White Ghost (35 page)

A
s Gage lowered his gun, he had only a vague sense of police rushing in. He gazed down at Ah Ming's crumpled form lying before him. Even though life had left his body, somehow death hadn't yet arrived, and Gage knew it wouldn't for another generation, for he understood that Ah Ming was more than just his life, his biography. He was a history, a violent, perverse history. A terrifying robbery, Peter bleeding out on a warehouse floor, Peter's grieving mother, desperate father, and courageous sister, Ah Tien's lonely execution, Eight Iron's manipulation, Lew's complicity, then abandonment . . . and finally a heart-stopping bullet in the chest.

All this was the history of Ah Ming, and Gage was a part of it—no, it was more than that. At the end, as Ah Ming willed his gun to lock on Gage, he knew he'd become all of it.

The last month welled up inside him. It resisted acknowledging what death brings even to the worst of mankind, resisted a final truth.

What did Casey say? A waste
.
It was all a waste
.

Gage started to turn away, but a chill shot through him and he was lost in an image of himself standing over Ah Ming's body. The image contained an unformed idea, floating just out of reach.
He knew he had to grasp it at its origin and think it through to wherever it led. He once again saw himself standing in front of the Buddhist temple in Bangkok. Then his wedding day, looking into Faith's eyes. Then Linda Sheridan limping from his office. Finally, he saw the cancer that would kill him.

Ah Ming was death. Cancer was death. And since the day of his diagnosis Gage had them linked in his mind in a way he hadn't understood. Did he really think that he could prevail over his own death by saving Ah Ming's life? Slap away the hand of fate?

No, that's not right. This wasn't about sowing and reaping, the scales of justice balancing, or justice winning out, or karma, or just deserts. The world just doesn't work that way. There was nothing inevitable about Gage's cancer or Ah Ming's death. Gage knew, finally knew, that fate was no more or less than a series of chance events and human choices. Ah Ming was dead because Gage killed him, and Gage was going to die of cancer. Nothing would change either one.

A wave of weariness crested above him. It seemed to pause, as if waiting for him to finish his thought. He felt himself reaching out, grasping at images that dissolved in his hands. Then he was wrenched back inside himself as words captured the images warring in his mind.

It was an illusion of immortality.

As long as the hunt for Ah Ming continued, Gage wouldn't have to look cancer in the face. But now the hunt was over, and the wave crashed down.

Gage felt a hand grip his arm. He jerked it away.

“Graham, it's me.”

Faith was standing beside him. She wrapped her arms around his chest.

“Sylvia called . . . I came . . . I heard the shot . . . I thought . . . Casey, he . . .”

Gage reached his arm around her and pressed her against him. Her tears soaked through his shirt, warm and wet against his skin.

Casey took the gun out of Gage's hand and passed it to a uniformed cop, then led Gage and Faith past the swarming police officers and through the news crews gathering at the end of the alley. Gage felt the peering eyes of secretaries and clerks who listened on the radio or watched the live feed on their office computers. A pouting street woman leaned against a wall, waiting for everyone to leave so she could return to her alley home. An ambulance passed them on its way to where Flat Nose lay in the alley. A coroner's wagon crept up and stopped, waiting for Ah Ming's body to be released. A warehouse supervisor gathered up his workers, herding them back to their jobs.

“The show's over. Time is money.”

An SFPD homicide detective, black suited and red tied for television interviews, stepped into Casey's path as he led Gage and Faith away.

“This is a homicide. Nobody's gonna run off. I need a statement. I need to know what happened.”

Casey grabbed the detective's shoulder, spun him around, and then yanked back on his collar. Casey pointed upward and jabbed his finger at the NBC helicopter hovering above.

“Get the video, you idiot. The whole world knows what happened.”

Casey pushed past the detective, through the mass of patrol cars with their lights flashing and around the television news vans with their antennas raised toward the sky. He guided Gage to an ambulance parked at the corner. The EMT pulled open the rear doors and sat Gage down on the ledge where he cut off Gage's shirt, bandaged the wound, and stabilized the arm.

After the EMT left to report in, Casey glanced around,
making sure all the cops and news reporters were out of earshot. Then he leaned down toward Gage.

“To tell you the truth I don't really know what happened out here. For a while I thought I did, but I don't, not a clue. Maybe, someday, you'll explain it to me.”

Gage looked up at Casey's face, now decades older than when they first met in that Chinatown alley. And he knew he owed Casey more than just an explanation. But it was a place to start.

Someday.

A
s I recall,” Dr. Stern said two days later when she entered the examining room where Gage and Faith waited, “my orders, rephrased by you, were to get rest, avoid infections, and stay away from people who can hurt you. Is there anything about those orders you haven't violated?”

“No infection.”

“Let me see, tough guy. Take off your shirt.”

