Stealing the Dragon

Chapter Nine

San Francisco, present day

Darkness had taken the city by the time Cape left his office.

The paperwork from Richard Choffer’s case took him longer than anticipated, but he expected an angry call from Richard’s lawyer in the morning and wanted everything to be in order. He called Sally earlier but no one answered. Just as well-he wanted to talk with her face to face.

He walked up Stockton toward North Beach, an uphill climb every step of the way. By the time he crossed Chestnut, he could feel the burn in his calves. Walking even a few blocks in San Francisco was a workout, one of the reasons women in this city had such great legs. It was one of the reasons Cape liked living there.

At Lombard he passed Saints Peter amp; Paul Church where Joe DiMaggio wed Marilyn Monroe, the celebrity marriage of its time. The marriage didn’t last long, and most folks had forgotten it ever took place, if they knew in the first place, and they certainly couldn’t tell you where it happened. But forty years later the church had retained all its beauty, if not its fame. The Gothic spires pierced the night sky, twin monuments of remembrance and hope in a city with an increasingly short attention span.

North Beach was still predominantly Italian, family restaurants lining the length of Columbus Avenue and crowding the side streets, drawing tourists from all over the world. Many families had been there for generations, but many new tenants were kids out of college looking to rent in a neighborhood that had become hip simply by not trying to be.

Cape came to Broadway at Columbus, passing Frank Alessi’s place on the corner. Frank was the local wiseguy, the self-proclaimed “don of North Beach.” Cape had crossed his path a few times over the years, the meetings memorable if not always cordial. Frank was a successful businessman and major political contributor, but Cape knew his main enterprise was narcotics, moving all the product brought into the city by the Chinese tong gangs. Frank bought the bulk of each shipment and spread it across the Bay Area like a poison fog. If someone bought a dime bag off a dealer in the Mission district, a nickel found its way back into Frank’s pocket. He’d built his distribution network as carefully as he’d constructed his facade of public respectability.

Within the borders of Chinatown, the tongs made their own sales. It was their turf and their product, after all. Even Frank’s long arm couldn’t reach across Broadway, the unspoken border between North Beach and Chinatown that Cape was crossing now.

At the corner of Stockton and Broadway, Cape became illiterate. The signs over every storefront, grocery, and restaurant were written in Chinese characters accompanied only occasionally by English.

The daytime crowds had long since gone home, but the street wasn’t empty. Two old men sat at a small folding table outside a convenience store playing mah jong. Both were smoking, an overflowing ashtray between their discarded tiles.

Farther down the block, four young men milled around the front of a restaurant that had closed for the night, puffy jackets and loose warm-ups incongruous in the mild weather. Cape wondered briefly if they were selling or buying, or just waiting for instructions from inside the restaurant. As he passed, they did their best to give him the look, mouths set in straight lines, eyes hard. Cape smiled amiably and nodded at each in turn, making eye contact, and saw them buckle slightly, caught off guard by the warmth of his expression. They were still at the age where they needed to feed off someone else’s fear or aggression to get their blood up. Cape knew they’d get the hang of it soon, change from kids trying to be hard to teenagers genuinely hardened by life. He guessed the oldest was twelve, thirteen at the most.

Another two blocks and Cape hung a right, subtitles on the signs disappearing altogether as he left the streets that welcomed tourists by day.

Sally’s school and home were the same: a converted loft situated above a grocery that opened at five a.m. and closed by three every afternoon. The grocery made the rent by selling items not found in the local Safeway. During the day you could see ducks rotating on steel hooks through the front windows, their long curved necks looking like a grotesque series of question marks. Live eels swam in a metal tub just inside the door, while behind the counter you could find fresh ginseng, ginger, bamboo, and about fifty other spices and herbs Cape didn’t know how to pronounce. It was rumored that if you knew how to ask, even powdered rhinoceros horn had a price.

Next to the grocery was a flight of wooden stairs that disappeared into the side of the building, leading to a landing on the second floor that served as an open foyer to Sally’s loft. Cape took the stairs two at a time, anxious to see his friend and clear his mind.

Cape pulled up short as he landed on the top step. In front of him was a sliding wooden door that ran the entire width of the landing. Cape knew behind it lay another sliding door made of wood and paper, set into the wall at the rear of the landing. The door directly in front of him looked impregnable, its unfinished surface rough and scarred. Although he’d noticed this outer door in the past, hidden in the recess of the stairway wall, Cape had never seen it closed in all the years he’d known Sally. Its presence alone spoke volumes, and he didn’t like what it was saying.

