Naked Moon

by Domenic Stansberry

  “Up,” the woman said. “Arms away.”

  The woman stood with the gun pointed at his chest. The man, her good-looking friend, he circled behind. The same couple, of course. Angelo was but an instrument, a prod. Still waiting out front, knowing, as these two knew, that Dante would not willingly emerge—but instead take this last avenue. If he hadn’t, if he had gone out to Angelo, no doubt his old friend would have surrendered him all the same. Angelo had whispered to his friends in Federal, and the whispers had traveled, the way whispers do. Dante could hear the insect hissing down there in the center of hell: Make him unwrap that package … before he dies…. Bury his face in the bloody dress. He had outwitted them three years ago, but in the end, no one betrayed the company. Do so, and they took your life away from you, piece by piece, and then when it was all gone, they came for you. They didn’t know, not yet, they’d gotten the wrong woman, down in Ensenada. Meanwhile, the old Chinaman went on meditating. Angelo leaned against his squad car out front, and Chin …

  The woman gave him the same smile he’d seen in the bar. They could have gotten him more simply, these two. They could have put a gun to his head and killed him in the street. But, no. They enjoyed their work, and the message it sent. The man, he loved the feeling of the dowel in his hands, loved that moment just ahead, when he would pull the wire tight, and this woman, with the gun in her hand, she loved to watch.

  Overhead, a light flicked on, off. A window opened. He could rush the woman, or pull his gun. She would have to shoot him in the stomach, kill him that way, but it was too late. What happened next, happened in an instant. Dante heard the rustle of fabric behind him, the man in motion. It was the moment toward which everything had been moving, he understood that now, the moment he would not escape. The woman sighed. He heard a snap of wire and the whistle of the air. It was too late even to reach for his gun. As the wire whistled down, he did the only thing that remained. He ducked. He let his body collapse toward his knees—and at the same moment, he raised his hand.

  The rope caught him anyway.

  It caught his hand at the palm, and his fingers were trapped there, under the wire, up against his neck. He felt his head twist back, wire in the throat, feet lifting from the ground. The man turned, bending, and the rope cinched, biting deeper. His feet left the ground altogether now. His neck twisted—there was a noise … a sudden cracking … a flash of white….

  THIRTY-NINE

  In the moment of death, there are a million eternities—or so the nuns had told him—the seconds divided into milliseconds, infinite divisions, in which the brain denies its own demise. As in the schoolboy story—one he had read as a child—the soldier on the gallows sees the calvary on the near hill—the marksman’s shot slices the hanging rope—and the self falls through the trick door into the continuing illusion of its own existence. Something like this, maybe, had happened in this moment, Dante would think later, stumbling. I am not dead. The voice coming from above sounded real enough.

  “Halt!”

  It happened so quickly, he could not be sure. The warning shot, and then the voice, a dark form peering down from the lighted window farther up the shaft. Dante recognized the voice. Chin. She had left off arguing with Angelo and circled around on her own, perhaps, coming through the adjoining building. Dante saw himself as if from the window above, flailing absurdly, panicky, gasping, grabbing with both hands at the rope as the man bent deeper, and the wire tightened, cutting into his own throat.

  I am not dead.

  The voice from above … or the mind deceiving itself … His heart beat impossibly fast…. His mind raced…. Then came the exchange of fire, the blackness streaked with light, the gunshots echoing in the small alley as if inside his skull. Inside that alley, that blackness, the woman whirled, firing into the light, and the light fired back. He felt the man stagger beneath him, and his own body go loose, slack, prickling all over. A pain flared in his shoulder. Then suddenly he slid free, twisting in midair, hitting the ground like a sack dumped in the alley. He lay motionless in the dark, with a great heaviness on his chest, as if all the air had been pushed out. Somehow, in the fall, Dante had ended up on the bottom with the man on top. The man had been shot in the skull. It was quiet, only the Sterno for light, and Dante glimpsed the woman leaning against the brick with her long fingers over a wound in her stomach. The woman slid down the brick, holding her stomach. The gun had fallen from her hand, but she did not take her eyes off Dante. Her face was going white, her exotic looks draining away. Her lip curled and hung low, and her chin lengthened as the death shudder ran through her, but she kept those eyes fixed on Dante, as if it were not her that was dying, but him, his body clenching, and as he let loose, at last, the light in her eyes receded until it vanished altogther, dwindling in the darkness of the shaft. He gathered all his strength and pushed the dead man off his chest.

