Naked Moon

by Domenic Stansberry

  “This is your fault, too,” Gary said.

  “I don’t have anything to do with the warehouse.”

  “No, of course not. You’re too good for that.”

  By stipulation of the will, Dante remained half owner. He had given the day-to-day operations over to his cousin years ago, in return for a percentage. In actuality, the business had not turned a profit in years, at least not on paper, and the property was mortgaged beyond its value. Dante had put a second mortgage on the place out on Fresno, to help his cousin out, but that, too, was sliding toward arrears.

  “You always thought you deserved it all,” Gary said. “But the truth is, you don’t deserve anything. I am not even blood. I never wanted it. They came over to Italy and dragged me here. They dressed me up.”

  Gary spread his arms wide in a beseeching gesture. Dante had seen the gesture before and he had heard the argument, too. His adopted cousin had used the argument ever since he was a kid, every time he got in over his head. If Salvatore and Regina Mancuso had left him in the orphanage, if they had not adopted him, none of this would ever have happened.

  “Do you think I wanted this life?”

  “It doesn’t matter. You’ve got it.”

  “I didn’t want this.”

  But his cousin had wanted it. Or he had wanted the stuff, anyway. He liked his sports car and his glass tile bathroom and his ten-jet Jacuzzi. He loved his house that looked out over the whole world and his video-monitoring system that let him see every bug crawling up the walk. He loved it even now, angry as he was. Loved catching sight of himself in the big gilt mirror, here in the living room, hands on his hips, staring back at himself in his silk shirt, his white slacks and his loafers with the tassels, his gold Rolex.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  Dante’s uncle had given Gary everything he could, but now the old ones were dead and Gary had run up against the wall.

  Because it wasn’t Gary who ran the warehouse anymore. It was the Wus. He was their front, their shill. He was really nothing more than a paid fall guy—one who wasn’t particularly discreet—and it was a wonder they hadn’t gotten rid of him a long time ago.

  All Gary’d had to do was close his eyes and take the money, but his cousin had bungled the laundering operations. He’d also gotten himself into debt.

  “The Wus are tied in with the CIA, you know. They can do any goddamn thing they want.”

  His cousin looked at him pointedly. It was a common rumor, containing a degree of truth. Dante didn’t argue.

  “This guy Dominick Greene. Who is he?”

  “No one. Just some two-bit. I drank with him a couple of times, that’s all.”

  “What does he want?”

  “He works for a fabric wholesaler. Merchandise—needs expedited delivery.”

  “You should be careful.”

  “This isn’t about him.” His cousin’s jaw tightened, and then the eyes went dark, woeful. “I need your help.”

  “I don’t have money,” Dante said.

  “It’s not cash,” Gary said, irritated, though Dante knew his cousin was perennially short of money. “I talked to some people…. If you help them, if you cooperate,” he said, “they’ll help me. They have insider contacts. They’ll kill the investigation.”

  Dante thought of Greene again. He thought of the call he himself had received, the insect down there in its den.

  “Someone’s pulling your leg,” he said.

  “This isn’t just for me. I’ve got two ex-wives … kids … responsibilities.” Gary hung his head. “This cop, Chin—with Special Investigations—she’s been after the Wus for years. Meantime, she’s got me in a bind.”

  Dante knew his cousin’s dilemma. Leanora Chin wanted the Wu operation and would use his cousin to get it. Other investigators had gone after the Wus before, cops tougher on the surface, but these others had either been bought off or disappeared. Meanwhile Chin had threatened to get the IRS on his cousin if he didn’t reveal the inner operations. She had offered him immunity if he cooperated, but if Gary took her offer, the Wus would come after him. His cousin’s only way out, if he wanted to avoid jail time on one side and the Wus on the other, was to join Witness Protection. Gary didn’t want to do that. He didn’t want to leave everything behind.

  “What makes you think I can do anything?” asked Dante.

  “I got a call, a visit … from some people….”

