Naked Moon

by Domenic Stansberry

  The mattress was old, the sheets stained. The streetlamp burned furiously just above the window, and the thin curtains did little to block the light. The noise from the freeway was constant. You had to be drunk to fall asleep here, or high. Meanwhile his leg hurt. A dull throbbing that got worse as the night went on.

  He stripped off his bloody pants, but the room was cold, and so he put them back on.

  He finally fell asleep, sometime after three, but it didn’t last long, because then the morning traffic rumbled over the freeway. The road’s concrete buttresses rose on either side of the hotel, so close the vibration seemed to emanate from the building itself. Sometime later that morning the traffic herded to a crawl, idling, a throbbing hum, an impatient sound with a great nothingness at its core.

  He lay listening to that nothingness in the sound. He thought of the old Cantonese behind the nameless hotel, in the lotus position, meditating. At some point, he entered that sound himself and maybe he slept. Maybe that was what you called it. When he opened his eyes again, it was midmorning. The room was filled with a purgatorial light.

  He spent most of his day in his room, tending to the leg. It was stiff. He staggered up the street with some difficulty and bought some three-dollar trousers at the thrift store. They did not fit well, but at least they were reasonably clean. He took some more ibuprofen for the pain and drank some more whiskey, but it didn’t do any good.

  Under the freeway, the figures moved in the gray light, the dealers standing alone, runners in back, users hunched and lying about like so much debris. Whores wandered on and off the corner.

  Dante felt the pain in his leg and touched his wallet.

  He had taken some amphetamine earlier to keep himself going, but the grogginess didn’t leave, and he yearned for something else.

  All he could figure, they were wearing him down. Letting him stew. Letting him think about Marilyn. Letting him worry until he would meet on their terms, no questions asked. Waiting, he examined the diary. Chinese script, the paper moldy in places, ink-spotted and stained. It was dog-eared, and tucked into the middle was a piece of legal paper, Chinese symbols taken from the text, along with a handful of names, these written in English. Yin’s notes, done with the assistance of his young friend. Some of the names Dante recognized, and some he didn’t. They were the kind of names to be expected: a state senator, the attorney general, the head of a firm in Silicon Valley. Dante could figure out the specifics if he had enough time, but in a lot of ways, the specifics didn’t matter. Yin had figured a link between the dayworld and the underground, between the shadowland where the company operated and the world of daily commerce. Chinese spies in the Silicon Valley, maybe. Heroin from Afghanistan. Saudi terrorists financed by American oil derivatives. Whatever it was, it linked prominent names to the underworld in which the company operated, endangering the organization itself. His guess, Yin had made contact with one of those names, seeking to exploit the knowledge to his own advantage. It might have worked. The company had not suspected Yin, but had come after Dante. They wanted their journal back. They could have it now, so far as Dante was concerned, but most likely his own innocence wouldn’t matter.

  Whatever stasis he had achieved, that was over now. He had been in the company. He had left. The initial betrayal alone had been reason enough to kill him, if not for the bargain he’d struck. Now that the bargain had been violated, it wouldn’t matter who was responsible.

  At last his phone rang.

  He answered, expecting to hear that voice down there in the static, but the voice he heard belonged instead to his old friend Angelo, calling from downtown. His ex-partner’s voice was gentle, as it sometimes could be, full of the neighborhood, of a brotherly concern he’d learned long ago to distrust.

  “Where are you?”

  “Out and about.”

  “We’ve been looking for you.”

  “That’s sweet.”

  “I have bad news. Your boss, Jake Cicero. Maybe you heard?” Angelo did not wait for his answer. “That’s three. Your cousin. The girl. Now Jake. All killed the same way.”

  “You talked to Louisa?”

  “Yes, we talked to her.”

  “How is she?”

  “Distraught. That’s how she is. She said you called her place that evening, right around six. Looking for Jake.”

  “What are you getting at?”

  “That matches time of death. I have a feeling.” It was another one of their old lines, tongue in cheek, when the facts of a case, the coincidences, began to add up.

  “So do I.”

  “Tell me where you are. Our feelings, we’ll talk them over.”

  “I’m feeling a little shy.”

  “I would be, too, if I were you. You know, we can help you, and you can help us. But the longer you are out there, the longer you stay away. You know how it makes things look. The kind of feelings we get.”

  “I thought this was Chin’s case.”

  “She’s tied up.”

  “I can wait.”

  “We’re working together. She asked me to call.”

  It was back to this. Technically, the various arms of enforcement all worked together, but Angelo had been under the gun lately, and though everybody talked about team effort, Angelo always had his own agenda.

  “There are reasons,” said Dante, “I’d rather talk to Chin.”

  “All right, I can see that. I’ll have her call you.” The sweetness in Angelo’s voice reminded him of when they’d worked the streets together and used to sit after hours down in Serafina’s, back when it had been a cop hangout, the two of them talking over old times, nudging elbows, staring down at the pictures of the old Italians embedded in the glass. Sweet as hell, one to the other, when they weren’t rubbing each other the wrong way. “I don’t want to see you go to hell,” said Angelo.

