City of Dragons (38 page)

The counter was nearly full, but she found a stool at the end of the curve. A thin young man with acne and a too-big apron poured coffee for her. She stared in the cup, swished it around, watching it lap the sides like an oil spill. Two eggs, two sausage, two hotcakes, sunny-side up. Keep your sunny side up, young lady, this is the sunny side of the street.

She reached for the discarded
Los Angeles Times
someone had left behind, hoping the coffee would make her sharper, more focused. Sharp enough to find out where the receipt came from. Winters was dead, but thought enough of the place to carry around a card in his pocket. And Wong had flipped a card on her desk as either a promise or a threat—maybe both.

She sipped the coffee, watching the short-order cooks, and lit a cigarette, still chewing down the pack of Raleighs. The L.A. paper didn’t offer much. Phony War still phony to everyone except the fleets getting sunk by U-boats. And the Finns, of course, gasping on their skis, holding the Mannerheim Line against the Russians. They were almost done, almost finished. The headline bleated FINNS HOLD RUSSIANS BUT BEG WORLD AID.

The world wasn’t listening. Not much. It was more concerned with Artie Shaw marrying nineteen-year-old Lana Turner a couple of days ago. However would Betty Grable take it? Answer on column four.

She flipped the paper to the top, caught an article about two Maryland women who were dragged from jail and almost lynched. They were Negroes, and wanted for questioning, and that’s all it took to be guilty of murder in Snow Hill, Maryland. They liked their snow pure white in Snow Hill.

The plate arrived, and Miranda set it on top the newspaper. Poured maple syrup over the sausage and pancakes until they were swimming in it. Tabasco sauce on the eggs, along with salt and pepper. The kid refilled her coffee.

No one bothered her, no one talked to her. She was alone, in her sea of syrup and sea of people, the lunchtime conversations loud and hushed, while she drowned, surrounded, alone in the sensual joy of eating pancakes the way she liked them, drinking coffee so bitter it couldn’t cry any more.

She looked down at the headline, chewed a piece of sausage. Asked for another cup.

The Herbert-Robert Cleaners was only big enough for one name. Miranda looked around the dimly lit shop, hearing the whirr of machinery in the back, watching the woman with the straggly gray hair rifle through the hanging clothes on long racks, searching for a fat lady’s evening gown. She finally found it. The fat lady found fifty-nine cents, paid, and left. The gray-haired woman moved her bored eyes to Miranda.

“I need to pick up this dress.”

The woman squinted at the receipt. “Be right back.”

The shelves at the front were lined with clothes bundled in paper and string, stacked and waiting. At the rear, Miranda caught a glimpse of a Chinese woman pushing a large cart toward one of the machines. The woman leaned against the cart for a moment, wiping her face with her sleeve.

The counter woman appeared from behind a rack of dresses, holding a red brocade number with a small matching jacket. The bodice was low-cut, an evening gown of the type that was common in Chinatown, an imitation of an expensive design at Magnin’s or City of Paris, remade with more traditional Chinese fabric.

Miranda held her hand over the dollar on the counter. Not too much. The woman looked down at the money, and up again at Miranda, her face not bored anymore.

“I’m picking this up for a friend of mine, and I need to know where she wants me to take it. Can you look it up for me?” Her voice was slow, careful.

The woman leaned against the counter and looked at her thoughtfully, tucking her hair back into the knot before more escaped.

“If you’re her friend, you’d know where to take it, I expect. Maybe I shouldn’t let you have it.”

Her eyes were drawn back down to the dollar. Miranda moved her palm aside to reveal another dollar bill below the first one.

“I’m a friend. She works during the week, so I need to know where she wants it. Did she drop it by herself or have it picked up?”

The woman tore her eyes away from the money, and moved toward a large metal file box next to the cash register, throwing the dress on the counter.

She mumbled: “Don’t suppose it’ll do any harm. Can’t be too careful in Chinatown, lady.”

The calluses on her thick fingers caught at the various receipt books, until she found one close to the top.

“Says here it was picked up on Monday afternoon. House at 110 Cordelia Street.”

Miranda shoved the money a little closer. “Say anything else?”

The woman’s eyes narrowed, but she looked down at the counter and licked her lips.

“Nothin’. Clara picked it up.”

