Chasing the Dragon (23 page)

As a child, he’d wondered more than once about the relationship between his great-grandfather and the Chinese man in the picture. And he’d wondered, too, what was in those boxes the men carried back to shore. It wasn’t something you could ever know, it was too far in the past, but Dante could not escape the feeling that events were repeating themselves.

Seven years ago he’d fallen in love with Marilyn. Then Strehli was murdered. Now he was back and three more people were dead.

To keep the ghosts in place, you prayed, you counted the beads, you poured water in the old stump, and you mashed the grapes with your feet in the basement. He was supposed to meet Marilyn tomorrow morning; they would go sailing on the bay. He wondered if he would ask her about the story Gary’s wife had told him.

My child?

He lay down on his father’s bed. He listened to the house settle and creak; there was a sound like footsteps on the stairs. The hasp on the basement window was still broken, he remembered.

The phone rang. He caught it on the third ring, before the message machine kicked in. It was Joe Williams.

“It’s in.”

“What’s in?” Dante asked, though he knew well enough.

There was a pause on the line.

“Fakir will be there?”

“Both of us,” Williams said. “Ten o’clock. Tomorrow morning.”

Afterward, Dante called Mason Wu. Then he dialed the number Blonde had given him: the company’s man at the DEA, who had been putting things together behind the scenes.

The agent, David Serles, answered on the first ring, and Dante gave him the details.

“I need to meet with you beforehand,” said Serles. “Tomorrow morning at seven thirty. We have a plan in place.”

Once again, it all seemed too easy. The way Serles picked up right away, as if he’d been waiting for the call. Known it was coming. The truth was, they should have met well in advance. Discussed details of the warehouse layout. The physical barriers. The best places to put a squad. Instead, the company had insisted they work separately.

Then Dante remembered something else. Tomorrow was Saturday, and the warehouse crew would be off. His cousin Gary, though—like his father and Dante’s father as well—had a habit of coming down to the office Saturday mornings to catch up on the paperwork. At least it had been his habit in the old days. Either way, he could not take the risk that Gary would show up tomorrow. Things could get out of hand, and he did not want his cousin on the scene.

Ying lingered in the room where Anita Blonde had died. His grandmother had gone into a silent meditation, and Ying took comfort in the silence. The little house on Winter Alley had seen a lot of family history over the years. His grandmother had a shrine to the ancestors in her bedroom, and he could feel their presence in the house, a stillness like the stillness of a pond on a winter night. Anita Blonde was there as well, at the center of their silence, dying on the bedroom floor.

He checked his cell and saw that he had missed two calls, both from his wife. He called her now, and as he spoke he imagined the sound of his voice vibrating the air, traveling along the old pine floorboards to the place where the old woman kneeled. Inside the old walls, the pipes let out a small moan.

Everything vibrated with everything else. A butterfly flapped its wings in Qingdao and the trade winds shifted.

“Where are you?” Lei asked. She had a rose petal voice laced with suspicion.

“I’m with Grandmother Ying,” he said. “But I have an appointment.”

“This late?”

“The Mancuso case—there’s a big push on to get it solved.”

It was partly true, but he could not help feeling as if he were lying. Because his appointment was with his informer in a lounge down in South City. The one time he had met her before, his heart had raced with illicit feelings, made more intense by the danger, by the feeling that he was about to penetrate the mystery of the Wus, and by the knowledge that informers often played both sides and he was placing himself at risk.

“The kids missed you this morning, you were gone so early.”

“I know,” he said. “I miss them. I miss you.”

There was a pause in which he noticed again the silence of his grandmother’s house.

“All right,” she said.

“Did you play today?”

“Yes.”

“How did you do?”

“Very well. It was a close match.”

“Was it doubles?”

“Yes.”

“Who was your partner?”

“Richard Hooper.”

He was jealous. Inappropriately so, perhaps. Richard Hooper was a nice man, still suffering over the death of his wife. He could not say anything without looking foolish.
But it should be me up at the club with my wife
, Ying thought.
It should be the two of us driving volleys across the net, our bodies taut, reaching, straining one toward the other
.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll be in bed when you get here.”

