San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics

by Peter Maravelis

  “He’s going to Alaska, and from there to Seattle. Too hot here, if you know what I mean. He gave me some money for you.” Rudy handed her an envelope and a note: Come to Seattle. After Alaska, I’ll meet you there. We will renew our sumpaan there, our vow. Write me. Alaska Packers Assoc., South Naknek, Alaska.

  “You are still my guardian angel, Rudy,” Nena said in Filipino. “Maraming salamat, kuya. I don’t know what else to … what we could have done without …”

  “It’s nothin’,” Rudy answered casually, and with a white man’s accent continued, “wala yan.” The strumming of a guitar floated up from the street outside Nena’s window. “I’d give my right arm to play guitar like that,” Rudy added, turning to go, “but then, of course, what would I play with?”

  * * *

  The King Butcher always slept with his blade. It was a tradition that went along with the job in Alaska. And during the day he was next to the butchering machines in the Fish House, out in the open, unlike most of the other workers, the regular butchers and the slimers, who were always cooped up in noise and wet and slime and stink. The King Butcher was the only person who worked with the king salmon. And he cut them by hand. They were too big for the machines. The machines catered to the much more numerous and expensive red sockeye. There is always a story about these characters. They say this King Butcher used his own blade to slice the king salmon, instead of using the one that the company supplied. But he got the job done. So no one asked.

  * * *

  Nena, alone in her room at the International Hotel, looked at the newspaper spread out on her small table. It was the previous week’s Chronicle. She was wondering if she should go to Seattle and have the baby there, or wait for word from Kip. Maybe if she waited she would hear from him and receive more precise directions. As it was, it had already been a week and she had not heard a word. Kip should be leaving Alaska after a month, so she decided she’d better go there now. She had a Seattle number that Kip had left her, so she was sure his people would take care of her there. She got up and brushed aside the newspaper and scrambled for some pad with numbers, tore off the top piece, and left the rest on the newspaper itself, not far from the small article, a filler:

  July 8, 1966: In a bar called Blanco’s on Kearny Street, three men were stabbed by a single butcher knife, two fatally; the surviving man walked away after warning the crowd to keep their silence.

  INVISIBLE TIME

  BY JANET DAWSON

  Union Square

  (Originally published in 1998)

  Greta watched the front door of the bakery on Geary Street, choosing her moment. When it came, it was brought by a middle-aged woman who wore a business suit and running shoes.

  The woman stopped at the window, eyed the tempting display of cakes, cookies, and breads, then moved toward the door. Greta slipped up behind the woman, a pace back from the leather briefcase that swung from her left hand. The woman pushed open the door, her entry ringing the bell above the door.

  The bakery clerk was a gangly young man wearing a silly white paper hat perched on his brown hair. He looked up from his post behind the counter and smiled at the woman. He didn’t see Greta.

  Fine. That’s what she had in mind. Now that she was inside, Greta hovered near the door, keeping one eye on the grown-ups and the other eye on the bakery’s wares. Picking a target was tough. The goods were piled alluringly on counters and shelves and stand-alone displays. Finally she spotted her best shot, bags of day-old cookies mounded high in a basket at the edge of a low table, just a few steps from the door that led out to the busy sidewalk.

  The bakery clerk’s head was down. He was busy boxing up a cake for a customer, a big man with a fat belly. Looked like he got plenty to eat, Greta told herself as she edged closer to the basket. Unlike some people she could name.

  The customer Greta had followed into the bakery stood on the other side of the table, examining the loaves of dayold bread stacked there as she waited her turn at the counter. She hummed to herself and tapped one finger on the edge of the basket that held the cookies. Greta kept her head down, her blue eyes constantly shifting as she observed the bakery’s occupants. The woman moved closer. Greta thought she smelled good, like flowers, but she didn’t smell as good as the combined perfume of what came out of the bakery’s ovens.

  Handing the clerk a twenty, the big man put a proprietary hand on top of the box containing his cake. While the clerk looked down at the drawer of the cash register, Greta snaked her hand toward the cookies. She grabbed two bags, whirled, and made for the door.

