Naked Moon

by Domenic Stansberry

  “Pardon?”

  “I don’t want her rolling around.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes, you do. The wheels have a lock, down low, where the patient cannot reach. So she does not roll herself into oblivion.”

  The young woman did as she was told. Dante smelled again the sour smell he’d noticed in the hall, and realized it came from the old woman, the smell of urine and perfume mixed together.

  “Ru Shen,” he repeated. “His diary—it’s here.”

  “I am just a nurse. I don’t know anything about it.”

  “On your knees.”

  He did not much like the tone of his voice. He heard cruelty and also a joy inside that cruelty. He bound her wrists behind her back, wrapping them with duct tape. Then he pushed her down on her stomach, face to the floor, and wrapped her ankles. It was for her own good, so she would not be roaming around while he examined the library.

  “Nelson will kill you for this,” the old woman said. “With his bare hands.”

  He saw the thin smile on the old woman’s face, however, her lips pursed out. The crone enjoyed the spectacle of the young woman lying bound at her feet. She did not much care for her young nurse, and the nurse, he suspected, did not much care for her.

  The alcove smelled of paper and dust. The boxes were stacked to the wall, and the shelves were piled with old ledgers, full of Chinese characters, shipments in and out, pages yellow with age, ripped and torn, but from the looks of them, the ledgers had been preserved by happenstance more than anything else. The shelves were poorly arranged. There were boxes of pictures and more pictures, photographs—relatives, he’d thought at first, but there were too many for that—and there were envelopes, too, of figures carefully clipped from their surroundings.

  Dante could see there had been a logic to it once, scrap-books of the woman’s life, pictures of herself, friends, pages from letters and journals, arranged according to the events of her life, the world around her—but at some point, the woman had lost focus.

  Along the bottom shelves, yet more. Children’s books. A Chinese encyclopedia. A history of silk. Schoolgirl diaries. All of which had been clipped as well, pages removed, dog-eared, sullied, smeared and scribbled, the books themselves filed according to a plan no longer decipherable. Then, against the wall, boxes and more boxes. He went through these, too. In the bottom tier, he found the boxes he’d hoped to find, or so they appeared to be, labeled along the top with the address of the San Francisco Library, and containing more catalogs, collector’s items, some of them from an older time period but now ravaged: items he recognized from the file list of “Across the Water.” He rummaged through them, book by book. The old woman had taken them for herself, clipped and pasted, integrated them into her world. But if Ru Shen’s journal had been among the artifacts, it was here no longer.

  From the other room, all of a sudden, came a tinny sound, oddly muffled, that reminded him of the Chinese music boxes the shopkeepers used to sell along Stockton Street. He stepped into the main chambers, but there was no music box. The old woman sat in her wheelchair, and the nurse lay on the floor, her face in the carpet. The refrain ended, started again. Dante kneeled over the nurse. Her blouse was loose, and her slacks stopped just below the knees. She stiffened as he searched her, but he did not stop, instead running his hands over her until he found the cell phone in the waist pocket of the cheongsam.

  The ringtone ended, started again. He flipped open the cell and looked at the yellow screen.

  Nelson Yin.

  No doubt there was a scene out on the street: fire trucks and squad cars and tourists with cameras. Among these would be the patrons from the Dragon, Yin among them. He had called on his cell, concerned about his lover’s safety. Dante went to the slatted shades. His temptation was to step onto the balcony, to peer down into the street and get a good look at the action below—but if he did so, someone in the square would notice. There would be a stir at the sight of the unknown man appearing on the balcony of Love Wu.

  Dante thought about the hidden stairs, the locked passages, the secret passage up, and glanced again at the girl.

  He widened the slats and stood there as he had once imagined Teng Wu standing. Dante listened for the whispering of the men down in the square, for the crackling of the magnolia leaves and the sound of the sampan in the Bay, for the sound of the tunnels being dug and the tracks being laid and the short-handled hoe hitting dirt and the pickax in the goldfield and the wheels of the fishmonger’s cart rolling down Grant. Of the dice rolling in the brothel. Hearing, too, the rustling of a white dress in a square far away and a squad car door shutting and heels clicking in the alley. His own name whispered. Scissors clipping. Behind him, the young woman grunted on the floor. He had felt the softness of her clothing, the warmth beneath, as he had searched her, looking for the phone.

