The Big Boom

by Domenic Stansberry

  Solano took the podium.

  His manner was not so different from what Dante had observed earlier, self-assured, yes, but with a hesitancy underneath. His lips turned in that smile of his, a smile like cut glass, and his hair was mussed. Solano’s eyes, though, had a certain fixity, and he possessed, in his gestures, the manner of someone who had penetrated an inner realm.

  Solano’s glance passed over Dante. If the man had seen him, Dante couldn’t tell.

  Solano began. His presentation was a recitation of names, spoken slowly, with an offhand charm.Gutenberg. He smiled to himself, as if he had a secret he could not reveal.Whitman. Dinah Shore. It was a ragged smile that suggested whatever you saw in front of you was only a part of what he possessed, that there were other things he was holding back.Sigmund Freud. That part of him mocked the very names—Cleopatra, Che Guevara—that he now mentioned, as well as the images on the screen behind him.Fritz Lang.

  The juxtapositions were arbitrary. People of the sword, people of culture.Mr. Ed. Scientists with real-life entertainers and cartoons.Katherine the Great.

  Meanwhile the screen filled with pictures, but the faces on the screen did not coincide with those of the people he named.The Dalai Lama. Rather they were faces of the anonymous. People at offices and schools. Workers on the job. They were not particularly stylish photos. They were instead somewhat mundane—Bessie Smith—the kind of photos that might be taken out of annual reports or school catalogues or brochures for the Water Department. Through it all was Solano’s droll voice, somewhere between mockery and reverence.

  Malcolm X.

  On the screen the images no longer focused on individuals but groups, streets scenes, people in a crowd, the crowds growing larger, a sea of people—then zooming in—Adam Smith—tight focus, a solitary face that seemed neither man nor woman. Then a randomizer took over, taking the colors of that last, anonymous face, with no relation to the name he uttered, and scattering them over the screen.

  “A lot of people,” said Solano. “A lot us are working on a vision. One that breaks down the barriers between those who have access, between those who have the power of knowledge, and those who don’t.” The tone in his voice was ambiguous, so that you could not tell if he was making fun of those barriers, or those who wanted to knock them down. Then he was earnest. “This is not a vision I created. It’s not a vision of one company, or one person. Our goal today is not to take credit but to let you know the contribution the people at our company are trying to make.” He gave the crowd his smile again, and in that instant the fixity in his eyes gave way, revealing something beneath the surface almost, but not quite. Unhinge this world, Dante thought, and the man will fall apart. “Now,” said Solano, “let me introduce you to our team.”

  Dante leaned forward then, looking to see which one was Bill Whitaker. But he was disappointed.

  Whitaker was not here. Or if he was, he was not among the handful at the front of the room.

  Solano fell quiet, and his underlings took over.

  Solano Communications, they explained, was creating its own private communications network and the content to go with it. The goal: to deliver custom material to people in the workplace. Based on proprietary technology. Faster than the existing Internet. Drawing its material from archives that were growing exponentially.

  An intuitive system … offering scalable solutions… interactive capabilities… operating on multiple platforms.

  They went on, for Dante’s money, a bit longer than he cared to listen. At the end, he knew little more about what Solano was doing, precisely, than when he had sat down.

  Dante approached one of Solano’s people: a young woman playing a role similar to the one Angie had played—a kind of press liaison who gave everything a down-to-earth spin.

  “I was wondering if you could tell me how I might get in touch with Bill Whitaker.”

  “Bill couldn’t be here,” she said. “He’s up against some pretty tight deadlines. But it if you could give me your name and number—”

  “How about Jim Rose?”

  “I don’t know if we have anyone by the name.”

  “How long have you been working here?”

  She looked at him blankly.

  “Did you know Angie? Angela Antonelli?”

  Solano appeared now and inserted himself between them. He had the faintest line of sweat over his upper lip, and his voice carried a chill.

  “I don’t know if this is the time,” Solano said to him. “Or the place.”

  “I called your personnel office, looking for Rose. But I haven’t had much luck.”