  “What people?”

  “All you have to do, is give them what they want.”

  His looks curled in an expression Dante remembered from their boyhood. When his cousin was desperate, he did foolish things. He grabbed at straws. He looked around for someone to blame, to pull down with him. Nevertheless, his cousin knew a lot, from his years at the trade—about the Wus, about this and that—and as Dante studied his cousin’s face, he wondered if his cousin had stumbled upon something else.

  “What were you doing at Rossi’s?”

  “Just paying my respects.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “People exaggerate.”

  “There was a scene.”

  “Big friend of the family, that one. Mayor for twelve years. I asked him to use his influence, that’s all. To get this cop off my back. But fuck me, that’s his attitude. Fuck me.”

  “He’s not mayor anymore.”

  “I wouldn’t have gone out there if you’d answered my goddamn calls.”

  “What do you expect me to do?”

  “You can help. That’s what I was told.”

  “Who told you that?”

  His cousin shook his head. “I was told in confidence.”

  “Greene?”

  His cousin turned away. Gary was weak—and if he went after him, if he pushed him hard enough, his cousin might tell him—but Dante felt the same hesitation he’d felt with the girl from Gino’s, who’d led him to the hotel room. It was sometimes better to let the messenger be, to let the pony go. Force Gary to talk, drag him in too far, there might be repercussions he could not see. He thought of Marilyn. He’d lingered in town too long, the company knew his every vulnerability, and now it was too late to leave.

  “It was a friendly visit. Like I said, if you help them,” he said, “they’ll help us. We can save the business.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You’re lying.”

  “No.” Dante dropped his voice, looking his cousin in the eye. They’d been raised like brothers, two kids on the block, and he saw his cousin hesitating under his glance, guilty, sheepish. But his cousin was right: Dante was not telling him everything.

  “You’re supposed to be the good one,” said Gary. “The cop … but it turns out, you’re the one with all the nasty friends.”

  His cousin sat on the couch, shoulders bent, hands clasped between his knees. He had dark brown eyes, curly hair, boyish. The women had always liked him, even those who saw through him. You could see the softness in him, something about to relent, the desire to be good—but in the end, he was always looking for another way. He got up now, smiling that kid smile, and went to the bookcase. There were pictures up there. Dante’s own father and mother. Himself and his cousin on the stoop.

  “Remember?” his cousin asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “There’s more pictures.”

  “I know.”

  “The old days.”

  More pictures, the two of them together. Of Uncle Salvatore and Aunt Regina. More cousins, more family. Old fishermen on the dock. His cousin gave him the soft look. “I miss them.”

  “Yeah.”

  “It seems like just a minute ago, they were all here. In another minute, us, too, we’ll be gone also.”

  “Time passes.”

  “There’s no such thing as time—remember. That’s what the priest used to say, the nuns. It’s just one moment. The big forever.”

  “I remember.”

  “So you think about it—we’re already dead.
”

  “Not quite.”

  “This is your fault, too. If you had come into the business,” he said. “If you had done what your father wanted, things wouldn’t be this way.”

  It was a perverse logic, typical of his cousin, but there was an element of truth. If he had gone into the business, if he had taken charge—if he had married Marilyn, years ago—if he’d never gone to New Orleans, then his friends at the company would never have paid his cousin a visit, in whatever outfit, whatever guise, promising to pull the strings that would kill the investigation and make everything right.

  His cousin looked at him now, his eyes soft and earnest, the little boy on the street, on the stoop, in the foreign country, in over his head.

  “Just give them what they want,” Gary said.

  PART THREE

  EIGHT

  A chicken could not cluck in Portsmouth Square, a fish could not whisper, without the sound carrying into the chambers of Love Wu, atop the Empress Building. Or this was the saying of the old men playing mah-jongg on the stone benches in the square.