“Clara’s Chinese?”

The woman put her head to the side, asked suspiciously: “How’d you know that?”

Miranda gave the money one more shove, then released it. “Because Mr. Wong sent me here.”

The woman slapped her hand on the two bills and slid them off the other side of the counter, pocketing them in one of the folds of the dingy yellow uniform she wore. Not much of an advertisement for Herbert or Robert.

“Don’t know a Mr. Wong, lady, but that’s all right. I don’t work the weekends or the night shift.”

“You think Clara might know him?”

She shrugged, her interest lost. “You can ask her. Clara! This lady’s got a question.”

The gray-haired woman left with noise and without undue haste, letting Miranda know that she knew she wasn’t needed anymore. She shoved a tuxedo shirt aside and vanished into the back, no doubt dreaming of a new apron and a bottle of peroxide. Miranda lit a cigarette and waited.

A small woman about forty emerged, her face damp with sweat. The same one Miranda had noticed earlier. The doorbell chimed, and the gray-haired counter worker came out to the front of the shop, chatting with the customer, a harassed-looking mother picking up four bundles of play clothes.

Miranda motioned down to the opposite end of the counter, and Clara followed her, face expressionless, body stiff with anticipation.

Miranda gestured to the dress, which still lay where the other woman had thrown it.

“You picked that up at 110 Cordelia.”

Clara nodded, waiting.

Miranda took a drag on her cigarette, looked over Clara’s head into the back, and said casually: “You pick it up from Mr. Wong?”

The woman froze, her eyes darting for a way out. The other woman’s attention was still focused on the customer.

“Look—I’m working with Wong. He knows me. I’m trying to find someone for him.”

Clara’s chest moved up and down in excited breathing, her hands shaking even while holding on to the counter. Then she shook her head.

“Can’t help, Miss. Can’t help. You go now. You go!”

Her voice was rising, and it was only a matter of seconds before the other woman would hear. Miranda pushed a dollar into her hand, adding in a low voice, “Betty Chow was a friend of mine.”

The woman held a trembling hand to her mouth and pressed it tight like a gag. When she finally dropped it, there was an imprint across her lower cheeks. The dollar tumbled out of her palm, ignored. She looked at Miranda, terror pouring out of her eyes with the tears.

Then she turned and ran back inside the cave of Herbert-Robert Cleaners.

_______

Cordelia was one of the small, forgotten byways of San Francisco, probably an alley for bilge water and quick assignations with sailors long before ’06. It tunneled between Broadway and Pacific, running parallel to Stockton, and contained mostly garbage cans, alley cats, rats, and pigeons.

Neighborhoods in San Francisco varied on a block-to-block basis, the smallness of the city masking fissures that cracked open and ran deeper than the fault line. Chinatown was circumscribed, cut off, a matter of legal record. Here, you could live; here you couldn’t.

Everywhere else was open to debate, tradition, and wallet books. Italians, Spanish, Chileans, Mexicans, and Peruvians clustered along the Bay front and Telegraph Hill and North Beach, which the Chamber of Commerce had tried to rename as the Latin Quarter. Time to capitalize on all that hot Latin blood for the million and a half visitors to the Pageant of the Pacific, the World’s Fair to end all World’s Fairs, by the city that knew how to put one on and put one over.

Cordelia Street was close enough to Chinatown to spit, if the wind was with you. And smack-dab by North Beach, with Italian restaurants and clubs and gambling joints. And only two blocks from the International Settlement, the new ode to the Barbary Coast for the new twentieth-century hell-raiser.

Whatever you wanted you’d find at the International Settlement. Made to order. Pleasure or pain, take your pick, you can have both, if that’s the way you like it.

Fancy nudie joints like the House of Pisco made Sally Rand look like St. Theresa. You could order up women like a T-bone steak, lean or juicy, tartare or well-done. Everything from tough and stringy to milk-fed veal, all available, all open, all the time.

Give the gentleman what he wants and keep the sin confined to a two-block stretch of Pacific Avenue, so those million and a half visitors will know where to go when they get sick of The Gayway and Midget Village and the Tower of the Sun and the pale-faced madonnas with the glued-together thighs hanging in the Treasure Island Art Collection.
Pacifica
was a nice sculpture, but her nipples were too small. Best try Pickles O’Dell, fourth bar from the left.

