Naked Moon

by Domenic Stansberry

  “What might that be?”

  “I was hoping you might have that information.”

  “My cousin had money problems,” he said, “but I told him there was nothing I could do.”

  Chin knew he was holding back, but he could not tell her about the journal even if he wanted to. She was working with Angelo, and the department was a sieve, information traveled, so if he spoke to one, he spoke to the many, and there were people among the many he could not trust.

  Chin flipped the second picture, the unplayed card.

  It was a woman in a vinyl jacket, head twisted. Her body was in the early stages of decay. A gash festered at her neck and the tongue protruded from her mouth. It was the same girl, the prostitute from Gino’s, in the same vinyl jacket.

  “Forensics says she’d been lying in an alley, maybe a week. In an abandoned area, not far from where she was living.”

  Chin could take him downtown, even charge him, given the similarities to his cousin’s death, but if she had meant to do that, she would not have come like this, alone.

  “There’s a pattern here,” said Chin. She was right. First his cousin, now the girl—though exactly how the pattern would repeat …

  “I told you before,” she said. “I can help you. You can’t do this alone.”

  He had the impulse then, despite himself, to tell her everything, and the suspicion, as well, that she already knew. But then something about her changed, in her eyes, in the turn of her mouth, and he saw, however fleetingly, that girl on the street corner struggling to make sense of things, and he realized Chin, too, was lost in the maze.

  “Who’s next?” She tapped the photograph. “That’s the question I want you to ask yourself.”

  “I’ve told you everything I know.”

  She resumed her old posture, unreadable. “If something else occurs to you, let me know.”

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  “Don’t think long.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  A million eyes roamed the streets of Chinatown. A millions hands. A million feet. Yet no one saw him. Or seemed to see. Their eyes rolled over the produce. Hands touched and squeezed. The old ones in their shapeless clothes, their two-dollar shoes, they stepped aside, but they did not see him, white ghost, all but invisible. They had learned the trick of this, the lesson, passed on long ago, by those who had survived. The Anglos, the Euros—they were not real. If you did not look at them, if you did not see them, if your eyes did not meet their eyes, then they could not hurt you. The younger Chinese, in their sharp clothes, it was the same thing, only different. For them, it was not a matter of superstition. They did not see him, because he was unimportant. The white man, he did not exist.

  The clerk at the Chinese Historical Society fulfilled his request without speaking, guiding him to Special Collections, where he could examine the manifest. The list describing the objects in the collection contained only the most cursory of information, but he found Ru Shen’s name there, in the itemization of artifacts for “Across the Water.” It was a list of Chinese characters alongside English transliterations:

  : Ru Shen. Diary of unknown stowaway.

  Dante spent some time with the transliteration guides. The ideogram at the top of the entry was simply Ru Shen’s name, as written in Chinese. Then there was the symbol at the end of the line:

  It took him a while to find its meaning—but it turned out to be a scepter, a ceremonial staff: a symbol of good luck, or of evil, depending upon the nature of the mind that perceived it:

  “As one wishes.”

  TWENTY-NINE

  Dante climbed into his Honda and headed south. He left the freeway in San Bruno, then pulled into a place called the New Airport Suites, just off the freeway. The place was neither here nor there, just a complex of buildings, remodeled stucco, with nothing to recommend it other than its proximity to the airport. He had chosen it because of the way the buildings sprawled haphazardly across the lot, with multiple exits, which would make his comings and goings hard to watch.

  It was possible that the company had already replaced Greene. Or that there’d been someone else watching all along.

  He checked into the hotel, though he stayed only long enough to see if another vehicle had followed him. Then he left. His cousin’s funeral was later this same day, just down the road in Colma. He needed first, though, to visit the surplus store down on El Camino, stocked with supplies for survivalists: men who liked to play soldiers in the woods, with Mylar vests and paintballs and exploding cans of smoke. The owner also sold guns under the counter.

  Dante had a plan.

