Chasing the Dragon (22 page)

“It was the abortion.”

“The abortion?”

“Marilyn didn’t tell Gary. She didn’t tell anyone. She just went off and did it. Whose child was it, that’s my question. Gary doesn’t like it when I say that, but . . .” Alice glanced about deviously, but did not meet his eyes. “That’s what happens. God punishes. He takes away the gifts he gives.”

Regina emerged now, flanked by Mora and her son.

“Oh, isn’t he a doll,” Alice said. “No wonder the women love him.”

Whether she was talking about Mora or her husband, he could not be sure. Her voice was full of vitriol.

Dante helped them into the taxi, then went across town on his own errand. He had business coming up any day now, and he still had not replaced the gun the police had confiscated. So he went to a gun shop known in the old days for its willingness to deal beneath the counter. The place had not changed. He bought himself a .40 caliber Glock to replace the one the police had taken, and a small-bore Smith & Wesson for good measure.

Toliveri picked up Gary Mancuso down at the warehouse. At the station, the grilling went on for quite some time. Throughout most of it, Ying hung in the background. He knew the plan: Separate the lovers. Press the notion that Gary Mancuso had killed his father in a moment of rage. Because there were business problems at the warehouse. Because his father had found out about the affair.

But it did not take long to see the plan was not going to bear fruit. Gary and his girlfriend had their stories in sync. More importantly, they had corroboration.

It came from the woman’s landlady. She had helped Roma locate the girlfriend’s apartment, then volunteered her own testimony as well. Made a trip to the station, not because she liked the young woman, no. Quite the opposite. She had seen her tenant and Gary together many times, making out in the car, on the apartment steps, in the hallway, brazen as could be. The landlady suspected the man was married, and she didn’t approve. What’s more, her own apartment was right next door; the walls were thin, and she had been forced to listen to them one too many times, all that obscene moaning and thumping at odd hours of the day. And they had been there that day, too, she remembered quite distinctly. The afternoon Salvatore Mancuso was killed. She’d seen them out front and heard them in the apartment, noisy as dogs. She was quite certain because she remembered the news of the murder the next day on TV, and if you didn’t believe her memory you could ask her husband. He was as bothered about it as she was, the way the two of them carried on.

At the end Toliveri held his head in his hands—as if he knew he would never make grade before he retired.

Whatever satisfaction Ying felt, it was short-lived. He left the interrogation area and put in a call to Dante. Then he turned off his cell and went out for a walk. He was thinking of Ru Shen, and of the Wus, and of the fact that he was scheduled to meet with Miss Lin tonight, and of the danger in that meeting. But more than that, he was thinking of Anita Blonde. The ballistics had not matched, and he remembered the sound she had made as she lay dying.

It was just before twilight now, on the other side of the bay, and Ying’s wife was leaving the tennis court at El Cerrito. Lei had taken an evening game, a doubles match, and her partner had been Richard Hooper—a man whose wife had died of ovarian cancer a few years back. He was a sweet man whom she suspected had a crush on her, but Lei knew he would never say so. Richard Hooper had a degree of dignity, of self-restraint. He had also met Frank and the kids a time or two here at the club, and the two men seemed to like one another.

Lei got out the cell and called her husband at Columbus Station.

It was warm in the car, pleasantly so. She felt good from the exertion and Richard Hooper had been a good partner.

No answer.

Tied up with the Mancuso investigation.
Better than SI
, she thought,
but he had grown more remote these last few days
.

Richard came out of the club now, emerging from beneath the redwood trellis. He gave her a shy wave and walked to his Lexus. She watched him and felt the dampness in her blouse and the sweat between her thighs.

She turned the ignition and drove home.

The kids had eaten a pizza dinner at a neighbor’s house and would not be back until eight. The house was dark and empty, and for an instant she was gripped by a cold feeling that got hold of her on occasion, a feeling that gripped every cop’s wife at some time or the other.

He was going to die.

She shook the feeling off. She put away her racket and took a shower. Inside the shower she wondered what it would be like if Frank died, how she and the kids would get by. She thought of Richard Hooper alone in his house, and let her thoughts drift into a forbidden area. Then she toweled herself off and changed her clothes. When the kids returned, she was clean and composed.

She tried the phone again. Ying still did not answer.

Ying and Dante were sitting alone in the upstairs room in Winter Alley, where Anita Blonde had died. Downstairs, the old woman was chanting.

It was Friday evening. Outside, an orange moon hung in the sky.

A little while before, Ying had ordered Chinese from some place on Kearny, and a little man with a high collar had delivered it. Now Ying spread out the food. Egg rolls and duck’s feet. Broccoli florets. A chicken’s bill.

“Why did you ask me here?”

“Eat,” Ying said.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You’re offending me.”

Ying pushed a foot at him. It was hard and rubbery. Dante was revolted but he ate it anyway.

“Good?”

“No,” said Dante.

Ying shrugged.

“I got Blonde’s gun,” he said. “And a bullet from your uncle’s murder. I sent them down to ballistics.”

“Was that wise?”

“I have a friend. Off the force. He did the comparison.”

“And?”

“Anita Blonde didn’t kill your uncle. Or if she did, she didn’t use the same gun she had with her here the other night.”

“No?”

“The ballistics don’t match.”

Dante was not surprised. Anita Blonde was a sneak thief, someone who milled around the edges. She was duplicitous, but he didn’t see her as an assassin. Capable of killing, certainly, in the right circumstances—but it wouldn’t be her central modus.

“This place was searched once before. When I was with SI.”

“What could she have been looking for?”

“The photos,” Ying said. “We were in contact, you and I, and maybe they suspected you had passed them along. Also, I visited with your father. Maybe they thought he passed me something. Given my history with SI.”

