Naked Moon Read online

  “I should get going,” she said.

  “Angel Island?” he asked “Friday—”

  “I’ll check with the office. I have a new listing to prepare … and there’s this couple looking for a place.”

  “A couple?”

  “New in town. They want to buy.”

  “Let me walk you home.”

  “No. I’ll be all right.”

  “Just to the corner.”

  “I’ve lived in this neighborhood my whole life.”

  “Then you know how it can be.”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “Just to the corner.”

  THREE

  When the phone rang again, he was alone. Marilyn was gone and he stood in the basement, looking at the things his parents had left behind. Inside a small wooden box, of the type that required careful handling, he found their wedding rings. Other boxes held old clothes, papers, a plethora of shoes. He had to decide what to keep, what to throw away. Before his mother died, she’d been tormented by voices, by all those things in the attic, their secrets, the past, conspiracies she could not decipher. He remembered his father putting his hands over her ears.

  Don’t Listen.

  Dante put down the box with the rings and answered the phone.

  On the other side, the line sounded dead at first, in the background a faint clicking, erratically spaced, like the noise of an old-fashioned Teletype—the electronic humming of an encrypted line. Then the voice—the same voice that had contacted him in the past, during those years he did not talk about. Whether the voice was male or female, he had never been able to tell. Filtered, for security purposes, so the identity could not be decoded. Throatless, reedy, not quite human. A sound like an insect speaking through a megaphone.

  “We have an unpaid invoice.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “That isn’t the answer we want.”

  “No?”

  “It’s not what we are hoping for.”

  Dante was tempted to pull off the phone, to hang it up, but in the end, he knew, it would not do any good, and there was—in the ugliness of the voice, the coercive thrumming, the cell phone darkness—a hypnotic quality.

  “I am speaking to Mr. Pelican?” the insect asked. It was a nickname, passed on to Dante from his mother’s side—on account he had inherited his grandfather’s ungainly nose. “Son of Giuseppe Mancuso and Marie Pelicanos, yes?” Dante did not answer. “We have the right man, I am sure. Grandson of fishermen. Nose of noses.”

  There was, on the one hand, a protocol, a means of identification expected when you talked to the company, but there had always been, on the other hand, a mocking quality about this protocol, the sense the rules applied only in one direction. Dante had broken from the company, something not easily done.

  “They have passed on, I know. But you have people you love, don’t you. A life that you want to live.”

  I should have walked Marilyn home, he thought. I should not have let her go on alone.

  “What do you want?”

  “I think you know.”

  With SFPD, Dante had worked his way to homicide, but eventually things had gone askew, and he’d found another way of making a living. Corporate security, he’d told people, for an export firm in New Orleans, and though there was an element of truth, the firm was a shill, a front for intelligence operations several steps removed, taking place in a gray area where the players were untraceable and the intentions hard to sort. His last case, three years ago, had brought him back here, to San Francisco, and he’d managed, through a kind of uneasy truce, to break free. He’d committed certain transgressions to do so, and the act of breaking free was a transgression in itself, and he’d feared, sooner or later, that this moment might come—that it would be wiser to leave the city, to forget his old life and disappear—but he’d lingered nonetheless.

  “You have a cousin, too, don’t you? Then there’s that partner of yours.”

  “What about them?”

  “You’ve been double-dipping.”

  “No.”

  “Someone has. Playing it two ways. Revealing information to both sides.”

  “That’s not possible.”

  “Mind your cousin.”

  “He knows nothing.”

  “There are others you care about?”

  The insect fell silent, so there was only the ticking on the line. The past circling back. It was a lulling, hypnotic silence. I’ve lingered too long, he thought. Still, what the voice suggested was impossible. He had not divulged anything to anyone. His own mother had gone mad in this house, hearing voices. Whispers in the creaking stairs. Conspirators in the plaster.

  He wondered what exactly had happened out at Rossi’s, with his cousin Gary, and he wondered, too, about his cousin’s new friend, Dominick Greene, the importer here on a working holiday, checking out shipping and storage supposedly, but spending a lot of time in the bars. Dante had run into Greene with his cousin in the square, then seen him around the neighborhood several times since. Coincidence, perhaps.

  “The Naked Moon,” the insect said at last.

  Dante knew the place, a strip bar around the corner.

  Maybe I am going mad, too, Dante thought. Maybe the insect is not here, and is just a voice in the plaster.

  “When?”

  He listened. The insect spoke.

  “Now.”

  Then for a long time there was just the ticking noise, the faint clicking, and then after a little while that was gone, too.

