Naked Moon

by Domenic Stansberry

“The only reason to kill her would be to punish you. To set an example.”

  There was a hint of weariness there. As if the insect were disappointed that Dante had not done it the easy way. That he had not simply handed over the journal and allowed himself to be strangled at the end of the pier. But the insect was practical. He hid his disappointment. “It is better to put this in the past,” he said. “We have need of you. It is better we make a deal.”

  THIRTY-SIX

  The New Asia was down off Vallejo, around the corner from the Serafina. An elegant place, Chinese, but without the smells of Chinatown. No old yellow men in gray trousers. No raw-handed women, stinking of skewered chicken. The New Asia did not cater to that group, and anyway they wouldn’t come. The prices were too expensive and the crowd too young, just off work, up from the finance houses on Kearney. The place had an international look, no pictures of the neighborhood along the wall, no memorabilia, just the sleek black surfaces polished until they reflected the visitor’s own face back.

  Dante’s instructions had been simple: Go sit at the bar. Two drinks, one for yourself, whatever you like, and a vodka tonic, Grey Goose over ice. In a while, someone will come and sit next to you, in front of that drink. You will hand them the diary. Then you will walk away, back out the way you came. Your girl will be left alone. All you have to do, after that, is everything we ask.

  He’d agreed, in essence, to disappear into oblivion. To do their every bidding. To take his old job back.

  We have need of you. You were a good agent once.

  Dante did not trust the insect. Neither did he have a lot of choices. He turned on his stool, surveying the crowd. From the back, alone at the table, a man regarded him: a tall, wide-shouldered man in a sport jacket, with bland good looks. He nodded, a comradely nod, that could have meant anything at all. He had the type of looks, change his clothes, he could be anyone. A tourist in a Windbreaker, walking with his wife to the top of Telegraph Hill. Some guy from the financial district, going over his notes at the end of the day. A fisherman at the end of a pier.

  The woman entered the bar. She was dark-haired like the woman on the bench, out at the pier, only her hair hung loose and the clothes were not the same. She was no longer masquerading, at least not in the same way. Put her in a polo shirt, a camera around her neck, curl the hair, she and the man behind him, they could ride a cable car all day. Wander up to Coit Tower. Walk in Cicero’s office, a divorcée and her lover. Strangle his cousin on Telegraph Hill.

  Dante had met her before, she and the man behind him, that day out in Marin, Marilyn’s clients, the couple she’d been showing around.

  “Is that mine?”

  “You tell me.”

  She leaned over, tasted it. “Grey Goose.”

  “Yes.”

  “You look a little out of place here, a man like you.”

  “You mean that as a compliment?”

  “Take it how you will.”

  It was the kind of game they played, the company, banter like this. He didn’t have the stomach for it right now, but he played anyway. Meanwhile, the clientele in the bar, they bantered, too. From the looks of them, they owned the world, these people. A young crowd, mixed race, bound by nothing. They hailed from everywhere and nowhere. The woman next to him, she fit right in. She had eyes that might have been Asian, but then again it could have been the way her eyebrows were done. Her lips had a touch of the negroid. Her skin was dark, but not too dark. Native American, maybe, or Filipina, Hawaiian. Then, too, maybe just a white girl with exotic earrings. Skin tinted in a tanning salon, the way they were doing these days.

  The man in the back, he had the same looks, more or less. Dante preferred Nelson Yin. Or Chin. Even Angelo. These new ones, you could drive a knife into them, split them up the middle, watch the lips curl up and the blood pour—and even then, you still wouldn’t know who they were.

  “That’s your associate, at the table behind me.”

  “Does it matter?”

  “You did a good job, you two. All this time circling, so close, watching, but I didn’t see.”

  “The journal …”

  “But you had help, didn’t you?”

  The woman shrugged.

  “Angelo.”

  “He’s just a cop,” she said. “He whispers to his friends in the Feds. Whispers get passed along—but you know all that. I don’t mean to be impatient, but you understand why I’m here.”

  “The journal, yes. How do you know I haven’t made copies?”

