Chasing the Dragon (18 page)

Even with every precaution, though, a body sometimes turned up when the seasons changed, and the cold water started to rise to the surface. But by that time, the corpse was pretty well rotted, the skin separated from the bone, the circumstances of death more difficult to determine.

In this case, Anita Blonde did not have to stay down forever. A couple of weeks, a month. Because even if they did discover her body, the chances of anyone tying her to Dante and Ying would be remote.

They pulled her from the fish compartment. They weighted her down and wrapped her and scooted her abaft.

In the middle of it, Ying’s cell phone started to ring. Ying glanced at the number on the screen.

“Don’t answer.”

“It’s my wife.”

“We don’t want anyone to know we’re out here.”

“She’s going to think I am having an affair.”

“Let her think it.”

The phone stopped ringing and they finished their work. They lifted Anita to the railing, then dropped her over the stern into the black water. In an instant she was gone.

Dante put his hand to his forehead, as if to cross himself, but the action gave him no comfort. He stared at the water.

Ying bowed his head. “Hey-yung,” he said, ever so softly, an expression his grandmother had taught him years ago. An ancient mantra, the origins of which he did not know. Simply something to be whispered upon departure, to the spirit who is passing. Perhaps it was something the old woman had made up herself.

They headed back to the shore.

In the city, a patrol car pulled up behind them, wailing suddenly, then racing by. Then there were more sirens, and engines racing up the hill—toward a calamity of some sort, a fire maybe, people trapped in a building. The sound of the sirens seemed to echo in Dante’s head all the way back to North Beach. Ying left him off at the corner of Bay and Columbus, and as Dante walked home he paused a moment out in front of the cathedral. It was not quite dawn, but there were birds chattering up along the belfry, and already some old crones had begun to gather for morning mass. It was Thursday he remembered, and Father Campanella would hold confession this afternoon, and for an instant he wished he believed the way his grandmother had believed: that he could drop on his knees in the confessional and list his sins and then walk away clean and pure. Father Campanella had wanted to see him, to show him his father’s
Il Libro Segreto
. Had Campanella been there this moment, standing in the darkness of the cathedral steps, he might have gone up to him, but Campanella was not there and confession was no longer in his realm, so there was nothing he could do but walk up the hill, home to Fresno Street. Nothing to do but go home and lie in his father’s bed and wish for sleep as the day got slowly brighter and it became more apparent that sleep was not going to come, and all the while he could not fight the feeling that there was something worse ahead.

Meanwhile, Ying had finished his drive across the bay. He had parked his car and keyed the door, sneaking through the just-graying hallway to lie beside his wife, crossing his arms and staring upward, before realizing he had taken the position of the woman they had slid into the water.

“Hey-yung,” he whispered again, thinking of the dead woman. One of his grandmother’s mantras, idiosyncratic, no meaning in the world. Give it whatever meaning you wanted.

Go with the spirits
.

And as he closed his eyes, floating on the gray void of the morning, Ying wished someone would say the same for him.

Dante slept for an hour or maybe two, a sleep that despite its brevity was both dark and deep, a plunge into the subterranean. But then he was on the surface again, unrefreshed. The sun was white, and he was both wide awake and dead tired, weighted down with a remorse that felt like a blanket over his head.

Dante thought of Campanella and remembered there had been something teasing at him early this morning as he’d walked by the cathedral.

Guilt, maybe.

He couldn’t help but think his own presence here had somehow triggered his uncle’s murder—and Blonde’s death, as well. Some move he had made without realizing its consequence. A step this way or that. A failure to see what lay ahead.

His grandmother had had rituals to prevent such stumbles. She’d had a picture of St. Alfonso in her kitchen and said a little prayer to him each morning, and sometimes—for no reason at all, it seemed—she would invoke his protection out in the street. The prayers to Alfonso were prayers to protect yourself against happenstance, from stepping right when you should have stepped left, from walking up Grant when you should have walked down Vallejo because on Grant someone was going to drop a hammer from the scaffold, or a bicyclist was going to run over your foot, or you would talk too long with old Mr. Gizzi, who would therefore forget himself later that afternoon and step in front of an oncoming Cadillac.

