Chasing the Dragon (29 page)

“If you get this, call me,” she said.

Even so he heard the chill in her voice, there at the end: worry mixed with the suspicion he had abandoned her again.

Dante wondered if he had imagined the movement downstairs, but at the same time he was going over the geography of the living room in his head. There were too many places for a person to conceal himself. If Dante went downstairs to investigate, the advantage went to the intruder. No, he wanted the intruder to come to him. Dante wanted the visitor to think he had not noticed his presence.

Dante sat down beside the phone, remembering the elaborate games he’d played as a kid. Staging phone calls in a voice loud enough for his parents to hear. So they would think he was on his way to the library, to church, to the movies, when in fact he had other things in mind.

He dialed the number of the meteorological society, same as he had done when he was young, then put his finger down on the receiver, killing the connection. All the time with his eye on the mirror.

“Marilyn,” he said.

He paused then, trying to play it like there was someone else on the line, so his visitor would believe he was carrying on a conversation. He remembered his grandmother in the last days of her life, and his mother in her madness, talking to dead relatives, people you could not see. He knew how the phone echoed in the little house, how the mutterings and smallest noises carried everywhere.

“No, I’m fine,” he said. “I was just dozing, and I couldn’t get to the phone.”

The ruse was absurd but he went on with it, quiet now—as if listening to Marilyn on the other end. He sat poised, gun in his hand, watching the mirror. He doubted his visitor would charge the stairs. This was someone who took no chances. Who killed old men in their sleep.

“No, no. Listen—I was there at the dock when the police made the arrests—but it’s okay.” He went on for a while, then, giving his imaginary listener a truncated, tumbled version of events. “I want to tell you more, but I just took a couple of Vicodin. I hurt my arm. . . . No, no. It’s not serious. But I need to sleep. So I took something to knock me out.”

He waited a long second.

“I love you, too.”

He felt a stirring in his gut, a wash of foolishness at his performance. Then he returned to his father’s bedroom. He took some pillows and laid them end to end, covering them with the quilt, fashioning things so in the darkness it would look like there was someone lying on the bed. Then he positioned himself in the closet.

He waited.

There was a mirror on the wall opposite the bed—a companion to the one at the top of the stairs, with the same frame and the same elaborate fluting. The way it was positioned would give him an instant of warning before the killer entered the bedroom—an instant when the intruder’s shape would be illuminated in the mirror, backlit by the light coming through the window at the end of the hall.

Time passed. Twenty minutes. Thirty. An hour. Outside a blues guitar at the corner saloon hit a discordant note. The white noise on Columbus fell and rose and fell again. A drunk shouted out she’d been stabbed—and the rickshaw music faded away. There was the thin sound of something breaking, over and over, as if someone were throwing cocktail glasses from a high window. A throttled laugh. Sometime past final call, a garbage truck hit the alley—the sound of Latino men talking, rolling the cans, the hiss and clatter of the truck’s hydraulic gate.

Through all this Dante listened to the house. The shifting, the bend and creak of the building at its middle. Then—a new sound, at the bottom of the stairs: floorboards responding to pressure. A footstep. The sound moved. On the staircase now. A man with a gun, his hand on the banister. Dante tried to visualize where the intruder might be. The creaking shifted, lower, not where it had been before. When the killer reached the top of the stairs, he would see his darkened reflection in the mirror.

The Vicodin had taken effect. It eased the pain, and as Dante nodded back into narcosis, the image of the man of the top of the stairs became more vivid, the shadow approaching the vanity, walking through the mirror, into the world on the other side—then he realized with a panic he was dreaming, on the verge of crossing over, and he shook himself awake.

It was too late.

The intruder had made it to the top of the stairs, but he had not stopped, he had not lingered. He had stepped quickly down the hall and now Dante saw him in the bedroom doorway, already entering, moving with a swiftness that was surprising, extending his arm in the shooter’s motion towards the cushions Dante had formed on the bed. The shooter fired—a small blast of blue—and in that same instant seemed to understand his error: it was not a man on the bed, but pillows, bedclothes—and he glanced up, jerking his arm toward the closet just as Dante himself fired, just as the bedroom mirror caught the reflection of gunfire, sparks of starlight, blue and white in the glass, and the doorjamb shattered by Dante’s head, and the shadow over the bed hovered a moment, then fell forward. Dante emptied his gun into the prone figure, then flipped on the lights.

It was Wiesinski.

The Big Why.

Once upon a time death had been a surprise, but it didn’t surprise Dante anymore. It made a certain sense to him now, this corpse splayed out on his father’s bed, bleeding into the mattress. It tied things together—and there was a kind of dark pleasure in that, as if some secret had been revealed, even though he knew such revelations were short-lived, quickly obscured. Wiesinski. The man responsible for Strehli’s death. Who framed Dante when he tried to investigate seven years ago. Who’d shown up in New Orleans, during Mardi Gras, and fingered him for recruitment. Wiesinski, the company man. Who’d stalked Dante’s father during his final days, who’d killed his uncle. Who’d set up the Fakir sting and sent Anita Blonde to rummage his bedroom, and Ying’s place as well. The Big Why, with his twisted logic, his insatiable desires. The man who didn’t want Ru Shen’s journal revealed, because to reveal it was to show his hand behind the scenes.