  “The information, once we have that, once we know what is being alleged, the people who need protecting, we find avenues.”

  “So it doesn’t matter.”

  “You know, deep down, the journal was only part of it.”

  She smiled, dismissive, but he’d gotten her gist. The company did not like its people playing both sides. On the phone, the insect had been almost polite, apologetic. Willing to make a deal. Let bygones be bygones. We have need of you. He was a lucky man. She leaned over then and whispered to him. As she whispered, he felt the hot breath in his ear and a cringe at the back of his neck.

  “Do you love her?”

  He did not like the question, nor did he like the light in her eyes.

  She was enjoying herself, lingering over her drink. She bent closer and ran her long finger down his nose. “This is how I knew you were the man,” she said, “by your nose.”

  “Marilyn,” Dante said. “I want to know she’s all right.”

  She reached into her purse and showed a series of pictures that had been e-mailed to her cell, a grainy sequence of shots. A woman walking in a foreign square. A cobbled alley. A basilica. From a distance, the woman looked like Marilyn, but up close, in profile, he had his doubts. Then another shot, the woman standing on a motel balcony, in a white slip, overlooking the beach. A shadow filled the door behind her, a man, perhaps David Lake, but no, Lake would do better. In the final picture, the motel had a touch of shabbiness about it, and there was a vendor cart selling helados, in the lower corner, a tired-looking woman pushing it across the highway. Ensenada, he realized. They had followed the wrong woman. He tried to keep the realization out of his face.

  “How did you find her?” he asked.

  “The airport,” she said, and he remembered then the gray car snaking down the access road when he’d driven out to SFO with Marilyn’s look-alike beside him.

  The woman finished her drink. The bartender came by, and the woman raised her eyebrows, as if she were ready to have another, as if she would sit all night, but by the end of it, nothing would be any different, because if he did not cooperate …

  The woman smiled. It was not a smile he liked. “Do you want to give it to me?”

  The insect’s deal, it was no deal at all, not really. We need you, an assignment, and for that they would let Marilyn be. In the end, nevertheless, there was no guarantee. Sooner or later, they would figure out the woman in Ensenada was not Marilyn. The woman’s eyes had that bright shine—like the first time he’d met her, out in Marin. Too bright. He turned sideways on his stool.

  “It’s a tough fix, isn’t it?”

  “I could just walk out.”

  “You could. But we’d find you.”

  “There’s other options,” he said, and he put his hand in his pocket. His other option was to kill them both, this woman in front of him, that man at the table, and to be on the next plane out. To move before they moved. The woman brushed the hair from her eyes. He could put his gun in the brunette’s stomach and shoot her friend, too, before he’d risen to his toes. But he did not know where the real Marilyn was.

  “You’ll never make it to the airport.”

  “I might.”

  “If I don’t walk out of here with that journal,” said the woman, “if our man doesn’t hear from us … you’ll never see her again.”

  It was a hollow threat. They had the wrong woman, but they didn’t know that.

  “They’re waiting for my call.�
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  “Of course,” he said.

  Better to let them win. Or think they had. The journal was nothing to him. He gave it to the woman. She took the journal as if it were nothing and slid it in the side pocket of her jacket. “I imagine the police are looking for you.”

  “I imagine.”

  “Before you leave the city, there’s a package for you. Back at your hotel.”

  “My assignment?”

  She smiled once more, lingering for a final moment over her drink, regarding him in a way that suggested it was not over, not quite, not really, and he imagined her giving the same look to Cicero, and to his cousin. Then she swallowed the rest of her Grey Goose and headed for the street.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Outside, the world had its same color, and it was tempting to think now everything might go on as before. An Asian couple came down the walk toward him, slicked up to the nines, sheer and well made. Jazz fell from a window overhead, and an aging hipster staggered down the way. Along Stockton, the buildings were red with twilight. The evening glistened.

  Dante had walked along the streets so often, it was easy to fool himself into thinking he would walk them forever. That they were his in some irrevocable way.

