Naked Moon

by Domenic Stansberry

  SEVENTEEN

  The Empress was not an easy building to navigate. Over the years, its seven stories had been carved up in incomprehensible ways, so that halls ended suddenly and the office numbering was askew. The lower corridors smelled of cheap veneer and cleaning fluid, and a sign at the end of one of these corridors listed the second story businesses: money exchange and employment services, travel and real estate, legal assistance for immigrants. These offices could be attained by stair or by elevator but Dante was not interested. The offices of the Wu family themselves, and their intimates—those were higher up and harder to reach.

  Both the stairwell and the elevator went only as far as the third floor. To get higher access, he had to negotiate the receptionist in the third-floor lobby, then the security office at the end of another hall.

  “I’d like to see Love Wu.”

  The receptionist regarded him blankly. It was the face he always got in Chinatown, though he had seen the woman’s cheek tremble. Fear—the suspicion she was being mocked. No one asked to see Love Wu, not if you were from the neighborhood and knew the stories. It was an arrogant thing to do.

  “What is your name?”

  “Mancuso.”

  Dante did not know his cousin’s contact here. He was relying on the arrogance of his request—together with the card he slid across the desk, bearing the name of the family warehouse. The receptionist got on the phone, speaking Chinese, her voice rising, falling, and in that glottal music, the sudden pitch and yaw, he heard the sound of his own name. She uttered it again a little later, talking to someone a little higher in the building, he supposed, then again, and with each utterance his name seemed more foreign, less his own. The receptionist pointed him toward a plastic chair.

  “You may wait,” she said.

  As he sat, a young nurse came up the stairs from the street, from the same direction he himself had come. She was Chinese, with dark eyes and darker hair. She had porcelain skin and delicate features, and she carried a shopping bag from one of the downtown stores. She skimmed over him with her sharp black eyes, a fleeting look, regarding him in much the same way the receptionist had, as if she were glancing through him, seeing him without seeing. Then she put her access card in the elevator slot and went up.

  Eventually, two young men sauntered from the security office down the hall, big-shouldered boys who looked as if they took a special pleasure in bouncing people into the street. One was big-boned, with a face from the Mongolian plains, but the other was a small man, quick-eyed and nervous. They took him to the elevator. Once the door closed, the pair gave him the same treatment he’d gotten from Angelo and the thick-necked cop out on Fresno Street a couple days before. The Mongol lurked behind him while the smaller man patted Dante down, touching him in all the usual places.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I have business with Mr. Wu.”

  “Love Wu,” the small one said, his voice dripping, and Dante guessed the boys from security were among those the receptionist had been talking to.

  “Who do you think you are?”

  Dante told him his name.

  “That’s not what I mean. I mean just who do you think you are?”

  “He’s not doing much thinking, you ask me.”

  “A business associate,” said Dante.

  “The Benevolent Association has lots of partners. They don’t come without appointments.”

  “Apparently, there are exceptions. You’ve been told to bring me up.”

  “What year do you think this is? You think this is 1878?”

  “He thinks we are little Chinamen with pigtails, this is what he thinks.”

  “You think it is the year of the monkey?”

  “He thinks we wear red silk jackets and sell egg rolls on the street.”

  “He thinks maybe he can find himself a yellow mistress.”

  “Maybe he is an admirer of the Orient.”

  “He wants a yellow girl to scrub his toilets.”

  “Is that why you came here, looking for a yellow girl?”

  “No,” said Dante. “I don’t want a yellow girl.”

  “What’s the matter, not good enough for you?”

  “You don’t like the way we smell?”

  “No. I love the way you smell,” said Dante.

  “What did you say?”

  Dante held his tongue. The Mongol stiffened behind him, and the other one clenched his jaw. There wasn’t much space in the elevator. Dante could sense the boys struggling, wanting to let loose, but what Dante had said was true: They’d been told to bring him up. Any trouble along the way, there’d be explaining to do, and that explaining wouldn’t be worth the pleasure of knocking around this Italian with the big nose. They rode the rest of the way in silence.

  The elevator went only as far as the sixth floor, one story short of the upper chambers. The two men guided him down the hall. On the way, they passed an open lift with an accordion door, and inside that lay a heap of dirty linen and a box of geriatric supplies. It was an old cargo lift, installed years ago, used to carry things up that final story. The men ushered him farther on, to an office with a waiting room. The door stood partially open, and he could hear voices beyond—a man and a woman.

  A young woman stepped into view: the same woman he’d seen earlier in the lobby, the nurse, only now she wore a different blouse and stood in such a way, one hand on her waist, that suggested she was modeling her purchase.

  “Very nice,” the man said. His voice was appreciative—but the man himself remained unseen.

  On the carpet, by the woman’s heels, a shopping bag lay discarded. She walked over and pushed the door closed.

