk-in business, but there were still those who lingered on occasion outside. Disg
runtled crooks. Spouses, pissed they’d been caught in the act. Plainclothes cops looking to nab one of Cicero’s criminal clients in violation of parole.

  “Did you get a look?”

  “Guy never got out of the car. But there was a woman out there as well. Same vehicle, later in the day.”

  “You sure.”

  “The woman got out. Walked up to the building. Then back out. Checking the directory.”

  “Wrong building, maybe.”

  “Divorce case. She had that look.”

  “Except she didn’t come up.”

  “Embarrassed, you know how they are. Not sure she wants to hire someone, not yet. But she’ll be back.”

  “You should know.”

  Cicero laughed. He had been divorced three times himself, and spent a good deal of his career tracking unfaithful husbands. It was still a good part of the firm’s business, though these days they made their bread and butter on contract work from the public defender’s office, looking for mitigating circumstances for career criminals.

  “What about Greene?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “No?”

  “Why are you so interested?”

  “Just tell me what you have.”

  Cicero went over it. Greene’s father was a businessman, Garment District, New York City. Greene himself had done a stint in the army. Worked now for a fabric importer. Unmarried, traveled a lot. No criminal record. Nothing to make it seem like he was anything other than he claimed: a business rep looking for the cheapest way to get his goods to market. On the surface of it, anyway, the man’s file sounded much like Dante’s own, back when he’d worked in New Orleans.

  “This guy—he have something to do with Gary?” asked Cicero.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’re not telling me.”

  “Later, we’ll talk.”

  Dante did not want to get Cicero further involved if he could help it. Meanwhile, If Ru Shen’s journal had been in “Across the Water,” as the mayor suspected, it would be on the manifest, over at the Chinese Historical Society. Dante didn’t need to meet Marilyn until one, so he headed down there. As it turned out, the place kept odd hours, and the room he needed to visit, Special Collections, was closed on Fridays. So he found himself aimless in Chinatown. There was the softest breeze, no fog, a nice day for going out on the water, as good as it gets, but at the same time, he could feel the day heating, the air thickening with the smell of the Chinese stalls, the dried fish, the twisted duck, the bok choy, all mixed with the smell of the asphalt and the crowds, people close together, perspiring in cheap nylon. Above it all, hovered the Empress Building.