Chasing the Dragon (7 page)

“All right,” Williams said. “We’ve got a mule coming.”

“When?”

“One week. Maybe two.”

“What’s the source?”

“Colombia. The Medellin fields.”

Dante nodded. He knew the trade route. There was a certain irony in it. In Bangkok, he’d been working to infiltrate the operation in northern Thailand—or so they told him—but even then the South American cartels had been moving their fields out of cocoa into opium, undercutting the Asians in the U.S. market.

He had sampled the wares himself more than once. In Bangkok, yes, of course, but in New Orleans, too. Down Esplanade, through the iron gates. Behind the mausoleum walls. You found dealers, people on their knees.
Chasing the dragon
, as the saying went. Unfurling the aluminum foil, lighting the powder, and breathing in the smoke. Trying to get every bit of that smoke before it vanished. Pursuing it with your whole being.

“We don’t want you selling it here,” Williams pointed out the window.

“I understand.”

“No, you don’t understand. We don’t want it here in these projects—or anywhere in the Fillmore, or Valencia Gardens.”

“We don’t have any intention to sell it here.”

“Sell it to the Chinese. Sell it to the goddamn Italians. Sell it to the goddamn Haight, but stay out of nigger country, you understand.”

“You protecting the good folks in the ’hood? Or keeping that market for yourself?”

“Take it out to the suburbs.”

Something was wrong. On an assignment like this, it took time to penetrate to the point where he was now. You did not waltz into the inner circle so easily, no matter the advance work. The Nation recruited out of the black prisons, and there was no reason for them to trust him. So Dante wondered about Williams. What kind of role was this man playing? You never knew on these kinds of things, because oftentimes the company had its people in roles you didn’t expect, playing every side against the middle, operating on hidden logic. Or on no logic at all.

Williams grabbed the gym bag and zippered it shut. He hadn’t bothered to count.

“I’ll call you when the shipment comes in.”

“You bring the boss when you come.”

“What are you talking about?”

“When we make the trade, you bring Fakir. To the family warehouse—that’s where we’ll do the deal. My partners will be there to check the purity.”

“That’s not usual. He doesn’t associate himself.”

“We’re laying the groundwork for the future. If Fakir doesn’t come, then nothing happens. No deal.”

Williams shrugged. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“If Fakir can’t be there, we might as well end this now. My partners want to meet him.”

Williams swelled a little. “He’ll be there.”

Dante left. This was the most dangerous moment. He had dropped off his money. If Williams had no intention of working a deal—if there was no dope, no connection—then there was a chance that he might have already made arrangements, given one of his buddies on the street here a few dollars to take care of Dante, to end the business while Williams himself slipped out with the money. Dante studied the gangbangers, and he scanned the windows up above. He decided to double back through the service alley, into the projects. Around the corner, a boy stepped out of a stairwell in front of him.

“You want something?” the boy asked.

“No.”

“I can get you anything you want. Horse, rock, Liquid X—hell, you want that yuppie shit, I can get that for you, too.”

“No.”

“Acid, dope?”

“No thanks. Not today.”

“Fuck you, then.” The boy planted his feet wide. He was a small-time dealer, street level, high himself and ready to explode. “What the hell you doing here?”

“Fuck you, too,” said Dante.

Then he showed the boy his gun and kept on walking. He knew better than to look back.

In The Beach, Dante stopped at Cassinelli’s corner drug for a pack of cigarettes. By the counter, same as the old days, he saw a drop box for sending your photos over to Monaco’s Lab. He remembered the envelope in his jacket pocket, the one his uncle had given him with the family pictures, and he dropped the negatives in the box. Then he walked up the hill past Marilyn’s house and stood looking at the bay. The sky was darkening and the wind was picking up. There was a light on inside Marilyn’s house. He lingered for a moment. He wanted to see her, but there were a lot of things he wanted. To walk down Esplanade. To kneel among the statuary, the tombs littered with aluminum foil. He decided to get a drink instead and headed down the hill to the Naked Moon.

All things are interconnected, even if by happenstance. Maybe once, when things were simpler, it was possible to divine the deeper intention, but now the connections . . . they are too many, too random. There is for example the black gangster on the street, the little fuck whose uncle had worked years ago in the Mancuso warehouse—and whom Dante’s mother had admired once as an infant in a carriage—but there is no way to know these connections. Just as there is no way for Dante to know, as he takes a seat at the Naked Moon, that Marilyn is at that moment packing her organza blouse and her silk skirt, getting ready for her trip to Sonoma with Mora the next day—but in the middle of packing she goes to the bottom shelf of the bookcase, looking for a picture from seven years ago. Just as there is no way to know that Uncle Salvatore is in heated conversation with his son Gary, telling him how he will meet with Dante tomorrow afternoon to discuss the family estate. And at the mention of Dante’s name Gary feels a sickness in his stomach. Meantime the Chinese detective drags out an old file, and Love Wu sits in his wheelchair on a balcony overlooking Chinatown, and Dante watches the girls at the Naked Moon, trying to fight off a craving rising in his chest, drinking, then drinking some more, eventually returning home, lying in his father’s bed, sweating as he used to sweat in the Ninth Ward, waking up to an image of the Bangkok girl with her body slashed, his mind skittering to the Strehli case, to Marilyn, to his uncle’s odd behavior, the convergence of past and present, a deeper meaning, connections he is able to fathom just for an instant, or so he believes, at the edge of sleep, but then he awakes and the understanding all vanishes. He counts on his fingers, mutters, and in a fugitive moment even crosses himself in the dark. Then at midnight, he goes out to the family warehouse. To make sure that the layout is as he remembered, and nothing has changed.