  Solano and the woman glanced at each other, and Dante saw something pass between them. He saw how this pretty young woman, with her red hair and her green eyes and her flame blue suit, was enamored of Solano—in maybe the same way Angie had been enamored—studying his face in a crowded room, looking forward to that moment later, away from here, when his guard fell and something was revealed, maybe, in the shallows of his eyes.

  “How about Whitaker?” Dante asked. “When can I talk with him?”

  Solano’s presence had drawn a small crowd. Potential customers, perhaps. Investors. People looking for jobs.

  “Yes,” echoed one of them, “where is Whitaker? I was hoping to ask him a question or two.”

  “On deadline,” said Solano.

  The young woman leaned in to the group. “I’ll have Bill get in touch with you,” she said. Then she touched Dante. “And you, too. If you give me your card. I’ll make sure he gives you a call.”

  She was lying. Whitaker was not going to give him a call. Meanwhile Solano had slipped away, separating himself from the crowd, and now he stood talking to a man across the room. The man was in plain clothes, but he was security, Dante guessed. Someone to keep troublemakers at bay.

  Outside, the light was gone. The sky was black, and Dante headed through SoMa. There were some fashionable clubs South of Market, and some not so fashionable ones, too, but in between the blocks were long and the sidewalks empty. Dante knew this area from when he was a cop; out-of-towners would come to hit the clubs, then find themselves lost in the empty space. A couple of kids swaggered by as if it were 1980, done up in spiked hair and leather jackets, and some dykes hung out in front of a bar across the street. There were some hard cases sleeping in doorways, and ex-cons just off the bus from Quentin. Under the freeway, he spotted a deal going down and a gang of smokers hunkering in a circle. It wasn’t grass they were smoking, and it wasn’t crack, either. The ground was littered with foil.

  He thought of what Barbara Antonelli had told him, about the mess on Angie’s floor.

  “Come on down here, old man. Come get some.”

  The man was a dealer. Dante could tell by the switchblade swagger, by the rotten teeth and the acne scars on his face. Dante felt the old ache inside himself. He felt the craving in his blood. He did not like to think much about the life he’d led those years he’d been away from The Beach, but the truth was he had not liked thinking about it even then, and he’d succumbed to certain temptations. He had taken comfort how he could. So there was a part of him now that wanted to slug the dealer in the face, but another part wanted what he had. Part of Dante wanted to be down on his knees with those Tenderloin junkies, those welfare moms, those runaways.

  “What’s the matter with you? You some kinda cop?”

  “Yeah,” Dante said. “I’m some kinda cop.”

  The dealer backed up. He laughed, ha-ha. Dante laughed, too. It took all his effort not to put his fist in the man’s stomach, or bring an elbow around and knock out all his teeth.

  He glanced at the foil.

  He didn’t want to think what he was thinking.

  He headed toward The Beach.

  FIFTEEN

  Later that night, inside Angie’s apartment, Dante once again went to the armoire and looked at her clothes. He thumbed through them as he had done before and found himself overwhelmed in much the same way. There was a
certain perversity in it, he supposed, but it wasn’t perversity alone that had brought him here. There were things that still rankled at him. The missing computer. The stained nightgown.

  What had happened?

  One explanation, he guessed, was that Angie had had the laptop with her that night she’d disappeared. Perhaps it had been on her arm, in its carrying case, and had fallen with her into the bay. He supposed that was possible. But there was something else that made him wonder otherwise. The way things were arranged haphazardly in the drawers. The dirty clothes on top of the clean. At first he’d thought it had been Barbara Antonelli, rearranging. But there was too much disorganization.

  Someone had searched the place, maybe. Someone had torn it

  up. But it hadn’t been anyone professional, because they’d left too many traces.

  The jism. The bottle of wine. The empty glasses.

  He went to kitchen. Under the sink he found the wine bottle Barbara had mentioned. Now he took the rest of the trash can and dumped it out. Aluminum foil, burned at the edges. He unwrapped the foil and held it up to his nose. He recognized the smell. It was a smell he would have recognized even if he hadn’t just been down there under the I-80 interchange.