  “Hey, little girl,” the woman in running shoes said, sounding surprised and shocked as she moved to stop this theft in progress. The little girl shoved the woman hard, knocking her into the table, and kept going, darting past a trio of teenagers who’d just opened the bakery door wide, giving Greta an open shot to freedom.

  Once she was out on the sidewalk, she dodged to the right and ran up Geary Street, against the tide of pedestrians heading down toward Market Street, where BART and the San Francisco Municipal Railway would take them home. Intent on their own destinations, they took no notice of the skinny little girl in baggy blue jeans and a red sweatshirt, her dirty blond hair spilling to her shoulders.

  Hank was waiting for her in Union Square, on the side close to the entrance to the Saint Francis Hotel and the cable cars that clanged up and down Powell Street. At his feet was a brown nylon bag with a zipper and a shoulder strap. It contained everything they owned—clothes, a couple of beat-up stuffed animals, and a picture of Mom.

  “You get something?” he asked eagerly, brown eyes too big in his pinched face. He looked far more streetwise than a five-year-old boy should.

  “Yeah. Cookies. Two bags. Looks like one of ’em is chocolate chip and the other is maybe oatmeal raisin. Did you get anything?”

  “Pizza,” he said triumphantly, displaying a dented cardboard box. “With pepperoni. Some guy was sitting on that bench over there eating it, and he didn’t eat it all. He was gonna throw it in the trash. But he saw me watching him, so he gave it to me. Look, there’s two whole pieces left.”

  “All right!” They high-fived it.

  Then they hunkered down on the bench to eat their booty. People hurrying through the square paid no mind to the two children, any more than they did to the pigeons congregating around the statue of Victory atop the column in the center of the square. As she ate, Greta watched shoppers laden with bags scurry from store to store. Hank focused on the food with the single-minded appetite of a little boy who never gets enough to eat.

  The store windows in Macy’s and Saks were full of glittering decorations, red, green, gold, and silver, signaling the approaching holiday season, and there was a big lighted Christmas tree in the square. But the passage of time meant little to Greta. She only knew that the days were shorter than they had been. The sunshine, what little there was of it, had turned thin and weak. Nights were longer and it was harder for her and her brother to stay warm. Today the wind had turned cold. From what little she could see of the late afternoon sky, it was dark gray.

  It was going to rain, she was sure of it. She didn’t know what they’d do if it rained. They’d been sleeping in doorways and alleys all over the downtown area, constantly moving so the cops wouldn’t find them during their periodic sweeps to rid the streets of human litter.

  If it rains we’ll have to go inside somewhere, Greta told herself. But it wasn’t safe to go down inside the BART station to spend the night. The BART cops would catch them. And there were too many weirdos down there already. Mom had always told Greta to take care of her little brother and to stay away from the weirdos.

  She was doing the best she could, but she didn’t know how long she could keep it up. She was careful to limit their range to the Union Square area, north of Market Street. That’s where the nice stores, restaurants, and hotels were. Greta felt safer where the people were better-dressed. Sometimes those people gave them money, or food, like Hank
’s pizza benefactor. South of Market and the Tenderloin were different, full of run-down buildings and scary people who would take their stuff, even during the day, though it was more dangerous after dark.

  Greta couldn’t remember when Mom left. A few weeks, a month, two months, it didn’t matter. After a few days, the hours all ran together, like a stream of dirty water chasing debris down the sewer grate. She only remembered that it didn’t used to be like this.

  Once she’d had a father, though lately it was hard to recall what he’d looked like. They’d lived in a nice apartment, two bedrooms so Greta had a room of her own. She had a baby doll and a crib her dad had made for her, pretty dresses. She remembered all of this. Or maybe she thought she remembered, because Mom had told her.

  She knew that one day her father hadn’t come home. Although it was a long time ago, she remembered that day and the days afterward quite clearly. Mom crying, people bringing food to the apartment. They talked about God’s will and a car crash. Greta didn’t understand how or why God could have fixed it so that her father never came home, but no one bothered to explain it to her. She only knew that Mom missed him something terrible.

