Naked Moon (24 page)

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.

T
here 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.

D
ante 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 hide 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.

“Up,” the woman said. “Arms away.”

The woman stood with the gun pointed at his chest. The man, her good-looking friend, he circled behind. The same couple, of course. Angelo was but an instrument, a prod. Still waiting out front, knowing, as these two knew, that Dante would not willingly emerge—but instead take this last avenue. If he hadn't, if he had gone out to Angelo, no doubt his old friend would have surrendered him all the same.
Angelo had whispered to his friends in Federal, and the whispers had traveled, the way whispers do. Dante could hear the insect hissing down there in the center of hell:
Make him unwrap that package … before he dies…. Bury his face in the bloody dress.
He had outwitted them three years ago, but in the end, no one betrayed the company. Do so, and they took your life away from you, piece by piece, and then when it was all gone, they came for you. They didn't know, not yet, they'd gotten the wrong woman, down in Ensenada. Meanwhile, the old Chinaman went on meditating. Angelo leaned against his squad car out front, and Chin …

The woman gave him the same smile he'd seen in the bar. They could have gotten him more simply, these two. They could have put a gun to his head and killed him in the street. But, no. They enjoyed their work, and the message it sent. The man, he loved the feeling of the dowel in his hands, loved that moment just ahead, when he would pull the wire tight, and this woman, with the gun in her hand, she loved to watch.

Overhead, a light flicked on, off. A window opened. He could rush the woman, or pull his gun. She would have to shoot him in the stomach, kill him that way, but it was too late. What happened next, happened in an instant. Dante heard the rustle of fabric behind him, the man in motion. It was the moment toward which everything had been moving, he understood that now, the moment he would not escape. The woman sighed. He heard a snap of wire and the whistle of the air. It was too late even to reach for his gun. As the wire whistled down, he did the only thing that remained.
He ducked. He let his body collapse toward his knees—and at the same moment, he raised his hand.

The rope caught him anyway.

It caught his hand at the palm, and his fingers were trapped there, under the wire, up against his neck. He felt his head twist back, wire in the throat, feet lifting from the ground. The man turned, bending, and the rope cinched, biting deeper. His feet left the ground altogether now. His neck twisted—there was a noise … a sudden cracking … a flash of white….

I
n the moment of death, there are a million eternities—or so the nuns had told him—the seconds divided into milliseconds, infinite divisions, in which the brain denies its own demise. As in the schoolboy story—one he had read as a child—the soldier on the gallows sees the calvary on the near hill—the marksman's shot slices the hanging rope—and the self falls through the trick door into the continuing illusion of its own existence. Something like this, maybe, had happened in this moment, Dante would think later, stumbling.
I am not dead.
The voice coming from above sounded real enough.

“Halt!”

It happened so quickly, he could not be sure. The warning shot, and then the voice, a dark form peering down from the lighted window farther up the shaft. Dante recognized the voice. Chin. She had left off arguing with Angelo and circled around on her own, perhaps, coming through
the adjoining building. Dante saw himself as if from the window above, flailing absurdly, panicky, gasping, grabbing with both hands at the rope as the man bent deeper, and the wire tightened, cutting into his own throat.

I am not dead.

The voice from above … or the mind deceiving itself … His heart beat impossibly fast…. His mind raced…. Then came the exchange of fire, the blackness streaked with light, the gunshots echoing in the small alley as if inside his skull. Inside that alley, that blackness, the woman whirled, firing into the light, and the light fired back. He felt the man stagger beneath him, and his own body go loose, slack, prickling all over. A pain flared in his shoulder. Then suddenly he slid free, twisting in midair, hitting the ground like a sack dumped in the alley. He lay motionless in the dark, with a great heaviness on his chest, as if all the air had been pushed out. Somehow, in the fall, Dante had ended up on the bottom with the man on top. The man had been shot in the skull. It was quiet, only the Sterno for light, and Dante glimpsed the woman leaning against the brick with her long fingers over a wound in her stomach. The woman slid down the brick, holding her stomach. The gun had fallen from her hand, but she did not take her eyes off Dante. Her face was going white, her exotic looks draining away. Her lip curled and hung low, and her chin lengthened as the death shudder ran through her, but she kept those eyes fixed on Dante, as if it were not her that was dying, but him, his body clenching, and as he let loose, at last, the light in her eyes receded until it vanished altogther, dwindling in the darkness of the
shaft. He gathered all his strength and pushed the dead man off his chest.

