Noir

by Christopher Moore

  “All you have to do is call them off,” Stilton said in her doting on the moonman voice. “It’s easy.”

  Stoddard looked at her like he’d just awakened to find her there. “Why are you here?”

  “I’m saving your life, Alton,” she said. “Sammy was just going to shoot you and leave. I talked him out of it.” She smiled, cut an ain’t I sweet pose. “Also to carry the ice bucket full of goons.”

  Alton Stoddard the Third slumped in his chair like a puppet with his strings cut. “I’ll call them off, all of them.”

  “Promise?” Stilton said.

  “He’s a lawyer, doll,” I reminded her.

  “I promise,” he said. “As soon as you leave. And if for some reason they don’t stand down, if someone shows up, don’t just have me killed. It will mean they haven’t listened to me. Call my office. Give me time to fix it.”

  “Maybe,” I said. I uncocked the Walther and dropped it in my jacket pocket. “Let’s go, doll,” I said to Stilton.

  I held the door for her, but as she left Stoddard’s office Stilton turned and said, “Good day to you, sir. To you, sir, I say, good day!” Then she stormed out.

  I caught up to her at the elevator, where we had to wait and watch the floors tick up.

  “Nice exit,” I told her.

  “Thanks. I didn’t know when I was going to get the chance to say that again.”

  “You did swell,” I said.

  The elevator dinged, but before the doors opened, the Cheese looked at me and said, “We coulda asked for money?”

  “Yeah, I guess I shoulda thought of that, huh?”

  27

  Sometimes

  Bailey and Hatch are about thirty miles outside of Barstow in the Mojave Desert when I start feeling warm enough to move around a little. I can’t lie, I’m a warm-weather serpent. The hollowed-out carcass of the skate was a comfy den, but Uncle Ho has chilled me more than somewhat with his fire extinguisher to make me lethargic, so he could get me in there, and although the Chinese broads who sew all the fish parts together leave me a nice exit right under the octopus, it’s a little chilly for my tastes. So once we’re in the Mojave with the summer sun beating down on the black Chrysler, I wake up a little. I peek out, and what do I see but the two guys in black fedoras sitting there in the front seat. Bailey is driving, going very fast. Too fast. If I’m going to get out of this jalopy, I need to slow them down some. So I slide up between the rear seats, across the floor, and I come up on the window side where Hatch is sitting. He’s a big guy, and even in this heat is wearing his coat, so I look for a good spot. I sort of stand up on the floor of the backseat, and there it is, a nice stripe of bare neck between his fedora and his collar. I BITE! BITE! BITE!

  Then I slide down under the front seat.

  Oh the yelling and the waving and the drama. The Chrysler is lurching from side to side, the tires screeching. Hatch is screaming, holding his neck. Bailey is yelling, “What? What? What?”

  “Something bit me!” Hatch yells.

  “What?”

  Bailey finally pulls the car onto the side of the road and stops, and just in time, because with all the commotion, I am about to barf up a five-spice rat. Meanwhile, Hatch starts to have convulsions, like they do when you get them in a good spot. And he goes all stiff and twitchy, stiff and twitchy. Now Bailey gets out of the car and runs around to the other side. Drags Hatch out onto the sand. Which is my chance, because Bailey leaves the passenger door open. I slide slick as snake snot out the door and onto the sand, which is hot, but not so hot I can’t make a run for some shade somewhere. Bailey sees me, but he’s holding his partner’s head, trying to clear his airway, and what’s he going to do? Sammy took his gun. I shoot him the fork-tongue raspberry a couple of times. Ya mook. Wouldn’t know a Martian if it bit ya. Ha!

  Some big rocks over there, some shade. I make my way over. Not a bad spot, something has hollowed out a little den. It’s cooler here, and when whatever made the den comes back, I can eat it. I’ll wait out the day here, but I peek my head out to watch what’s going on back at the road.

