Naked Moon (21 page)

Dante fired once.

The bullet caught Yin in the back. The man staggered into the stairwell and went tumbling down.

There was an ugly noise down in the stairwell. Dante pulled the scissors from his leg.

T
he young woman lay with her head to the ground, sobbing. Meanwhile the old woman cried in a muttering, hopeless kind of way. Her face was bruised, and she had lost her oxygen mask in the scuffle.

“Help me,” she rasped.

The nurse wriggled on the floor. Dante kneeled over her, but he could not hold the squat. It was too painful. His first thought had been the wound was superficial, but it did not feel that way.

“Ru Shen … ,” he said. “I want the journal.”

“I don't know anything about it,” said the nurse.

The old woman was gasping, only there was, as in everything the crone did, an aura of the theatrical. She struggled for air, and her hands clawed for the mask. She could not reach it. Dante cut the tape from the nurse's hands and feet, unbinding her. He watched as the nurse reattached the tubing, but at the last moment yanked the oxygen mask from her hand.

“To the lift.”

Po Li wheeled the old woman down the narrow hall toward the lift. Dante had jammed the lift door on his way up, and now he cut the electrical wire to the control box. Then he lashed the door shut, so they could not get out and cause him any more trouble. Meanwhile, the old Chinese woman gasped, not blue yet, not quite, though she would be soon. Her throat spasmed and her chest began to heave.

“The journal.”

Dante pointed the gun at the young woman. She was young and beautiful, but at the moment he did not care. Then he dropped the sight, as if to shoot her in the leg and maim her for life.

“It's in Nelson's office,” the woman said.

“Where?”

“On the shelves, maybe. Or in his desk. I'm not sure.”

“If it's not there, I'll come back.”

“It's there.”

“Are you sure?”

She nodded then. The old woman let out a fearful whine. He felt the pain in his leg and was tempted to shoot the old woman in such a way that it would take her a long time to die. Dante threw the mask inside the elevator, then went through the bedroom and down the stairs. Nelson Yin lay sprawled at the bottom. His body heaved and gurgled unpleasantly, but it was just the after-death stuff. The internal organs discharged themselves in a long hiss that smelled of the sewer. Meanwhile, Yin still held the keys to the passage in his hand. Dante pried them loose, then stepped over the man's body. The staircase kept going, but there was another passage to the right, and he walked through the darkness toward a thin light at the bottom of a door up ahead.

When he pushed open the door, he found himself in Yin's office.

Dante went first to the bookcase, to the old books, and he hurtled them off one by one. They were fragile, loosely bound, ancient, but this was not his concern.

There was noise out in the hall, and he could hear the main elevator coming up the shaft. The rescuers were on their way.

He went into Yin's desk then.

He yanked open the drawers.

It was a businessman's desk, and down in the bottom
drawer, on the left side, he found it, underneath a stack of papers.

Inside the journal there were more papers, notes, written in a different hand. He gathered them all, then descended into the stairwell, taking the dark passage down.

T
he taxi wound out of Chinatown, South of Market, past the streaming lights of the Moscone Center. It had been skid row here, not one block but a dozen, a tangle of old hotels and rooming houses, the old South Beach neighborhood, once full of watch parlors and fix-up shops and cheap housing for the dockworkers, the Blue Blocks so-called, on account of this was where the bus from San Quentin dropped of its parolees, in their blue denim pants, fifteen bucks in their wallets. The Blue Blocks had been plowed under and paved for the conventioneers and the hotels. There was a park now, concrete, a shopping complex lit by panes of colored light, but the denizens had not vanished, only scattered, living in the cracks between the warehouses and the lofts and the new bars and the seed joints and ecstasy clubs and old Victorians gone to hell amid empty lots full of rubble.

The taxi turned on Brannan, then turned again.

To a cluster, a freeway underpass, ten lanes wide. The traffic thundered overhead. Sagging buildings along the noisy street, under the steel abutments. Lean-tos made of corrugated tin, carts of stinking clothes. A liquor store and an auto repair shop on the bottom floor with rooms overhead, rented by the night. Across the way, a gentlemen's club, so-called, a half-trendy place where a cluster of young women lingered on the corner.

“Here,” Dante said.

The taxi stopped. Dante had been here a few days back, looking for the girl from Gino's, not expecting to find her, but this wasn't why he was here now. He had come because the way to the nameless hotel had been blocked with men and equipment. During the taxi ride, the pain in his leg had not abated. He looked at the women at the corner, then down into the darkness of the freeway underpass. The area was fenced, but this did not stop anyone from making it over. Hooded men, solitary, waiting. Perched behind these, at a distance, groups of milling boys. Then, scattered around, in the shadows of the concrete abutments, other figures, hunched, prone, lying in a field of burnt tinfoil.

The pain in his leg was bearable, almost, but there was another pain that was not. He had been places like this before, in his other life. Or places close enough. He had not wanted to end up here, but part of him had expected he would and yearned for it nonetheless.

“Do you want me to wait?”

“No,” Dante said.

The taxi drove away.