“I won’t wake you up.”

Downstairs, his grandmother sat all but motionless. Her eyes were open, glimmering in the half dark. Her skin was dark and leathery. If you looked closely, you could see her chest move, the slow in-and-out. Ying pressed his cheek against hers and felt a vague shudder pass through her body and then his own. In this trance, her body temperature had dropped. He kissed her. Then he got in his car and headed south on 101, toward the New Asia Restaurant and Lounge.

The place had been built back in the sixties. There was a domed ceiling inside and a hanging glass ball. Onstage a Thai woman sang a pop song of indeterminate origin to a crowd that was more interested in their drinks and their chatter. It was a mixed group, Asian locals and airport businessmen. An illicit couple went after one another in one of the booths nearby.

The informer was not here.

He had a drink, even though he was not much of a drinker. The drink came with a little parasol. Then he had another drink and ordered some appetizers.

He studied the crowd around him, careful of the fact that this could be a trap. No one seemed to pay him any mind. On the way to the door, a big man in an oversized business suit stopped at his booth. He had a bulbous nose and warm eyes and a disarming smile. He peered at Ying intently.

“Can you tell me the time? My watch—it seems to have stopped.” The man showed his watch, and it indeed appeared to have stopped.

“Eleven thirty.”

“Thank you.”

The appetizers came. Ordinarily Ying was a man of moderation who seldom drank. He watched his diet and exercised every other day. He had a measured routine. These last few days, though, since Anita Blonde’s death, things had been different. He finished his appetizers greedily and ordered another drink.

An hour went by, and still the woman did not show.

The Thai singer went on break. A business party at a nearby table called it quits and the illicit couple started arguing. Ying took another taste of his drink, and as he did so he felt the effects of the alcohol, the buzz just catching up to him.

He pushed the drink away and paid his bill.

The woman wasn’t coming. Something had happened. Maybe she couldn’t get away; it wasn’t safe.

Outside in the lobby he saw the man in the oversized suit talking on a cell phone over in the corner. The man gave him the briefest of glances and turned his back. Ying started to go out the main entrance but then changed his mind. Instead he went out the way he had come and circled around to his car. The night sky seemed very black above the cadmium lamps, and suddenly he was gripped with fear. On the way home, he checked the rearview mirror. He engaged in the customary maneuvers, but there was no one following, at least as far as he could tell.

At home, he checked in on his children. He watched them sleeping. Then he got in bed next to Lei—who lay with her hair splayed in the moonlight. By the time he fell asleep it was close to two. At six o-clock, four hours later, his cell went off.

The voice on other end belonged to a man by the name of Bill James. Ying was surprised to hear from him. They had worked together at SI, and James had helped with the security arrangements when Ying was being harassed. More than once, James had shared his disgruntlement with the bureaucracy.

“Sorry to wake you,” he said now.

“What’s up?”

The last time Ying had seen Bill James had been on the day he’d cleaned out his desk, and the agent had expressed envy and his own desire to get the hell out. Even so, James had been promoted a few weeks later, and he was in administration now. The truth was, Ying had never quite trusted him.

James’s voice was apologetic, as if he did not want to be making this call. “I have a request for your presence.”

“What’s this about?”

“Grove Street,” he said. “The county building. Room sixty-seven. You need to be there at seven thirty.”

“Is this SI business?”

Lei was up on her elbows, still half-asleep. He got the impression that she did not really see him—as if she were looking at him through a veil.

“It’s a DEA office, in the basement.”

“Can you give me details?”

“The DEA guy is Serles. David Serles.”

The name wasn’t familiar.

“You can’t tell me more?”

“Serles will detail you,” said James. “To be honest, I don’t know much more.”

Lei had rolled away from him, back to sleep. It was Saturday morning. He could roll over, too, he thought. There was nothing stopping him. He could cling to his wife, ignore the call.

Instead Ying climbed out of bed and got himself ready.

