There was a house phone on the wall near the elevator.
“What are you doing?”
“I thought I’d call. Let them know we’re coming.”
“I thought you had the key?”
“I do.”
“Then there’s no need, is there?”
The girl seemed hesitant. “I guess not.”
“A surprise party, like you said.”
They stepped into the elevator, and he sensed her nervousness and her youth. It occurred to him that she was exactly what she seemed. A girl alone in this elevator, this tight space. A young woman who had been through this kind of thing before, taking strange men up into hotel rooms, not knowing exactly what lay ahead, whether it would be a threesome, or two couples, or just a watcher, some guy going at her while the other got hot in the corner, just looking. Sometimes it was the other way around: Sometimes they wanted you to watch them.
Some hotels in the city, they had cameras to prevent molestations in the elevators, but not here. He leaned in toward the woman. She mistook his gesture and shifted in her skirt, as if he might want to lift it up.
“You can touch me if you want.”
“Who sent you?”
“No names.”
“A man or a woman?”
“A surprise,” she said. “Remember?”
“You said friends…. There was more than one?”
The way she looked at him, he saw that she thought this maybe was part of the foreplay, that it got him excited, talking about this kind of thing.
“I was told you would be like this. That you would want to know everything.”
The elevator had arrived, but he didn’t let her out. He pushed her up against the controls, not too hard but hard enough. She misinterpreted the motion anyway and touched him down low.
“Describe him,” Dante said.
“Him?”
“Or her. If that’s the way it was.”
“Who said it was just one?”
“How many?”
“You’re kinky.”
“How many?” he repeated. He pushed her hand away, grabbing her more roughly now. The girl’s eyes widened, and he saw the flicker of panic.
“As many as you want. A man alone. A woman. Three, five … What the fuck do you want?”
What he did next, maybe it was magnanimous. Because he suspected this girl did not know what was going on and there was no sense getting her involved. Or because he was getting aroused in a way that had some ugliness to it, and he did not want to walk that line. Or because deep down, he knew it didn’t matter. Whoever had set this up with her, however many, he would find out in a minute, as soon as he walked into that room.
“Go downstairs,” he said.
“Three hundred,” she said. “I was promised three hundred.”
“I paid Gino.”
“The money you gave Gino is for Gino. I need mine.”
“I don’t have that much.”
He gave her a half-dozen twenties. The young woman took the money and put it in her purse. It was not a rushed gesture, but slow, even delicate. He thought of Marilyn, with David Lake, in the seven-hundred-count Egyptian-cotton sheets, down there in Santa Barbara, with the olive trees in the hills under the coastal sun. The girl glanced back up at him, subdued, the lips full, chin down but eyes up. She clicked the purse, stepping closer as she did so, brushing against him, and he could see, by the turn of the lips, that she regarded him as a fool, paying for something he wasn’t going to get. That part of her had also liked the rough treatment.
“Go.”
“This wasn’t the agreement. It was three hundred.”
“That’s all I have with me. Give me your address. I’ll give you the rest tomorrow.”
“No, you won’t.”
“Call the cops, if you have a problem. Or I can just call the front desk.”
She twisted her lips, surly as hell, then changed her manner altogether, wondering if he was one of those, the kind of customer who would pay even if he didn’t want to fuck.
“You can find me at Gino’s,” she said. “You want to do this again.”
“Wait a minute.”
“What?”
“The room key.”
Dante waited until the girl was in the elevator, then went down the hall. He still didn’t know about her. His old friends at the company were insidious with their games. His guess, she was no agent, just a pony, as the expression went, someone the agent had given a few dollars to carry him in. It was possible he was wrong, but he didn’t think so. Most likely, she was out on the street with her money, headed not for Gino’s but toward some street corner where she could get more powder. He’d seen how it went, during his days with vice. If she couldn’t find anything close by, there was a twenty-four-hour gallery down under the freeway, the other side of Market. The girls with hard habits, they sold themselves on the street corner across from the freeway, keeping everything convenient. For a moment, despite himself, he was tempted to go with her.
Instead he slid the magnetic card into the lock and pushed open the door.
The room was dark. There was no one inside.
The sheets had been turned down, a couple of chocolates on the pillows, but there was no sign that anyone had been around.
He went to the window and looked down eight stories to the sidewalk below, the figures moving through the yellow light, down Broadway, into Chinatown, up the long hill toward Coit Tower.
He sat on the edge of the bed. He called downstairs to find out the name under which the room had been registered.
Smith.
Original, he thought.
He could wait here, see if anyone showed, but it seemed the whole thing had been some kind of game. A distraction.
Why?
