Dilla Eckles shuddered in her oversized ratty wool sweater. The loose-fitting legs of her putty brown pants flapped against her ankles as she shifted her weight back and forth.
It was like splitting glue, Dilla thought, trying to get that woman out of the Green Vase showroom. Oscar had tracked down a sizeable bounty prior to his death. Much of that treasure, Dilla knew, still lay hidden throughout the city. If his niece were to pick up where Oscar left off, she was going to need a little push.
Dilla clapped her gloved hands together to ward off the chill, her mouth firming with resolve. She had assured Oscar that she would look after his niece, and she was determined to make good on that promise—no matter how difficult that vow was becoming to keep.
Dilla stretched her neck to glance down at her watch. She had difficulty reading the time; her eyes were impeded by the thick rubber mask plastered over her face. The slanted oval slits around her eyes cupped as she tried to look downward. She brought her hand up to her face and tugged on the ragged charcoal-colored scarf tied around her neck, using the motion to get a more direct viewing of the watch face. Satisfied that she had waited a sufficient amount of time, Dilla exited the back side of the park, hustled down Sansome Street, and headed toward Jackson Square.
If not inspected too closely, her outer shell emulated that of an elderly Asian woman. The only Dilla-distinguishing feature she wore on her feet: square-toed, ankle-high, neon green go-go boots.
THE AFTERNOON BREEZE whipped up my hair as I stepped out the front door of the Green Vase. I hopped off of the semicircular stone threshold and skipped down the two steps to the street. My efforts to tuck the loose strands of hair behind my ear blinded me to the elderly Asian woman in bright green shoes peeking around the corner from the alley behind Frank Napis’s papered-up storefront.
A few minutes later, I rounded the corner of Columbus and began walking down Montgomery Street. The wind barreled through the canyons of the financial district’s tall office buildings, whipping up loose pieces of trash into tiny tornadoes that slapped against the bumpers of passing cars.
I used the wait at the next stoplight to button up my jacket, smiling ruefully at the iced-down pair of optimistically dressed tourists standing next to me on the curb.
A block ahead on the right, a colorful display of flowers could be seen through a clear plastic sheeting, brightening Montgomery’s otherwise cold, gloomy corridor. Wang’s flower stall was tarped up against the day’s wind, but it was still in business.
Mr. Wang had been as obsessed as my Uncle Oscar with San Francisco’s history and folklore. It was an interest the two of them had apparently shared. In the days following Oscar’s death, Mr. Wang seemed to have known more than anyone else about Oscar’s clandestine treasure-hunting activities.
With his pallid skin, constant cough, and unchecked cigarette habit, it shouldn’t have been a surprise when Mr. Wang himself passed away a few weeks after Oscar. But somehow, I still expected to see his frail, skeletal hand waving at me from the rows of flowers.
Instead, the jarring sight of an impatient female figure in a trim yellow pantsuit dominated the flower stall. The front lines of her slacks were ironed into perfect pleats; the silhouetting outline of a tight black knit sweater was visible beneath her fitted jacket. The woman’s thick auburn hair curled neatly under a black headband and bounced smoothly out the back into a perfect bob. Heavy black liner etched the boundary of her eyes; a thick coating of bloodred lipstick glazed her lips.
I watched as Miranda Richards glowered threateningly at Mr. Wang’s demure but defiant daughter, Lily.
“I won’t be put off any longer,” the voice of Oscar’s attorney sliced through the crisp, chilly air. “You must know where she is.”
My legs instinctively curled beneath me as I slipped behind a conveniently located blue metal mailbox. I had no desire to draw Miranda’s attention, particularly if she were already fired up into her barracuda lawyer mode.
I nosed over the humped lid of the mailbox as an unfortunate shopper approached the dueling pair with a bouquet of fluffy daffodils. From his defensive hand gestures, it appeared that the man was trying to make a purchase. Sulking testily, Miranda stepped aside while Lily rang up the sale.