  Above him, he heard voices, bystanders, the unruly chatter of the apartment dwellers as they peered down into the alley, curious, frightened—switching on lights, switching them off, yelling contradictory instructions—in the center of that confusion was the window from which the voice had issued, and the gunfire as well. He expected Chin to call down, but he heard instead the static of the citizen band, a cop radio, and a faint voice, a woman, radioing for help.

  “Officer down. Need assistance here. I’m bleeding.”

  The voice belonged to Chin. She had not been invited, no, but she’d looped around the back, spoiling the party. She had killed the man and the woman, and in the process taken fire herself. Dante had been hit in the shoulder during the firefight.

  Dante took the journal from the dead woman’s pocket. At the other end of the alley, on the near side of the iron gate, he encountered Angelo, hovering as if in a dream, a little boy, an Italian kid in the alley in a strange part of town where he’d come despite himself, unable to stay away.

  Dante held the gun in his good hand.

  “No,” Angelo said.

  Behind him, Dante heard the sound of the Chinaman meditating in the alley, the same mantra, over and over. It had been there in the background, all the while, persistent, unceasing. Looking up, through the stairwell window, he caught a glimpse of Sergeant Jones pounding the stairs upward into the hotel. Angelo backed away. He raised his hands. Dante could smell him, the sweat in his nappy hair, a smell like his boyhood streets.

  “No,” Angelo said.

  “Of course not,” Dante said. “I would never do such a thing.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t.”

  The old routine, it never ended.

  He shot Angelo in the stomach.

  Then he took out the key the Russian had given him a few days before and unlocked the iron gate.

  FORTY

  Dante weaved up through the street, past the Wu Temple. He limped as before, only worse, dragging his foot behind him—and he was also bleeding from the shoulder. He wore a kimono, taken from a street rack on Grant Street, but the blood seeped through, and his hair and face were flecked, too, with blood from the dead man. People looked in his direction but did not seem to see him, even as the crowd thickened, down along the slope toward Vallejo. There was a logical explanation for this, he told himself. People in Chinatown, their eyes avoided trouble. The crowd always thickened through here, but it was tighter now. Still he slid through—as if he were a ghost passing through. A rally clotted the street. With the surge from Gennae Rossi, and the incumbent’s troubles, the race had tightened, and Lee’s people were beating the drum. A white Ford, battered to hell, draped in bunting, a microphone over the hood, the sound of Chinese wailing up through the static. A giant papier-mâché worm, wiggling down the street. A dancing monkey. A woman holding a sign.

  IT’S OUR TURN NOW

  At Serafina’s, Dante leaned against the darkened window. Stella had left everything as it was. The tables, the checkered cloths. The candles and the wineglasses and the painting of Mt. Vesuvius on the wall. Stella hadn’t bothered to finish cleani
ng. There was a dirty plate over where Old Lady Besozi had been sitting, and a half-empty wine bottle on the bar. On that counter, underneath the bar top, all those photos, laminated behind the glass, old-timers and their Cadillacs, fat cigars, a thousand Polaroids, two thousand, any wop who’d ever walked through North Beach, his own mom and his dad and his grandfather with his pelican nose. Himself, Marilyn. Old Man Prospero and Gino and some dancing girl with her chest pushed out. Dante pressed his nose against the window, peered in, woozy, and in his heightened state, he imagined they were all in there at once, eating, drinking, rubbing shoulders. It was a celebration, like the old days, of the type that used to go on, and in the midst of that, Marilyn in her white dress, and himself, too, and everyone raising their glasses.