  His high had worn down to the point of desire, and his leg hurt. He lit a cigarette, then pushed deeper into Chinatown, onto the thronged walkways, the strangers parting half-heartedly, bumping shoulders, pushing this way and that, the air thick with the smell of ginger and pig fat and rotting poultry.

  After the woman left the bar, Dante had sat for a long moment in the New Asia, with the drink in front of him. The man at the back table had vanished as well. Seemingly, everything was settled. The company had their journal. Marilyn was safe, off with David Lake. As for him, his next assignment lay waiting ahead.

  Still, he was filled with unease.

  In Portsmouth Square, the pigeons squabbled beneath the benches, and magnolia leaves littered the walk. Most of the day people had cleared out, but a couple of old Chinamen persisted, coats buttoned to the collar, hovering about the stone chess table. Farther on, a cruiser parked across from the nameless hotel, and he saw what looked like an unmarked car at the mouth of the alley, by the iron gate.

  It didn’t necessarily mean anything. There were always cops around.

  A package for you, back at the hotel.

  The woman had flirted, smiled insidiously, letting him know, if not now, then eventually, the trap would spring. That sooner or later, his utility would wear thin.

  A bullet in the back of the head. A knife in the stomach. A fall from a parking structure.

  Meanwhile, Dominick Greene was still lying in the basement back at Serafina’s, among the canned tomatoes, in the blocked tunnel. Once upon a time, those tunnels had led everywhere. There were a million stories, and in one of those stories, a fugitive had swapped his identity with that of a corpse, and disappeared through those tunnels.

  Those tunnels, the old-timers said, went all the way to Italy.

  Now, up ahead, he could see the million Buddhas in the lobby window, and back in the dim light the Russian behind the desk. Inside, the Russian sat with his package of Kools on the counter, posed in what looked to have been the identical position as before, behind the hotel desk, surrounded by the many Buddhas. The Buddha of tranquillity. The Buddha of sexual foreplay. Of the lecherous grin. Of the insatiable appetite.

  The place was empty of customers, as it was always empty.

  “There is something here for you.”

  The Russian turned to the bank of slotted cubbyholes behind the long desk, a structure left from the days when lodgers dropped their room keys with the clerk and visitors left handwritten messages, tucked and folded, stashed into those little boxes. The slots were all empty now, full of dust, but the Russian pulled a package from the shelf below: a smallish box, wrapped in brown paper.

  “Who dropped it off?”

  “I was out.”

  “That’s unusual.”

  “I have to eat lunch sometime,” he said. “I have to take a crap.”

  The lobby man looked like someone accustomed to lying, so even if he was telling the truth, you would not know. It was clear the man had no intention of speaking on the matter further. Dante knew how it went: You got the job, you figured out how things worked—and then you shut up. You sat quietly. You took a little money on the side, and you aligned yourself with the forces that were going to win regardless.

  What fool would do otherwise?

  Dante took the package upstairs. He paused at the top of the hall and looked out at the street. The unmarked car was still there at the mouth of the alley, and the squad car sat as before. He imagined the couple up at the Stanford Hotel, at the top of Nob Hill, pausing at the window to look at the city below them. Then down the elevator, into the taxi, in their anonymous Windbreakers, cameras around their necks, off to the airport, the next city, the next open house.

  Dante went down the hall into the room. It still smelled of the old woman, but of himself now, too. He put the package on the bed and checked his gun and peered into the alley. There was no moon. The light the evening before, that naked glow pouring in through the hotel window, had issued from an arc lamp beneath the freeway.

  Dante stripped away the brown wrapping and the white string to reveal the box beneath, a cardboard mailer, the size of a shirt box, itself as of yet unopened. It had been sent international express from Mexico, judging from the markings on the outside, though the mailing bill had been stripped away.

  The inside package was soft with padding, packed with tissue, spotted in places, scabby and damp. Inside the wrapping: a white nightgown, gauze thin. Slashed and stained with blood.

  A noise came from somewhere. A low keening; a rolling wail; laughter almost, but not laughter, not at all; a sound not quite human. Or too human. Dante himself could not tell where it came from. From down below somewhere. From the night streets out there, Angelo and his squad car friends. Chin. Up out of the black dirt, from the hollow in his chest. He understood now. The woman in the cell phone picture. The lace gown. The shadow in the background.