He left quickly then, descending, joining the figures in the yellow light below, only it didn’t seem yellow once you were in it. He hurried toward Union. It was late, and the tourists were outnumbered by the vagabonds. A couple staggered hand in hand, Midwesterners in love with the city. Meanwhile a handful of Asian kids watched from the shadows—not good kids, Dante could see in a glance—but the couple was oblivious. A cop drove by, but he was oblivious, too. If I were a better man, Dante thought, I might simply stand here until the couple walked safely by. Diffuse the moment, deterring what might be coming by his simple presence—a robbery, a mugging, or worse. Instead he headed around the corner, up toward Marilyn.
There had been a threat implicit in that voice, in that static, and he knew how the company operated.
Marilyn’s apartment was at the top of Union—in a corner Victorian. The place was on a rise, up off the street, but before he could climb the stairs, he saw the Mercedes in the driveway. Though the front of the apartment lay in darkness, a light issued from the back, from the bedroom.
He glanced at the Mercedes and then back at her window.
He took the cell out of his pocket.
She had an old-fashioned phone in the bedroom, a landline without a call screen. He had urged her to replace it, so she could identify incoming callers, but she’d paid no attention.
“Hello.”
Her voice was husky, as if she had just woken from sleep. In the background, he could hear someone else, a man’s voice.
He clicked off.
He had been mistaken, his worries unfounded. Marilyn was safe, at least for the time being. The Mercedes belonged to David Lake.
SIX
Fresno Street was not a street at all, but an alley, wider than the alleys in Chinatown, true, but an alley nonetheless: two blocks of row houses, with a tavern at one end, down there in the bottom of the gulley, and an apartment building at the top of the rise. Though the sky was black and moonless, the alley was filled with shadows. Yellow light issued from the barred windows of the homes, through the fire escapes, and the railed shadows fell upon the street.
In the blackness of the alley, his father’s house had the look of a place abandoned. No curtains,
only blinds, and these cantilevered in such a way that the glass seemed to absorb the darkness, suggesting a greater emptiness within.
He had left the front light on inside the house, he was all but sure, but it was off now. Perhaps he was mistaken, but he did not take the chance. He dropped through a casement window into the garage. It hadn’t been there originally, the garage. His father had had it placed beneath, at considerable expense, dug out into the slope beneath the foundation.
Dante stood listening.
The house creaked, a door slammed, but the houses were close here, the walls thin, and the slamming could have come from anywhere nearby.
The garage had a six-foot ceiling. It was below grade, dark in the daytime, but he nonetheless could make out the shapes of the boxes around him. He felt a draft and noticed a softness in the darkness ahead, a graying at the top of the basement stairs. The kitchen door at the top of those stairs had been left open. He edged forward. Papers underfoot, clothing, knickknacks, and family miscellany. Boxes opened, strewn and scattered.
He stood in the doorway for a long time. The one advantage Dante had, he knew the place well. He knew every floorboard, every creak. Once he would have proceeded differently, furrowing his way from room to room, searching. Instead, now, he moved once and once only, stepping swiftly across the threshold, quietly, gun in hand, across the open space into the kitchen. He sat in one of the chairs at the table. From here, he could see both the living room—with the front door—and the landing stairs descending past the kitchen to the courtyard below. These were the only ways out.
Now he sat and listened some more.
To the creaking. The shifting and sighing of the house. The surge of the furnace and voices from one of the apartments in the building beyond. It all mingled, and he sat in the darkness, not moving, just listening. Sitting like a man asleep. He had grown up in this house, and he knew how the imagination transformed the creaking into footfalls, how a window shutting next door, a laugh in the street, traveled through the walls, how it could make you jump. He knew, too, how the sounds infiltrated your dreams. After a while, he concluded the intruder had left, likely before he himself had arrived, but he kept still nonetheless, and in the stillness, maybe he did sleep. He heard the fluttering of wings—an explosion of birdsong out in the alley, parrots in the eucalyptus. The light turned gray, and he saw himself as if in a dream, moving through that grayness, groping, room to room, swiveling, gun in hand. The house had been ransacked. Clothes scattered. Cushions split. Drawers upturned and emptied.
The routine with the prostitute—the cat and the mouse—it had all been a distraction, to keep him out of the house. Whatever they had been looking for, they hadn’t found it, he knew, because there was nothing here to find.
His guess, his visitor had known that as well.
It was all gesture—a way of letting him know his time was up.
He knew what they wanted, though. He knew what this was about. Three years ago, he had returned to San Francisco on assignment with the company. He’d wanted out, and that last assignment had provided a way. Part of that assignment had involved retrieving the journal of Ru Shen, a deceased businessman, an evangelical Chinese, a charismatic figure of sorts, with ties on both sides of the Pacific, a man of principle, it was said, with access to sensitive information, who’d betrayed those principles, depending on your point of view: not just an agent, but a double agent, he’d kept a detailed record that jeopardized the secret workings of the company, the covert operations linking the official intelligence operation to the unofficial, the criminal to the governmental. The short of it was that Ru Shen had been murdered and the journal destroyed, but Dante did not tell the company this latter fact. Rather, he had allowed them to think that the journal still existed, and he had used its alleged existence to reach a kind of stasis, buying his own way out of the company, so to speak, with the threat of revealing whatever information was inside. In the event of his death, all would be revealed. It was a dangerous game, one that could come undone at any time, and for this reason, and for the safety of those around him, Dante had not intended to stay in San Francisco but rather to disappear, to abandon his identity. But there was Marilyn. There was this house. One day had passed, then another, and though he’d feared this would come, he’d let himself think his bluff had worked these last three years. Now the company claimed someone was leaking their secrets. So far as he knew, there was only one other person in the city who knew about Ru Shen’s journal. The man was a friend of his father’s, Joe Rossi, the former mayor whose youngest daughter, Gennae, was running for mayor now.
