Chasing the Dragon (16 page)

“Ying. He used to be in SI. I heard he was looking into the container deaths a while back. But like I said: You’d be better off forgetting that business.”

Then Cicero rolled the bocce. It was a beautiful roll. It hit Dante’s front bocce on the bounce and sent it caroming to the side. Meanwhile, Cicero’s ball rolled forward and kissed the pallino.

Cicero smiled, and you could see all the creases in his leathered face. “I’ve still got the touch,” he said. “I still got the goddamn touch.”

It was coming on four o’clock, and for once Ying intended to get across the bay at a reasonable time, so he could sit with Lei and his kids around the dinner table. He had an errand to run on the way—up Grant Street to buy a certain rejuvenating tea for his grandmother: a foul mixture prepared especially for her by the herbalist Mr. Chan. Grandmother Ying took the potion every day at dinner time. Ying knew it was important for him to pick it up. She was almost out of the tea, and if he did not bring it home for her, then she would head out herself, with her white cane, tapping her way through the crowded streets.

There was another reason, too, that Ying wanted to visit the herbalist. In the adjoining trinket shop, run by Chan’s daughter, there was a bank of mailboxes. One of those mailboxes was his contact point with Miss Lin, his informant.

On the way out of Columbus Station, Ying ran into Angelo, the Homicide chief. There had been no morning briefing, and Angelo wanted to know how things were going on the Mancuso murder.

“So, Dante Mancuso—he’s still your prime?”

“I haven’t crossed him off.”

Angelo was in his late forties, a half-bald Italian with wire-rimmed glasses and a studious expression. He and Dante Mancuso had been partners once, Ying knew—but after Dante fell from grace, Angelo had risen. Ying had never worked with the man in the field, but he had noticed in his superior officer the ability to ask seemingly innocuous questions in such a way that you sensed an underlying implication, even when his manner was friendly.

“How about the rest of the family? The mother and the son?”

“Toliveri talked to them both at the scene. And I sent Detective Roma over to interview the old woman in the hospital.”

“Louise?”

“It seemed better to send a woman. The old woman was frail. And Detective Roma, she has a good touch for these kind of situations.”

“Have
you
talked to the old woman yet?”

“I was out to the house yesterday, and I talked to the son.”

“Does his story hold?”

“He told me the same thing he told the first time around. Added a few details. Toliveri’s hunting down the alibi—but apparently the son put the warehouse on a skeleton crew. With the funeral and everything. So it’s taking some footwork.”

“Nothing from Forensics? Nothing on Dante Mancuso?”

“No. No breakthroughs.”

There are other things I could bring up
, Ying thought. The dubious nature of Dante’s employment. The fact he’d been seen outside the Wus. Or his own growing suspicion that this was leading somewhere else altogether. But there was that little voice inside him.
You still have your head in SI
, it said.
You have to let that go. You’re reading patterns in the tea leaves when all you’ve got is wet grass. You’re not focused on the task at hand
.

“I assume you’re going to catch up with Toliveri.”

“Of course.”

“All right,” said Angelo. “You do that. Then we’ll all crack our heads on this one at the Friday briefing. Me, you, and the rest of the troop.”

The herbalist’s shop up was off Grant, down a nameless alley—a narrow bit of asphalt strung with fire escapes. There were residences overhead, and the fire escapes were hung with laundry. The shop’s window was smudged, but inside the place was clean, and there were hundreds of tiny vials filled with liquids and powders.

“I have something to pick up,” he said, “for Elenore Ying.”

The young woman at the counter gave him a dour look. She was one of Chan’s daughters. Ying wasn’t as welcome as he used to be. There was another trade that went on here, he knew—in the ground-up remains of endangered animals: elephant tusks and rhinoceros ears and the beaks of eagles—and the trade in such substances was against the law. Part of his job with SI had been to crack down on that trade.

“Ah, Frank Ying,” said the old herbalist, a wizened man with a black toupee. “Here is for your grandmother.”

“Thank you.”

“You are a good son.”