  Bailey looks up, sees a Chrysler, identical to the one he was driving, pull up. At first he thinks help has arrived. He sees the hat and maybe sunglasses. Maybe. The driver’s door swings open, and the next thing Bailey sees is what appears to be a tiny spy in a trench coat and a wide-brimmed fedora, carrying a cornet with batteries and other bits wired to it. It’s the last thing he sees.

  There’s a flash and a couple of mushroom clouds rise over the desert.

  Waste of venom, really. Hatch would have hung on for hours. Oh well.

  I watch the second Chrysler pull away. He’s getting to be a pretty good driver. Long, straight desert roads are good practice. I coil up for a nap.

  * * *

  I don’t know what happened with the moonman. Maybe he’s still out there somewhere, driving a big Chrysler, wearing my best suit jacket. Maybe he found a way home.

  It’s six months now, and we haven’t heard from the tax men, or anyone else involved with the Bohemians, so maybe Alton Stoddard the Third got the message out to his powerful pals. Who knows? We keep an eye out for anything strange.

  I’m still bartending, although I have a stake in the joint now, as Mrs. Sal asks me to stay on to run the place for a share in the profits. I tell her, “Really, Mrs. Gabelli, I don’t think what they tell you happens to Sal is strictly on the level.”

  And she says to me, “I know that, Sammy. Sal was terrified of flying. He wouldn’t go up a stepladder to change a lightbulb, let alone get on a plane in the middle of the night. He was a douche bag. His life caught up with him. End of story. You want the job or not?”

  Romance.

  Lone Jones is still waiting for his call from President Roosevelt, although after meeting Jimmy Vasco he is now considering becoming a lesbian, as that seems like it might be easier to get into than the Secret Service. Lone and Jimmy have become fast friends and she sometimes joins us at Cookie’s for late-night coffee and conversation.

  Bokker, the merchant marine, is getting a new snake for Uncle Ho, which Moo Shoes and I are paying for out of our own pockets, although we have opted for something more portable but just as deadly—called a boomslang—so Ho can rake in some respectable doubloons in the snake-whiz noodle-soup business.

  Moo Shoes and Lois Fong are an item going on six months now, and have decided to go in together on a driving school for the people of Chinatown. Lois will sing the written parts, and disrobe as needed to keep the students’ attention. Moo Shoes will teach the actual driving.

  “But technically, you don’t know how to drive,” I tell Moo.

  “Yeah, but in an emergency, I do fine,” he says. “What could go wrong?”

  He has a point. There is a need. He has an angle.

  Milo is also expanding his business by serving adult beverages to his fares while driving them to work. He is driving a little more each week, in small doses, so he builds up his tolerance, and if the cops do not catch on to his game, he will be able to rent a place where he can sleep more than one night in a row.

  Me and the Cheese, well, it’s not what you’d call a picket fence life. She’s still dealing breakfasts off her arm, and I’m still tending bar and keeping company with citizens of the night, but we see each other every night, mostly at her place, since mine is still infested with the kid. She agreed to stop acting like a floozie and so did I, so we go to the pictures on my night off, or out to Playland at the Beach. We have a drink from time to time, or go listen to some jazz at Lone’s club; we do the razzmatazz until the wee hours, and sometimes, afterward, we sit naked together on the kitchen floor and eat cheese and crackers off the same plate and laugh until we collapse in a heap. It’s just swell.

  Oh yeah, sometimes, late, with the music on her record player turned down low, we dance.

  Afterword

  The Setting―the City

  Location is a place. Setting is place and time. From the beg
inning, I knew that San Francisco was going to be the place where this story would take place, but what was in question was the time. I knew I wanted a time after World War II and before cell phones, which gave me a window of about sixty years. In a sort of emergency swing during a phone call with my editor, I picked the year 1947, which ended up being both the curse and the gift of this novel. The gift was just how dynamically San Francisco was changing at the time; the curse was that 1947 was just long enough ago that anyone I could find who had been alive and in the city at the time couldn’t actually remember what happened, with the exception of one very nice guy who had come to San Francisco right after the war and who remembered (fondly) guys taking girls over to Playland at the Beach on dates. Playland ran from the 1920s to the 1970s, when it was torn down, and today the only remnant remaining is one oversized windmill still visible from the Great Highway along Ocean Beach.