As he put on his shoes, he thought briefly of Miss Lin. He could not know, of course, that the police coroner had the body of an Asian woman, midtwenties, on a slab down in the morgue. Suicide, maybe, it was hard to tell. Fell from her bedroom window the previous evening, ten stories above Geary. Face disfigured by the fall, dress bloodied. Chrysanthemum in her hair.

The evening before—as Ying sat sipping his umbrella drink in the New Asia Restaurant and Lounge—Dante had climbed the Filbert Stairs to his cousin’s house up on the promontory. It was closing in on eleven, late for an unannounced visit, but Dante rang anyway. He came because he didn’t want his cousin at the warehouse in the morning, but Gary could be stubborn, Dante knew; and he and his cousin were not on the best of terms. So keeping him away would require persuasion—and in the end, it might not be persuasion of the gentlest form that would be the most effective.

Alice answered the door. She wore a simple frock with a lace neckline. Her face was pale and maybe a little swollen. Her expression was vulnerable at first, then the smirk took over. If she knew Gary had spent the afternoon with the police, she didn’t show it.

“I’m afraid my husband is out.”

“Where can I find him?”

“He went to his mother’s,” said Alice. “Regina’s back at her house, and Gary’s helping her settle in.”

Her eyes were moist, and her head tilted and wavered. He suspected she’d been drinking. She did not care for him, he knew, but something in her posture suggested she was considering inviting him inside; then her eyes skittered away.

“I’ll walk over and see if I can catch him,” said Dante.

It did not take Dante long to figure out that Gary was not at his mother’s house either. The lights were dim, and the place was quiet. Dante cupped his hands to the front window—and after a moment or two he saw his Aunt Regina lying on the couch. The living room was dark, but the light from the kitchen fell through the archway and illuminated her features. Her mouth was open and she was lying in her clothes, asleep.

Gary wasn’t here. Dante knew the cops had called him down to the station earlier. Probably he and his lover were off somewhere licking their wounds.

Even if Alice didn’t know Gary had been hauled in for questioning, she knew about the other woman, Dante suspected. Probably she’d known for a while. It explained her foul humor, at least in part. But she shouldn’t have been surprised; he’d cheated on his first wife, too. Alice should have known because she’d been the object of desire the first time around. But Dante did not think Gary would stay out all night. Even if Alice knew about the affair, she wouldn’t like it thrown in her face. Besides, Dante knew his cousin. He was a sneak. Gary would fuck around, but he would have some kind of excuse. Out with the boys. Working late. Waiting on a late-night delivery.

So Dante walked up the hill to Montgomery Street, and his hunch proved right. Just after midnight, his cousin pulled up in his BMW; he triggered the garage door with his remote, and Dante strolled into the garage behind him, before the automatic had a chance to close.

“What are you doing here?” Gary’s eyes were wide with surprise. “If you want to talk about the will—the money—”

“Enjoy your conversation with the police?”

“That’s none of your business.”

“Cheating on your wife.”

“Listen—”

“I don’t want you going into the office tomorrow.”

“Fuck you.”

Gary tried to push past him then, but Dante wouldn’t let him. He backed his cousin against the wall. There were garden tools nearby. A rake. A shovel.

“You want me to tell Alice what’s been going on?”

“You have no right.”

“I have every right.”

There was a noise out on the street, a dog, maybe, or a raccoon, something inconsequential, but in that instant Dante turned and Gary reached for the shovel. It was a foolish thing to do. Dante hit him in the stomach. It was a quick jab, hard and without restraint. Dante hit him again, then grabbed him by the collar and pushed him to the wall. If Gary knew how to fight Dante might have been vulnerable, but Gary knew nothing. Dante would tear off his cousin’s testicles if need be.

“This is the story. There is going to be a bust down at the warehouse tomorrow. You stay away, and I can help you stay clean. Otherwise, this crap you been pulling, whatever’s been doing down at the warehouse, I can’t save you.”

“I don’t need you to save me.”

“What were you arguing about, you and Uncle Salvatore?”

“You,” he said. “I didn’t want you in the goddamn business.”