D
ante had caught the taxi on Leavenworth, several blocks up from the Wu Benevolent Association. So far as he knew, the driver had not noticed his leg, though the man dealt with all kinds of clientele and did not look like the sort who cared about much other than his fare. After he was gone, Dante went across to the liquor store and took out his wallet to pay the clerk for a room upstairs, in the quarters overhead.

“Identification?”

“Why?”

“Listen. I don't care, but if the cops swing through here—and they ask to see the register—if I got nothing on paper, they might go room to room just for fun.”

Dante gave the man his driver's license and watched as he wrote down the number. It was a fake license and a fake number, but Dante knew it didn't matter much either way. The cops rarely came down here, and those who did were bullyboys who shook down the junkies for extra cash. He also bought a bottle of Jack and some cigarettes and a container of ibuprofen. The TV hung in the corner above the counter, reporting on the incident at Plymouth Square, drumming it up. Billowing smoke. Panic at the thought of fire.

“No smoking,” the clerk said.

Upstairs, Dante lit up anyway. He drank the whiskey and lay down with the gun on his stomach. Unlike the nameless hotel, this place had a name, at least according to the receipt, but it wasn't a name worth remembering. The place was down a step from the nameless, the rooms smaller and
dirtier, and the neighbors less wholesome. He cleaned his wound and disinfected it with the whiskey: a puncture wound, dirty scissors—it already bloomed red in an ugly way. He peered out the window at the figures beneath the freeway. He knew what they sold back there and he was tempted; ibuprofen got you only so far. Meanwhile, across the way, a young woman standing apart from the other prostitutes beckoned the passing cars. A driver slowed. Brazen and shy at the same time, the way she leaned into the window. She might have reminded him of the dead girl, the dancer from Gino's, only the stance was all wrong, the sway of the hips. His days with the company, fresh from some assignment, he'd found solace in places like this—back in those shadows. The prostitute looked in his direction but didn't see him. She climbed into the john's car and was gone.

T
he mattress was old, the sheets stained. The streetlamp burned furiously just above the window, and the thin curtains did little to block the light. The noise from the freeway was constant. You had to be drunk to fall asleep here, or high. Meanwhile his leg hurt. A dull throbbing that got worse as the night went on.

He stripped off his bloody pants, but the room was cold, and so he put them back on.

He finally fell asleep, sometime after three, but it didn't last long, because then the morning traffic rumbled over the freeway. The road's concrete buttresses rose on either side of the hotel, so close the vibration seemed to emanate from the
building itself. Sometime later that morning the traffic herded to a crawl, idling, a throbbing hum, an impatient sound with a great nothingness at its core.

He lay listening to that nothingness in the sound. He thought of the old Cantonese behind the nameless hotel, in the lotus position, meditating. At some point, he entered that sound himself and maybe he slept. Maybe that was what you called it. When he opened his eyes again, it was midmorning. The room was filled with a purgatorial light.

H
e spent most of his day in his room, tending to the leg. It was stiff. He staggered up the street with some difficulty and bought some three-dollar trousers at the thrift store. They did not fit well, but at least they were reasonably clean. He took some more ibuprofen for the pain and drank some more whiskey, but it didn't do any good.

Under the freeway, the figures moved in the gray light, the dealers standing alone, runners in back, users hunched and lying about like so much debris. Whores wandered on and off the corner.

Dante felt the pain in his leg and touched his wallet.

He had taken some amphetamine earlier to keep himself going, but the grogginess didn't leave, and he yearned for something else.

A
ll he could figure, they were wearing him down. Letting him stew. Letting him think about Marilyn. Letting
him worry until he would meet on their terms, no questions asked. Waiting, he examined the diary. Chinese script, the paper moldy in places, ink-spotted and stained. It was dog-eared, and tucked into the middle was a piece of legal paper, Chinese symbols taken from the text, along with a handful of names, these written in English. Yin's notes, done with the assistance of his young friend. Some of the names Dante recognized, and some he didn't. They were the kind of names to be expected: a state senator, the attorney general, the head of a firm in Silicon Valley. Dante could figure out the specifics if he had enough time, but in a lot of ways, the specifics didn't matter. Yin had figured a link between the dayworld and the underground, between the shadowland where the company operated and the world of daily commerce. Chinese spies in the Silicon Valley, maybe. Heroin from Afghanistan. Saudi terrorists financed by American oil derivatives. Whatever it was, it linked prominent names to the underworld in which the company operated, endangering the organization itself. His guess, Yin had made contact with one of those names, seeking to exploit the knowledge to his own advantage. It might have worked. The company had not suspected Yin, but had come after Dante. They wanted their journal back. They could have it now, so far as Dante was concerned, but most likely his own innocence wouldn't matter.

Whatever stasis he had achieved, that was over now. He had been in the company. He had left. The initial betrayal alone had been reason enough to kill him, if not for the bargain he'd struck. Now that the bargain had been violated, it wouldn't matter who was responsible.

At last his phone rang.

He answered, expecting to hear that voice down there in the static, but the voice he heard belonged instead to his old friend Angelo, calling from downtown. His ex-partner's voice was gentle, as it sometimes could be, full of the neighborhood, of a brotherly concern he'd learned long ago to distrust.

“Where are you?”

“Out and about.”