  By the time it opened again and the boys from security led him through, the woman was gone. It was just a man behind a desk in shirtsleeves and glasses. Like Rossi, he had pictures of his wife and family at his elbow, and on the wall behind him hung certificates and honors of the type bestowed by the local chamber of commerce.

  Yin was his name. Nelson Yin.

  He wore a tie.

  He had a Diet Coke on his desk.

  Dante wondered where the young woman had gone. She had not left by the way Dante entered. It was an odd setup. The office had a second door, leading perhaps to an inner office, and he heard now on the other side of the wall the sound of footsteps, as of someone ascending a stair. In the corner behind Yin stood a statue of a goddess with a multitude of hands and four visages, so she faced in every direction all at once.

  “I was looking to speak with Mr. Wu directly.”

  Yin smiled. “Which one? We are a big family.”

  “The one in the penthouse suite.”

  “There is no one in the penthouse suite.”

  Yin spoke in a matter-of-fact way, bemused, but Dante had seen the cargo lift and heard the nurse’s footsteps and suspected there was something going on up there. From the looks of the scene he’d glimpsed through the office door—the way the young woman had stood, turning so as to show herself to Yin in her cheongsam—he suspected there was something else going on as well, which maybe the wife in the picture didn’t know about.

  “The elevator goes higher.”

  “Height does not always indicate ascendancy.”

  “You’re in charge?”

  “A family as large as ours—no one is in charge. We are an association.”

  “There is always someone in charge.”

  The fluorescent light played across Yin’s glasses, obscuring his eyes—but in his voice there was a deeper bemusement. “Why are you here?”

  “My cousin, he had business with you.”

  Yin did not respond. This silence, Dante read as assent. His cousin may not have dealt directly with Yin, but in the end, it did not matter. The business relationship, given its nature, would be masked in reams of paper.

  “Do you know who killed my cousin?”

  “How would I know such a thing?”

  “You knew he was being investigated, I am sure. An
d if he were to cooperate in that investigation—”

  “I know what you are implying. I would be offended, but I understand, you are speaking from grief. I am aware, too, that certain people in the police department have not given up a particular view of my family—but these investigations, they never go anywhere. And like I said, we are a large family.”

  “With no one in charge?”

  Yin smiled again, a little too smugly, as if to let Dante know, yes, indeed, he was a man of power, but the nature of the smile itself undermined him, suggesting Yin did not have all the power he wanted.

  On the wall behind him hung more family pictures. Yin with his family in front of a ranch home out in the suburbs. A house that was nice enough—but not ostentatious. A middle-management kind of house. Somewhere on the peninsula. Commuting distance. Other pictures showed Yin as a younger man, out in the Richmond District, posing with men of an earlier generation, and still others showed him here in Chinatown, standing in front of the Empress.

  Dante glanced again at the many-headed goddess. At a row of texts in a glass bookcase. Chinese texts. Very old, some of them—collector’s items. On top: a stack of magazines, some in Chinese, but not all. Fashion and travel, celebrity and desire. Property, perhaps, of the woman who’d disappeared up the stairs.

  “You read Chinese?”

  “To a small degree. After a couple generations, that gets lost.”

  “What about the girl?”

  “The girl?”

  “The nurse?”

  Dante saw something in the man’s face. Yin did not like the angle of discussion, perhaps, the prying into personal business, but it wasn’t just that which Dante saw. It was the look of a man who was trapped. Not in the way Dante himself was trapped, but in a different way. A man trapped by the drive home, by the leather chair and the aging wife whom he lay with at night in an overlarge bed, in the moonlight falling through the sliding door. A man who had foolish dreams and knew they were foolish, but could not help but have them anyway. Those dreams had to do with the young nurse in the cheongsam blouse.

  “Chin is determined to investigate,” Dante said.

  “Waterfront property, it always attracts rumors. There is such a thing as legitimate trade. From what I understand, your cousin was a good partner. If you are interested in continuing the association …”

  “So you are making me an offer?”

  “You came to me.” Yin smiled more wanly now, thin-lipped, polite as could be, but the meaning was nonetheless clear. Keep a secret and we will prosper together. Whisper and everything comes undone.

  “The police are going to put pressure on me—the same way they put it on my cousin.”

  “What do you want?” asked Yin.

  According to the old stories, Love Wu’s library was upstairs, in his private chambers. The reason Dante had come here had little to do with his cousin. Rather, Dante had come here on reconnaissance, because if Ru Shen’s journal was on the manifest, then he would need to make his way back, into that library, but he could not tell Yin that. His guess, Yin expected he had come for a piece of the business, in the wake of his cousin’s death.

  “I don’t want anything,” Dante said.

  “Nothing?”

  “I want nothing.”

  “Pardon?”

  “What I am saying here—I have no intention of cooperating with the authorities, but I want no part of the business either.”

  “You want out.”

  “I don’t want to end up like my cousin.”

  “I understand.”