  A vision of what might have been, maybe, his brain dizzy from loss of blood, lack of oxygen.

  As he leaned there, staring into the glass, he almost believed it was possible. They had killed the wrong woman after all, down in Ensenada. All he had to do was pass through that glass. All he had to do was exchange his body for Dominick Greene’s. Swap identities with the corpse in the tunnel.

  Then he would find Marilyn…. But, no … there was no going back … even if it was not too late, and he could pry her away from David Lake …

  They would follow.

  There was only one way to keep her safe.

  In the reflection, he saw the gash in his neck, and he poked his finger inside, feeling the cut. I am not dead, he told himself, though in truth, he did not have any other explanation for the way he felt just now. As if he were passing through that glass. As if he were down in that maze, pulling Greene by his arms, yanking him through the underground sewers, through the winemaker’s tunnels, up toward his father’s garage. The others would be coming soon, he knew that: the Federal agents and the bullyboys, the local cops and the Wus—and the only question was which of them would come first, and how many. They would not come gently, he knew that, too, and when they were done with him, there would be nothing left. They would seize it all, the family property: the house on Fresno, and his cousin’s place and the business down at the wharf. They would let all the property sit empty for a while, letting the taxes run up, compounding penalties, and when there was no equity there, not a nickel for anyone to claim but the government, they’d sell it at auction to the highest bidder, with his family’s junk still inside.

  Dante stood in his father’s house, in the basement. He had made it home. He did not have much time now.

  After he was gone, all this stuff—these boxes of paper and bags of crockery and the tapestries and the unwanted furniture and his father’s old clothes—would end up in the scavenger truck. The real estate agents wouldn’t want it around. The new owners, someday, would drink coffee here and eat risotto and panini in commemoration of the people whom they imagined to have lived here, but the fact of the matter was, before any of that could happen, all that old stuff, with its musty smell, had to be gone first, removed from the house.

  Dante reached inside the box containing the wedding ring his father had worn, given to him by his mother those many years ago. The old Italians—Pesci, Marinetti, Gino and Stella, Julia Besozi and all the rest—they all looked on in approval. Into the tunnel. Greene’s corpse gave him the rictus smile.

  Dante slid the ring on his finger.

  He picked up the can of gasoline. It was a big can, and there was more gas in the big container under the bench. He dumped the gas on the boxes, on the clothes. He soaked it all good. That’s right, burn it all. There was a furnace in the corner, with an electronic ignition, controlled by a thermostat upstairs. When you adjusted the thermostat, there was a lag of a couple minutes. Then the burner would ignite.

  He took the other can and splashed gasoline all over the front room. All over the sofa and the RCA. His father’s chair. Over the drapes and the counters.

  He checked the pilot to the stove. Turned on the thermostat.

  He climbed into the attic, a lurching, clumsy figure, hunched under the rafters, pouring the last of the gasoline. His mother’s things now, the picture albums, endless photographs. Birth certificates and baptismal records, a wedding menu from the Fior d’Italia, a dance card issued by the Knights of Columbus, old 45s, Holy Communion cards and a ribbon he himself had won throwing javelin at an event sponsored by the Saints Peter and Paul Church.

  He found at the last minute a list of passage, names of families who’d made the voyage, their names, the villages, compiled by the defunct newspaper, L’Italia, in the days before World War II. He touched the gash in his throat … too deep for him to be alive … in the moment of death, you wander the streets of your childhood … you suffer what you have lost…. I am not dead…. There was one way to keep them from following Marilyn. If he himself were forever beyond their reach, there would be no reason. They could not punish him by going after her.

  Downstairs, the heater engaged.

  He’d heard it engage, just like that, thousands of times.

  Where had it started?

  In the hold of those ships … lonely men, holding shovels …

  There was a lull.

  Marilyn.

  A slight whooshing, as of a breeze through an open window. A bell rang somewhere. Then came the explosion, the sound of which carried out to the Bay, or so they said later. All of North Beach in flames, the whole city. Himself at the center, in the incendiary light.

