Naked Moon (2 page)

“I guess there's no rush,” she said.

“No.”

“But this place—it could use some paint, at least.”

He and Marilyn had been together off and on. He'd
known her before he'd gone away, and after he came back, and they'd put each other through the usual kinds of difficulties, but there was still, despite everything, the same electricity between them. She was in her mid-thirties, some five years younger than himself.

“I guess it depends on how you want to live. If you mean to rent the place out, or live here yourself …”

They did not talk about the fact that Marilyn had been gone for the last ten days. Dante did not ask and she had the delicacy not to tell him, though he knew well enough.

She'd been to Santa Barbara—in the company of David Lake.

David Lake was a widower, a few years older than Dante, who had taken an interest in her after the accident.

Wrong place, wrong time.

My fault, Dante thought, because he'd taken her to Oakland that night. Because the event had been in behalf of some client at Cicero's Investigations, where Dante worked. Dante and Marilyn did not talk about that, however, nor did they talk about David Lake. They talked instead about the empty house, and about his parents. They talked about his cousin Gary, who was having legal troubles out at the warehouse, and about Gary's wife, Viola, who wanted a divorce, and wanted it now, before the Feds moved in and took everything. They talked about his grandfather's old felucca, a small sailboat of the sort once used by the Sicilian fishermen. It sat unused in a slip down at the Marina, and it was one of the things Dante had resolved to let go.

“The buyer, he's taking title Saturday.”

“Are you going to take it out one last time?”

“Maybe.”

“You should.”

“It's an idea.”

“It's nice out there, on the water.”

“Friday?”

Marilyn had grown close to David Lake, Dante knew. Before the accident, she worked down at Prospero Real Estate, and Lake had gone to her with some property he wanted to sell. Whether there had been anything between them back then, Dante wasn't sure. Either way, Lake had money—and after the incident, arranged for an eye specialist, then trips down to Los Angeles to a plastic surgeon. The surgeon was one of the best. She was lucky her injures were not worse. Lucky, too, that the widower David Lake had taken an interest in seeing her mend.

It was not an unselfish interest, but few things were.

She had most all her vision in one eye, but the other one was glass—or plastic, more accurately, as that was the way they made them now, with some kind of material in the artificial surface designed to mimic the good eye, so both eyes appeared to shift and track. The effect was imperfect at times, disconcerting.

“We could take the boat out to Angel Island,” Dante said. “The weather's been good.”

Angel Island was an uninhabited island in the middle of the bay. They used to take the boat out when they were younger and things had been simpler between them. Cut the engine. Let it drift.

“What did the doctor say?” he asked. Her eyes skittered over him, the good eye and the bad eye.

“It's coming along.”

The surgeries were over. This latest examination could have been done locally, but Lake had taken her down to the specialist's clinic in Ysidro, at an old ranch in the Santa Barbara foothills. A healing resort. Mud baths and physical therapists and the swimming pool where Carole Lombard once swam. Ysidro was where the Hollywood people went these days to recuperate after plastic surgery.

“Let me see,” he said.

She had a primness that had not been there before and stiffened, just a little, when he reached toward her. He reached anyway and put a finger on her lips, just touching, then brushed the hair back from her face. Despite her involvement with David Lake, they were still intimate from time to time. They kissed, and he felt a sharp desire and for an instant imagined a distant shore someplace, an ancient alley, the cathedral in a picture she had shown him once upon a time. She had told him—self-deprecating, laughing at herself—how she used to imagine, when she was a girl, that she would get married in Italy, in a picture like that. But that was some time ago when she told him that, and they had both been a lot more innocent then, lying together fully dressed, legs twisted, chests pushed one against the other, and he pulling up her shirt so he could press her stomach to his. They lay on the bed now, similarly entangled, but they were—both of them—thinking about David Lake.

Dante lifted his head, and she pulled away, lying beside
him but not touching. She petted his enormous nose for a little while, but it was more like the petting you would give a lost dog. He walked away to the window and lit a cigarette and stared down into the shadows.

“He asked me to marry him,” she said.

She sat on the edge of the bed, knees together. Her blouse was open, unbuttoned at the top, and she wore a camisole beneath. The clothes were new. Purchased in a boutique down in Santa Barbara, maybe. She and David Lake, out shopping. A moment before, he had been running his hands up over her slacks. Expensive. He liked the feel of them, of running his hands up over the fabric, over the zipper at the front, feeling the warmth beneath. He was tempted to get on his knees now and crawl back to where she was and put his head down so he could bury his nose in the fabric between her legs.

David Lake.

She regarded Dante with the dead eye. The oracular eye. Reading his mind, maybe. Glimpsing for an instant all that stuff inside. He wondered what she saw, but in truth, the good eye was downcast, and it was just the other eye, stubborn, confused by the darkness. Not following its mate.

H
is cell phone sat on the table next to the bed. The ringer was off, but it started to vibrate, shaking, a thrumming noise, small-throated, persistent.

That was when it had all started, he would think later. With the shaking of the phone on the tabletop. That was the
moment leading to the moment when he would find himself at the nameless hotel. When he would hear at once the old Buddhist moaning in the alley and the assassin's cord whipping the air behind him and see the flames rising at his feet. The moment in which you saw backward and forward and realized there was no such thing as time, no such thing as space, only the instant of death. All of life was spent in this instant, but he did not see this now, not yet. He saw only Marilyn sitting there on the bed.