  Later, he would return to the city, but he could not stay on Fresno Street anymore. After the funeral, he would come back to the New Airport Suites, but he would not stay the night here either. Instead he would drive the car into the airport lot. He would go through security, as if he were boarding the plane, but then he would come back out again. He would go through a series of maneuvers to make it look as if he were leaving town, then go back to Chinatown, to the nameless hotel. Inside the surplus store, he bought what he needed.

  The Italian Cemetery was up in Colma. The usual thing was to have a Mass out at Saints Peter and Paul, in Washington Square. Even the families who no longer lived in the neighborhood often held the viewing down in the Beach, at the Green Street Mortuary. Afterward, the funeral cars would wind through the streets of the city, ending out in Colma. That was how it had been when Dante’s mother passed, and his father, too, and his uncle as well.

  Viola had forgone all that.

  His cousin’s assets had been frozen, and she had little money. So she held the service at Caputo’s Memorial, not far from the cemetery itself. If the service had been held in North Beach, it would have been better attended. There would have been the old-timers from the Beach, but there would also have been more gawkers, drawn by the murder.

  As it was, there were only a handful in attendance, including Viola and her kids, and Nancy, too, the first wife.

  The two women were not on speaking terms.

  His cousin’s burial plot stood down in the oldest part of the cemetery, not far from SFO. The freeway passed on either side, and there was the roar of jet engines overhead. The air tasted of fuel. This part of the cemetery was laid out in concentric circles, the gravel road spiraling through the outer fringes of the old Italian cemetery, through the lonely and crumbling stones toward the inner, more desirable plots. Past the old-lady cannery workers who’d lost their fingers in cans of Del Monte peaches. Past Nick Abruzzi, who’d killed his brother’s wife and hanged himself in prison. Past the giant stone fish, a memorial to fishermen and shipwrecked sailors. Past the aged widows with no markers at all, and the restaurant workers and dock laborers all lying in long anonymous lines that reached from here to the end of time.

  Down to the family plot. To his mother and Grandfather Pelicanos. To Salvatore Mancuso and Regina. Down there among Avincenza and Tony and Jojo and all the dead relatives whose names were forgotten until you stood among the stones.

  The way the graveyard had been laid out, circles within circles, it gave the effect, no matter where you stood, that you had found your way to the center: a hole in the black earth, six feet deep, with the dirt mounded alongside.

  Viola lurched toward him, all in black but for her purple scarf dangling wildly. Her makeup was smeared. The way she approached, he thought they might find some mutual consolation. He wanted to speak with her—after the ceremony—about the people she had described to Chin. Viola stumbled on her heels. He reached to steady her.

  She gripped his arm fiercely and pushed her face into his. “This is your fault,” she hissed. “You fucking asshole. You could’ve helped him. You could’ve done something.”

  “Those people, the couple …”

  “Now I’m destitute. The cops are going to take every goddamn cent.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She slapped him, making a show of it, the way she bro
ught her hand back, swinging wide. He could have stopped her, he could have grabbed her by the arm, but he did not want to get into it with Viola, wrestling next to his cousin’s grave. The priest, his mouth fell open, and one of the kids started to weep, the family closing around the boy, but they’d all, Dante suspected, taken some vicarious pleasure in her action. Viola stepped away from the others, beautiful, alone, petulant. When the ceremony ended, the priest put his hand on her shoulder, but she would have none of that. She shrugged him off and went stomping through the stones.

  Dante departed the cemetery, shoulders slack, his long face even longer now. He peered past the gravestones, surveying the road as he walked, the figures on the horizon. A man with a shovel. More mourners. A woman placing flowers on a distant grave. Viola was right: His cousin might still be alive if not for his own involvement with the company, but there was little he could do. His cell vibrated in his pocket. On the small screen, he discovered a text message from Jake Cicero.

