Chasing the Dragon (6 page)

Ying was a tall man, lanky and not particularly graceful. He had black hair. He had sinuous lips and gray eyes—a glance that was at once both reserved and probing. He was not a dapper man, but he was not slovenly either. His face was weathered and gave him the look of someone who had been out a long time in the wind.

On Grant, he turned up Fresno Street. Despite its name, Fresno was not so much a street as it was an alley—the heart of the Italian neighborhood when Ying was a kid: cats everywhere; laundry over the fire rails; and mean-as-hell Italian boys on the corners, hands in their pockets how they liked to do, knocking the old billiards about, touching their dicks. The laundry was still there, and the cats, too, but the kids nowadays were Chinese, just as mean, maybe, but quieter and less promiscuous with their hands, at least in public.

Still there were some old Italians here, he knew. Ying had been down this alley just a couple weeks back to talk to an old man who lived in one of the houses at the top of the street—and claimed someone was trying to kill him. Ordinarily those kind of calls were left to the regular beat guys, but somehow Ying had gotten the honors.

Giovanni Mancuso was the old man’s name: a wide-eyed Italian, weak at the knees—who had denied even calling when Ying came by to check on the story.

“No, not me. You make a mistake.”

“Are you sure?”

“Everything’s A-okay.”

“That’s not what you said on the phone.”

“It’s someone else scared for his life, not me,” the old man had said, smiling, laughing, panting for breath as he hung onto the doorknob. Then he had leaned back, appraising him, the way Ying remembered old Italians doing since he was a kid, surprised at his height. He realized that he could talk to this old coot till the end of time but the man would never reveal anything to him, a Chinese cop. Then Giovanni smiled with a kind of toothy pride.

“You know, my son was a cop, too.”

The old man had died a few days later, overdosing on his pain medicine. Dementia, the doctor had told Ying. Giovanni Mancuso had gone a little wacky at the end, prone to imagining things—as sometimes happened when the cancer traveled to the brain.

Ying supposed it was true, but there was a part of him that wondered. He recognized the name Mancuso from his time with SI, maybe, but he could not be sure. He rummaged through his notes to see if he could find a connection between the Mancuso family and the Wus—obsessive behavior, his wife had told him, unhealthy, to focus on these criminals—but he found nothing, and the Wu family had so many arms, so many businesses, the legitimate intertwined with the not-so-legitimate, that he wrote it off to coincidence. Then he ran a computer search and found the name of the son, the ex-policeman. Ying had still been working the Sunset District then, seven years ago, when Dante Mancuso had left the force—but it had been big news for a while.

It was funny how a career could shift on you. Ying himself had been transferred off Special Investigations back to Homicide. True, the transfer had been at his own request—and his wife’s insistence—after things had gotten ugly. He’d been investigating the Wus at the time, looking into the disappearance of a Shanghai businessman by the name of Ru Shen. That’s when the threats had started. Phone calls, his house trashed, his wife’s car smeared with pig guts. It had gotten so bad, he’d moved his family over to the East Bay.

Leaving SI had been the right thing to do, he supposed—to put himself and his family out of danger—but the truth was his wife was not satisfied. She wanted him off the force altogether, into private industry, and if not that then at least out of Chinatown.

Now, as he approached the top of Fresno Street, he was surprised to see a light on upstairs in Giovanni Mancuso’s house.

Relatives, he guessed. Maybe Giovanni’s son had returned home. The cop in disgrace, home to collect the inheritance. To sell the house.

Now Ying noticed a second figure farther up the street, like him, studying the Mancuso house. Ying stepped back in the shadows, and after a while the other person started down the hill. A woman in a black coat, short hair—but she walked by now without giving the Mancuso house another glance. A tourist, maybe, checking out the view, or the row house architecture.

Ying was about to move on when he saw a man in the upstairs window. He was looking in Ying’s direction. Not wanting to be seen, Ying instinctively stepped away, slipping a little further back into the shadows. The man disappeared, and the upstairs went dark. Ying waited a beat or two. Then he continued up the hill, embarrassed at himself, at all this cloak-and-dagger. There was no need. The old man had died in his sleep.