  That was about the time Greta started kindergarten. Mom had a job working a cash register at some store, but it didn’t pay much. Not enough to make ends meet, Mom told Greta. At the time Greta wasn’t sure what that meant, but now the ends didn’t meet at all, she knew. That was when she and Mom went to live with Grandma.

  Greta didn’t much like Grandma. The old woman seemed as ancient as a dinosaur, and not even half as cuddly as the stuffed stegosaurus her mom had given her. Grandma coughed a lot and smelled bad, puffing on foul-smelling cigarettes even if she did have some sickness with a long name. She had a sharp tongue on her, too, one she used to peel layers off Greta’s mom, until Mom didn’t have much spirit left.

  Then Mom met Hank’s dad and got some of the sparkle back in her eyes. Of course, Grandma kicked them out because Mom took up with Hank’s dad. He was a different color than Mom, and Grandma said bad things about him, but Greta liked him a lot. He drove a cab and brought her chocolate, her favorite. And when Hank was born, a year or so later, she thought the baby was beautiful. She loved him and swore she’d always take care of him, no matter what. She just didn’t think it would be this soon.

  Hank didn’t remember his dad much. He was not quite three when the cabdriver was shot to death. Greta heard one of the other cabbies at the funeral say Hank’s dad should have given the money to the punk who pulled a gun on him late one night. But Greta figured maybe the punk would have shot him anyway.

  Hank’s dad had left something called life insurance, which was kind of strange to Greta, seeing he was dead. She’d have rather had Hank’s dad instead of money. It hadn’t been much anyway, and after a while there wasn’t any left.

  She was nine and in the fourth grade when Hank’s dad got killed. She liked school, but the rest of her life was hard. She had to take care of Hank and Mom both. Hank because he was just a toddler, and Mom because she was drinking cheap, sweet-smelling wine in big bottles. Greta would come home from school and find her passed out on the bed of the tiny apartment, Hank roaming around on the floor with soiled pants.

  Greta stayed home from school more often, missing classes. No one ever seemed to notice she was gone. Mom got fired from her job at the store and didn’t bother to get another job. She said she’d rather die than go back to live with Grandma, but as it turned out, Grandma had died by then and left all her money to some cousin.

  They were evicted from that apartment. They moved to a run-down rickety hotel in the Tenderloin, where all three of them shared one room and a bath. Greta stopped going to school altogether, because looking after Mom and Hank was a full-time job. She’d cook their meager meals on a hot plate, put Mom to bed when she drank too much, and read to Hank so he could at least learn his letters. Then she’d put Hank to bed and try to get some sleep herself, which was hard to do. Down on the street, music spilled from the bars, and the hookers called to men cruising by in cars. The hookers worked for a tall man called a pimp, who hung out on the corner and kept an eye on the girls. Sometimes he hit them, and Greta would hear screams and shouts. She’d cover her ears with her hands, trying to keep the sounds out.

  Then Mom started bringing men home, men who gave her money. Did that make her a hooker, too? Greta didn’t like to think about that. All she knew was that Mom would shut Hank and Greta out of the ugly room. They’d huddle together on the stairs that stank of urine, dodging the other residents of the hotel, those scary-looking weirdos Mom had warned Greta about in those few times when she wasn’t giggly and woozy from that stuff she was drinking.

  One day Mom left. She said she was going to the store on the corner to get a bottle. But she never came back.

  The manager of the hotel told Greta he was going to call social something to come and get the two children. But social something sounded like cops to Greta. She didn’t want to go to jail or wherever the cops would take them. She packed what little they had in the nylon bag and they left. Now they lived on the streets and it was getting harder to find food and stay warm.

  Hank, his stomach filled by the pepperoni pizza and the cookies Greta had stolen from the bakery, drowsed next to her, leaning on her shoulder. Greta put one arm around him as she savored the last bite of her chocolate chip cookie. Then she felt someone’s eyes on her and looked quickly around, her senses honed by weeks of surviving on the urban landscape.