SEVEN
Dante went down to the warehouse first, but Gary was not there, and so he climbed the hill to the top of Telegraph. Gary lived in a big house, ungainly, terraced into the rock, huge windows on every tier, tinted so you could see out but not in—and the tint gave the windows on odd metallic sheen. Gary had wired the place for security: cameras everywhere, laser-triggered switches, video monitors inside and out. The system was too sensitive, though, set off by raccoons on the front lawn, birds on the wing, falling shadows. As a result, the system was disabled much of the time—though it was true also that Gary sat for hours at the video monitors, watching the front lawn on the black-and-white screen.
No one answered the front door.
Dante walked around the back. His cousin stood on the second-story balcony, looking down.
“You’re not answering the door these days?”
“I could see you on the monitor.”
“Are you going to let me up?”
“I am thinking about it.”
“You were the one who called me.”
“Three times,” his cousin said. “Three times, I called you.”
His cousin hit the switch and Dante climbed the stairs. Ten years ago, the property had belonged to a bachelor who’d worked down at the Mancuso warehouse—a straggle of anise weeds and rocks with a cabin that faced away from the view. Gary had torn the cabin down and dozed the land, jackhammering the bedrock, terracing in a house that sprawled over the lot, a jumble of vaulted archways and inlaid floors, balconies and marble counters, a whirl tub built into the deck and security cameras mounted underneath the eaves.
“So you decided to come after all.”
“I expected to find you at the warehouse.”
“I have a situation.”
“So I’ve heard.”
“An auditor. He was coming in this morning. So I decided not to be there.”
“The books aren’t there?”
“They can’t audit what they can’t see.”
“That will work only so long.”
They both knew what had been going on at the warehouse and had been going on for years. Shipments in, off ledger. Shipments out in the middle of the night. Underneath-the-table money. No questions asked. The Mancuso warehouse was one of the few still operating on the San Francisco side. The port business had moved over to Oakland—where the bay was regularly dredged—and it was through other arrangements that the business kept going.
The warehouse had been under investigation before. In the end, these investigations always faltered, but this one was being headed up by a woman from SI, a Chinese cop by the name of Leanora Chin. Dante knew her from his time on the force.
The Lady in Blue, so called.
This was how her fellow cops referred to her, on account, no matter the occasion, she always had the look of someone in uniform. She always wore the same blunt cut. Her clothes, it seemed, were always blue.
“I didn’t start this mess,” Gary said. “I inherited it.”
Inside the living room, smooth surfaces were everywhere, hard and sleek, Italian furniture, glass and gold leaf, all contemporary, expensive, colors bright and simple. There was a carton upturned on the glass table. A shattered bottle of wine. A broken vase on the floor.
“Viola had one of her fits,” he said.
Dante knew about Viola’s fits. He had seen her once sweep a
shelf of imported crystal from the display. He’d seen her go after Gary and rip his shirtfront with her long nails. He’d seen her inflamed, and he’d heard her wail. In the dining nook, a china plate lay shattered, a designer piece, some rococo nonsense, and there was a great red smear on the wall. Tomato sauce.
Viola was a wild one, but Gary was no prince.
“Where is she?”
“Tahoe …” He pointed. “I’m not cleaning it up. It’s her mess.”
“Is she coming back?”
“She always comes back,” he said ruefully.
It was true: Viola always came back. Or she always had in the past. She liked the house with its big windows and her closet full of clothes and the jet-black Jaguar in the garage. Nonetheless, she was the third wife, and she had her reasons to explode. A slew of stepkids in and out. Gary mooning over his first wife, fighting with the second. Sleeping with Lola down at the warehouse, bending her over the big metal desk. Not to mention the money problems now, the whole thing a house of cards. With the Feds standing outside, ready to blow it all over.
“She’s talking to lawyers. She’s going to testify against me if I don’t give her everything I own.”
“She’ll calm down.”
“She’s jealous. She thinks there’s another woman.”
“Another one?”
“It was business, I tried to explain. With the woman—and her husband.” Gary smirked despite himself, forever proud of his dalliances, though his eyes held a self-conscious glimmer that Dante had seen often enough, along with a hint of fear. It could be difficult to tell when his cousin was lying.
“What kind of business?”
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