Chasing the Dragon
CHASING
the
DRAGON
Domenic Stansberry
For Concetta and Domenic Mussolino, Vincenza Rose
,
Chadwick Leroy—and all the rest
Special thanks to
Fred Hill and Kelley Ragland
On the night he died, Giovanni Mancuso heard the floorboards creak, and he knew someone was in the house.
My murderer
, he told himself. Not that he needed anyone to finish him off. He would go on his own soon enough. Though the pain was worse now—accompanied by double vision and a loss of control in the extremities—there were consolations. The doctor had given him a medication implant under the skin, a squeeze pump full of morphine. He had visions, at times quite beautiful.
There was a creaking around the corner, down the hall, at the top of the stairs.
Giovanni Mancuso had lived in the house long enough to know that the sound he heard, those footsteps, were not his imagination. It was not the sound of the house settling.
There was someone here, he was all but sure. A shadow appeared in the mirror across from his bed. In the mirror, the shadow moved again, stepping through the slanted light that fell through the hall window from the arc lamp outside.
His heart beat more rapidly.
“What are you hiding, old man? Tell me. Where is it?”
The pain flooded him, and he reached for the remote that controlled the pump, sending morphine to a little cavity in the base of his spine. He was on a bluff, overlooking the ocean, and his wife was below him down on the shore. She was singing like she used to do, her voice carrying up from the kitchen. Rossini, maybe. Verdi. Her voice had been beautiful once. A wind moved through the pines and set the shadows in motion. The footsteps were closer, and he opened his eyes.
The shadow hovered over him, and there was a face inside that shadow.
“No,” Giovanni said. “My son will track you down . . . my son, the cop, my son . . .”
His words were unrecognizable, he realized, an old man’s mumbling—a sound like the fluttering of wings. The face was still in shadow. He couldn’t see the features, but he felt the visitor’s hands on his shoulder. It was not a gentle touch. The hands rolled him over, face into the pillow. He felt a hand on his skull, holding him in place.
He coughed, struggling for air. The pain wracked through him and he squeezed again.
There were birds, there were flowers, there were all the people he had ever known, his old buddies from Lucca and Calabria, from Genoa and Santa Lucia from all over the goddamn place, women with hawk noses, peasant dresses, here among the poppies and the oak and the madrone, here on Telegraph Hill with its shanties tumbling under skyscrapers, the wind gusting through the clothes on the line, down the alleys. But they were all gone now, the old crones and the winepresses and the fishmongers, buried under the mud, under the concrete, the passing feet.
The pressure on his head relaxed.
“Where, old man? Who do you think you’re fooling?”
He couldn’t answer such a question. He tasted the pillow in his mouth. He could smell the intruder’s body against his own. He groped for the remote. The doctor had warned him to be careful, not to overdose.
Then he was coughing. Face into the pillow. There was blood in his throat. He squeezed again, trying to get back into the vision—then a spasm shook through him.
He had passed some boundary.
I know who you are, Mr. Shadow
, he thought.
I know and I will tell my son
. But it was too late. The footsteps were already receding, growing fainter, back down the steps, the carpet, through the front door, into the streets, fainter, and for a second he could see all of North Beach below, here on the edge, on this peninsula jutting into the dark Pacific. Meanwhile the footsteps, fainter, then fainter still . . .
My heart has stopped. The stranger is gone. There is no one in this room
.
And the vision. . . .
It was August in New Orleans, and Dante Mancuso was far from San Francisco, far from his dying father. He had taken to sleeping in the afternoon, after the daily thundershower, during that time of day when the light outside had begun to grow white again, hot, more merciless than before, and the humidity rose from the ground in vapors thick enough to see. Outside, the traffic slowed, and people sought the shadows. It usually took Dante a couple of shots to go under, but once he did he tumbled into a sleep that was sweet and dark and empty.
At the deepest point, he awoke. Since his last assignment, it often happened this way. He awoke with no transition to find himself sitting bolt upright in his bed, heart beating like a drum. His clothes were damp; the room smelled of his own sweat. The image that stayed in his head was simply one of darkness, but beneath that darkness, he knew, there had been something else.
Things had gone badly on his last assignment, in Bangkok. A young Thai girl—a professional concubine, with sweet, drug-clouded eyes—had been slashed to death, and he’d been the one to find her, bloody on the sheets.
It was time to quit, he’d told himself. To leave the company. But it wasn’t so simple. He took the bottle and went out on his stoop.
The bourbon helped, but not enough. The darkness was still inside him, an emptiness he could not fill. In Bangkok he had grown used to stronger stuff. It had been part of his role: a decadent businessman gone over the edge, bingeing on liquor and opiates and sex. He’d taken it a little too far, carried away in the part, and those cravings still haunted him.
The Ninth Ward was a working-class neighborhood. Black families, Irish, Italians. They lived in bungalows like Dante’s, built on swamp fill underneath the levee that held back the wide, polluted waters of the Mississippi. At twilight people came out on their stoops to chatter. The “yat” couples in their blousy clothes, mouths full of booze, out to greet the evening. Young black men walking alone, escaping the heat of the Desire projects.
Though the similarities were superficial, there were times when the streets reminded him of home—or made him long for it, anyway. For San Francisco, North Beach, the old Italian neighborhood where he had grown up: its nineteenth-century rowhouses, its concrete patios and the sound of drunks caterwauling in the midnight streets. An old man’s face, maybe, glimpsed in passing; a building cornice; a woman’s skirt—such things would trigger in him an unreasonable nostalgia.
But he was far away. He had been away from home seven years. The air here was heavy. Even his memories were languid, full of murk.
Inside, the phone rang. Dante hesitated, drenched in sweat, already a little drunk, thinking about getting drunker. He let it ring three times, then meant to grab it, because he was superstitious about numbers—a trait he’d inherited from his grandmother on his mother’s side, Nanna Pellicano.
It was a superstition that amused him, that he did not really take seriously, he told himself, but it stuck with him anyway.
Three. The number of the Trinity. Of flesh and spirit in union with the divine
.
Nanna Pellicano had gotten truths like this from the nuns in Calabria when she was a little girl, but hers was an older Catholicism mixed with the spirits of the old country—the kind of demons that rose from the peasant landscape, informed by some pagan augury—and Dante had been drilled in it more thoroughly than he cared to admit.
There are things you should know, my grandson, Mr. Homicide Cop. The devil can’t come in if you don’t invite him. . . . If you wear the scapular beneath your shirt. . . . If you count the beads as you pray
.
Tonight, though, he was a little bit slow and did not catch the phone until the fourth ring. When he heard the thin voice on the other end, he wished he had not picked it up at all.
“New Orleans Import?” asked the voice.
He didn’t know for sure if it was the same voice that had contacted him in the past—when he thought of the voice later he could not be sure, at times, even of the gender—but either way there was a certain timbre, a reedy quality, not quite human, like that of an insect speaking through a megaphone.
Dante paused, knowing that if he didn’t come back with the right phrase, the conversation might end. Part of him was tempted to foil the whole business.
“Import-export,” he said.
“We have some cane furniture coming in.”
“Can the routine,” said Dante, breaking from the script. “Just tell me what you want me to do.”
There was silence on other end. He’d violated protocol. The company liked their sequence of greetings, their routine. The business had to be played out, no matter if they had his every move monitored, likely as not. No, the company liked these conversations to proceed in a certain way. Each phrase like a number in a combination lock. And all those numbers had to line up precisely, in the right order, or the alarms went off.