After Gage slipped it off, Stern unwrapped the bandaging that covered the stitches he received in the emergency room at SF Medical after the surgeon dug out the slug.

“Nice work. Faith, why don't you come look at this?”

Faith got up from her chair and looked over Stern's shoulder.

“I see a little redness there.” Faith shook her head, feigning a kind of professional disapproval. “Just as we thought, a little infection.”

“Can I still do chemo today?”

“Of course. The blood results show you're healthy enough. You'll just need some antibiotic ointment.”

Stern applied cream from a tube she took from a cabinet and then rewrapped the wound. Both she and Faith sat down. Gage slipped down from the exam table, then pulled on his shirt.

“You mind if I ask you something?” Stern asked, crossing her legs, resting her folded hands on her knee.

“There's nothing you can't ask.”

“I watched on television. Why'd you let the man point that gun at you for so long? I thought my heart would stop. And now that the media is reporting who he really was, I just . . . I just don't get it. He could have . . .”

“As it turns out, it's not that complicated. I'm really not a tough guy. Never was. The truth is I wasn't ready to face my own death.”

Stern leaned back and studied Gage. For a few seconds she sat, lips compressed, eyes narrowed, gaze unfocused, then she sat up.

“I think I understand. I really think I do.”

“I thought you would.”

Stern turned toward Faith. “And you knew it all along, didn't you? You knew. That's why you let him go.”

Faith nodded. “I knew.”

“You have more courage than I have. I don't think I could have done that.”

“Everyone has to approach death in their own way in order to remain who they are. And I married him for who he is.”

Stern looked back at Gage, started to speak, then paused. He knew what she was thinking, the question she was asking, the question he was asking himself: Would he ever be ready?

Gage looked down at Faith gazing up at him. He'd learned something else in the alley. Faith was all death could take from him; everything else he could leave behind.

I
'm not a tough guy either. And that's just one of the similarities between Gage and me. Not only do he and I share the same sense of the world and walk the same moral landscape, but he knows the rough ground of crime and the hard people who make it so only because I traveled there and learned it all before him. And he knows how to live in the shadow of death only because that shadow fell over me first.

As I approached the fourth Gage novel, and my seventh overall, it seemed to me it was time to show some aspects of what that life is really like. And not for my sake, but for others who live, have lived, or will live—or who will die—in that shadow. And what I learned over the last fifteen years of biopsies and chemotherapy, of hospitals and examining rooms, of radiology labs and infusion centers is that—contrary to the mythology of panic and terror, collapse and paralysis, that surrounds cancer—we carry on.

Except for those who have been inflicted with forms that are too disabling or who survive only weeks or months—we carry on.

Mothers mother. Fathers father. Workers work. Sellers sell. Writers write. Doctors doctor. Liars lie. Cheaters cheat. Predators prey.

We are who we are, and we do what we do.

Regardless of what our initial reaction to the diagnosis might have been—rage, fear, resignation, self-estrangement, or self-pity—it fades. Regardless of the promises we might have made to ourselves—to be kind or generous or Zenlike in our equanimity—we return to whomever we've always been. Regardless of the ways in which we might have viewed ourselves—as patients, victims, sufferers, warriors, or survivors—in the end we rediscover who we've always been. Regardless of the ways we think the world has been changed and remade—brighter or dimmer, engaging or indifferent—in the end we find it's the same world and we are the same in it.

And we carry on.

All this should be obvious. And it certainly is, inside infusion rooms and radiation oncology departments and in all the other places where patients are diagnosed and treated. But outside, however, in fiction and in memoir, on talk shows and in film, and in the cottage industry of self-help and popular psychology, the mythology lives on.
*

The adversity Gage faces in
White Ghost
is more urgent than mine, a chronic and often treatable, but ultimately incurable form of lymphoma. The oncologist's original prognosis of my time from diagnosis through treatments to death turned out to be overly conservative and I rode, am still riding, the bell curve of probability, first traveling up and then down the sweeping arcs, and now along the thinning tail. Indeed, I worked for an
other nine years in scores of places around the globe before I reached the moment in Gage's life when this story begins.

But by then I was transitioning from investigator to writer and whatever discomforts I underwent in treatment were compensated for by my undergoing them in the company of my wife and in the comfort of my own home. My commute was no longer to my office downtown, but only to a converted bottom-floor bedroom. My lunch, just a short climb back up the stairs. A nap, just one more flight.

Although there is never a good time to undergo chemotherapy, my two years of treatment began during a busy period. I was putting the final edits on
Final Target,
finishing the first and second drafts and major edits of
Absolute Risk,
and writing the second Harlan Donnally novel. I was also investigating a death that occurred ten years earlier, one of my last cases.