The long, curved claws of Miranda’s expertly manicured nails clicked against the counter while she waited for the flustered man to count out the total from his wallet. Her pouty red lips spouted out a slew of inaudible curses as I grimaced behind the mailbox.
One of the most powerful attorneys in San Francisco, Miranda Richards worked in a prestigious glass-walled office on the top floor of one of the taller buildings in the financial district. I had never figured out why she had agreed to represent my Uncle Oscar—or, for that matter, how he had managed to pay her exorbitant fees.
Despite the verbal bruising and diminished self-esteem I suffered each time we interacted, Miranda had turned out to be an ally, of sorts. She had tried to warn me about Frank Napis and his collaborator, and, in the end, it was Miranda who had saved my life by providing the tulip extract antidote to the hallucinogenic poison.
That history notwithstanding, I didn’t intend to interrupt Miranda and Lily’s heated discussion, which had resumed upon completion of the daffodil transaction.
The nearest traffic light turned, releasing a small herd of pedestrians. This seemed like the best moment to relinquish my mailbox screen and slip past the flower stall unnoticed. I fell in amongst the crowd, carefully avoiding Miranda’s direct line of sight. As I passed the main entrance to the flower stall, Miranda’s venomous voice seared the sidewalk.
“Tell me where my mother is.”
Gulping in panic, I increased my pace, almost running over an amorous couple strolling hand in hand in front of me.
Although other limbs of their family tree were still a mystery to me, the strained relationship between Miranda Richards and her mother was well-known in Jackson Square.
Miranda’s harsh, driven, frequently barbed personality marked a sharp contrast to her mother’s fluttery, eccentric one. Dilla Eckles seemed to enjoy tormenting—and embarrassing—her daughter at every turn.
I hadn’t thought to ask Dilla if she was still wearing her elderly Asian woman disguise. Surely that precaution was no longer necessary, I mused. I was trying hard to convince myself that Frank Napis must have moved on to another city and a new alias by now.
Since meeting Mr. Wang, I’d only caught a couple of glimpses of the woman I presumed to be his wife, but Dilla’s mask, I thought as I scurried down the street away from the flower stall, had made her a dead ringer for Mr. Wang’s widow.
After I’d cleared a safe distance, I glanced back toward the flower shop, searching the rest of the inside for the elderly Asian woman who sometimes helped Lily out with the flower stall—the woman I’d always assumed to be Mrs. Wang—but I didn’t see any sign of her there that day. I dismissed the thought and hurried the remaining blocks to the BART station.
IT NEVER OCCURRED to me that Dilla had been the real Mrs. Wang all along.
Chapter 4
EN ROUTE TO CITY HALL
THE DOORS OF the BART train slid open, releasing a stream of passengers into a mammoth concrete cavern that formed the lowest level of the Civic Center Station. I fell in line behind the crowd, hopping over the short gap between the frame of the train and the lip of the platform. Echoes of voices and footfalls followed me up a maze of escalators to the street.
The subway probably wasn’t the most direct means of public transportation from the Green Vase to City Hall, but I had yet to master the bus routes that passed through Jackson Square.
On my last ill-fated attempt, I had inadvertently boarded a bus headed straight into the middle of Chinatown—which, on that particular day, happened to be celebrating one of its larger festivals. Each stop had brought an endless line of would-be riders patiently pushing their way inside the bus until the driver managed to staunch the flow and clamp the door shut.
The bus had quickly packed beyond capacity. I’d found myself squashed onto a bench seat next to an elderly gentleman with a battered cane and a wide, toothless smile. A worn, wild-haired woman of indeterminable age crammed in behind me. Without apology, she shoved a cloth-covered cage into the nonexistent space between us. Every so often the animal inside emitted a loud, protesting squawk, causing the toothless man to burst into giggles at my disconcerted expression.
It took several blocks and two more stops before I could maneuver close enough to the door to burst free from the melee. I had been walking through the financial district to the Market Street BART stations ever since.
