Naked Moon (6 page)

Love Wu, the perverse, the ancient one, ruler of the hidden kingdom.

Father of Chinatown, to whom the wind carried every sound. Founder of the Wu Benevolent Association, the oldest of the Chinese associations.

You could not breathe, you could not whisper, without Love Wu knowing.

The benevolent associations were old institutions in Chinatown, offering help to newcomers, aid to the indigent, business ties. Older still were the tongs: secret societies with their roots in the Chinese underworld. The lines between the tongs and the associations were not always clear, even now. Both went back to the time when the Chinese clipper ships had anchored by night in the fog off the Golden Gate, and the smugglers brought their longboats up to the wharf in the small hours, carrying cargo for the opium dens, women for the brothels. They brought indentured labor for the railroads, to hoe the fields and clean the toilets. Men to dig the basement tunnels that extended beneath Chinatown and spiraled out into the city. But the contraband had gone both ways. If a local strayed too close to the wharf at night, stood too long on a street corner, that person—man, woman or child—might find themselves bound and gagged, facedown in a Chinese longboat. Headed out to those clippers in the fog.

A white slave.

A galley mate for life. A concubine. A child for the delight of Oriental perversions.

Love Wu had been around since the time of the tunnels, it was said, though that would make him impossibly old. The stories about him were contradictory, his birth date a matter of conjecture. The streets were full of his relations—sons, nieces, granddaughters, cousins. But as these relations grew old and passed into the grave, Love Wu remained.

No.

He had died long ago. He was not one man, but many. In fact, Love Wu was not a man at all but a title given to a man: a designation passed along from one dying kinsman to the next.

No.

Love Wu had not died. Rather he had returned to China. He lived in a monastery in Sonoma. He was the old beggar you saw every day on the corner, wandering the streets in disguise.

No.

He still lived on the top floor of the Empress Building, in the upper story, above the manifold operations of the Wu Benevolent Association. His chambers opened onto the balcony at the top of the building, and sometimes at night his shadow could be seen moving in the yellow light that issued from those slatted doors.

He dwelled in his library there, among the ancient scrolls, listening to the secrets drift up from the street. There were stories about his library, and the information recorded there.

Dante had seen him once, years ago. Or rather he had heard the name, Love Wu, issue through the crowd, and seen an old Chinaman in silk garments and braided hair being escorted across the street like some dignitary.

Back hunched, infirm.

The Italians joked, every old man in Chinatown. There goes Love Wu.

It was impossible he could still be alive.

Regardless, the smuggling continued. Not just laborers, tucked in the hold of a ship. Not just AK-47s and counterfeit cell phones, heroin and cocaine, black market computers and AAA batteries, factory defective goods recycled in new wrapping. Information, too, trade secrets from Silicon Valley, under-the-counter real estate deals, money to launder. And the news of these dealings carried upward to the old man forever on the verge of death. A man who was not a man at all but a sunken spot on the bed—ashes in an urn—dust scattered over the ocean.

Everything got back to him, sooner or later.

He had a million spies.

Hotel clerks. Fishmongers. Maids.

Attorneys and cops.

Scribes.

As a child, restless in his bed on Fresno Street, listening to the creaking of the old house, Dante had imagined what it was like to be Love Wu, hearing what he heard, decoding the secret language—and sometimes, on the edge of sleep, it seemed he actually understood. Dante had the same sensation
now, leaving his cousin's house, midstep—as if he were looking down on himself from up there, listening to the breeze on the other side of those slatted doors.

Ru Shen.

I
t was election season, and overnight a new wave of campaign flyers had been plastered along Kearny: on the telephone poles and bus shelters, on the plywood sheeting under the construction overhangs. Identical pictures of Gennae Rossi, placed one after another. Daughter of Joe Rossi, the former mayor. Dark horse candidate for mayor now, sentimental favorite in North Beach. Running against Ching Lee on one side, and the incumbent Edwards on the other. Whoever posted them had continued past Columbus, around the corner into Chinatown, but here the likenesses had already been defaced. The same was true on the other side of Columbus, however. Lee's posters did not last long before they were peeled and plastered over with Gennae Rossi's face.

