Naked Moon (17 page)

“Where did you go with her?”

“When?”

“The night of the robbery.”

He had been up to the hotel, of course, to the Sam Wong, but he wasn't going to tell her this, or anything about the company. It would not be wise. Regardless, he could sense her determination, and he almost trusted her.

Chin the dogged. Chin the pure.

“We just stepped outside for a little bit.”

“Did you get a room?”

“You don't have to go anywhere special to have sex. You know that.”

“Where did you go?”

“Out in the alley. You want the details? Or should I leave it to your imagination?”

“You have been back to look for her several times. You've been over to her residence. You've been down to Gino's. Why?”

“I have a crush on her.”

It was a childish thing to say, though in some odd way, perhaps it was true. Meanwhile, the equanimity was still there in Chin's face, but it had a different surface, as if carved from stone, and her eyes darkened. She leaned back, reaching into the blazer again, to the inside pocket, putting the picture away, pulling another. As she did so, Dante saw her holster,
and the thin outline of her breast under the white blouse. She held the picture facedown, like a card, on the table.

“What did you and your cousin talk about?”

“I believe we've been over this.”

“You didn't tell me everything.”

“I told you what I know,” he lied.

“His wife, Viola.”

“What about her?”

“We released your cousin's body to her yesterday, for the funeral. And I spent some time talking with Viola. She was a little more cooperative this time around.”

Dante had forgotten about Viola. After the murder, Angelo and Chin had dragged her downtown, behind the glass window, and apparently the young widow had had some kind of fit. Viola was a redhead who wore her skirts tight and her boots high. She had a very sweet face, and a sweeter figure, but she was barely twenty-seven and prone to hysterics.

“She mentioned your cousin, he'd developed some new associations shortly before he was killed. And I was wondering if you know anything about these.”

Dante wondered how much Chin knew about Dominick Greene—if his corpse had been discovered, and if this discovery was what had brought Chin knocking.

“According to Viola, Gary met with a woman.”

“He always met with women.”

“Viola said, this one, it might have been business.”

“It was always business, those flings of his.”

“Viola was suspicious, too. But this fling—if that's what she was—this woman, she had an associate. A man. The
two of them, she said, what Gary told her, the pair of them worked together. Viola didn't necessarily believe him.”

“Do you have a description?”

“Viola saw the woman from a distance, leaving their house—a couple of days before your cousin was killed. She had her hair up, in a twist. A brunette.”

“That could be anyone.”

“I know.”

“The man?”

“No. Viola didn't see him. Viola thinks he never existed. That Gary made him up, to cover the affair.”

“It's possible,” Dante said. “It's the kind of thing he might do.”

“Your family warehouse—the Wus have brought shipments through there on a routine basis, we are sure of it. And your cousin got a cut.”

“I'm not in the family business.”

“Who employed you, while you were in New Orleans?”

Straitlaced Chin. The little girl who had grown up around the corner. Who'd seen her own uncle shot to death in the Chinatown restaurant. Who looked, despite everything, like a girl in the uniform of the Salesian school. The earrings, the makeup—none of that changed anything. She was the sort who pieced things together. She worked in SI; she had access to records.

“This investigation, I get close,” she said, “and people are killed, witnesses disappear. Files get pulled.”

Her face remained placid. Her brows were a flat line over her eyes, and she sat very straight and still, stonelike, ancient,
but at the same time, he could see the alertness, her lips trembling, the quickening of her breath. She understood, he thought. Like that statue in Yin's office, facing every direction all at once, a multitude of outstretched hands, each of them empty, holding nothing. The truth wasn't one thing but many. Not just the company, the Wus, the police, each a separate entity moving of its own accord, snakelike, but all moving at the same time, intertwined, so it was impossible to separate one from the other, to penetrate to the core of it, to eliminate your own desire, your past.
Ru Shen.
He wondered how much Chin knew.

The moment passed. She was just a cop, sitting there.

“There's something else,” she said. “Your cousin, he told Viola, these people—they told him you had something they wanted.”

“What might that be?”

“I was hoping you might have that information.”

“My cousin had money problems,” he said, “but I told him there was nothing I could do.”

Chin knew he was holding back, but he could not tell her about the journal even if he wanted to. She was working with Angelo, and the department was a sieve, information traveled, so if he spoke to one, he spoke to the many, and there were people among the many he could not trust.

Chin flipped the second picture, the unplayed card.