  Another old line, an old routine. Mocking the old priests, the nuns, and their playground admonitions.

  “I might like it down there.”

  “I’m sure you would.”

  “You could visit.”

  “Like I said, I’ll have her call you. You can set something up, just you and her.”

  In a little while, the phone rang back, just as Angelo promised. Only it was not Chin herself, but an office underling, an anonymous voice, calling on behalf of her boss.

  Chin would meet him tomorrow.

  Dante went ahead with the arrangements, but he knew better. If Chin wanted to arrange a meeting, she wouldn’t go through intermediaries. She would have made the arrangements herself. It wasn’t Chin’s underling making the arrangements, he suspected, but Angelo’s.

  Angelo had to know he would be suspicious. But his friend was counting on his desperation, and his curiosity. On his inability to leave anything alone.

  The whore was back on the corner now, languid against the wall. Dante looked past her, toward the freeway, and felt the old yearning. It was a trap, that business with Chin, he was all but sure, because Angelo wanted the collar for himself. He wondered if Angelo had talked to the Feds, and what kind of information had been passed along. Meanwhile, though, he had still heard nothing from the company, and he needed something to kill the pain in his leg. He lit a cigarette and took in the smoke, tasting the ash and heat in his throat.

  He went across the street. He wasn’t interested in the girl, he told himself, but it would have been easy enough to avoid her—if that’s what he wanted. She wore a shift with a cheap sheen, too thin for the weather, but when you got close, the way she jittered, it didn’t have so much to do with the cold. Her face was mottled and her eyes had a different kind of yearning.

  “Looking for a date?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Maybe you take me with you, then. Across the way, that’s where you’re going?”

  He glanced past her toward the break in the fence that led to the shadows beneath the freeway.

  “You remind me of someone.”

  “Oh, yeah,” s
he said, cocking her hips. It was something all the johns said, he supposed, and her response, maybe, was always to move her hips just this way.

  “A dancer. She worked at Gino’s.”

  “I can dance, too. That’s what you want.”

  Overhead, the traffic headed back the other way at this hour, northbound across the bridges, away from the asphalt canyons, the high towers, back toward all those houses nestled beside one another on the other side of the Bay.

  “What do you want, then?”

  “Nothing.”

  “That’s sad.”

  “Not if it’s true.”

  “I thought about working at Gino’s.” She glanced win-somely over at the freeway, as if it were impossible to be a junkie and work at a place like Gino’s, so far across town.

  “I need fifty bucks,” she said.

  He didn’t need to ask why. A horn blared in the exit. Overhead the noise from the freeway, all those cars heading home, had become too much, and he wanted to find that empty space inside the noise. He felt sorry for the girl. Or she reminded him of the dead stripper. Of other women with whom he had walked in moments like this, in similar places. “No,” he said, but either she did not hear, or something in his manner was not convincing. The prostitute hustled alongside him, squeezing through the place where the fence had been cut. Her dress seemed to shimmer a little more in the darkness under the freeway. Maybe it was the light shooting along the ramps, the glinting of the headlamps catching her as she moved, just ahead of him now, toward the hooded figure who stood alone, waiting. Then she backed off, letting him make the purchase. She knew the decorum. It was yet noisier here, not worth talking—and it was all pantomime now. Dante showed his money, and the hooded figure eased away, nodding imperceptibly toward one of the runners, a kid in a baseball cap twisted sidesways, his long legs set in motion, off scampering to the stash. In another minute, Dante was on his knees, his nose in the powder, the woman kneeling beside him, her shoulder against his. His body went loose, suffuse with a sudden warmth, and he leaned against a nearby buttress, and after a while rolled over onto the ground. The woman lay a few feet away, reclining in the sparkling tinfoil. He closed his eyes. Back in New Orleans, in Armstrong Park, behind the gravestones. In a rickshaw, in Bangkok, head lolling as the cyclist pedaled over the Chao Phraya. In Spokane, under the railroad trestle.

  He had been many places during his life with the company. Now, lying in the foil, he went there again.

  The woman accompanied him to his hotel room above the liquor store. He did not ask her to come, but he did not stop her either. He had made another purchase, and she followed. He took some comfort in her presence.

  “No prostitutes,” the clerk said.

  “I’m his wife.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “We’re just going to talk,” said Dante.

  “No visitors after ten. No whores. No double occupancy.”

  “I’m not a whore.”

  “No drugs.”