The last limb in the Civic Center Station’s tree of escalators rose out of a slanted, concrete-walled pit and deposited me onto the United Nations Plaza, a couple of blocks away from City Hall. The day’s breeze had only strengthened while I’d been underground. The wind blasted my head as soon as it rose above street level.
I proceeded down a red brick walkway, littered with the scattered, leafy remnants of broccoli, cabbage, and bok choy. It was just after midday on Wednesday, and the Civic Center’s weekly farmers’ market was about to wrap up.
At a nearby table, a few stragglers haggled over the last remaining hunks of daikon root. Across the way, a worker packed up a small pile of green onions, neatly tying their slender green stems into two-inch round bunches. At this point in the day’s trading, the tented makeshift stalls were nearly depleted of the fresh-picked produce that had been unloaded on the plaza earlier that morning—a verdant array of fruits and vegetables tailored to the recipes of the market’s predominantly Asian shoppers.
As I passed the last food stall, the red brick pavement merged into a wide asphalt corridor populated by an army of hungry pigeons. The birds swarmed in around me, strutting fearlessly toward my feet, their beady black eyes eagerly assessing my snack-dropping potential. One of the leaders cocked his head and swiveled it sideways, giving me the leering, one-eyed ogle of a bird confident in his own machismo.
Stepping timidly through the pack of aggressively cooing birds, I approached the backside of a monument to the Latin American icon Simon Bolivar. His bronze figure was depicted seated astride a rearing horse. One of Bolivar’s arms stretched out in a grand gesture, as if to beckon me on toward my destination, Civic Center Plaza.
The long width of City Hall fenced in the far side of the sweeping plaza. The main branch of the city’s library, the Civic Auditorium, and several state and federal buildings flanked the other edges of the square. I crossed the windswept common, passing more statued monuments as my feet pointed toward City Hall’s gilded dome.
The building had sustained extensive damage during the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake, but top to bottom renovations had recently been completed, outfitting the building with state-of-the-art seismic fortifications.
The project was one of the most lauded accomplishments of our previous Mayor. He had meticulously ensured the restoration of the original building’s grand structure, down to the last flourishing detail—with one bright and gleaming exception.
The building’s original dome had been plated with copper. Over time, the copper had corroded, tingeing to a greenish hue. To provide a more permanently glamorous exterior, the newly renovated dome was covered in a special 23.4-carat gold-infused paint. The proud pigeons of City Hall now roosted on a gold roof worth nearly half a million dollars. Perhaps that explained the bravado of the pigeons I’d encountered.
As I approached the front entrance to City Hall, my eyes were drawn to its center second floor balcony, which fronted the curtained glass doors of the Mayor’s office suite. From the far end of the square, the balcony was dwarfed by the mammoth Corinthian columns rising up from its terrace. As I grew nearer, my attention focused in on the abundance of leafy gold scrolling that wound in and around the balcony’s front railing. From my spectator’s distance on the pavement below, it appeared as if a multitude of gilded octopus arms were swarming into the Mayor’s office.
I climbed up the front steps of City Hall, fending off the amorous advances of a last few pigeons. At the top of the stairs, menacing stone faces scowled down at me from the keystone of three arched entrances. I chose the ghoul on the far left and pulled open its thick glass door.
A serpentine of modern security equipment greeted me inside. The assembly of square metal boxes, scanners, and bulky computers looked decidedly out of place in the lobby’s polished marble surroundings.
I surrendered my shoulder bag to a pair of security guards who absentmindedly poked inside it before waving me into the open doorframe of a walk-through scanner. As I retrieved my bag on the opposite side, I tried to catch the attention of the nearest guard, who seemed far more interested in the sandwich he had just picked up from behind the scanner’s counter. Floppy blond hair dusted down over his eyes as he stretched his mouth around a large corner of the bread and chomped down on it.
“I’m looking for Montgomery Carmichael,” I said hopefully. “Can you point me toward his office?”
The guard squinted a left eye at the ceiling and pumped his jaw up and down as he chewed on the massive hunk of sandwich.