  The Empress was not on the square itself, but on the rise, a block back, and the sound carried to the upper stories. The building was not in itself impressive, seven stories high, built with brick, then covered with deteriorating stucco on the upper layers. At the top it had been corniced in the fashion of a pagoda, though this facade, too, was in partial disrepair.

  On the street level, the building housed the ubiquitous vegetable parlors and junk palaces of Chinatown, stalls crammed with cheap luggage and cheaper produce. Above that stood the offices of the Wu Benevolent Association—and on the top floor, or so it was said, the chambers of Love Wu himself.

  Love Wu, the perverse, the ancient one, ruler of the hidden kingdom.

  Father of Chinatown, to whom the wind carried every sound. Founder of the Wu Benevolent Association, the oldest of the Chinese associations.

  You could not breathe, you could not whisper, without Love Wu knowing.

  The benevolent associations were old institutions in Chinatown, offering help to newcomers, aid to the indigent, business ties. Older still were the tongs: secret societies with their roots in the Chinese underworld. The lines between the tongs and the associations were not always clear, even now. Both went back to the time when the Chinese clipper ships had anchored by night in the fog off the Golden Gate, and the smugglers brought their longboats up to the wharf in the small hours, carrying cargo for the opium dens, women for the brothels. They brought indentured labor for the railroads, to hoe the fields and clean the toilets. Men to dig the basement tunnels that extended beneath Chinatown and spiraled out into the city. But the contraband had gone both ways. If a local strayed too close to the wharf at night, stood too long on a street corner, that person—man, woman or child—might find themselves bound and gagged, facedown in a Chinese longboat. Headed out to those clippers in the fog.

  A white slave.

  A galley mate for life. A concubine. A child for the delight of Oriental perversions.

  Love Wu had been around since the time of the tunnels, it was said, though that would make him impossibly old. The stories about him were contradictory, his birth date a matter of conjecture. The streets were full of his relations—sons, nieces, granddaughters, cousins. But as these relations grew old and passed into the grave, Love Wu remained.

  No.

  He had died long ago. He was not one man, but many. In fact, Love Wu was not a man at all but a title given to a man: a designation passed along from one dying kinsman to the next.

  No.

  Love Wu had not died. Rather he had returned to China. He lived in a monastery in Sonoma. He was the old beggar you saw every day on the corner, wandering the streets in disguise.

  No.

  He still lived on the top floor of the Empress Building, in the upper story, above the manifold operations of the Wu Benevolent Association. His chambers opened onto the balcony at the top of the building, and sometimes at night his shadow could be seen moving in the yellow light that issued from those slatted doors.

  He dwelled in his library there, among the ancient scrolls, listening to the secrets drift up from the street. There were stories about his library, and the information recorded there.

  Dante had seen him once, years ago. Or rather he had heard the name, Love Wu, issue through the crowd, and seen an old Chinaman in silk garments and braided hair being escorted across the street like some dignitary.

  Back hunched, infirm.

  The Italians joked, every old man in Chinatown. There goes Love Wu.

  It was impossible he could still be alive.

  Regardless, the smuggling continued. Not just laborers, tucked in the hold of a ship. Not just AK-47s and counterfeit cell phones, heroin and cocaine, black market computers and AAA batteries, factory defective goods recycled in new wrapping. Information, too, trade secrets from Silicon Valley, under-the-counter real estate deals, money to launder. And the news of these dealings carried upward to the old man forever on the verge of death. A man who was not a man at all but a sunken spot on the bed—ashes in an urn—dust scattered over the ocean.

  Everything got back to him, sooner or later.

  He had a million spies.

  Hotel clerks. Fishmongers. Maids.

  Attorneys and cops.

  Scribes.

  As a child, restless in his bed on Fresno Street, listening to the creaking of the old house, Dante had imagined what it was like to be Love Wu, hearing what he heard, decoding the secret language—and sometimes, on the edge of sleep, it seemed he actually understood. Dante had the same sensation now, leaving his cousin’s house, midstep—as if he were looking down on himself from up there, listening to the breeze on the other side of those slatted doors.