But now the journal is in my possession
, Dante thought,
and I can use it to my advantage. To guarantee myself safe passage, another life. Or to keep the company at bay. To stay here
. And for the moment—sitting on the bed, leaning his head against the backboard—he imagined such a scheme might work. He would call Marilyn in the morning. He would live here in his father’s house and stroll with his hands behind his back, and the people in the neighborhood would pat him on the back, and he would be the man he had been destined to be. And he could live safe from the fear that a company man would visit him someday and put a bullet in the back of his head.

He glanced at the dead man, and something else occurred to him.

No one knows
.

He struggled to get up, but his head was heavy. He closed his eyes—only for a minute, he told himself—but then the exhaustion, the Vicodin, they came at him in waves. He fought for a minute, trying to lift his head, but gave up. Sleep was not so bad, no. The darkness was refreshing. Out to sea. The wind in his face, the spray of the black water. Marilyn by his side.

The dead man lay in his father’s bed, and Dante woke up beside him. It was late, well into the afternoon. Dante was hungry, and his mouth was dry. He went downstairs to his father’s kitchen. He fixed himself a meatball sandwich and poured himself some grappa. And he took another Vicodin.

No one had come for Dante. And he did not think they would. The police had waived jurisdiction on the warehouse sting to the Feds, and the Feds had backed off after talking to the insect.

After dark, he would have to take another trip out to the bay.

In the meantime there was cleanup to do. He dug the bullets out of the wall. Mopped the floors. Scrubbed the walls. Searched the room for scattered bits of flesh. Fortunately, Wiesinski had done most of his bleeding directly on the mattress. It took a while, it took patience—especially with his bandaged arm—but Dante dragged the mattress down to the basement. Then he dragged Wiesinski down there, as well. He loaded Wiesinski into the back of his father’s truck and put the mattress on top of the body, threw in his ruined clothes, and covered it all with a tarp.

Later that night, he took his grandfather’s boat. The night was windy but clear. He dumped Wiesinski into the blackest part of the bay.

He weighted the mattress and sunk that, too.

No one knows
.

He approached the shore. He held the journal in his hand now. His passport, his protection from the company’s revenge. It had occurred to him the company might not know about the journal. Wiesinski would not have said anything because he would not have wanted the exposure. He would have wanted to handle it on his own.

The mayor knew, but the mayor had done whatever damage he could do. He could not call Wiesinski anymore. He would have to shiver it out on his own.
I am safe
, Dante told himself. (Though there was another part of him that suspected otherwise, that knew safety was not permanent. And there would be another visitor someday, climbing those stairs as he lay sleeping.)

Dante held the journal and looked out at the shoreline, at the jagged piers and the old tower on Telegraph Hill. His father had told him that when you went after things bigger than you, it was a form of arrogance. There were things you could not expect to change. Evils you could not erase. And his grandmother, with her superstitions, waving her hands, muttering, had essentially believed the same.

Say your prayers. Invoke the gods. Hope for the best.

There was no action you could take that did not unleash another action, no meting of justice that did not bring, by way of happenstance, punishment for the innocent as well as the guilty. Because there were others behind Wiesinski, no doubt, and still others behind them.

The water was calm and black. For a moment Dante was overcome by hunger, by desire. For what, he wasn’t sure. For the old restaurants with the family around the table. For Joe DiMaggio with his arm around a big blonde. For the big-muscled fisherman wrestling a netload of fish. For the old ladies in the canneries. He saw the lights of Chinatown, serpentine, snaking over the crest, into Little Italy. Who was there to punish? Only the mayor, or men like him. Old men and their kids. Meanwhile, there was a song in the air, the crying of the gulls, the brown pelicans swooping down. There were the colored lights of pleasure crafts moored over the stumps of the old finger piers, out where the junks had used to linger. Crates of opium and perfume. It was a tangled business, the secret life of the Barbary Coast, the commerce you could not see. The commerce that made the other commerce possible. And who was to blame?

He turned to the back of the journal. The Chinese did it that way, starting at the back and writing from right to left. So he turned the book upside down and he tore out that last page, or the first, whichever it was supposed to be. He examined the torn page in his hand. He looked at the carefully brushed Chinese characters and guessed at the mystery between the lines. The secret life of Chinese laborers. Guns and drugs smuggled in container ships. A presidential candidate taking money from across the sea to turn his head the other way. A family warehouse where the shipping clerks signed off without examining the contents. Where you made a little extra money for closing your eyes. He took the page then and threw it into the sea. Then he tore out another. There was so little left of the old days, how could he betray them? The old men in the park. The hateful old woman at Serafina’s Cafe. His cousin. Grandmother Ying. He tore out another page and another. The pages swirled and disappeared into the wake. Overhead, a pelican flew high in the morning light and then dove into the water. It was a beautiful bird. Dante turned off the motor and waited for it to resurface.

An Asian steamer came through the Golden Gate. The morning ferry headed out past Alcatraz. The tourists gathered on the wharf. Dante stayed out there for a long time, becalmed, waiting—but the bird did not surface. Then he turned on the motor and brought the old felucca into port.