“Don’t think I’ve heard of that one before,” he replied after a long moment of masticular consideration.
The guard looked as if he might still be considering my request, but I decided not to wait through the duration of his next bite. “I’m sure I’ll be able to find him,” I replied and proceeded through the lobby to the rotunda.
I’d driven past City Hall’s mammoth block-long building several times, but this was my first actual experience inside. I’d heard people gush about the famous structure, but I was unprepared for its breathtaking panorama. Despite all of its gleaming gold grandeur, the outer shell of the building couldn’t match the magnificent beauty of the cathedral-like interior.
My height seemed to shrink as I stood beneath the soaring dome. Enormous arches ringed the rotunda’s upper walls, letting in such a flood of light that it was as if a part of the sky had been captured within. At its apex, the crown of the dome glowed a bubbling shade of pink, hovering over the rotunda like the underside of a gigantic jellyfish.
I tilted my neck upward, marveling at the myriad of carvings worked into every inch of ceramic, stone, and plaster. The skyward slant, however, quickly diminished my balance, and I almost lost my footing on the slick pink marble that decorated the floor directly beneath the dome.
As I was struggling to regain my balance, a pair of dark-suited men brushed past me. They crossed the floor of the rotunda with their heads bent close together in conversation; then they began to climb a sweeping marble staircase on the opposite side.
One of the men looked vaguely familiar to me. He had a smooth, fleshy, childlike face that was framed by limp mousy brown hair. A member of the city’s Board of Supervisors, I thought as I squinted at his profile.
I followed the two men up the stairs, my own ascension much slower. I had to stop every couple of steps to let my eyes swallow another gulp of the elaborately decorated rotunda. Each step in elevation revealed more details of the figures carved into the surrounding walls.
A countless number of mythic deities howled into the chamber with spouting, circular-shaped mouths. Creamy stone lions with flowing manes and sharp, narrow eyes keenly assessed each passerby. Thick, curling ribbons of plaster fringed richly festooned frescoes mounted onto seemingly every surface.
Above it all, a flood of light flowed in through the stained glass windows that framed the arches of the rotunda’s upper walls. Each wall of windows depicted the outlines of a ship, its sails rippling in the wind as it headed through the mouth of the Golden Gate and into San Francisco’s treacherous bay.
Ten minutes later, I finally made it to the top of the stairs. I began wandering down the second floor hallway, which carved a circular path around the periphery of the rotunda. The search for Monty’s office, I decided, could wait until I’d done a little sightseeing.
&n
bsp; DILLA’S NEON GREEN go-go boots crept across the granite on the darkened corners on the main level of the rotunda. She stood next to a gilded lamppost, closely watching as a brown-haired woman in glasses climbed the central staircase and turned down the second floor hallway.
Once Dilla had ensured that the coast was clear, she scurried down a foyered hallway near the backside of the staircase and slid into a long coat closet that had been modified to accommodate several public telephones.
Dilla waited a moment for her eyes to adjust to the dimmer light in the windowless room; then she picked up the nearest receiver and began to dial.
The line on the other end rang only twice before a voice answered.
“She’s here,” Dilla whispered breathlessly through the thick lips of the mask.
Chapter 5
A NEW ACQUAINTANCE
I STROLLED THE length of the second floor hallway, following its route around the circumference of the rotunda. As I neared the central marble staircase, I paused for one more look up at the ceiling before I began my reluctant hunt for Monty’s office.
“Wonder what the view is like up there,” I murmured to myself as I leaned over a gilded iron railing and gazed toward the top echelons of the rotunda. A dazzling display of light flitted across the delicate crinkles and curls of the masonry, just beneath the opulent crest of the dome. My eyes scanned the highest tiered balcony several hundred feet above, checking for signs of tourists, but public access to that level appeared to be closed.
It was as I stood there, craning up at the dome with my back to the hallway, that I suddenly became aware of a presence moving in behind me—a putrid, smelly one that reeked of decaying fish and rotting garbage.
Nine Lives Last Forever Page 4