Ying took out his wallet. It was part of the reason he came. This little concoction was not cheap; the old woman was on a fixed income, and it was the least he could do. As to the efficacy of the remedy he had no idea. He knew that the exact nature of the ingredients had changed over time as she grew older, the proportion of sweet to sour, of hot to cold, but no matter the proportions the content maintained its rank odor.

“Maybe you let me make up something for you,” said Chan.

“Not now.”

“Something for you—your wife. Make life nicer at home.” The man smiled in a way too kindly to resent. “Some people say I shouldn’t sell to you. But I say no problem.”

“No, not to worry,” said Ying.

Ying understood. Despite his overtures, the herbalist feared he would take the little bag down to be analyzed. And it was true, more than once he’d wondered what he might find if he did. Tiger balls. Panda intestines. Tip of a kangaroo’s tongue.

“I tell people you understand how it is. It is for your grandmother. You are Chinese, like us, after all.”

“Yes,” said Ying.

He put up with little lectures such as this often enough in Chinatown. People who did not like him going after the Wus. People who regarded it as a betrayal of his people. He had been taken aside and chided by old women. Spit on. Laughed at and hooted on down the street.

Or that’s the way it felt, anyway.

He was a hypocrite, who bought the medicine for himself, his own family, but persecuted others. And now that he had backed off the Wu investigation, rumor was, no doubt, he was on the take.

He turned out of the store and down Grant, glancing for a minute back at the building of the Wu Benevolent Society, with its balustrades trimmed like pagodas, its deco lights over gilded balconies, cracked now and sagging. Love Wu was up there somewhere. Or so rumor went. In his wheelchair these days. Blue oxygen bottles by his side. A lovely nurse. Too lovely for words.

Ying went on down the street. His informant’s mailbox was in the back of a trinket store adjacent to the herbalist. There was a bank of such boxes there, frequented by immigrants and other passers-through, legal or otherwise.

He kept walking.

He couldn’t worry anymore about the larger picture, he told himself. He had his wife to worry about, his grandmother. The world was full of contradictions, of paradox. He couldn’t worry about Angelo and the look in his eyes and the fact that the Wus were bringing in not just the ground-up intestines of endangered animals but assault rifles and heroin in its most purified form.

Fuck it
, he thought.

But he couldn’t help himself. He pulled out his pad. Wrote out a message there in the middle of the avenue.
Meet me. At the New Asia Lounge
. He scrawled out a time and a date. Then went to the back of the trinket store and dropped it in the informant’s box.

Dante caught Ying as he was entering Columbus Station. Dante had just finished talking to the desk sergeant—who’d told him that Ying had left, gone for the day—but as he turned to leave there was Ying, coming in the door. They stood for a moment in the over-lit lobby, with the fluorescents too bright overhead, while the desk sergeant turned his attention to a Chinese woman who had parked herself in one of the vinyl chairs. The woman had come to complain about some boys in the neighborhood who made a practice of throwing rocks at her cat. Dante could not know this, but Ying did, because the woman came in every day.

The two men regarded each other without surprise. They were both intense men. Dante with his close-cut hair and his dark eyes. Ying with his strong jaw and his skewed, angular looks. Ying still held the paper bag containing his grandmother’s tea. His intention had been to drop it off and go home, but then he’d decided at the last minute to swing by the station and check on a report he was expecting from the lab.

“What can I do for you?” asked Ying.

“I’d like to talk.”

“Okay, let’s go to my office.”

“Not here. Off the record.”

“Nothing’s off the record with a cop, you know that.”

“Not here,” said Dante. “And off the record.”

“Where?”

“Your choice,” said Dante. “Someplace where they don’t speak much English. And where they won’t pay much attention to us.”

Ying led him down Stockton and up the heights to a small place at the edge of Chinatown. Ying had been here a few times before. The service was slow and the help surly but they left you alone.

“My treat,” said Ying.

“How come the place is so empty?”

“Food’s horrible.”

Dante nodded. They ordered a couple of Tsingtaos and passed on the dim sum.

“I thought maybe we could help each other.”

Dante tossed the photos onto the table.

“What are these?”

“I was hoping you could tell me.”