“Gary?” she asked.

It was a reasonable guess. His cousin had left him a number of messages these past days, his voice more urgent with each call. There had been some kind of scene, Dante knew, out at Rossi's place, between his cousin and Joe Rossi, the former mayor, whose daughter was running for office. Then there was this new man Gary had been meeting with, Dominick Greene.

“Is it your cousin?”

“I don't think so.”

“Work?”

“Maybe.”

The number was not one Dante recognized, but this was often true in his line of work. Some of Cicero's clients were not particularly savory, and they used disposable phones that were difficult to trace. Either way, he decided not to pick up, not now. He looked at Marilyn across the room.

I am going to get on the floor,
he thought.
I am going to drop to my knees and crawl.

“I should get going,” she said.

“Angel Island?” he asked “Friday—”

“I'll check with the office. I have a new listing to prepare … and there's this couple looking for a place.”

“A couple?”

“New in town. They want to buy.”

“Let me walk you home.”

“No. I'll be all right.”

“Just to the corner.”

“I've lived in this neighborhood my whole life.”

“Then you know how it can be.”

“I'll be okay.”

“Just to the corner.”

W
hen the phone rang again, he was alone. Marilyn was gone and he stood in the basement, looking at the things his parents had left behind. Inside a small wooden box, of the type that required careful handling, he found their wedding rings. Other boxes held old clothes, papers, a plethora of shoes. He had to decide what to keep, what to throw away. Before his mother died, she'd been tormented by voices, by all those things in the attic, their secrets, the past, conspiracies she could not decipher. He remembered his father putting his hands over her ears.

Don't Listen.

Dante put down the box with the rings and answered the phone.

On the other side, the line sounded dead at first, in the background a faint clicking, erratically spaced, like the noise of an old-fashioned Teletype—the electronic humming of an
encrypted line. Then the voice—the same voice that had contacted him in the past, during those years he did not talk about. Whether the voice was male or female, he had never been able to tell. Filtered, for security purposes, so the identity could not be decoded. Throatless, reedy, not quite human. A sound like an insect speaking through a megaphone.

“We have an unpaid invoice.”

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

“That isn't the answer we want.”

“No?”

“It's not what we are hoping for.”

Dante was tempted to pull off the phone, to hang it up, but in the end, he knew, it would not do any good, and there was—in the ugliness of the voice, the coercive thrumming, the cell phone darkness—a hypnotic quality.

“I am speaking to Mr. Pelican?” the insect asked. It was a nickname, passed on to Dante from his mother's side—on account he had inherited his grandfather's ungainly nose. “Son of Giuseppe Mancuso and Marie Pelicanos, yes?” Dante did not answer. “We have the right man, I am sure. Grandson of fishermen. Nose of noses.”

There was, on the one hand, a protocol, a means of identification expected when you talked to the company, but there had always been, on the other hand, a mocking quality about this protocol, the sense the rules applied only in one direction. Dante had broken from the company, something not easily done.

“They have passed on, I know. But you have people you love, don't you. A life that you want to live.”

I should have walked Marilyn home, he thought. I should not have let her go on alone.

“What do you want?”

“I think you know.”

With SFPD, Dante had worked his way to homicide, but eventually things had gone askew, and he'd found another way of making a living. Corporate security, he'd told people, for an export firm in New Orleans, and though there was an element of truth, the firm was a shill, a front for intelligence operations several steps removed, taking place in a gray area where the players were untraceable and the intentions hard to sort. His last case, three years ago, had brought him back here, to San Francisco, and he'd managed, through a kind of uneasy truce, to break free. He'd committed certain transgressions to do so, and the act of breaking free was a transgression in itself, and he'd feared, sooner or later, that this moment might come—that it would be wiser to leave the city, to forget his old life and disappear—but he'd lingered nonetheless.

“You have a cousin, too, don't you? Then there's that partner of yours.”

“What about them?”

“You've been double-dipping.”

“No.”

“Someone has. Playing it two ways. Revealing information to both sides.”

“That's not possible.”

“Mind your cousin.”

“He knows nothing.”

“There are others you care about?”

The insect fell silent, so there was only the ticking on the line. The past circling back. It was a lulling, hypnotic silence. I've lingered too long, he thought. Still, what the voice suggested was impossible. He had not divulged anything to anyone. His own mother had gone mad in this house, hearing voices. Whispers in the creaking stairs. Conspirators in the plaster.

He wondered what exactly had happened out at Rossi's, with his cousin Gary, and he wondered, too, about his cousin's new friend, Dominick Greene, the importer here on a working holiday, checking out shipping and storage supposedly, but spending a lot of time in the bars. Dante had run into Greene with his cousin in the square, then seen him around the neighborhood several times since. Coincidence, perhaps.

“The Naked Moon,” the insect said at last.

Dante knew the place, a strip bar around the corner.

Maybe I am going mad, too, Dante thought. Maybe the insect is not here, and is just a voice in the plaster.

“When?”

He listened. The insect spoke.

“Now.”

Then for a long time there was just the ticking noise, the faint clicking, and then after a little while that was gone, too.

PART TWO