  Meet me at the office. ASAP

  It was unlike Cicero. Jake did not send text messages, but rather had an aversion to the whole concept, his fingers too fat and wide, his eyesight too dim, his patience too short to navigate the tiny keyboard. Besides, today was Monday, Jake’s tennis day, and every Monday afternoon he went down in his shorts and his polo shirt to meet Louisa at the club. If Jake’s life were only Jake’s, if it were only Jake and Jake alone, the man might not leave his office except to eat and drink. That’s the way it had been for a while, between wives, but things were different now. Dante didn’t think Jake would skip out on Louisa.

  Dante left the path. He stood among the older graves where the earth had settled, and dialed Jake’s cell phone. There was no answer. He tried the office landline, but that call went unanswered as well.

  THIRTY

  Cicero’s office was at the crest of the hill, on an abutment overtop the Broadway Tunnel—in a building that trembled with the traffic rumbling below. Dante wheeled into the parking terrace, on the south side, and pulled in alongside Cicero’s sportster. On the front seat sat a box from Coco’s on Union, wrapped with a giant yellow bow. Apparently Cicero meant to surprise Louisa later this evening, after they’d finished on the court.

  Dante could not imagine Jake wanting to meet him tonight. And he could not imagine him sending a text as opposed to picking up the phone.

  Even so, Dante went up.

  It might not be the wisest thing, but if something had gone wrong—with Marilyn and Lake, with the decoy—he needed to know. Or if Cicero needed his help …

  The office was on the third story, at the end of the hall. The outer door had been stenciled in the old fashion, black letters on rippled glass. As a rule, Cicero left the door unlocked when he was inside working, but not tonight. Dante used his key. Then he pushed the door open, standing back as he did so, knowing that if there were anyone here—anyone other than Cicero—the real trouble would come now. Cicero’s office was toward the back, past the receptionist’s desk, and his door stood partly open.

  “Jake!”

  He called the name a second time, but he already knew Jake wasn’t going to answer. Maybe it was the smell, not a strong smell, but a smell with which Dante was not unfamiliar, a vague aroma, like stale clothes too long in the back of a car—a sickly smell, like that of a man who sweats too much, whose perspiration smells faintly of urine and blood. A smell that a nose such as his own—oversized, absurd in its dimensions—was uniquely suited to detect. Though perhaps, too, the odor, the rising certainty, was simply the scent of fear rising from his own skin: the suspicion he’d had from the beginning that things would turn out this way. He’d been selfish, putting his old friend at risk.

  When he walked around the corner into Jake’s office, the smell was less subtle. He could smell the blood; he could smell the shit. A fly buzzed. A lazy fly, circling slowly. Descending with its thousand eyes. Coming to light on the tiny flap of skin on Jake’s neck, rubbing its front legs in the open wound.

  Jake had been garroted, strangled while sitting down in his oak chair, the one that swiveled. His back was to the window. The blinds were closed.

  Dante understood his mistake. He’d been wrong about Greene. Cicero had been garroted in the same fashion as the others. So Greene was not the murderer, Greene could not have killed Cicero, because Greene himself was already dead, lying in the basement of the Serafina Café.

  Dante thought of the prostitute and her contradictory stories regarding who had recruited her. He thought of the story Viola had told Chin, about the man and the woman who’d contacted his cousin. And he thought, too, of the couple he’d seen on the hill outside Marilyn’s house.

  Greene had not been the agent after all.

  Dante examined Cicero’s office. There was nothing in the appointment pad. He punched the button on the answering machine and listened to Louisa’s voice, asking for Jake to call, sounding a little tipsy, a little pissed. The club they belonged to, out in the Avenues, had a bar courtside, and there were times she and Jake never made it to the court, lingering at the bar instead. Dante glanced over at his partner, who sat with his head wrenched back against the window blind. Then he dialed Louisa.

  Louisa did not sound thrilled to hear from him.

  “Have you seen my husband?”

  “No, I haven’t.” Dante turned away from the corpse. “He’s not answering his cell.”

  “Big surprise. He never answers his cell. I’ve left half a dozen messages.”

  “Did he say anything, earlier?”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Did he have any appointments, that he mentioned?”

  “Some kind of divorce business, I don’t know. Some couple—he was going to meet them at the office, but that was hours ago.”