  And everything shuffled in his head.

  Angie in another world. On her knees, like those people beneath the underpass. Angie bringing someone here to fuck. To get high.

  Then stumbling into the water.

  He went to the window and looked out at Mortuary Row. No, he thought, this didn’t add up, either. Something else nagged at him, but he wasn’t sure what, and then he saw someone lingering in the shadows across the way.

  Whoever it was, they pulled away suddenly, and Dante bounded down the stairs. Moving too quickly, perhaps. Allowing himself to get carried away.

  Jim Rose, he thought.

  The alley was empty, but up Powell he spotted a figure receding, head down, a man the same size and build of whoever had been in the alley, maybe, he couldn’t be sure, the same build as Rose, perhaps, but he didn’t know that, either. He had only the one picture to go on, Rose leaning slope-shouldered against the boat railing Dante started after the figure, not running quite, but almost, closing the gap. Was it Rose? Yes! No! And when he was within hailing distance, he felt it a near certainty. A feeling based on instinct, on the swarming feeling in his gut. Then the man, hearing Dante’s footsteps perhaps, glanced over his shoulder and started to run. Dante’s certainty became absolute. He bore down. He grabbed the man by the collar and threw him against the brick. He was mistaken.

  The man at his feet, lying on the sidewalk, was not the man in the picture. He was not Jim Rose.

  The stranger rolled way from him then, yelling as he rolled, waving his arms and flailing in a manner so ridiculous, so ineffectual, that Dante wanted to kick him, to chase him down and stomp him until he was quiet. He’d felt the impulse before, back when he was a cop. He feinted now in the man’s direction, but at the last minute held off. The stranger rolled to his feet and scampered down the hill.

  Dante went the other way, up Powell. He needed to work the wildness out of himself, so he kept going, and pretty soon he was at the top, standing in front of the Stanford Hotel, the place where the cable cars crested before plummeting down again.

  As he stood there, his cell rang.

  It was Jake Cicero. Dante was glad to hear from him. There was something about his voice. The gruffness, the Old World fatalism.

  “I got news for you,” said Cicero.

  “What kind of news?”

  “You sound out of breath.”

  “I was just up at Angie’s place.”

  “Find anything?”

  “No.”

  “Then why are you breathing so hard.”

  “Ghosts,” he said. “I was chasing a ghost.”

  Cicero laughed. Dante could hear the sound of smoke in his throat, like that of some aging nightclub performer. He could hear tinkling glasses and guessed that Cicero was in the bar by his house where he went sometimes when his wife wasn’t around. Dante could hear the old juke in the background. Tony Bennett, he thought. Or maybe Dino and Frank, some kind of duet. The cell was fading in and out, picking up static, stray conversation, and it was hard to tell.

  “How about Whitaker?” asked Cicero. “Did you talk to him?”

  “No. He wasn’t there.”

  “I thought he was one of the featured speakers.”

  “I thought so, too.”

  “Well, I don’t know if it makes any difference now.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just got a call from Antonelli.”

  “What’s he doing, replacing us? We going too slow for him?”

  Cicero laughed again.

  “You got it half right, anyway. He’s pulling us off the case.”

  “Did he give a reason?”

  “He said it was too hard on his wife,” said Cicero. “He said to let it drop. Let the cops handle it.”

  “I thought he hated the cops.”

  “Well, you know Antonelli, how he is, but I have to say …” Cicero’s voice started to fade. The reception was breaking up. It skipped in and out, and by some anomaly the background noise was louder than Cicero’s voice. Dante could hear Bennett on the jukebox now, singing the song everyone knew. The one about San Francisco and your heart breaking on the concrete. Cicero faded in.

  “And it makes sense. Barbara and Nick want to bury their daughter. They want closure. They want to move on.”

  “Yeah,” said Dante.