  The saloon where Sammy works is based on a real place, still in the location described in the story, on Grant Street near Broadway, where it has stood since 1861, one of the few structures that survived the earthquake and fire of 1906. The layout and history of the saloon, however, is completely from my imagination, as is the character of Sal Gabelli.

  Club Shanghai, where Eddie Shu works, was also a real place, on Grant Street in Chinatown as I described. The Chinese clubs with dancing girls and entertainers doing impressions of Anglo entertainers had become the rage in the ’30s among the “nobs” of Nob Hill and Pacific Heights, and continued until the 1970s. You can learn more about the Chinese nightclubs in Arthur Dong’s book and documentary film Forbidden City USA: Chinese American Nightclubs, 1936–1970, as well as in Lisa See’s novel China Dolls, which tells the story of four showgirls working in the clubs in the 1940s. The Chinese community had been insulated and mostly relegated to Chinatown, the largest community of Chinese outside of China; but after the earthquake and into the twentieth century, Chinese businessmen moved to attract patronage from the surrounding city. One of the first steps was to redesign the neighborhood with Chinese architecture for an “authentic” look. Later, businesses that catered specifically to the non-Chinese community―chop suey houses and businesses with self-parodying names like Fur Man Chu (a fur shop)―opened. In fact, both chop suey and the fortune cookie were invented in San Francisco, not China, to appeal to non-Chinese. Other businesses like the jook houses catered almost exclusively to Chinese Americans, and the eight-foot-wide, four-stories-tall jook house described in Noir was a real place, although I have no idea if they actually served noodles with the urine from deadly snakes. That tradition is still practiced today in Shanghai, according to my good friend Google.

  Like the jook house, other locations in Noir are based on real places that existed but are long gone now. Cookie’s Coffee was a real diner in the Tenderloin called Coffee Dan’s; and like Cookie’s, they catered to the theater crowd, and indeed celebrated New Year’s Eve 365 nights a year. There was also a cabdriver who, like Milo, served shots of liquor to Coffee Dan’s patrons for two bits a shot, although Milo owes his particular history more to the character Henri in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row―an artist who was building a boat but was afraid of the sea―than to the real-life cabbie.

  Jimmy’s Joynt, too, is based on a real spot, and Jimmy is based on a real woman called Tommy Vasu, who indeed dressed like a guy and had a weakness for gambling and willowy blondes (not redheads like Myrtle). She ran a club called Tommy’s Joint, on Broadway (which has nothing whatever to do with the hofbrau Tommy’s Joynt, on Van Ness Avenue, which is still open today and serves fine buffalo stew, meat loaf, and carved turkey and dressing every day of the year). Female drag clubs were popular in North Beach in the 1940s (and into the 1950s, when the city codified hostility toward gay and lesbian clubs). The most famous of the lesbian drag clubs was Mona’s 440, which is portrayed in Ellen Klages’s novel Passing Strange.

  The Bohemian Club is also a real organization. The main clubhouse is located at Post and Taylor Streets in what is now the Tenderloin (or lower Nob Hill or upper Union Square to the more charitably minded). Descriptions of the interior of the club come from written accounts, and although I was invited to attend as the guest of an artist member, I ran out of time before I had to write the scene, so I never got there. The Bohemian Grove and the ritual of the Cremation of Care, complete with giant concrete owl, come from academic descriptions. I have never set foot in the Grove, although I’ve driven by the entrance many times, as I keep a writing hovel and squirrel ranch nearby. The nefarious goings-on beyond the well-documented ritual are all products of my imagination because nothing but rainbows and cupcakes ever comes out of secret meetings among immensely rich and powerful white guys.

  The Neighborhoods

  Most of Noir takes place in the neighborhoods of North Beach, Chinatown, the Tenderloin, and the Fillmore. North Beach has been an Italian neighborhood since the late 1800s, populated by fishermen from Italy who migrated and brought their food and culture with them, although in the 1940s it was also the mecca for the gay community, both men and women, before it migrated to the Castro, a neighborhood at the southwest end of Market Street, which was a solidly working-class Irish neighborhood in 1947. (Which is not to say that there weren’t gay people living there, but it is pretty safe to say that they weren’t out at the time.)