  The nurse knows, he thought.

  She is Yin’s lover and she knows, and I have wasted valuable time. He touched his gun, wondering how far he would have to go to get her to speak. Then there was the possibility, too, that the journal was not here at all.

  “Come here,” said the old woman.

  “Why?”

  “I want to show you something.”

  The old woman had managed to reach one of the scrap-books stacked on the table nearby, an older one assembled years ago, in which the inner logic had not yet deteriorated, its outer cover emblazoned with the symbol of the Wu family. Inside the book were pictures of this room as it had been in the past, and of a Chinese man, very old, and others who had lived here once upon a time. “That is me as a little girl,” she said. “I was from a good family. They sent me here by clipper, and I never saw them again. They wrote me, though. Teng’s wife was old, and he was old, too. I nursed them both.” The woman did not say much else, but he understood, looking at the pictures, that she had been more than a nurse. She had been mistress to Teng Wu, or Teng Wu’s son—it didn’t matter, it was impossible, ultimately, to tell them apart, and they were all dead now. When she had gotten too old, her place had been taken by a younger woman, who herself had gotten old, but these others, they were all dead now, no trace, only these pictures clipped and scattered, and now there was just her, living with this nurse of her own.

  Except this young woman, lying on the floor, was not like her. She had come from that new China, and Nelson Yin, he went back and forth from the suburbs, and all the pictures and letters were all meaningless now.

  So this is what is left of Teng Wu’s library, he thought.

  “Nelson pulled some strings,” the old woman said. “He got these for me. Missing pieces. Lost relatives.”

  The old woman gestured at the recent clippings. These were older pictures, and Dante realized the source. They had come from the historical exhibit, “Across the Water,” secured so that the old woman would have more pictures for her endless project. Ru Shen, he thought, and something came clear to him, almost, but then the phone rang again. Dante went to the woman on the floor.

  “Speak in English,” he said. “Tell him everything is okay. That there is no hurry.”

  He flipped open the phone and held it so the woman could speak to Yin. She did as she was told. The conversation did not go on very long, but Dante worried Yin would notice the fear in her voice.

  He heard at the same time a noise in the corridor below, as of footsteps ascending.

  “Where is he?”

  “He is going home to his wife.”

  Dante realized, no, with this woman waiting, so soft to the touch—with her wide eyes, her childlike pout … No, Nelson Yin had not gone home to his wife. Yin knew the building well. Yin could get past the firemen easily enough if he wanted. He undoubtedly had access to that locked passage on the other side of the blocked stairwell. It also occurred to Dante that the man had called his mistress not from below, but from inside, as he climbed up the hidden stairwell. Then, as if to verify his suspicion, there came more clearly the sound of ascending
footsteps in the wall behind the adjoining room, and of keys now, rattling in the bolted door. The old woman fell silent and the younger woman on the floor lay still. They realized, too, what was happening. It was Yin, on the other side of that door, opening it now, in the bedroom, calling out his lover’s name as he came across the floor.

  “Pi Lo.”

  The young woman stirred, as if to respond, but saw the gun in Dante’s hand, and out of wisdom, or self-preservation, or the paralysis of fear, she checked her impulse. At that moment, Yin appeared at the threshold, a Chinese businessman in his dust-colored suit, his red tie, a bead of perspiration on his forehead, exhausted from climbing the stairs. His eyes met Dante’s, darting from him to his sweetheart on the floor. Something transpired between them then—himself and the nurse and Yin—or so Dante imagined. The so-called blind hunch, communicated not by logic but by the flashing of the eyes, the wrinkling of the brow, the kind of thing that did not stand up in a court of law, but which was revealed in the circumstance of the moment. Ru Shen’s journal had been stashed away in the historical society, unread, forgotten, just as the mayor said. It had been brought here, with the other items, a plaything for the old woman, a distraction, discovered, perhaps, by the young woman, thumbing through the articles in the box. The nurse had shown it to Yin, and whatever was inside, Yin had decided to make use of it. Blackmail—of whom, exactly, Dante did not know—but he had seen the mask fall away from Yin that day in his office, the desire underneath—just as he saw now the look of a man undone by his foolishness, realizing he had been found out, though by what mechanism, exactly, Yin could not know. Yin raised a hand in confusion, wanting to know, perhaps, why it was this particular man who had found him, but there was something else in his expression as well, a quickening. Dante heard the old woman fussing behind him, but he did not turn his head. He focused on Yin. He stepped forward. Behind him, the old woman lunged. She was strong, despite everything. Aiming at the small of his back, he would think later. At his kidneys. But Dante had already started in motion, so the arc of her arm as it came down, the descending thrust, entered lower than she intended. Still, it was a good thrust. She jabbed the scissors deep into his thigh.