  The tunnel opened ahead.

  FORTY-ONE

  Several days later, when Leanora Chin got out of the hospital, the block still smoldered. The fire crew had struggled with the hydrant on Fresno, but in the end had to run the hoses in six different directions, over the hill and back around, in an effort to tap into the broken water main. Meantime the adjacent building went up, and the flames leaped to the wood-frame apartments on the corner.

  The fire had spread across Grant and up Telegraph as well. Under control now, supposedly, though early morning, at dusk, the infrared cameras—in the news copters overhead—showed pockets that still burned.

  The scene had a feeling of unreality. Chin had been wheeled out after the shoot-out, red lights spinning, paramedics calling ahead for blood. She’d been shot, her elbow shattered, and her body sliced by the falling glass. She had taken shards in the neck, and in the chest, and the blood ran down her white blouse and soaked her skirt. She’d had the feeling then as if nothing were real, as if she herself were being imagined—I do not exist—and remembered herself as a little girl, inside one of the temples in Chinatown, a vast temple, humming with emptiness, in the middle of that emptiness, an old monk whispering, but later, she wondered if the memory were true.

  We are figures in a dream. The dreamer, too. You have no control.

  She stood on Fresno Street now, with her arms in a sling.

  She was dressed in blue.

  She wasn’t healed, the wounds seeped beneath their pads, but she had wanted to be here when they pulled the body. It took a while. The house had fallen in on itself, and the forensic team had to dig through the charred rafters.

  Last night, still in the hospital, she’d gotten a visit from the Feds, filling in the gaps, but the information they’d given her, the report to be filed, she knew certain aspects weren’t true.

  No matter, the news was full of it: examining the link between the man inside the house and the shoot-out in the alley, and the fire consuming the neighborhood.

  TRAGEDY ROCKS ITALIAN NORTH BEACH, the paper said.

  The story of the private detective gone mad. His rage triggered by some family ugliness, perhaps, or the fact that his fiancée had gone off with another man. Killing his cousin, his business partner. Invading the Wu Benevolent Association. Then, cornered by the police, there’d been a shoot-out in Chinatown. According to the news reports, two tourists had been caught in the cross fire, and a policeman slain as well.

  A bizarre killing streak that had spiraled out of control, then ending when the man burned himself alive
in the family home.

  The truth of the matter was more illusory. Chin knew the story didn’t check. The dead couple in the alley, they were not tourists—of this, she was positive—but she’d been given instructions: Say nothing. Meanwhile, the news was all over the television. A time line of the killings, maps with special insets, interviews with old-timers, the parish priest, a psychologist who specialized in understanding such rampages. And tales, too, of the fire burning while voters went to the polls.

  An election-day circus. The city gone out of control.

  The stories had not helped Gennae Rossi, the neighborhood girl, but the votes that might have gone to her, they did not go to Lee either.

  On the front page, in the midst of it all, the incumbent stood, sleeves rolled, helping at the fire line. Everything changed, but nothing at all. He, too, Chin knew, was financed by the Wus. They spread their money to every candidate, taking no chances.

  The forensics team found the bones. The fire had burned the body beyond recognition, but the dentals were intact. The body was the right size, and there was a ring, on the wedding finger, fused to the bone.

  Angelo had been in touch with the Feds before the shoot-out; she knew that now. Angelo had learned that Dante was going to be there, in that old hotel, and positioned himself for the arrest. Angelo had arranged it on his own, telling her nothing. She’d found out at the last minute that Angelo was there, staking out the scene, planning the arrest. Something was wrong about it, she’d thought: how he’d waited, how there was no one stationed at the alley around back. So she’d gone herself, moving through the dream-dark street, under the yellow neon, up the steps of the adjoining hotel. Peering down into the darkened shaft. Nothing at first, just the Sterno flashing, odd shadows against the brick. A voice, her own, calling down into that darkness. Then came the exchange of fire, the exploding glass.