  In the 1940s, the Tenderloin, while a fairly rough neighborhood today―a spongy center of poverty and street crime surrounded by a rich crust of gentrification―was the theater district, the center of both entertainment and government, as City Hall and the Civic Center lay in its midst. Its transformation can be traced back to World War II, when the United States started gearing up for it, opening shipyards up and down the West Coast to build war and transport ships and munitions. The factories required workers, and the workers required housing, so single-room occupancy (SRO) hotels were built in the Tenderloin to house the workers. Today the Tenderloin rings of sad desperation, but in the 1940s, with three shifts of defense workers cycling in and out of the neighborhood, not to mention the entertainers and theater crowd, the Tenderloin was jumping.

  Cross Van Ness Avenue from the Tenderloin and you’re in the Fillmore, which was also changed radically by the war, but for different reasons. The Fillmore, known for its Fillmore theater and the landmark rock concerts of the 1960s, was little more than a slum before the war. Many of the population living there were Japanese, and the Fillmore and Japantown were barely distinguishable. In 1942 President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, ordering Japanese-Americans living on the West Coast imprisoned in internment camps. The Japanese residents were forced to sell or store their belongings and were moved to camps up and down the coast. Another executive order, number 8802, which banned discrimination based on race in defense plants, had already caused a mass westward migration of blacks fleeing the oppressive Jim Crow South. These migrants were following the promise of good jobs and guaranteed housing and benefits. The new housing being built for workers couldn’t keep up with demand, so when the homes of the interned Japanese opened up in the Fillmore, African Americans moved in. Jazz clubs began to open in the neighborhood, and by the 1950s, the Fillmore was a premier jazz destination for musicians and enthusiasts. When the Japanese were released from the camps, many returned to the Fillmore, which engendered an interesting intersection of cultures that I’ve written about in earlier books (A Dirty Job, Secondhand Souls), but many also moved into the new housing being built in the Richmond and the Sunset to house the families of returning servicemen (as referenced by Sal in chapter 3 when he’s trying to formulate dog pizza).

  The aforementioned changes to racial demographics in San Francisco have resonated through the years to shape the Bay Area into what it is today, but in 1947 the changes were new, and the city was trying to catch its breath after a great war, and inevitably those changes affected the people.

  The Characters

  It was tough to find firsthand sources for what life was like in San Francisco i
n 1947, so I turned to the writings of Herb Caen, the intrepid columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Francisco Examiner from 1938 until 1997, whose beat was the street and people of the city. Caen’s work touched on every aspect of city life and often profiled colorful characters-about-town. In one column, he wrote about a racist cop who made it his business to try to beat the neighborhood white. Caen also reported how the cop was pulled off the street but kept on the force because he knew where too many of the city’s power elite’s bodies were buried. Caen never mentioned the cop’s name, but after I read that column, Pookie O’Hara was born.

  During the war the African American population of San Francisco rose from just over 5,000 at the beginning of the war to more than 35,000 by the end of it―an increase of more than 600 percent. And that was just in San Francisco proper, not including Oakland, Marin City, and Richmond, where there were also shipyards. Portrayals of indigent veterans in the Third Street Sherry Society were also inspired by Herb Caen, who wrote about them frequently.

  General Remy, and consequently the moonman, came out of one of my very early web searches of “San Francisco, 1947,” which returned one small item in the middle of the second page, posted by a UFO aficionado, noting that in March 1947 the commander of the air force base at Roswell visited San Francisco. The crash at Roswell, whatever it was, happened in June of that year, only a week or so after the first “flying saucer” was spotted by a pilot near Mount Rainier in Washington State. There is nothing beyond that coincidence for the basis of the character of Remy; once I knew that a general was in the city in the same year as the flying-saucer sighting and the Roswell crash, well, I had to run with it. With the general came the Men in Black, and, of course, the moonman.