Above the battle, in the higher reaches—on the billboards, on the sides of buildings—laminated on the panels
of a passing bus—was the image of the incumbent: Dale Edwards.

Edwards had more money than the others, more campaign funds, and there were questions in the paper about where the money came from, but in one way, it did not matter. His face, too, was scrawled with graffiti.

Dante was on his way to find the girl from the other night. He'd been to Gino's earlier, but she'd missed her shift, so he got her address from one of the other girls. He had not pushed her that night in the elevator, but told himself, now, with some cash on the table, she might describe for him the person or persons who had sent her his way. He could push her in ways he could not push his cousin—and without the same kind of repercussions. Then pack her on the bus and send her back to from wherever she came.

It would be the best thing, the safest all around.

As Dante turned the corner, down into the flats, there were fewer posters. This was where the dancer lived, Gino's girl—in one of the brick apartments that survived in the shadows of the high-rises along the Embarcadero. It was all blacktop and concrete here, parking garages and steel gates. It had been marsh once—smelling of sulfur and septic—and it still smelled that way. The ground sumped, and the drains backed up, and the stench rose through the gratings of the corner sewers.

The girl lived in a three-story walk-up that was slated to be torn down, but she did not answer the door. After a
while the manager appeared and told Dante he had not seen her for several days.

“Where did she go?”

“I don't know. She's by the week.”

“She moved out?”

“You a cop?”

“No.”

“What do you want with her, then?”

“I'm a friend.”

“I told her, none of that kind of business here.”

“It's not that way.”

“She's by the week,” he said again. “She's got two more days. But I haven't seen her.”

“Does she have a forwarding?”

The man laughed. “What kind of place do you think this is?”

Dante left. He went up through Chinatown into Portsmouth Square. On the causeway leading down from the Chinese Cultural Center, some workers were in the final stages of dismantling an exhibit, “Across the Water,” that had been financed by the Wu Benevolent Association. There had been some controversy, he remembered, regarding some artifacts that the association had taken and placed in its private collection, in the Empress Building across the way.

Dante wondered where the girl had gone.

It did not mean anything. Girls like her, they came and went all the time. The city was like that. He wondered if he'd made a mistake—not getting to the girl when he could.

He tried to reach Marilyn at Prospero's, but there was no answer.

Out with clients, according to the receptionist.

Some couple, new in town.

Marilyn had been dragging them all over.

T
here was no reason anymore to go to the Serafina Café. It had been lively once, cops at the lunch counter and the tables full of families, old men with napkins tucked into their shirtfronts, the place full of noise, half-drunk bohos, and a card game in the back, kids spilling sauce on their Sunday best, men flirting with their brothers' wives. Stella scolding her husband in the kitchen while the regulars laughed and wept and George Marinetti announced his daughter's wedding at the bar. They were dead now, most of them, and their children moved away, and the place was too dark for the tourists, too full of dust. The food was not what it used to be, and it was just the oldest of the old, coming for the gossip and the wine, but the wine was better elsewhere, and cheaper, and so now it was just the photos along the bar and the dead ones gossiping in the shadows. There was no reason to come here, but Dante came anyway.

An old habit, inherited from his father. Come to listen to the dead. To hang his long nose over the bar.

Inside, the restaurant was all but empty. It was only Stella Lamantia, the owner, and the blind woman Julia Besozi, who sat as she always sat, dressed primly, perfectly erect, with her legs crossed and one shoulder toward the window. The TV played in the corner. Julia could not see, but her hearing was fine.

Stella meanwhile had out her broom and made a show of sweeping the place, pushing the dust toward the corner. This was not usual. Usually, Stella had a Chinaman who did the sweeping and washed the dishes, but the man was nowhere in sight. What Pesci and his nephew had told him the other night, over at Gino's, was true enough.