The little house on Fresno Street was musty inside. Dante saw immediately his father had done little, if anything, to the place since he’d left town. Everything was the same as always, though a little dingier, as in some fading Polaroid: the double-hung curtains on the windows, yellowing the light; the chairs draped with lace; the ancient carpet, handwoven, lions and jackals in the tapestry border. There was a ceramic pig on the mantle, and a humpback sofa in the living room, and family pictures everywhere. In the den, an RCA. No cable, of course. Just jackrabbit ears and an antenna wire that hung out the window to catch the signal from Mount Davidson.

His father had a woman come in once a week to wipe the dust, but it seemed everything was in the same place as the day Dante’s mother had been buried.

Downstairs, in the basement, Dante found a casement window with a broken hasp—as if someone had forced it open. Most likely it had been his father, he guessed, after locking himself out. Dante pushed the casement into place and went back up. There was a mirror on the second-floor landing, so Dante could see himself growing larger with each step. Dante’s grandmother had used to cross herself whenever she climbed the stairs, mumbling some cautionary phrase her own grandmother had mumbled before her: a protection against the world behind the looking glass.

Nanna Pellicano had heard voices sometimes as well. People from beyond the grave. The devil. His mother had used to joke about it—
runs in the family
—but sometime in midlife the voices had started to speak to her as well. Conspiracies revealed by the laundry detergent. By the noodles as they boiled. By the pipes moaning in the wall. Nanna Pellicano had known how to deal with such things. Counting to seven on her fingers, then seven again. Invoking the saints. His mother on the other hand had no belief in such things. She died in the asylum.

Tomorrow Dante had work to do. He would get rid of the rental car. He would pick up a bag out at Federal Express, then taxi down to the Fillmore District and meet with Williams. He would give him the cash from the bag and set the sting in motion. Then a few days later he would walk into the Wu Benevolent Society and make contact with Mason Wu. Dante’s role in all this seemed simple. The details had been worked out by an advance contact, someone the principals trusted. But somehow he doubted things would turn out simple.

Inside the company there were layers within layers. Headquarters had its primary network of agents, all accountable in some way, under the government wing. There was another network a step removed, people contacted via proxy, paid by secondary funding. People such as himself, who worked on projects from which the government wanted a certain distance. Sometimes lines were crossed, though, and it was hard to know on which side you stood, and whether the intentions of those who spoke to you were exactly as they seemed.

There was a mirror in his father’s room, too. Mirrors everywhere. He lit up one of the old man’s cigars and studied himself. His parents’ wedding pictures were tucked into the edges along the frame, and a picture of Dante, too, when he’d first joined the force. In the mirror, he could see the open bedroom closet: the old man’s clothes and his mother’s dresses still hanging alongside. His father had never thrown her wardrobe out.

Dante ambled down to the hall window. He used to stand here when he was a kid. You could see the neon down on Grant, and Coit Tower up on the hill, and old lady Musso with her big tits washing dishes in the window across the way.

He heard the floorboards creak behind him. There were times when he wondered if he, too, were prone to the family disease.

Ghosts were real
, Nanna Pellicano had liked to say.

You could hear them in the creaking of the floors, and you could feel them pass through you, and you could see them in the faces of your children, all those ancestors peering back.

Just as he was about to step away, Dante glimpsed a figure in the alley below—a shadow retreating into the alcove—and at the same moment, up at the corner, a woman in a dark coat, head bowed, crossed the street. Instinctively Dante moved away from the window: The hall light illuminated him from behind, making him visible from the street. He killed the light and edged back to the window.

After a beat or two a man emerged from the alley and headed up the hill. The woman had already disappeared. Dante could not be sure if the appearance of either figure was a matter of concern, but he felt the hackles rise on his neck. He went back into his father’s bedroom. Dante let the cigar burn in the ashtray and lay back all the way on the bed. He unbuttoned his shirt, removed the gun from its holster, and lay there with the gun resting on his belly as he listened to the sounds of the floorboards, the creaking he remembered from childhood.

He fell asleep with the gun on his chest.