  Dante glanced at his partner again. The fly had burrowed itself into the wound in such a way that it looked like a black mole on Cicero’s neck.

  “I’m sure he’s on his way.”

  “That man, you know, he makes a big deal out of where I go, who I see, suspicious as can be. But where is he now, that’s what I want to know?”

  “He was down to Union Square earlier,” Dante said.

  “Union Square?” Her voice rose.

  Union Square was the shopping district, downtown. Dante remembered Cicero talking about Louisa and her thighs, how she looked in her white tennis shorts. It was embarrassing, a man talking about his wife like that, but Cicero could not help himself. She loved looking at herself in the mirror, changing clothes, this outfit, that, and Jake, he loved to lie on the bed, watching.

  “He was picking something up,” said Dante.

  “For me?”

  “I think so.”

  “Well …”

  He heard a sweetness then in her husky voice, mixed in with a greed she could not help. The thing I love about Louisa, Jake had told him, the thing I can’t resist, that girl, she’s always out for herself.

  In the background, a man laughed too loudly, one of their tennis buddies, those guys who got under Jake’s skin, the way they flirted with Louisa. It didn’t mater now. Louisa would get it all. The little condo, and the sports car, and the membership at the club. She would close out the office, cancel the lease. Maybe I should tell her, Dante thought. Maybe it would be easier that way, if she heard it from someone she knew. Nevertheless, he could not get involved with the police, not now. Rather, he needed to clean up after himself, wipe off the prints, do his best to leave without being seen. The body would be found soon enough. Then Louisa could do whatever it was Cicero feared she might do—find another man, younger, who’d drive around in the little silver car and spend all the money Cicero had never got to spend. Never mind, though. Jake would be a saint in her book.

  Lucky girl.

  “He’s on his way, I bet.”

  “I’m sure.

  “He probably just got caught in traffic.”

  “Do you want me to leave him a message?” she asked.

&nbs
p; “No. I’ll catch him later.”

  Dante got off the phone.

  He left the building, but he had not gone far when he received another text on his phone.

  We have Marilyn.

  PART SIX

  THIRTY-ONE

  Dante lay naked on the bed, inside the nameless hotel, with the revolver on his chest. After leaving Jake, he’d driven to the motel in San Bruno, as planned, then circled back to Chinatown. Now, lying on the bed, listening, he could not escape the feeling he had been here before. The pigeons fluttered at the window, pecking at the rotting sill, as if there were something delectable hidden beneath the paint. Another one of the birds flew in, chest puffed, pushing for its place. The noise rising from the street was meaningless, chaotic. There was the sound of laugher, guttural Chinese, coughing and hacking, of voices calling across the square, and of a rally truck returning. Evangelists, or the supporters of Ching Lee, the mayoral candidate who was challenging the incumbent.

  The polls had tightened as the race entered its final week, with Ching Lee hammering Edwards from one side and Gennae Rossi pounding from the other.

  Dante’s ears were acute. Too acute. Hearing things that weren’t there. The rustling of a dress. The old Cantonese, at the far end of the alley, meditating, muttering a Zen koan in the back of his throat.

  He dialed Jake’s phone, thinking those who’d stolen it, who’d left the earlier message, perhaps they would answer. But it was just Jake’s voice, prerecorded, full of ash and whiskey.

  They had found Marilyn. Or her double in Ensenada.

  The wise thing to do, perhaps, was to wait. To sit tight until the company called, except he knew what they wanted, and he had grown weary of waiting. He went to the closet. The apartment smelled of the previous tenant, the old woman, but her scent was stronger here, where her dresses dangled and her skirts drooped, hanging on metal hangers: half-buttoned blouses, frayed sweaters, old skirts, stylish once but too frayed now even for the salvation stores in the lower Mission. Alongside the dresses hung a canvas bag. He took the bag from its hook and put inside a can he’d bought at the surplus store in San Bruno. The can held a particular kind of phosphorus, white phosphorus, which had particular kinds of uses.