People in the neighborhood knew to stay clear of the school unless they had business there, and Cape had experienced Sally’s approach to home security firsthand. It usually involved Sally dropping from the rafters behind you, unheard and unseen, with a knife or sword in her hand. Cape doubted if the Invisible Man could sneak up on Sally, even when she was asleep. And since you couldn’t see if she was home from the landing, you took your chances by stepping inside. As a result, Sally had never bothered to shut the outer door. Until now.

Cape frowned, knowing the closed door meant one of two things:

Sally had left town and wasn’t coming back any time soon. And that meant she’d left suddenly, without telling him.

The other option, that Sally was holed up inside, was a possibility that troubled Cape even more. As long as he’d known her, Cape never worried about Sally. Not once. He had seen her bleed, and he had seen her kill, but he’d never seen her afraid. He couldn’t imagine who or what could make Sally hide behind this fortress door.

He raised his right fist and knocked, almost breaking his hand in the process. The door might be made of wood, but it felt like cement. He couldn’t hear anyone moving around inside, and he seriously doubted they could hear him, even if he were using a sledgehammer.

Cape stood for several minutes staring at the faceless wooden surface, running through the possibilities again and again, liking them less each time. Tentatively, almost gently, he raised his right hand to the gnarled wood, his palm resting flat against the door. He stood that way for a long moment, as if he could divine Sally’s whereabouts from the coarse surface. Finally, he exhaled loudly and turned toward the stairs, more frustrated than enlightened.

Sally knew how to take care of herself better than anyone. If she were inside, she’d come out when she was ready-if she was coming out at all. That door said Do Not Disturb louder than any sign. And if she had left, there must have been a good reason. Cape just had to find out what it was.

Head down, Cape descended the stairs slowly, lost in thought. As he reached the bottom he stopped, noticing a stain running across the top of the first step, down the side, and ending on the pitted cement of the sidewalk. In the dim light of the stairwell it was a dark reddish brown, maybe a water stain, a natural discoloration in the wood, or something more sinister.

Licking his index and middle fingers, Cape bent and ran his hand from the inside of the step toward the outer edge. Putting his fingers to his tongue, he frowned. Could he taste the faint copper tang of dried blood, or was it merely dirt mixed with his own anxious sweat that left such a bitter taste in his mouth? Reluctantly he admitted that he couldn’t be sure without getting the proper equipment, and then what? The skeptic in him said he was wasting his time, that events were moving outside his control, while the hypochondriac in him said he’d just swept some serious germs into his mouth. Either way, he was fucked.

He started walking, trying to visualize the scene on the ship that Beau had described. He wanted to call it coincidence, not related to Sally’s disappearance in any way. But Cape wasn’t in the habit of lying, even to himself. He realized his visit to the loft had unnerved him, even though the only thing he’d found was a closed door.

As he walked toward the traffic sounds coming from the end of the block, Cape glanced again at the signs overhead, trying to discern a pattern in the characters. Even common Chinese characters seemed radically different as the typography and design changed from sign to sign, making an already foreign language indecipherable. Cape imagined the signs spoke of impending danger, only he couldn’t understand the warnings. The silent faces of the closed storefronts mocked his ignorance as he passed.

At Broadway, Cape turned and looked back the way he had come. He had spent a lot of time in Chinatown over the years, and a few cases had taken him deep into the neighborhood. But he had never navigated the back streets and side alleys without Sally at his side. And he realized that without a guide, this world was as impenetrable as the names of the stores and restaurants he had just passed. Without Sally he was deaf, dumb, and blind. She might be missing, but he was lost.

Beau had been right. Sally was his partner in ways Cape never appreciated until now. Part of their relationship was taking each other for granted, trusting the other person would be there to watch your back. But now that Sally was gone, Cape found himself looking over his shoulder.

It was a feeling he didn’t like.

Cape turned up the collar of his coat as he walked south on Broadway toward home. The wind off the bay had picked up and the temperature had dropped at least ten degrees in the last hour, but he felt colder still. He could feel Death in the clutch of the wind, but he couldn’t tell if it was behind him or directly ahead.

He just knew it was close.