The Fillmore District had its ghosts, too. It had been a neighborhood of old Victorians. Ornate as hell, ramshackle, decaying grandly along the avenues. Filled with transplants from Louisiana and the Deep South: dirt farmers turned dockhands, shipbuilders, porters on the railroad; women in flowered blouses and tight skirts, hair slicked with straightener; little girls in pinafores. A neighborhood of barbecue joints and jazz clubs and tenements and corner churches. Streets where the street cleaners never came. Men doing the New Orleans mambo, the Atlanta chicken fry, the Detroit Staggerlee. A mosaic, full of this, full of that, spreading from Hayes Valley all the way out to Geary. Then came the change. Instituted from on high with the best of intentions, or the worst of intentions, depending upon whom you talked to, but either way the change came. The best of the old houses—the ones with sound timbers—were sold at auction, loosened from their foundations and dragged on wide-bed trailers up to Pacific Heights. Everything else was torn down. Bulldozers pushed it over and the government built public housing. Out Laguna. Up Hayes. At the Heights on Webster, in the shadow of the U.S. Mint.

The meeting place was up a dead-end street that overlooked the projects. There were old gangbangers hanging out nearby. Men in their thirties, burned out, dressed in baggies that had been hip a decade before, cutting edge—but the men were clichés now, hanging around in their corny clothes, caps twisted bill backward.

Nonetheless, they might be watching him, Dante knew. They might be the eyes, as the expression went. When you made a drop like this, there were always eyes.

Williams’s place was at the top, up a narrow staircase. At length a man opened the door. Maybe thirty-five years old, a little bit heavy, he had a real ordinary quality about him and dressed in a regular kind of way: jeans, a plaid shirt, loafers. He did not look like a drug dealer so much as the owner of a hardware store. But Williams had served time, Dante knew, and he was affiliated with another ex-con by the name of Yusef Fakir. Fakir was the man the company really wanted. He had been associated with left-wing politics in his youth, out to break the chains, tear down the wall, but how it ended up was in armed robbery. He was suspected of killing a county judge, though no one had been able to prove it. Either way, Fakir had done his time and was now a preacher for a local offshoot of the Nation of Islam down in Cole Valley: preaching the gospel, telling the congregation the CIA was behind the drugs in the black community. Meanwhile, he was pushing glory himself, building a bank account.

Or this was the story Anita Blonde had told him, back in New Orleans, under the statue of Andrew Jackson, in the square where they used to auction off the slaves. Who knew how much of it was true.

To Dante’s surprise, there was no one in the apartment with Williams, or at least there didn’t appear to be. But perhaps this was not so surprising. There was no transfer of drugs going on, nothing for Williams to protect. The risk was all on Dante’s side.

“What’s in the case?” Williams asked.

“I think you have a pretty good idea.”

Williams unzipped the bag and peered at the money.

“How much?”

“Half.”

“When do we get the rest?”

“On delivery.”

He and Williams sat down at a kitchen table in a bay window. It was a modest apartment, with furniture that was old but well kept. There were some pictures of kids up on the mantle, and a lot of little homey touches. There was something incongruous here. He doubted the apartment belonged to Williams. To some parishioner down in Cole Valley, maybe. A woman, from the look of things—someone with a vanished husband and a couple of kids—who more than likely didn’t quite know what Williams was up to.

The bag rested on the table between them.

“So what’s your story?”

“Story? I don’t know what you mean,” said Dante.

“You’re an ex-cop, aren’t you?”

“Ex. That’s the important part.”

“Can’t you find other work?”

Dante said nothing.

“I mean you’re a white man, local boy. Seems like you could find yourself some respectable work.”

Williams was pulling Dante’s chain, goading him. But there was a point underneath, maybe. Williams was letting him know he had his suspicions.

“I had to leave my old profession,” Dante smiled. “But I’ve been compensated. Traveling around, bringing things in and out of the country. Now I’m home. And I want to make my own mark.”

Williams smiled in return. It was a wry smile, and the look of the hardware clerk was gone. He had instead the look of a man who knew there was something else beneath the surface, and who knew that you knew, too, and who didn’t want to be taken for a fool.