  In that instant, Yin bolted back the way he had come.

  Dante felt the pain, as of something tearing inside, his leg giving way, but this did not prevent his reaction. He came around with his right elbow, knocking the old woman in the face. Then stumbled toward the threshold. He propped himself against the door frame lest his leg give way. If Yin had not closed the stairwell door behind him earlier on his way inside … if that door were open now … if he had attacked Dante instead of running at the instant the old woman thrust the scissors into his leg … then things might have been different. As it was, Yin had to pause to open the door. He flung it open recklessly, at the top of the stairs, but that small delay was too much.

  Dante fired once.

  The bullet caught Yin in the back. The man staggered into the stairwell and went tumbling down.

  There was an ugly noise down in the stairwell. Dante pulled the scissors from his leg.

  The young woman lay with her head to the ground, sobbing. Meanwhile the old woman cried in a muttering, hopeless kind of way. Her face was bruised, and she had lost her oxygen mask in the scuffle.

  “Help me,” she rasped.

  The nurse wriggled on the floor. Dante kneeled over her, but he could not hold the squat. It was too painful. His first thought had been the wound was superficial, but it did not feel that way.

  “Ru Shen … ,” he said. “I want the journal.”

  “I don’t know anything about it,” said the nurse.

  The old woman was gasping, only there was, as in everything the crone did, an aura of the theatrical. She struggled for air, and her hands clawed for the mask. She could not reach it. Dante cut the tape from the nurse’s hands and feet, unbinding her. He watched as the nurse reattached the tubing, but at the last moment yanked the oxygen mask from her hand.

  “To the lift.”

  Po Li wheeled the old woman down the narrow hall toward the lift. Dante had jammed the lift door on his way up, and now he cut the electrical wire to the control box. Then he lashed the door shut, so they could not get out and cause him any more trouble. Meanwhile, the old Chinese woman gasped, not blue yet, not quite, though she would be soon. Her throat spasmed and her chest began to heave.

  “The journal.”

  Dante pointed the gun at the young woman. She was young and beautiful, but at the moment he did not care. Then he dropped the sight, as if to shoot her in the leg and maim her for life.

  “It’s in Nelson’s office,” the woman said.

  “Where?”

  “On the shelves, maybe. Or in his desk. I’m not sure.”

  “If it’s not there, I’ll come back.”

  “It’s there.”

  “Are you sure?”

  She nodded then. The old woman let out a fearful whine. He felt the pain in his leg and was tempted to shoot the old woman in such a way that it would take her a long time to die. Dante threw the mask inside the elevator, then went through the bedroom and down the stairs. Nelson Yin lay sprawled at the bottom. His body heaved and gurgled unpleasantly, but it was just the after-death stuff. The internal organs discharged themselves in a long hiss that smelled of the sewer. Meanwhile, Yin still held the keys to the passage in his hand. Dante pried them loose, then stepped over the man’s body. The staircase kept going, but there was another passage to the right, and he walked through the darkness toward a thin light at the bottom of a door up ahead.

  When he pushed open the door, he found himself in Yin’s office.

  Dante went first to the bookcase, to the old books, and he hurtled them off one by one. They were fragile, loosely bound, ancient, but this was not his concern.

  There was noise out in the hall, and he could hear the main elevator coming up the shaft. The rescuers were on their way.

  He went into Yin’s desk then.

  He yanked open the drawers.

  It was a businessman’s desk, and down in the bottom drawer, on the left side, he found it, underneath a stack of papers.