Ying dwelled a moment on the corpses inside the shipping container. It was a hardened glance, professional and a little sad. Saddened not at the deaths themselves but because the part of him that had once been shocked by such sights wasn’t shocked anymore.

“My uncle gave me the negatives before he died. Negatives,” Dante repeated. “Not undeveloped film. So that means other prints were made, some time or other. Though I don’t know if my uncle ever saw those prints. My father, maybe. I don’t know.”

“Your father?”

“Apparently he’s the one who gave the negatives to my uncle. To give to me.”

“Why didn’t you tell me before?”

“I just picked them up.”

The men drank. Dante was a more vigorous drinker and ordered another. Ying held back.

“You’ve checked my background, haven’t you?” asked Dante.

“Yes.”

“And what did you find?”

“New Orleans Export . . .” Ying looked at Dante—at the half-smile, the square shoulders, the eyes with their dark sheen. He was not sure really what to think of this man. “It’s a vinyl sheet,” he said. “Or it appears to be.”

Dante didn’t argue with this or acknowledge it, either. The thin smile played across his lips.

“Seven years ago, a man named Strehli was murdered. He was a customs inspector. I think he took those pictures—and was killed on account of them. And I think whoever killed my father, my uncle, both of them, I think it has to do with those pictures.”

Dante pushed a pair of photos at Ying. One was a tight shot of a man’s face, partially decayed.

“Do you know who this man might be?”

Ying studied the face. It was pretty well decomposed, but when he looked at the other photos—a woman, two children—the circumstances brought back the old rumors.

Ru Shen.

Ying kept his opinion to himself. Partly because it was only a guess, but also because he was not sure of Dante’s intentions. He didn’t know if what he told Dante might be used in some other way than he expected. And at the same time he saw Dante was reading him, realizing that he was holding back, or wondering at least, and wondering, too, if Ying was working more than one angle, more than one game. The two men sipped at their beers and regarded one another and in this mutual mistrust there was a kind of bond.

“Why are you showing me this?”

“I want to find my uncle’s murderer. The killer, I think he was harassing my father at the end.”

“You think these pictures are connected to their deaths?”

“I’m going to find out.”

“That’s my job.” Ying was about to launch into the bit about how Dante should leave the investigation to the police, but he knew the man wouldn’t listen “What branch are you with?” he asked. “What’s with the vinyl sheet?”

“You were with SI?”

“Yes.”

“But you left.”

“Family reasons.”

“They wouldn’t protect you, would they?”

Ying didn’t respond, but it was true. When he had started pressing the investigation, the threats had come—and there hadn’t been much anybody could do.

Dante leaned in. “The Wus,” he said. “You were after the Wus. And we are, too.”

“You think they’re behind the murders.”

“I don’t know. But if you can tell me who’s in that picture, maybe we can work together. Maybe we can help one another.”

“Give me the pictures, I can run some facial comparisons. See what we find.”

Dante hesitated. “Who will run them?”

“I’ll run them myself. I won’t tell a soul.”

Dante picked up the envelope. He reached inside and took out the negatives. He slid those into his own pocket and handed the photos to Ying.

The two men parted at the top of Winter Alley. It was just past twilight. Ying went down the road toward his grandmother’s house, and Dante went on up the hill. He hadn’t gone more than a half block before he turned around and headed back.

La Saggezza
, his grandmother might say. The wisdom. Because there was a part of him that had sensed something in the shadows, back there in Winter Alley. Or maybe it was just because he’d been overcome by a craving and didn’t know what to do with it and decided to fill it, however shoddily, with a pack of Luckies and a pint of Jack from Coit Liquors.

Either way, when he returned to the corner of Winter Alley, he stopped for a moment. He saw Ying at the front door of his grandmother’s cottage—or rather he saw Ying disappear inside, closing the door behind him. An instant later he saw a figure emerge on the fire balcony above Ying’s door. A woman, he thought. All in black, thin and lithe, working the ladder, attempting to work her way down.

Dante broke into a run.

The figure disappeared back into the house.
A mistake
, Dante realized.
I should have waited
. But it was too late. Dante grabbed the fire escape ladder, dislodging it, and headed up.