Stella was closing the place down.

“All I have is spaghetti.”

“All right.”

“It's cold.”

“Okay.”

“And the bread is hard.”

When Stella came back with the food, it was in the condition as promised.

“I would make it fresh,” she said, though her voice carried no hint of apology, “but this one, that one over there”—she pointed toward the Widow Besozi—“she eats nothing. And if it's just one person, why cook?”

“I like it cold,” said Dante.

“Of course you do,” she said. “You never had any sense.”

“Pesci is mad, for her closing,” said Besozi. “You know how he is. Leads that nephew around like some goat.”

“They boycott me, that's what they are doing. Thirty years, forty years, I can't tell you how long, that man has been coming in here, filling the air with his stinking cigarettes—and this is my thanks.”

Julia Besozi let out a small moan.

“Look,” said Besozi. “It's Gennae Rossi.”

On the television, Gennae Rossi filled the screen, the darling of North Beach, dark haired and olive skinned. The volume was low. Besozi might not be able to see, but her hearing was sharp. The old woman's posture came yet more erect. Everyone knew Gennae Rossi's story. The mayor's daughter, a wholesome girl with a streak of compassion, who every Saturday served up chow for the old ones down at Fugazi Hall. A few years back, she'd come down with multiple sclerosis, not the worst strain of the disease, but bad enough. She took the podium standing, sometimes, but wheeled the streets in her chair. Nonetheless, she'd gotten herself on the city council, and now she was running for mayor. Though she was a long-shot candidate, behind both Edwards and Lee in the polls, her presence rankled the race. A cult of sorts had developed around her, an odd coalition. Old women from the Beach. Hipsters from the Mission. The shops sold necklaces of her image hung on string.

“I have a lock of her hair,” said Besozi.

“It's not her hair.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Keep it in your purse.”

“Why?”

“It's not real.”

“No. It's beautiful.”

“She has a hook nose.”

“You sound like Pesci,” said Besozi. “He's an awful man. He's losing his mind.”

Stella glanced toward the screen. At the moment, on the television, Gennae Rossi worked the sidewalk in front of the building that had burned on account of the hydrants that had failed. It was a big issue, the sporadic water pressure all over the Beach. City crews had been busy down on Columbus forever it seemed, tearing up asphalt, searching for the broken main.

“The woman's an opportunist,” said Stella. “Just like her father.”

Stella stood lamenting her situation. She had signed her lease over to the owners of the Chinese disco next door, who planned on punching a whole in the wall, expanding into her old space. The fault for this went back to Rossi thirty years ago, who had sold the city out to the Chinese. It was a tangled logic, but Dante understood. He had heard it from a hundred others who, like Stella, had vowed never to sell.

“I got good money, though,” said Stella. “I didn't just sign it over. I got mine.”

The old Italians always said this.

Dante ate. Besozi leaned against the wall. Stella swept.

The television showed the Chinese candidate now, his
rally truck, then Edwards, the incumbent, working the outer Richmond, out in the sand dunes, among the new middle class, trying to wrestle for himself some of the Asian vote.

W
hile he was eating, Marilyn returned his call. Stella did not like people talking on a cell in her place. It was unnatural. It made her ill just to see someone, head over their food, talking to someone she could not see. Sometimes, such situations, she cleared your plate early and took away your wine.

“No telephones at the table.”

Dante wrapped his fingers around the stemware and batted the old woman away.

“No,” he said.

“What?” said Marilyn.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Of course. I've been with clients all morning.”

“Give me that glass,” said Stella. “Everyone in your family, they are difficult. I heard about your cousin, out at Rossi's. What was that about anyway? What's the matter with him?”

Dante let the glass go.

Stella's son had appeared in the back of the restaurant, a thick-shouldered man, a few years older than Dante, graying at the temples with a bald spot in back.