City of Dragons (3 page)

He passed a hand through his short gray hair, sweat starting to bead along his scalp. Kept his voice low.

“That’s the problem. That’s why I want you to go home, and forget about this kid. Chalk him up to Nanking.”

Miranda stared at the clock above his head, minute hand sweeping the time away. No use trying to make it cleaner. Not in the Hall of Justice. Not with Phil.

“You mean because he got killed during the Rice Bowl Party we fucking forget about it? Just blame it on what made Nanking in the first place?”

He found a yellowed handkerchief in his pocket and wiped his forehead.

“Watch your mouth. You talk like a sailor, not a professor’s daughter.”

“Keep my father the hell out of it.”

Voices swirled around the room, staccato, sharp. Miranda was breathing hard, the cigarette burning between her fingers forgotten.

“You’re not even going to investigate this, are you? A few feeble courtesy calls on Filipino Charlie, who’ll have an alibi, and then you’ll forget about it, stick it in a drawer, because a Japanese kid had the bad luck to get plugged in Chinatown on a day when the Chinese are raising money to fight the Rising Sun. Happy, happy fucking New Year, Phil.
Gon Hay Fat Choy
to you, too.”

His eyes glittered, and he stood up, shoving the chair into the desk with a hard clatter.

“Save yourself for Sally and the mashers, honey, and spare me the soap-box. The Fair will reopen in a few months, and you’ll get by. You always do. There are always men willing to make a pitch at you and fat wives willing to pay you to do it. Or do they pay you?”

The minute hand ticked. Somebody coughed. The clatter of typewriters started up again, the sound of bored questions and shrill answers pounding out to an eight-bar beat.

Miranda calmly rubbed out the half-finished cigarette in the wood of the desk. Phil sank back into his chair, the map of broken veins in his cheeks and nose shining purple against the white.

She started to gather her things. Unhurriedly, carefully, last time. He watched her, lit a cigarette. She was putting on her hat when he said something, voice hoarse.

“Don’t do it. I’m not warning you, I’m telling you. We’ve got a new chief coming in, and nobody needs the trouble right now.”

She made her voice sweet and mellifluous, just like Dianne had taught her.

“I’m no trouble, sugar.”

She adjusted the hat, walked around to his side of the desk, slowly, as if she were at the Club Moderne and on a job. Stood in front of him, bent forward, made sure he couldn’t help looking. Then she put a hand on his upper thigh, and rubbed it a little. His mouth hung open, desperation and horror etched on his face.

“You’re a good Catholic boy, Phil. Even if you’re sixty. Do us both a favor and go to confession. You don’t want to be my uncle, and we both know it.”

She left him with his face in his hands, her breath ragged and trembling by the time she got to Kearny Street.

That night she dreamed of Spain and Johnny.

The fields were golden with yellowing grain and dotted with the wings of birds, black against the cloudless sky, and they walked on dirty red roads, past one-room houses of ancient stone, and smelled the grapes in the cellar and the olives in the press. There was that moment, that one flash of truth, when she turned to him and looked in his eyes and his soul answered and everything went away and she was blind, and knew only joy, and the feeling of being whole, complete, oneself and yet more than oneself.

Then the breeze from the coast brought the smell of petrol and sulfur. And the horizon was red, it was evening, and a drone, not a bee or a locust, grew louder. She tried to hold him, to hold him tight, and he fought her, overpowering her, bruising and hurting her until she had to let go, and she screamed, and she screamed, and she screamed.

Miranda woke up, shaking, sweating. It was three in the morning.

She flung off the cover, and swung her legs around the small bed, grabbing an almost-empty package of Chesterfields off the nightstand on her way to the window. She pushed it open, inhaling the fog that pulsed downhill on its way to Market Street and south of that to the piers, the street lamps dim with cloud-wrapped cataracts, the traffic noises muffled as if by a damp wool blanket.

1937. At three in the morning it was always 1937.

She watched a couple in evening clothes stroll down Mason toward Union Square and the big hotels. She watched the man put his arm around the woman, watched as she leaned into him, their footsteps beating a sharp tattoo in the wet pavement. She lit a cigarette, and watched them until they were out of sight.