  Ru Shen.

  NINE

  It was election season, and overnight a new wave of campaign flyers had been plastered along Kearny: on the telephone poles and bus shelters, on the plywood sheeting under the construction overhangs. Identical pictures of Gennae Rossi, placed one after another. Daughter of Joe Rossi, the former mayor. Dark horse candidate for mayor now, sentimental favorite in North Beach. Running against Ching Lee on one side, and the incumbent Edwards on the other. Whoever posted them had continued past Columbus, around the corner into Chinatown, but here the likenesses had already been defaced. The same was true on the other side of Columbus, however. Lee’s posters did not last long before they were peeled and plastered over with Gennae Rossi’s face.

  Above the battle, in the higher reaches—on the billboards, on the sides of buildings—laminated on the panels of a passing bus—was the image of the incumbent: Dale Edwards.

  Edwards had more money than the others, more campaign funds, and there were questions in the paper about where the money came from, but in one way, it did not matter. His face, too, was scrawled with graffiti.

  Dante was on his way to find the girl from the other night. He’d been to Gino’s earlier, but she’d missed her shift, so he got her address from one of the other girls. He had not pushed her that night in the elevator, but told himself, now, with some cash on the table, she might describe for him the person or persons who had sent her his way. He could push her in ways he could not push his cousin—and without the same kind of repercussions. Then pack her on the bus and send her back to from wherever she came.

  It would be the best thing, the safest all around.

  As Dante turned the corner, down into the flats, there were fewer posters. This was where the dancer lived, Gino’s girl—in one of the brick apartments that survived in the shadows of the high-rises along the Embarcadero. It was all blacktop and concrete here, parking garages and steel gates. It had been marsh once—smelling of sulfur and septic—and it still smelled that way. The ground sumped, and the drains backed up, and the stench rose through the gratings of the corner sewers.

  The girl lived in a three-story walk-up that was slated to be torn down, but she did not answer the door. After
a while the manager appeared and told Dante he had not seen her for several days.

  “Where did she go?”

  “I don’t know. She’s by the week.”

  “She moved out?”

  “You a cop?”

  “No.”

  “What do you want with her, then?”

  “I’m a friend.”

  “I told her, none of that kind of business here.”

  “It’s not that way.”

  “She’s by the week,” he said again. “She’s got two more days. But I haven’t seen her.”

  “Does she have a forwarding?”

  The man laughed. “What kind of place do you think this is?”

  Dante left. He went up through Chinatown into Portsmouth Square. On the causeway leading down from the Chinese Cultural Center, some workers were in the final stages of dismantling an exhibit, “Across the Water,” that had been financed by the Wu Benevolent Association. There had been some controversy, he remembered, regarding some artifacts that the association had taken and placed in its private collection, in the Empress Building across the way.

  Dante wondered where the girl had gone.

  It did not mean anything. Girls like her, they came and went all the time. The city was like that. He wondered if he’d made a mistake—not getting to the girl when he could.

  He tried to reach Marilyn at Prospero’s, but there was no answer.

  Out with clients, according to the receptionist.

  Some couple, new in town.

  Marilyn had been dragging them all over.

  TEN

  There was no reason anymore to go to the Serafina Café. It had been lively once, cops at the lunch counter and the tables full of families, old men with napkins tucked into their shirtfronts, the place full of noise, half-drunk bohos, and a card game in the back, kids spilling sauce on their Sunday best, men flirting with their brothers’ wives. Stella scolding her husband in the kitchen while the regulars laughed and wept and George Marinetti announced his daughter’s wedding at the bar. They were dead now, most of them, and their children moved away, and the place was too dark for the tourists, too full of dust. The food was not what it used to be, and it was just the oldest of the old, coming for the gossip and the wine, but the wine was better elsewhere, and cheaper, and so now it was just the photos along the bar and the dead ones gossiping in the shadows. There was no reason to come here, but Dante came anyway.