  “So you can have it all. That’s it. That’s all I came to say.”

  Yin nodded, as if this were satisfactory. Dante did not know if the man believed him, but it didn’t matter. He had given a reason for his appearance here. He had come to submit—to let them know he was not a threat. Likely, they did not believe him. Or could not afford the risk. Likely the world of the company and the Chinese underground overlapped—and Yin was already calculating a way to be rid of him. No matter, Dante’s explanation had been good enough for now, and the brutes led him down back the way he had come. Dante walked out of the building, into Portsmouth Square. He paused in front of the nameless hotel, where he studied the alley for a moment, the descending fire escapes. Then he kept going, away from the Empress, thinking as he did about all those locked doors, those labyrinthine passages, and the sound of the woman’s footsteps ascending behind the walls.

  EIGHTEEN

  His grandfather’s felucca was docked in a slip down in the North Beach Marina. Dante had agreed to sell, some time before, to a young man who worked at the harbor. Dante hadn’t wanted to let the boat go, but the marina had gone upscale. The slip fees were too much, the boat wasn’t getting much use, and the yacht owners complained it was an eyesore. The young man who bought it planned to take it over to Sausalito, to have the engines overhauled, but he had told Dante he could take it out one last time.

  Dante kept his eyes open at the boatyard. Examining the faces of the dockhands, of the wharf bums on the benches, the loungers with their beer bottles and foam cups. A man stood watching from the planking as he and Marilyn untethered the boat, then waved at the last moment, with the camaraderie of a fellow boater. Farther back, a woman leaned at the railing, chatting with her husband. There were others as well walking the pier—onlookers, bystanders, people with their own business, their own worries, killing time by the bay, though it was hard to know which passing glance, whose interest, was less casual than it seemed.

  Marilyn had brought lunch in a basket. She stood in the prow of the ship in her sleeveless blouse and her sunglasses and her capris. The day was warm and she wore her hair tied back. The surface of the sea was bright and glassy, and something about how the light reflected brought out the scars on her face.

  They headed out across the water, toward the island.

  He studied a speedboat arcing across the water ahead, and studied, too, a sailboat that had left the dock behind them and some kayaks in close to shore, and other crafts, farther out, white sails like cocked hats, veering this way and that on the horizon.

  Back on the shore, the bystanders grew small.

  “This is nice,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s idyllic.”

  “I think so.”

  “It clears my head just to be out here.”

  They were out in the middle of the channel, halfway to the island. He could see the refinery tanks squatting in the hills off to the east, and the bridge out to the west. When he and Marilyn were younger, he had taken her out toward the headlands and cut the engine and let it float. The current had taken them halfway to the Farallones, but they’d been too busy underdecks to notice.

  She cut him a glance but did not say anything.

  There was a cabin underneath—a small quarters with a fold-down bed and a gas burner and a dry closet for storage and portholes along the side for light. Marilyn went down there for a moment and came back up in some loose-fitting shorts. He could see now as well the scar tissue on the backs of her legs.

  “It’s hot.”

  “Yes.”

  The boat sputtered momentarily, and he felt the tug of the current, the slow pull out toward sea. Then the engine caught and they kept on going.

  They docked on the other side of the island, downcurrent from the main beach. The island was uninhabited, except for the park service station—and the remains of the old military prison. Ferries ran back and forth to the island several times a day, carrying tourists and day hikers. The service made its last run at five, and it sometimes happened that a visitor missed the ferry and was stuck overnight, without gear, to sleep on the ground of the eucalyptus forest.

  As they disembarked, Dante surveyed the sea behind him. No one had followed. There were a couple boats already in the cove, day travelers like themselves.

  “Your blouse.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “Sure.”

  Marilyn w
ore a sleeveless blouse that buttoned down the back—a bronze shade that brought out the color of her skin. She looked good, but the blouse wasn’t one he had seen before, and it reminded him of David Lake and that trip to Santa Barbara. They walked past the old prison. It had been the holding ground for Chinese immigrants once upon a time, and the prisoners had scratched their names into the stone. Also the names of their beloved. Their towns of origin. Poems. Obscenities. The dark cubicles were filled with ideograms. A handful of Italians had been incarcerated there as well, at the start of World War II, for their allegiance to Mussolini, but they hadn’t left any record behind.

  From the steps, Dante could see over to San Francisco on one hand and back to Marin on the other—to those little towns scattered in the dappled light along the underside of those brown hills.

  “I’ve got a new listing.”

  “Another one?”

  “A nice place. An earthquake cottage.”

  “Marin?”

  She nodded. After the earthquake, a hundred years ago now, refugees had thrown up shanties on the other side of the bay. Though most of those earthquake cottages were gone, the name was still used to describe bungalows built in the years since.

  “Not too big. But there’s lots of light.”

  “How much money?”

  “It’s affordable, relatively speaking. Some young couple will jump on it.”

  “I thought things were slow.”