  Upstairs, the woman took off her panties but did not remove the dress. She positioned herself over him. The room was dark, the switch off, but light poured in anyway, past the flimsy curtains on their sagging rod. Moonlight, he thought, but that did not seem possible, given how the freeway trundled along the roofline, blocking the sky. Though the girl’s features were masked, back there in the shadows, her arms, her shoulders, her neck, her skin, all had an alabaster glow. She arched her back, and he reached out to touch her breasts. She could be anyone. He saw in her eyes that little house in Marin, with the bedroom that opened onto the flagstone patio. He saw the square on the other side of the ocean. Meanwhile, the freeway thrummed in the walls. The girl moaned, an imperfect sound, touching herself on the belly as she did so. Then came down with her open mouth on his cock.

  She lifted her head from between his legs. The moon was in her eyes.

  “I’m so high,” she said.

  Later, she lay on the bed beside him. He expected she would leave any minute, but she was too high and fell instead into a dead sleep. The light poured through the window. The light was white, and everything else was black. The light was unadorned. The woman did not move, but lay silent with the light draped over her like a sheet.

  Dante lay on the bed.

  His leg no longer hurt.

  He lay with one leg straddled over the bed and his arm hanging down and his head to the side. The light danced along the floor. There were blocks of darkness on the floor, rivers of light. A black city with avenues of white. Every thing was simple. There was nothing else, just the blackness and the light. Outside, a moth fluttered at the glass. The streets were naked, empty of desire.

  “Marilyn,” he said.

  In the morning, his ache returned. It was the gray light coming through the window. The woman was gone. She had taken his dope—and his wallet, too.

  But she had left the gun.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The meeting place was along the Bay, past a line of corrugated huts out by Hunters Point. There had been a warehouse out here, but that had been torn down years ago, and all that remained was a ramshackle pier with the bench at the end where he was supposed to meet Chin. He did not walk out there but crouched in the brambles on a stone jetty, some half mile across the muddy inlet, a pile of rocks and concrete sprayed with graffiti. The brambles covered the jetty. Crackheads came here to get high, and faggots to suck each other off, but there was no one here at the moment and Dante lay alone in the brambles. The dope had worn off and the pain returned, but he still had amphetamines and also some Vicodin he’d gotten with some stray cash, tucked into his old pants, that the prostitute had not found. He focused on the fisherman who stood on the rotting pier across the way, a tall man in a hooded slicker, who reeled his line in, then cast once again into the water. The man fished with his back toward Dante, off the opposite side of the pier.

  For a long time, it was just the fisherman out there.

  Then a car pulled up, stopped at the pier. The driver did not get out, not right away. Man or woman, Dante could not tell, just a shape behind the wheel. It was a colorless vehicle, plain and dull, of the type enforcement officials might use. It matched, too, the description of the vehicle Cicero had seen out the window.

  Dante knew the history of the pier. The warehouse here had been owned by a German family, German Jews. During those first few months after the invasion of Pearl Harbor, the army had gone door to door, rousting out foreign nationals who owned property along the coast, and the warehouse that had stood here, it was one of those properties seized. With the help of Mayor Rossi, a young attorney back then—hand over his heart, saluting the flag—Dante’s father and his uncle had made sure this place stayed closed. The city stopped dredging here, let the place fill with silt, and the war trade went through the Mancuso warehouse instead. His grandfather, nose like his nose, the Sicilian fisherman, got a piece of the shrimp trade, down at China camp.

  We are all fish, the old man whispered. We all get caught in the net.

  But it wasn’t just that. During the war, there were certain needs. Medical supplies from fascist Chile, morphine by way of Singapore. Covert trade, arranged by government agents. Nobody cared about that anymore, just as no one would care later about whatever business was going on now.

  A woman got out of the gray vehicle, across the inlet, and stepped onto the decaying pier: a dark-haired woman, with sunglasses, in a long coat to protect her from the wind. She might have been Chin, but he could not tell from this distance. She wore her collar turned up and had her back to him as she headed out toward the bench. The way she walked, it was not Chin’s walk, but he could not be sure.

  Perhaps the fisherman was just a fisherman.

  The woman sat there patiently, well past the meeting time, and he was tempted to walk out. Part of him wanted to trust Angelo. It would be easier that way. Because if the woman was Chin, he could hand her the journal, he could seek asylum … and for a minute he allowed himself to bel
ieve that such a thing was possible, that there was a straight and narrow, and all he had to do was follow it. That his friend would not sell him out. That Chin could help him. The woman leaned back, arms spread across the bench, but it was not Chin, he knew now for certain, because the fisherman came and sat down beside her.

  He watched the fisherman load his gear in the trunk and he watched the woman, too, and he knew who they were.

  He lay in the brambles.

  The phone rang.

  The line was full of static and white noise. With that same hollow clicking, persistent but growing faint. When the insect spoke, the voice was tinny and cruel, as always, but that cruelness seemed tinged with melancholy.

  “You were a good agent once.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Untouched.”

  “How do I know that?”

  “You could be a good agent again, given the opportunity.”

  “Let her go.”

  “You have it wrong. At this point, we are only monitoring. We know where she is, let’s put it that way. But I think it would be better if we work together.”

  “You want the journal.”