She smoked, and thought about Eddie Takahashi, and shivered a little. She’d be alone, but Miranda was used to that.

Two

S
pain taught her what war could do, to living and dead and the ones in between. But Nanking … the old world wasn’t over, Middle Ages not done. Torture not out of style, not just yet.

The reporters reported, of course; that’s what they did, whether anyone was listening. Then the Japanese bombed the
Panay
, American gunboat, American refugees, and suddenly Joe and Jane Doe woke up. Not just Orientals killing Orientals anymore. The story of Nanking seeped out of China, red and running, Yangtze no longer golden.

Chinatown sobbed from every pasteboard window, every CHOP SUEY neon sign. Three hundred thousand gone, Nanking a graveyard. Cry for Mother China. Then sobs turned to speeches, weeping to war relief. Boycotts, in place since Manchuria, intensified. No Japanese trade, no shops, no merchandise. Feed China, they pleaded, help us feed the starving victims of Nippon.

Rice Bowl Parties raised money from people with money and others without, those who recognized suffering: liberals, Communists, Socialists, unions, Jews. Whoever understood this wasn’t just a “European war,” whatever the hell Lindbergh said.

Miranda always knew better, knew what was coming. Three o’clock in the morning around the whole goddamn world.

_______

She watched the sunrise, eating hot cakes and bacon at an all-night diner near the St. Francis Hotel. Checked in at the office, found an envelope waiting from the bigamist’s wife, a thin, spare woman of old family and older morals, who didn’t believe in detectives, private or otherwise, but managed to hold her nose long enough to pay with brand new bills. Miranda rifled through and counted it twice. Seed money for Chinatown and Eddie Takahashi.

Fifteen minute walk to the southeast end of Grant, Japanese end of a Chinese city. Most of the shops and sake houses gone, dried up in the red wind of 1937, or chased out with the boycott six years before. Some still clung to the Yamamoto Hotel, largest business left. Some found room in Little Osaka, down in the Western Addition. The Takahashis lived in Chinatown, once upon a time, and they would’ve lived here.

Chinese? Go to Chinatown. Filipino? Head for Chinatown. Japanese? Try—yeah, Mister, I know you can’t tell the fucking difference. Always Chinatown, always fused together, human chop suey, dish made in America.

A green neon light turned on at the lone sake place on the corner. She walked down to the doorway, looked up at the Japanese lantern, torn and faded above the entrance. Soot and dirt covered the door. She pushed it open, wishing for gloves.

Dark filled a long narrow space, filled it wherever the bar didn’t. Rich brown wood from a richer era, Lillie Langtry flirting with her ankles while she danced on the smooth, polished top. Scarred by time, sad and lonely, except for an old man at the far end. He crouched on a stool, bathed in a dim red light from somewhere behind him.

Miranda felt her way between the bar and the small tables crowding the floor, fingers gliding along the pits and scratches in the mahogany. He watched her, his voice cracking the silence.

“Hus-band?”

A woman entered through a back door. She was lost somewhere between forty and sixty, wrapped in a tattered kimono. Red light lit up the back of her head, silver hair gleamed through the black. She wore it pulled back, bound tight.

Eyes froze Miranda’s, then drifted toward the man on the stool. He groped at the bar, pulled out a battered crutch, Civil War vintage. Right leg was missing from the knee down. Propped himself up, grunting, and hobbled into the red-black darkness.

“What do you want?”

“Information about the Takahashi family. They used to live around here.”

Small intake of breath. Looked Miranda up and down.

Miranda pulled out a wallet. Scrutiny over.

“Why do you ask about them?”

“I’m a private detective. Eddie Takahashi was murdered yesterday afternoon in Chinatown.”

Her eyes widened, trying to figure out how much there was in what she had. Miranda pulled out a couple of dollar bills, made a show of unrolling them. The woman drew her kimono together more tightly, hands older than her face.