“Did you get an identification on the family in the photos?”

Ying registered the question but did not answer, preoccupied with his own line of thinking. “Or maybe she was looking for something else.”

“What could that be?” Dante asked.

“Something we don’t have. Or something you’re not telling me about.”

Ying picked up another webbed foot and offered it to Dante with a certain sadness. When Dante didn’t accept, Ying began to eat it himself.

“I killed her for nothing,” he said.

“She had her gun out,” said Dante.

“It didn’t have to happen.”

“She made a mistake. It’s not your fault.”

Despite himself, Dante felt a great indifference. He didn’t know if it came from within, or if it was just the recognition of a greater indifference that existed outside himself, an indifference as vast as the night. Blonde was dead. The machinations of the company were part deliberate, part happenstance, and she had gotten caught. Just as he himself would be caught someday.

“Why did you call me here?”

“You want help finding your father’s murderer. And me . . .” Ying hesitated. “I want to know who your master is.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Central Intelligence. FBI. ATF. Or is it the Wus?”

“There’s times I don’t know myself.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“I’m with the good guys. Or that’s what I used to think. But there’s overlap—and I don’t always know where the overlap is. It’s the nature of the work.”

He knew that Ying wanted a different kind of answer. But there’d been a change in the man since he’d killed Blonde. Maybe it had been there before, underneath the surface—the sense that good and evil were intertwined, that you couldn’t take an action without unexpected consequences—but Ying’d kept the idea away from himself. That wasn’t possible anymore.

“How’s the official investigation going?” Dante asked. “Into my uncle’s death.”

“Your cousin’s changed his story. Toliveri brought him in today, and his alibi—it seems he wasn’t telling the truth.”

“He wasn’t at the warehouse.”

“No.”

“Then where?”

“He’s having an affair—a woman over in Point Richmond. It seems he was with her, and he didn’t want to tell us in front of his mother. Obviously doesn’t want the wife to know.”

“Did it verify?”

“He’s having an affair. That part seems true. As to whether he was with her that afternoon or she’s covering for him, we’re still looking into it. But it seems their story will check out.”

Dante went for the rice. Downstairs, the old woman’s chanting had grown a little louder. It was a guttural noise with a vibration at the center of it. He’d heard similar chants in Thailand. In the streets, sometimes, from a beggar lost in meditation. At night, lying in a dragon dream, in the opium house. His last morning in Bangkok, as he’d walked away from the girl on the blood-soaked bed.

“Who do you work for, really?” Ying asked again. “What organization?”

Once again, Dante refrained from answering. “Did you get anything from the photos?”

“Myself, I was with SI for three years,” said Ying. “And I earned a lot of enemies. People in the community. Old chums. They called me a lackey. They said I was working for the ghosts.”

Dante knew the term. It went back to the old days. The ghosts were white people. Malignant spirits who moved vaporously through the world, but they could not hurt you if you did not acknowledge them. Twenty years ago, when he was a boy, it had seemed silly to him—the Italians so vibrant and full of life. Later he had understood; one night, moving through Chinatown on his own, surrounded by Chinese, the people on the street, they looked right through him. He did not exist. And now, with the Italian neighborhood all but gone, reduced to memory, and that, too, fading . . .

“I was tracking the Wus,” said Ying. “So many rumors, so many interconnections. Textiles. The gun trade. Hong Kong companies with links to the mainland. Spies working both sides—and when you got close, when you saw the fabric, you’d be shifted to a new case. Those deaths in the container . . .”

Dante took a sip of the tea. He pushed the rice aside. In it were bits of flesh with a taste he did not recognize. Snake, maybe. Some kind of bird. And at the bottom, a soupy bit of flesh that seemed to have the fur still attached.

“You know the rumors about your family’s warehouse,” Ying was rambling. His eyes had a glazed look. “Your cousin’s money, it’s from the smugglers. For turning his head. If it’s true, maybe that’s what he’s hiding, aside from the affair. If your uncle objected, if Gary got himself in a corner . . .”

“I don’t think so,” said Dante.

“I got forced off SI. They scrawled threats on my wife’s car. I’d been looking into the Wus for a while. I’d also been looking into the disappearance of Ru Shen. . . . It was his family in the containers, I’m all but sure.”

“Who is he?”

“Who are you?”

Dante regarded Ying. The detective was a good man. It was a mistake to have dragged him into this.

“Go home to your family,” said Dante.

“It’s too late for that.”

“Go home.”

Downstairs, the old woman was still chanting. She sat in the front room, on the rattan couch; her back was straight and her hands rested lightly on her lap. She didn’t turn her head when Dante entered the room but went on chanting. The sound was too deep and persistent to be coming from the old woman, and indeed her lips seemed to be barely moving. Dante walked in front of her. Her eyes were open, but she did not notice him as he passed through the room and out into the night. Or if she did notice him she gave no sign. She did not blink an eye.

On the staircase wall on Fresno Street, there were pictures of Dante’s family going back to the early days: the ancestors in their work blouses and suspenders, their fedoras, their dress coats, and high collars. And there was a daguerreotype from before the end of the nineteenth century, men standing by the old wharf, fishermen and merchants with waxed mustaches similar to old man Marinetti’s. What drew his attention, though, were two men on the far right. One of these men had been identified to him as his great-grandfather—a thick-shouldered man who stood with his arms folded. Beside him was a Chinese man dressed incongruously in the European fashion, with a waistcoat and a bowler, but with his pigtails intact. It was a candid shot, relatively speaking, and in the background, moored behind the feluccas, you could see the masts of several Chinese junks. Though the details were fuzzy, it was apparent the junks were in the process of being offloaded, their goods carried to shore.