  They had killed Marilyn. Or the woman they thought was Marilyn. Down in Ensenada.

  There was nothing inside him. The noise had emptied out of him, and in the middle of that emptiness, again, the ringing of his cell.

  “We know you are up there,” said Angelo. “You should come down. It could be messy otherwise.”

  Dante stood in the hall, at the window overlooking the street. Angelo was at the squad car, and his thick-necked partner, Sergeant Jones, lounged against the unmarked sedan. There were other shadows in the square as well, moving, and heading from the corner he saw Chin, in a hurry, crossing against the traffic. Angelo did not seem pleased to see her, and the way she confronted him, Dante saw her urgency, her fury. She was late to the party, not of her own accord, Dante guessed, but because she had not been informed, at least not by Angelo. Dante saw how it was. Angelo had been tipped to his presence here, and his friends at the company, they’d never intended to let him off so easy.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Dante dropped down into the alley. The drop had been hard enough two days back, when he’d first explored the alley, before he’d taken the scissors in the leg. When he landed, the pain shot back up into his thigh, up through the groin. He lingered an instant in his crouch, like a wounded cat, staring warily down into the far recess, where the alley narrowed. There were only two ways to go: toward the iron gate, where the thick-necked sergeant was waiting, or back into the alley.

  He went toward the street first. On this side of the gate, there stood a pair of Dumpsters fed by a restaurant whose employees had access from the other side, but the access was one-way. He peered through the iron gate at Sergeant Jones sitting sentry in the unmarked car.

  Dante headed back into the alley.

  There was a parapet up along the ledge, and behind that parapet a little stone recess, big enough for a man to hid
e in. Something shifted in the blackness up there, along the parapet, but he could not be sure. He went deeper into the alley, more slowly now, softly, stilling his breath.

  The look in the woman’s eyes, there at the bar …

  He hesitated at the place where the corridor narrowed then bent back on itself, turning, then turning again, the passageway growing blacker with each turn. The alley ended in a small clearing, if you wanted to call it that, an asphalt patch between buildings where the old Chinaman, the gate-keeper, kept his bedroll.

  He stopped at the final corner.

  A dim light flickered against the brick ahead, and there was a sound, like a broken record, a humming, a man about to sing but stuck on the opening syllable. Dante edged along the alley wall, and as he did so, his view widened. He did not see the old Chinaman at first, and when he did see him, it was not so much the man himself as the shape of the man, tucked back in the recess of a farther alcove, illuminated dimly, momentarily, by a can of Sterno at the head of the arch. The old man was meditating, and the moans came from him, some old chant, by no means sonorous. Dante stepped out into the open area. It was no more really than a shaft between buildings. At this angle the old man was no longer visible. The Sterno threw vague shadows against the brick along the opposite wall, and he had an impression of someone moving in those shadows. There was a narrow walkway on the other side of the Chinaman, but it went nowhere, a shoulder-width passage, brick on both sides, that sloped down to a metal drain. He heard a shuffling back there, rats, and then another noise, as of someone dropping into the larger alley—from that parapet, perhaps—back in the direction from which he had just come.

  Dante had been here in daylight. The fire escape dropped from above, down the shaft, ending prematurely, a flight above. At the point where the fire stairs broke off, an iron slat remained embedded horizontally into the brick. He had to strain to reach this, then plant his feet against the wall, arching his spine, looking for purchase, all the while reaching with the free hand for the bottom of the ladder. He heard a noise behind him. Pain shot up his leg. He pushed through it, grasping upward. In the same instant, he heard a click behind him, the cock of the chamber, a soft female grunt. The old man was still meditating. Dante heard another set of footsteps behind him, a third presence, emerging from the corridor down which he himself had just come. He realized it now, who they were. He reached for his holster as he hung one-handed from the ladder, twisting. Then his leg gave out and he fell. He landed raggedly, falling to one knee, with the other leg sprawled behind and two hands on the ground.