Uncle Salvatore lived up the steep side of Telegraph Hill, in a double-story Edwardian that looked back over Vallejo Gulch. It was the same house his uncle had lived in for the past thirty years. To reach it, Dante climbed the Filbert Steps, where more than a few old-timers had had heart attacks, the blood rushing to their heads as they plodded up the hill, stubborn as donkeys, one foot in front of the other, carrying in paper sacks their groceries and their bottles of wine.

Better to drop dead, your heart beating like a cement mixer inside your head, than give a goddamn taxi driver four bucks to take you two and a half blocks.

The Widow Bolinni lived at the crest of the hill, across from his uncle. She’d been a peeper, always at the window. Judging from the curtains, the yellowing lace, she still lived there now. Dante climbed up his uncle’s stairs. The front door was ajar, but that wasn’t unusual. Aunt Regina often opened the door to let in the air, despite her husband’s objection that it might let in other things as well.

Dante knocked. When no one answered, he rang the bell.

“Uncle Salvatore,” he called.

There was no answer, but this did not surprise him. The stairs were around back, off the kitchen, and his uncle’s office was at the top of those stairs, toward the rear of the house. And Aunt Regina, he knew, was on her weekly visit across the bay, to her sister in Alameda.

The house was bigger than his father’s house—light and full of air. There were none of Grandmother Pellicano’s talismans here, and not much in the way of old world Italiana. Aunt Regina was a modern woman who did not like her place to look like a museum.

In the kitchen, Dante found the back door open, as well. He stood on the rear landing and noticed that the gate leading into the alley was thrown wide. Dante had an ill feeling in his gut that he told himself was foolishness, paranoia, based on nothing, too many years in the company.

Upstairs, he found his uncle.

The old man lay on the floor, with his feet straddled wide on the imported carpet. The air smelled of cordite. The room around him was in disarray, papers and books scattered everywhere.

Uncle Salvatore had been shot in the head, and there was a large amount of blood, as yet uncongealed. The skin had lost its pink, but the extremities did not yet have the mottled look that came when the blood settles into the lowest parts of the body.

After his years in Homicide, Dante was familiar with crime scenes. Maybe it was because the professional part of him took over. He knew better than to touch anything. He did not want to jeopardize the evidence, or somehow implicate himself. From the looks of things, the wound was fresh, the killing very recent. And something else: there was a great deal of splatter, but no smearing. It suggested that the visitor had searched the room before the shooting. Otherwise the blood droplets would lay on top of the scattered papers.

Dante took out his gun. He searched all the rooms, but found no one.

The killer had left through the back door, Dante surmised, through the alley.

If Dante called the police, he would be in for a lot of questions. He did not want the attention. The company had him here on assignment, and it would be best to keep his distance.

He holstered his gun. He had disturbed nothing, touched nothing. The problem was to leave without being seen. In the alley, just beyond the back gate, a tree crew had just pulled up, going after an old Bay Laurel in a nearby yard. So Dante went out the front.

He left the front door ajar, just as it had been. He guessed that the killer, whoever it was, had stuck the gun in Uncle Salvatore’s face as soon as he opened the door. Bossed him into the house. Sat him down while he searched the room.

The street was deserted, and Dante was glad for that. As he hit the sidewalk he glanced up at the Widow Bolinni’s. One of the lace panels parted, then fell closed.

And he knew he had been seen.

PART TWO

Ying should have been at home hours ago, in his little house in El Cerrito with the Queen Palm out front. He should have taken the five o’clock tube under the bay. Then he would have been home when the call came, home with his wife, Lei, and their two kids, and somebody else would have been assigned to the case. Instead he’d worked late, then dallied in Chinatown, stopping in Portsmouth Square to watch some old bachelors from Guangdong haggle over a game of go. Afterward he’d doubled back to his grandmother’s house in Winter Alley.

His grandmother’s place was tiny, and the rooms were small, closet-sized. A fire escape jagged to the rooftop. On more than one occasion Ying had folded the escape ladder back up because the gangbangers in the neighborhood were always yanking it down, using it as a way onto the roof. There was a small desk in one of the rooms, and a bed where Ying slept when his work kept him in the city.

About a year ago, he had walked in to find the upstairs room trashed, his files scattered and the bed overturned. Whether it had been the doing of the neighborhood gangbangers or someone else, he didn’t know. It had happened when he was still with SI, investigating the disappearance of Ru Shen.

Today, his grandmother was not in the front room, but no doubt she had already sensed his presence. Grandmother Ying could see very little and hear even less, or so the doctor said; but it rarely happened that Ying took her by surprise. She was attuned to the subtle vibrations of the house and sensed in advance, it seemed, his key turning in the front lock. By the time he reached the little kitchen, she had already turned in her chair. As he stepped toward her, she offered him her cheek. Since he was a boy, it had been their greeting; he pressed his cheek against hers and whispered her name.