It was a woman in a vinyl jacket, head twisted. Her body was in the early stages of decay. A gash festered at her neck and the tongue protruded from her mouth. It was the same girl, the prostitute from Gino's, in the same vinyl jacket.

“Forensics says she'd been lying in an alley, maybe a week. In an abandoned area, not far from where she was living.”

Chin could take him downtown, even charge him, given the similarities to his cousin's death, but if she had meant to do that, she would not have come like this, alone.

“There's a pattern here,” said Chin. She was right. First his cousin, now the girl—though exactly how the pattern would repeat …

“I told you before,” she said. “I can help you. You can't do this alone.”

He had the impulse then, despite himself, to tell her everything, and the suspicion, as well, that she already knew. But then something about her changed, in her eyes, in the turn of her mouth, and he saw, however fleetingly, that girl on the street corner struggling to make sense of things, and he realized Chin, too, was lost in the maze.

“Who's next?” She tapped the photograph. “That's the question I want you to ask yourself.”

“I've told you everything I know.”

She resumed her old posture, unreadable. “If something else occurs to you, let me know.”

“I'll think about it,” he said.

“Don't think long.”

A
million eyes roamed the streets of Chinatown. A millions hands. A million feet. Yet no one saw him. Or seemed to see. Their eyes rolled over the produce. Hands touched and squeezed. The old ones in their shapeless clothes, their two-dollar shoes, they stepped aside, but they did not see him, white ghost, all but invisible. They had learned the trick of this, the lesson, passed on long ago, by those who had survived. The Anglos, the Euros—they were not real. If you did not look at them, if you did not see them, if your eyes did not meet their eyes, then they could not hurt you. The younger Chinese, in their sharp clothes, it was the same thing, only different. For them, it was not a matter of superstition. They did not see him, because he was unimportant. The white man, he did not exist.

The clerk at the Chinese Historical Society fulfilled his request without speaking, guiding him to Special Collections, where he could examine the manifest. The list
describing the objects in the collection contained only the most cursory of information, but he found Ru Shen's name there, in the itemization of artifacts for “Across the Water.” It was a list of Chinese characters alongside English transliterations:

: Ru Shen. Diary of unknown stowaway.

Dante spent some time with the transliteration guides. The ideogram at the top of the entry was simply Ru Shen's name, as written in Chinese. Then there was the symbol at the end of the line:

It took him a while to find its meaning—but it turned out to be a scepter, a ceremonial staff: a symbol of good luck, or of evil, depending upon the nature of the mind that perceived it:

“As one wishes.”

D
ante climbed into his Honda and headed south. He left the freeway in San Bruno, then pulled into a place called the New Airport Suites, just off the freeway. The place was neither here nor there, just a complex of buildings, remodeled stucco, with nothing to recommend it other than its proximity to the airport. He had chosen it because of the way the buildings sprawled haphazardly across the lot, with multiple exits, which would make his comings and goings hard to watch.

It was possible that the company had already replaced Greene. Or that there'd been someone else watching all along.

He checked into the hotel, though he stayed only long enough to see if another vehicle had followed him. Then he left. His cousin's funeral was later this same day, just down the road in Colma. He needed first, though, to visit the surplus store down on El Camino, stocked with supplies for
survivalists: men who liked to play soldiers in the woods, with Mylar vests and paintballs and exploding cans of smoke. The owner also sold guns under the counter.

Dante had a plan.

Later, he would return to the city, but he could not stay on Fresno Street anymore. After the funeral, he would come back to the New Airport Suites, but he would not stay the night here either. Instead he would drive the car into the airport lot. He would go through security, as if he were boarding the plane, but then he would come back out again. He would go through a series of maneuvers to make it look as if he were leaving town, then go back to Chinatown, to the nameless hotel. Inside the surplus store, he bought what he needed.

T
he Italian Cemetery was up in Colma. The usual thing was to have a Mass out at Saints Peter and Paul, in Washington Square. Even the families who no longer lived in the neighborhood often held the viewing down in the Beach, at the Green Street Mortuary. Afterward, the funeral cars would wind through the streets of the city, ending out in Colma. That was how it had been when Dante's mother passed, and his father, too, and his uncle as well.

Viola had forgone all that.

His cousin's assets had been frozen, and she had little money. So she held the service at Caputo's Memorial, not far from the cemetery itself. If the service had been held in North Beach, it would have been better attended. There
would have been the old-timers from the Beach, but there would also have been more gawkers, drawn by the murder.

As it was, there were only a handful in attendance, including Viola and her kids, and Nancy, too, the first wife.

The two women were not on speaking terms.