A
bove him, he heard voices, bystanders, the unruly chatter of the apartment dwellers as they peered down into the alley, curious, frightened—switching on lights, switching them off, yelling contradictory instructions—in the center of that confusion was the window from which the voice had issued, and the gunfire as well. He expected Chin to call down, but he heard instead the static of the citizen band, a cop radio, and a faint voice, a woman, radioing for help.

“Officer down. Need assistance here. I'm bleeding.”

The voice belonged to Chin. She had not been invited, no, but she'd looped around the back, spoiling the party. She had killed the man and the woman, and in the process taken fire herself. Dante had been hit in the shoulder during the firefight.

Dante took the journal from the dead woman's pocket. At the other end of the alley, on the near side of the iron gate, he encountered Angelo, hovering as if in a dream, a little boy, an Italian kid in the alley in a strange part of town where he'd come despite himself, unable to stay away.

Dante held the gun in his good hand.

“No,” Angelo said.

Behind him, Dante heard the sound of the Chinaman meditating in the alley, the same mantra, over and over. It had been there in the background, all the while, persistent,
unceasing. Looking up, through the stairwell window, he caught a glimpse of Sergeant Jones pounding the stairs upward into the hotel. Angelo backed away. He raised his hands. Dante could smell him, the sweat in his nappy hair, a smell like his boyhood streets.

“No,” Angelo said.

“Of course not,” Dante said. “I would never do such a thing.”

“I knew you wouldn't.”

The old routine, it never ended.

He shot Angelo in the stomach.

Then he took out the key the Russian had given him a few days before and unlocked the iron gate.

D
ante weaved up through the street, past the Wu Temple. He limped as before, only worse, dragging his foot behind him—and he was also bleeding from the shoulder. He wore a kimono, taken from a street rack on Grant Street, but the blood seeped through, and his hair and face were flecked, too, with blood from the dead man. People looked in his direction but did not seem to see him, even as the crowd thickened, down along the slope toward Vallejo. There was a logical explanation for this, he told himself. People in Chinatown, their eyes avoided trouble. The crowd always thickened through here, but it was tighter now. Still he slid through—as if he were a ghost passing through. A rally clotted the street. With the surge from Gennae Rossi, and the incumbent's troubles, the race had tightened, and Lee's people were beating the drum. A white Ford, battered to hell, draped in bunting, a microphone over the hood, the sound of Chinese wailing up
through the static. A giant papier-mâché worm, wiggling down the street. A dancing monkey. A woman holding a sign.

IT'S OUR TURN NOW

At Serafina's, Dante leaned against the darkened window. Stella had left everything as it was. The tables, the checkered cloths. The candles and the wineglasses and the painting of Mt. Vesuvius on the wall. Stella hadn't bothered to finish cleaning. There was a dirty plate over where Old Lady Besozi had been sitting, and a half-empty wine bottle on the bar. On that counter, underneath the bar top, all those photos, laminated behind the glass, old-timers and their Cadillacs, fat cigars, a thousand Polaroids, two thousand, any wop who'd ever walked through North Beach, his own mom and his dad and his grandfather with his pelican nose. Himself, Marilyn. Old Man Prospero and Gino and some dancing girl with her chest pushed out. Dante pressed his nose against the window, peered in, woozy, and in his heightened state, he imagined they were all in there at once, eating, drinking, rubbing shoulders. It was a celebration, like the old days, of the type that used to go on, and in the midst of that, Marilyn in her white dress, and himself, too, and everyone raising their glasses.