  He was standing there on top of Nob Hill. It was the place in the city everybody talked about. The place where he’d kissed Angie once upon a time and other girls, too, whose names he could no longer remember. Meantime, Jake was still talking. Sounding a little drunk, saying this was how things went in this business. You followed a trail and then the client jerked the plug and you never knew. All this while the fog was coming in and Dante could see it rolling in over The Beach and up around the high tiers of the Bay Bridge. From this spot he could see down the hill into the gaudy nonsense of Chinatown, or the other way to Union Square, and at the same time taste the fog in his throat and feel the transport cable trembling in its groove under the street as the pulleys strained to bring the car up the hill. The phone was going in and out. He could hear the cable bells ringing and Bennett pouring it on. Then all of a sudden the static went away.

  Dante dropped his voice. “I don’t know if I can let this go that easy, Jake,” he said. “I don’t know.” There was no response. “Jake,” he said. And then he realized why the sound was so clear. The connection was broken. The line was dead. He stood there with the cell in his hand. The fog swirled low now, and a cable car lurched over the hill.

  SIXTEEN

  On a hillside, down the peninsula, a woman cried out, then cried out again. Perhaps her cries did not go unnoticed. It was dark, true, and there was no one on the street, and the neighborhood had, as always, the look of a place deserted. The neighborhood had this look despite the cars in the driveways and the lights in the windows. In the bushes, though, some small creature twittered at the sound of the woman’s voice—a rodent, perhaps, a possum—and a shadow fell across a picture window. Up the road, a car rumbled into a cul-de-sac and disappeared.

  It was a serene neighborhood, this hillside in San Mateo. The ranch houses were well tended. The birds-of-paradise were prim and upright. The televisions flickered. An orange dropped to the ground, thoughtless as a rock.

  Meanwhile the woman called out.

  “Oh, kitty,” she called. “Kitty, kitty.”

  She went through a gate into an open area behind the house. She cupped her hand to her mouth and directed her voice up the hill, toward the junca and the oak. Then she went down the berm along the ravine, following a path behind the houses. She bent down. Calling into the gap under the redwood fences. Into the pink oleander. Into the poppies and scrub.

  There was no response.

  The
woman was Barbara Antonelli, but she did not know how many of her neighbors recognized her voice, or even heard her at all. She had made a mistake, though, she was certain of that. The people inside the houses would tell you the same. You bring an animal to a new place, you keep it inside a few days. You let it out a little at a time, till it learns its way around. But she hadn’t done that. She’d been foolish. So now the cat had scattered off somewhere, and she would never find it.

  “Eccentric!”

  Barbara stood at the top of the cul-de-sac. Her voice penetrated the stucco walls, she imagined. The neighbor could hear it in the garage across the way, his kid could hear it in the bedroom. His wife could hear it in the kitchen as she prepared dinner with the television on, the newscaster giving the local report, broadcasting the photos of the missing.

  My voice is not just an echo on this empty street, lost in the wind and white noise from 280. Someone is listening, she told herself. Someone hears. There are houses on this hillside. This is not just some canyon, filled with wind and rocks.

  Then she called out again.

  “Kitty, kitty.”

  Barbara Antonelli shivered under the stars in her olive skirt and her sleeveless blouse. She went inside through the sliding door and lay on her bed. She was far above herself now, looking down. She knew how ruthless her husband could be, how self-absorbed. How foolish without thinking. But there was a moment you went back to, a million years ago, his body and yours, the smell of him as he put his arms around you, your skirt billowing, people looking as you strutted. There was the thrill you felt that first time you slid in the car beside him and the feeling you were safe, under wing, and pretty soon there were pictures in a drawer, furniture, and cloth and silverware, and your daughter racing down the hall “Daddy, Daddy,” and the memory of his hip swaggering next to yours once upon a time, a dress you used to wear, a suit coat still in the closet, all those things that kept you in his bed, bound to him. Now something had happened, and she did not want to admit it, just like she had not admitted a lot of other things. But she knew. She lay in the bed in her olive dress. The pool was blue, and the only sound was that of a woman weeping. Faint at first, then louder. She rolled onto her side, but the wailing only got louder. There was no one listening, she knew that. There was nothing she could do to make it stop.