  There he was, a man, staring at them across Union Square. She’d seen the man before, staring at them like this. He wore shapeless green coveralls, and stood hunched over the handle of a metal shopping cart. Inside the cart was a black plastic bag that clinked and clattered. Greta knew it was full of cans and bottles. The man had a black beard and a brown knit cap that didn’t quite disguise his long black hair.

  Greta didn’t like the way he was always watching them. Then the man pushed his shopping cart toward them, the wheels squeaking. She jumped to her feet and shook Hank awake.

  “Invisible time,” she whispered.

  That meant it was time for them to disappear into the shadows. She picked up the nylon bag and slung it over her shoulder, then took Hank’s hand. The two children darted down the steps that led out of the square, across Geary Street, just as the green “walk” signal changed to a flashing amber “don’t walk.” As they angled to the left, Greta glanced back. The man in coveralls was following them, pushing his shopping cart into the crosswalk, ambling slowly as though he didn’t care that the light had changed to red and the people in the going-home cars were honking at him.

  Greta tugged Hank’s arm and the two children rushed along Geary, dodging pedestrians. They turned right on Stockton, heading toward Market. Finally they pushed through a pair of big glass double doors and entered the first floor of the Virgin Megastore, sound pulsating around them.

  They were in familiar territory now. The store was one of their favorite hangouts. It was brightly lit and full of loud music, where customers bought CDs, tapes, videos, and books. It was open late, and the children frequently spent the evening here, walking the aisles, riding the escalator up and down, and using the restroom on the third floor. Greta figured they’d lost the man with the shopping cart, but even if they hadn’t, he wouldn’t be able to follow them in here.

  “I’m sleepy,” Hank told her on their fourth trip up the escalator. “Can we find a place to spend the night soon?”

  Greta was tired, too, but she didn’t like to admit it. Watching and moving all the time took its toll, but she was afraid to let her guard down. She wished they could find a spot somewhere in this bright, warm store, but she knew that was a bad idea.

  “Let’s go to the bathroom first,” she said. “Then we’ll find a place.”

  They detoured to the third floor, past the videos and into the bookstore. The restrooms were located down a short hallway near the store’s café. Greta watched Hank dart into
the men’s room, then pushed open the door marked with a woman’s silhouette. Sometimes, if they didn’t know the place, she’d take him with her into the women’s side, where they’d barricade themselves into the larger stall usually reserved for handicapped people. But they’d been here before and hadn’t had any problems. Greta felt as safe here as she felt anywhere, which wasn’t saying much.

  When she came out of the restroom Hank was waiting for her, bouncing in time to the music that blared from the overhead speakers. Greta shifted the nylon bag from one shoulder to the other and they walked toward the café.

  “You kids okay?”

  The speaker was a young woman, wearing thick, clunky shoes and black tights under a short black skirt. Above that she wore a tight black T-shirt with the store’s name printed across her tiny round breasts. Her hair was cut short and dyed an odd bright pink. She had little gold rings arrayed up and down both ears, and a glittery jewel in her nose. Greta had seen her before, once working behind a cash register on the second floor and another time waiting tables in the store’s café.

  Hank stared at her, transfixed. Greta started looking around for the quickest and shortest way out.

  “I’ve seen you before,” the young woman said, talking quietly as though she were afraid they would bolt. “You come in and wander around for hours. Don’t you have any place to stay?” When neither of the children answered, she continued, her voice low and seductive. “I’ll bet you’re hungry. Would you like something to eat? Come back to the café. I’ll give you some gingerbread.”

  From the corner of her eye, Greta saw something move, a skinny form in a T-shirt that resolved itself into another store employee, this one a young man with white hair. Trap, she thought. They wouldn’t be able to come in here again. If they ever got out.

  “Invisible time,” she said with a hiss.

  She grabbed Hank’s arm and ran straight at the young woman, who held out her arms as though to catch them. Greta shoved her hard and the young woman fell back against a bin full of CDs. The young man who’d come to her assistance looked startled as the children darted past him. As they ran toward the down escalator, Greta heard voices behind her, all jumbled as the two sales clerks spoke together.