These little rituals, they had taken over his grandmother’s life as she had gotten older. Protecting herself against the devil. The shadow in the mirror. The creaking at the bottom of the stairs.

Himself, he didn’t know. If he’d driven one more time around the block with Angela, his high-school sweetheart . . . If he hadn’t run into Marilyn with his cousin that day seven years ago . . . If he had picked up the telephone in New Orleans on the third ring . . . If he hadn’t headed back toward Winter Alley last night . . .

The old ones had had their remedies for such folly. The thirteen Stations of the Cross and the three faces of God and the twelve apostles and the forty days of Lent. The ten decades on the rosary, a prayer for each bead and act of confession at the end. When he was a child his grandmother had taught him to run his thumbs over the beads, counting as he prayed, and though he no longer prayed or carried the beads, he still tapped his fingers against his legs as he walked, worked his thumb against the other fingers—and he counted. It didn’t seem to help. He had made a wrong turn. He was a company man now and did not know how to get out.

Dante went down the stairs. He left his father’s house on Fresno Street and once again paused in front of the cathedral.

What was in his father’s
Il Libro Segreto?

He knocked on the rectory door and after a while a small woman came to the door. She was the housekeeper for the priests, the same woman from years ago; she wore the same gray skirt, it seemed, the same pin-striped blouse, the same crucifix around her neck.

“Father Campanella’s gone on retreat.”

“Retreat?”

“To pray. He’ll be back in a few days.”

He was tempted to go around to the rear of the rectory, to open the door and rummage through the priest’s desk and find the book for himself. He knew where the priest’s room was, and how Father Campanella kept things lying about, but the housekeeper had her eye on him from the window, and he decided it wasn’t a good idea, at least not now. Instead he walked up Union to Montgomery Street, toward Marilyn’s house. He stood at the top of the hill looking out at the bay, at the sailboats and the blue water, just as he had done that first day after his father’s funeral.

Finally he could not hold himself back anymore. He walked across the street and knocked on Marilyn’s door.

Hers was not a face that demonstrated surprise easily. Rather she smiled wryly—as if perhaps she had seen him lingering outside. Even so, her demeanor was not without a certain self-doubt, a certain agony. She was dressed in autumnal colors, both bright and subdued at the same time, like a leaf dying on a tree.

“Dante,” she said. “You look like hell.”

“I need to be with you.”

She was wearing too much makeup, or maybe it was the morning light. He saw the age in her face.

“Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

She hesitated. “I was on my way to work. I could meet you later,” she said. “Or I could call in late, I suppose.”

She did neither. She closed the door behind her and they headed down the hill together. Out of the wind for the moment. The sun in their faces. Walking. Dante had no idea what he meant to say, or if he even meant to say anything at all. It was her physical presence he wanted, next to him on the street.

“Do you remember Lido’s?”

Lido’s had been a hangout, a place to go when they were kids. Red booths and polished leather. Somewhere in this block, maybe. Next to the Ligurian Bakery. Or Lucca’s Delicatessen. Somewhere in here. Or maybe it had been the next block over. Somewhere.

“Yes,” she said.

“How about the Columbo Hotel? With the old men out front?”

“Yes,” she said again, looking at him curiously, and just as she spoke, he saw the old place up ahead. It was called the Sam Wong now; no more Italians, only Chinese pensioners lingering out front these days, except for Pesci, the old Black Shirt—but he looked again and Pesci was gone, too. They were on Columbus now, walking a little faster, the way you tended to walk on Columbus, jostling through the crowd—the tourists, the Chinese, the slew-footed old women—all the while looking for a familiar face and feeling the passersby looking back, looking without seeing. The glances penetrated through as if you were not there.

Ghosts
.

“And how about Rivini’s Restaurant?” Marilyn said. “And the woman with the vegetable cart?”

“And the fishmonger?”

“Yes.”