  Inside the journal there were more papers, notes, written in a different hand. He gathered them all, then descended into the stairwell, taking the dark passage down.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  The taxi wound out of Chinatown, South of Market, past the streaming lights of the Moscone Center. It had been skid row here, not one block but a dozen, a tangle of old hotels and rooming houses, the old South Beach neighborhood, once full of watch parlors and fix-up shops and cheap housing for the dockworkers, the Blue Blocks so-called, on account of this was where the bus from San Quentin dropped of its parolees, in their blue denim pants, fifteen bucks in their wallets. The Blue Blocks had been plowed under and paved for the conventioneers and the hotels. There was a park now, concrete, a shopping complex lit by panes of colored light, but the denizens had not vanished, only scattered, living in the cracks between the warehouses and the lofts and the new bars and the seed joints and ecstasy clubs and old Victorians gone to hell amid empty lots full of rubble.

  The taxi turned on Brannan, then turned again.

  To a cluster, a freeway underpass, ten lanes wide. The traffic thundered overhead. Sagging buildings along the noisy street, under the steel abutments. Lean-tos made of corrugated tin, carts of stinking clothes. A liquor store and an auto repair shop on the bottom floor with rooms overhead, rented by the night. Across the way, a gentlemen’s club, so-called, a half-trendy place where a cluster of young women lingered on the corner.

  “Here,” Dante said.

  The taxi stopped. Dante had been here a few days back, looking for the girl from Gino’s, not expecting to find her, but this wasn’t why he was here now. He had come because the way to the nameless hotel had been blocked with men and equipment. During the taxi ride, the pain in his leg had not abated. He looked at the women at the corner, then down into
the darkness of the freeway underpass. The area was fenced, but this did not stop anyone from making it over. Hooded men, solitary, waiting. Perched behind these, at a distance, groups of milling boys. Then, scattered around, in the shadows of the concrete abutments, other figures, hunched, prone, lying in a field of burnt tinfoil.

  The pain in his leg was bearable, almost, but there was another pain that was not. He had been places like this before, in his other life. Or places close enough. He had not wanted to end up here, but part of him had expected he would and yearned for it nonetheless.

  “Do you want me to wait?”

  “No,” Dante said.

  The taxi drove away.

  Dante had caught the taxi on Leavenworth, several blocks up from the Wu Benevolent Association. So far as he knew, the driver had not noticed his leg, though the man dealt with all kinds of clientele and did not look like the sort who cared about much other than his fare. After he was gone, Dante went across to the liquor store and took out his wallet to pay the clerk for a room upstairs, in the quarters overhead.

  “Identification?”

  “Why?”

  “Listen. I don’t care, but if the cops swing through here—and they ask to see the register—if I got nothing on paper, they might go room to room just for fun.”

  Dante gave the man his driver’s license and watched as he wrote down the number. It was a fake license and a fake number, but Dante knew it didn’t matter much either way. The cops rarely came down here, and those who did were bullyboys who shook down the junkies for extra cash. He also bought a bottle of Jack and some cigarettes and a container of ibuprofen. The TV hung in the corner above the counter, reporting on the incident at Plymouth Square, drumming it up. Billowing smoke. Panic at the thought of fire.

  “No smoking,” the clerk said.

  Upstairs, Dante lit up anyway. He drank the whiskey and lay down with the gun on his stomach. Unlike the nameless hotel, this place had a name, at least according to the receipt, but it wasn’t a name worth remembering. The place was down a step from the nameless, the rooms smaller and dirtier, and the neighbors less wholesome. He cleaned his wound and disinfected it with the whiskey: a puncture wound, dirty scissors—it already bloomed red in an ugly way. He peered out the window at the figures beneath the freeway. He knew what they sold back there and he was tempted; ibuprofen got you only so far. Meanwhile, across the way, a young woman standing apart from the other prostitutes beckoned the passing cars. A driver slowed. Brazen and shy at the same time, the way she leaned into the window. She might have reminded him of the dead girl, the dancer from Gino’s, only the stance was all wrong, the sway of the hips. His days with the company, fresh from some assignment, he’d found solace in places like this—back in those shadows. The prostitute looked in his direction but didn’t see him. She climbed into the john’s car and was gone.