“They lived here. Across the street. Moved about two years ago.”

Miranda put a dollar on the bar. “How many, and where are they now?”

The woman was watching the paper between Miranda’s fingers. “Father, mother, son, and daughter. No more children. Mr. Takahashi was a client.”

Miranda didn’t ask of what or whom. “Do you know where I can find them?”

She let the dollar dangle from her fingers, hovering just over the bar. She could get the information if she felt like flirting with a cop or someone in the coroner’s office, but that came with a higher price tag. Especially since yesterday.

The woman’s eyes met hers before falling back to the money. She turned around, her back straight and elegant through the scuffed silk, and walked toward the red light, disappearing behind the door.

Miranda reached into her purse and found a crumpled Chesterfield, rolled it between her fingers while she waited. No cops would question this woman, even if they bothered to look. No murder case, not Eddie Takahashi. He was a public relations project.

Chinese boy with an empty rice bowl, staring from newspapers, walls, and streetcar fronts, reminding bankers’ wives about the Rice Bowl Party, reminding them to buy Humanity League ribbons and their maids to drop a quarter in relief jars. Rice Bowl, so fashionable this year among the social set. Dust Bowl farmers and Kentucky miners, so terribly ’38.

So first a police delegation to the Six Companies, supposed ruling body of Chinatown, another one to Japanese business groups. Phil with hat and assurances in hand for the money men on the charity circuit, gentlemen who served on a Bay Area–wide Rice Bowl committee with a name as long as their bank deposits. Charity was a big investment. Nobody wanted to lose money over it.

She leaned against the stool the old man vacated, fingering the cigarette, fighting the urge to light it. Everyone would wring their hands and talk about what a shame it all was, and Filipino Charlie would be questioned and produce an iron-clad and rusty-from-use alibi that was full of holes and leaked orange water. But not Eddie Takahashi’s blood. Nobody would ever be found guilty of that.

The woman came back in before the cigarette was in Miranda’s mouth. She was holding a torn piece of butcher paper, with careful, small writing on it: 8 Wilmot St. Miranda dropped the other dollar and lit the Chesterfield. The woman watched her, made no move for the money.

“Thanks.”

It passed by, unacknowledged. She made her way toward the door, her fingers trailing against the comfort of the pock-marked mahogany. Gave a quick glance back; both the woman and the dollar bills were gone.

Clouds smothered the sun, yesterday’s warmth all spent. Fog on its way, white fingers curled in a lover’s clutch. She climbed the couple of blocks back up to Sacramento and Grant, where she’d stood the day before, stuck in human traffic, trying to get back home.

Odor of firecrackers lingered, sharp, blending with sidewalk slop from chop suey joints. Acrid and sour, catching her throat when she passed the cheaper restaurants, sandwiched between nightclubs like Forbidden City and the Chinese Sky Room.

No crowd on Sacramento except for pigeons. Cigarette butts, newspapers, spit. And a barely visible chalk outline, already faded and wiped, in a hurry to be forgotten.

He had looked to his right. Last act of communion. The First Chinese Baptist Church, Romanesque brick and brimstone, guarded the corner of Waverly Alley and Sacramento. Below it clustered shops for locals—Chinese herbalist, grocer, bathhouse. Eddie fell or stumbled or was thrown from one of them.

Across the street the YMCA, large and modern, hugged the hill. It and the church gave this end of Sacramento Street a claim to respectability, let the City Fathers feel self-righteous whenever the world “slum” was mentioned.

Phonograph squawked from a window, same one as yesterday. Miranda looked up, squinting, high fog too bright for her eyes. Teddy Wilson and Billie Holiday again. Someone liked jazz.

A cigarette that bears a lipstick’s traces …

Goddamn it. Not that song, not 1936. Miranda walked quickly toward the grocer. Boxes of tired-looking vegetables and fruit were stacked on the sidewalk, and she fingered some bok choy, trying to forget the music. A middle-aged man in a smock came out, smiled at her, swept the sidewalk, dust and ash obscuring the chalk marks a few feet away.