According to the local police department, a young man in his twenties who had been found dead in a basement had been beaten by drug dealers a few weeks earlier and had died of his untreated injuries. During the intervening decade, no one had been arrested, no suspects even identified. The case was old, cold, and closed.

It had been many years since I'd worked in the tough parts of the Bay Area. My practice had developed into one that found me working more often in London, Kiev, or Chennai than in San Francisco, Oakland, or San Jose, and investigating this death meant for me, as for Gage in
White Ghost,
going to once familiar places and relying on people from the past to catch up to the present.

In searching the housing projects and skid-row motels and drug corners for witnesses, I found myself surrounded by death, and not only because of the reminders provided by my continuing visits to the Stanford Cancer Center. Driving around those streets was like walking through a cemetery, one not made up
of headstones and crypts, but of sidewalks and corners, streets and alleys, front steps and backyards, empty lots and abandoned houses, each a reminder that many of those in the generation I once knew and on whom I had once relied to get me to the facts behind the tales were dead.

As I was talking to an old-timer outside the liquor store at Eight and Campbell in West Oakland, I thought of Stymie Taylor, a damaged man who'd spent much of his life in prison, but who many times knew someone or something that helped me get to the truth. I stopped in to visit his mother who had been at his bedside when he died. By then she'd outlived four of her children. She told me Sunday dinners had become a time of empty chairs.

Driving past a drug-dealing spot in East Oakland, I thought of Henry Scott, a cunning man who'd done a lot of bad in his life. I saw him last when he dropped by my office about a dozen years ago. I'm not sure why he came to see me and I'm not sure he knew why either. I was long out of his world, but by his walk and his talk, I understood the place he still held in it. I told him if he stayed in the Bay Area, he'd be a dead man; and a couple of months later he was, shot down outside a bayside nightclub.

And there were many more. Way too many more.

I passed the corner flower shop near the Sixty-Fifth Avenue housing project, within gunshot distance of hundreds of murders in the previous thirty years, and I remembered a sign I'd seen in the window in 1986:
Funeral Sale
. There are so many things wrong with that phrase, so disturbing anyone would even think it, I'll just let the image of that storefront speak the thousand words for itself.

I drove through the once infamous intersection of Ninety-Eighth and Edes, where in 1989 I had been trapped as men shot at each other from opposite corners. At least I'd had my car's sheet metal around me. The people running and ducking didn't. Six
rounds were exchanged in seconds, the gunfight was over, and the shooters fled leaving nothing behind but lead and a memory.

Hairless, fatigued, pale, infused with chemotherapy drugs, and on the hunt for a witness, I walked into the courtyard of an apartment building where I had been told one was living. It was also where years earlier a drug dealer had me at gunpoint. It struck me that if he'd pulled the trigger I wouldn't have lived to die of cancer. I saw where I'd been standing and where he'd been standing, a dead strip of concrete on which there had occurred a live moment. I remembered his hand coming up out of his pocket and the look in his eyes.

They say cancer is the emperor of all maladies. At least on that day, it wasn't. It was a man with a gun.

In the end, it had turned out to be just another day in the life. He went his way. And I went mine.

Ultimately, I located witnesses who told me, and who later testified in federal court, that the men who had beaten the victim and caused his death weren't drug dealers at all. In truth, they were undercover police officers, and the homicide detective assigned to the investigation had known it almost from the start.

Based on the testimony of these witnesses and admissions by some of the officers involved, the judge later ruled that the department had engaged in a decade-long cover-up. The city's defense against the family's civil rights claim had been both absurd and immoral: its attorneys had made a statute of limitations argument that the victim's family should have discovered and exposed the police conspiracy sooner.

In fact, the injustice went far beyond the death and the cover-up. Not only did the detective remain in the homicide unit even after his role in the case became known inside the police department, but upon his retirement, the district attorney, the chief law enforcement officer in the county, hired him to work as an inspector in her office. And the lieutenant who supervised the offi
cers, who was present at the time of the assault and who engaged in what the department admitted was an attempt to influence officers' reports of the beating, was assigned to head the internal affairs unit and promoted to the rank of captain.

I considered using the death of this young man as the basis of a Harlan Donnally novel, but unlike the mayors, city council members, judges, prosecutors, police chiefs, and city managers who served during these years, no reader of fiction would tolerate this kind of ending.

Some of Gage's thoughts in
White Ghost
are ones I had as I searched for witnesses, and they are at least some of the thoughts all cancer patients have as we carry on. Among other things, it meant thinking about time and what is worth spending it on and a reminder that the young man whose death I was investigating died at about the same time as I was first diagnosed. His life was stolen, beaten out of him by fist and boot, but mine remained—it still remains—my own to spend. And at least some of that time I chose to spend walking Graham Gage and Harlan Donnally, and their readers, through the landscape on which I have lived much of my life.