Some respectable joints like the Monaco operated at the Settlement, too, a hall of mirrors reflection of the Naughty Nineties. Their brand of sin was inspired by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the film company that held God’s ear. According to Louis B. Mayer, second only to Moses and possibly Jesus as a prophet, the Earthquake was a punishment for our wicked ways. So Clark Gable reformed, and Jeanette MacDonald lived to sing “San Francisco” again, and Spencer Tracy tugged at the collar around his neck and blessed them both. And went back to the bottle under his cot.

Hollywood liked to celebrate anniversaries, and hell, an earthquake and fire were still big news thirty years later, but no sense in scaring off tourists. That good ol’, bad ol’ broad the natives never called Frisco was a sober, God-fearing city now, as scrubbed and clean as Shirley Temple’s puberty. So the Monacos and Diamond Horseshoes batted their eyes and flirted, fronting for the real International Settlement that lurked behind the chromium and glass.

And the tune went out from the land. And the tune was good, and milk and honey came to the land. And the tune was “Sing, you Sinners.”

Miranda stood at the edge of Broadway, looking down Cordelia Street. A couple of houses still squatted in the alley like an old woman taking a pee. They lingered, cheek by jowl to hash houses and bars named after Mike or Sam, mostly with the neon burned out, mostly with liquor spiced up from old bootlegging supplies and rubbing alcohol.

110 Cordelia was the better off of the two, at the more respectable end of the street near Miranda, away from Pacific Avenue and the run-off from the International Settlement. Pierino Gavallo’s little foray into rebuilding the Barbary Coast into fun town, sin town, buy-what-you-like town came with a set of streamlined blueprints and arches at each end of Pacific Avenue, the old Terrific Avenue of the ghosts who roamed the gold-dust-sprinkled slats at Tar’s, the one lone bar still shipwrecked from the Old Coast. It lingered there, looking inward, next to chrome and steel, curves and lines and violet-colored lights, wrapped in its memories of the old days. People came in for a drink to say they’d seen it, then left for more excitement down the street at the Conga Club, where the dance wasn’t the only thing to get in line for.

The International Settlement. Gavallo had a few partners in his venture. Joe Gillio was one of them.

Miranda inhaled, trying to find some taste in the Raleigh. She could stake out the house if she could enlist the tavern across the street from it, hire out a back room, and keep watch. But talking her way into it would take time, and time is what she didn’t have.

She leaned against the brick wall of a barbershop kitty-corner from Cordelia. It was close to two o’clock, and she couldn’t stay much longer—she’d already drawn unwanted attention from two sailors and a drunk. Make that three drunks.

The house was a wood-frame cottage that probably looked like a shanty when it was new. The years hadn’t been kind, but it nodded to livability. Someone had even dabbed some brown paint by the front windows.

She figured she was supposed to be here. She was looking for Wong.

What she saw was a hawk-nosed man in a fancy green suit and a broad-rimmed fedora.

Miranda disappeared into the barbershop, keeping her eyes on the Italian. The customer in the chair opened his eyes in surprise, and the barber paused, razor in mid shave, staring at her.

“You lookin’ for somebody, lady?”

“Yes. I mean, no, sorry.”

She walked out, turned left toward Market. He was walking down Broadway, and she was now behind him.

She recognized the face. It was Sammy Martini.

The red brocade dress was small and light in the paper bag. A woman out for a stroll down to the shops. Only a few people looked at her twice. She tilted her hat, making her cheek look less swollen. The makeup hid the blue-and-green bruises.

Martini didn’t turn around, walked with a light step, his hat worn low, his hands in his pockets. Sure of himself. At ease. And he didn’t walk far.

Once across Stockton and halfway to Grant, a dark sedan pulled up next to him. It double-parked, but the taxi driver behind it quit honking when the guns in the back climbed out.

They both flanked Martini like Great Danes around a terrier. Miranda watched from the front window of a small bookshop as he nodded, grinning at the men, and gestured for them to go back into the car. They obeyed and drove off, making an immediate right on Columbus.

The bookstore clerk was walking over, smiling, helpfulness incarnate. Not a neighborhood for readers, unless they were selling pornography. Valentine’s Day Special. Miranda stepped outside quickly, keeping Martini in her sights.