They turned off Columbus, past the old coffee shops, the old vagabond hotels, a street corner where, as a young cop, he’d watched a man die one night, his skull caved in with a tire iron. A kid with a boom box stood there now, alongside his girlfriend, blue hair and tattoos, the heroin fire in their eyes—and Dante felt a longing pierce his heart.

“Where are we going?”

“I just want to walk,” he said. “I just want you next to me.”

They headed up Russian Hill away from the crowd. He sensed her hesitation, but she kept pace.

At the top, they were winded. They could see down to the bay, and to the city, all that pastel light, all that stucco and brick and steel, little sprouts of green, trumpet vines sprouting from the concrete, palm trees, and meantime the wind up here blew hard and cold, and there was the racket of the cable wires, and you could see all the way to Oakland.

It had always been like this. Walking up the hill made you feel as if you owned the city. She was beautiful beside him.

“Things have changed,” Marilyn said. “I don’t know . . .”

He looked at her face and saw it was going to be ravaged. How the folds were going to go deep and the worry lines would set in, and at the same time he saw her as she had been just a few years before.

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

Then he kissed her. He expected her to pull away. She did, at least at first, but then she kissed him back. It was a long kiss, and it was pure, almost—except for everything that lay beneath the surface—and then he pulled away from her. His body went stiff and he sobbed. Because he was thinking of Anita Blonde. And the dead girl in Bangkok. And a man in Paris. And some son of a bitch in Des Moines. Because while maybe he could say that it had been a wrong step that had killed Blonde, a miscalculation, and maybe it had been the same with the Thai girl, he had killed the Frenchman with his own hands, a knife in the gullet. And there’d been others. And would be more. He had not joined the company altogether by accident, one stumbling foot after another. There had been an act of will at some point.

He began to sob more fiercely, and Marilyn put her arm around him, thinking perhaps it was his father he cried for, thinking these were paroxysms of grief that shook him to the bone, and though that might have been true in part, there were all those other ones, too, all the dead, but more than that he was weeping because of a premonition of how all this was going to end, and how complete would be his loss.

“Take me out on the boat,” she said. “Let’s go sailing together.”

They were necking in the doorway of an abandoned grocery. He pushed his leg between her thighs, unzipped her skirt, pulled at her panties, and she didn’t stop him. In the window reflection Dante saw an old woman working her way up the hill.

“Take me sailing,” Marilyn whispered. “Take me out on the waves.”

He clutched her close. When he looked again the old woman’s reflection was gone.

Detective Ying was out of harmony. His wife, Lei, was serene, however, composed and fresh-scrubbed, and they worked together side by side at the counter, as they often did, making breakfast and packing lunches for the kids.

On the surface it was a tranquil scene, but inside his chest was full of dread, and his head felt hollow from lack of sleep.

“Are you driving us, Dad?” his daughter asked. She was the older of the two, a smaller, fiercer version of her mother. His son was another matter. Scatter-headed. Driven by impulse.

“Yes.”

“Don’t you have to go to work?”

“Not until later. I was out late last night. On assignment.” He gave his wife a glance which she did not return.

“Did you kill anyone?” asked his son.

“Daniel—”

“Just joking.”

He watched his family at the breakfast table and felt oddly estranged from them. He had made a mistake last night, in more ways than one. He had no idea of Dante’s real motives, or if he could believe anything the man had told him about the dead woman or anything else.

One thing, though: Ying had held on to the dead woman’s gun. He wanted to run ballistics, to see if the same weapon had killed Salvatore Mancuso. Ying couldn’t go to the police lab under the circumstances, but he could go to a friend of his, Max Grudgeon, who these days ran the criminology lab at UC. He got up from the breakfast table to phone Grudgeon and leave a message, saying he would come by to see him later.

When he returned to the table, his children were gathering their things for school.

“You’re taking them?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“You’ll be late.”

“No. We’ll make it.”

He had a hard time meeting her eyes. Lei noticed and reached out to touch his cheek.

“Who were you talking to?”