  PART TWO

  FOUR

  The Naked Moon sat on the far end of Broadway. An old-school joint, a rub-and-run parlor owned by the Orsini brothers, Gino and Carlo. The sidewalk sign promised local girls, neighborhood sweeties, though exactly what that meant anymore was hard to say, and the tattered pictures on the display board outside—women in aprons, college girls in cardigans, nurses, and schoolteachers—all looked as if they’d been posted de cades before. Wholesome as hell if not for the uplifted apron, the naughty ruler, the fingers deep inside the elastic band.

  Inside, the Moon was bone simple. Gino and some old Italians at the bar. A handful of tables. A stage with a velvet curtain and a pole in the middle. For years, the place had gotten by on the old routines, strictly hetero, but times had changed, and the old-fashioned grind didn’t draw like it used to.

  “It’s a dead end,” said Gino.

  Gino’s brother had had a stroke, and Gino ran the place alone now. On the other side of the counter hunched Old Man Pesci and his nephew Marinetti. Pesci was older than made any sense, wrinkled and ugly and bitter, barely able to get around—balanced precariously on the stool. His nephew, no young man himself, brought him here a couple nights a week, helping him downstairs from his apartment on Stockton, guiding him across the broken concrete.

  “There’s no future in anything,” said Pesci.

  “That’s a bit extreme,” said his nephew.

  Gino, the owner, shook his head. He wore a mustache like a barber, dandered up with too much oil. “It’s no-win. You put a girl up on the stage, you lose the fags. Go with the dancing fags, you lose the tourists.”

  “The Boom is doing okay.”

  Gino grunted.

  The Boom was a competing institution just around the corner. There were a number of other grind shows struggling for an identity, but the Boom had gone techno, blending gays and straights in a live act, meanwhile streaming in an Internet simulcast from a sister club in Tokyo. The Boom was full of Asians, upscale businessmen, tourists, local hipsters with rings through their noses.

  Gino, on the other hand, was a veteran of the old school, from back when San Francisco had been a shipyard town, from when all you had to do was throw out a big-breasted blonde in a sailor suit and the clientele would come in your hand.

  “Things have changed.”

  “A man’s a man, you ask me,” said Pesci.

  “My lease is almost up,” said Gino. “I can
’t afford this place anymore.”

  “And a woman’s a woman.”

  “On the Internet, everyone’s the same. Man, woman—you can’t even tell.”

  “Everyone’s equal.” Pesci said it with disdain. “It’s perverted. What kind of man jacks off in front of a computer screen?”

  “Foot traffic,” said Gino. “Synergy. When Four X was on the corner—the mags up front, peeps in the back—you had people walking by. Nowadays …”

  “It’s not healthy, the way things are.”

  “All I know,” said Gino, “sitting around the house like that, in one place too long, you get a hard-on. That’s the nature of the human animal.”

  “I know.” Pesci grinned through his yellow teeth. “I’m having that problem right now.”

  Onstage, one of the girls emerged from behind the velvet curtain. The music started. The old men glanced, leered, then lowered their noses to their drinks.

  Dante had finished one drink and was nursing the second. Though the old Italians had never been quiet types, they were louder now that their numbers were diminishing.

  Eyesight going. Hearing, too.

  The older they got, the louder.

  The crowd was sparse. Aside from the men at the bar, there was just a couple at a table in front of the stage, and another man sitting alone. His contact might be one of these. With the company, you could never tell their intentions. The voice on the phone had given no clue. Just go to the Naked Moon. Someone will meet you.

  Though the girl was dancing, the conversation at the bar went on, local gossip. Stella’s place was closing down apparently, the Serafina Café. Or that was the rumor. Stella was selling out to the Chinese, after all these years pushing meat-balls and sauce across the red-checkered cloth.

  “She sold out. Stella’s husband, he would turn in his grave.”

  “I don’t know. All those years, on her feet. He would be happy, maybe. She has money to retire,” said Marinetti.

  “You always take the other side.”

  “I am trying to find the bright side. The positive.”

  “There is no bright side. Stella’s closing. This is the last place for us now.”

  “No more meatballs.”

  “No more wine.”

  “Just naked girls.”

  “You don’t like it here?” said Gino. “It’s not exactly good for business you know, your ugly faces at my bar.”

  Pesci scoffed. “You should be so lucky, to be so ugly as me,” said Pesci. “Isn’t that right?” He turned his attention to Dante at the end counter. “Your grandfather would be proud of you, that nose of yours.”

  “That’s right,” said Marinetti.

  “True ugliness, it’s a rare thing.”

  Marinetti agreed again. There was spittle on his chin.

  “How’s your cousin doing?” asked Pesci.

  “Fine,” said Dante.

  “I bet he is.”

  From the tone of it, Pesci had heard the gossip, how his cousin was being investigated and heard, too, of the fuss out at Rossi’s house. The old Italians knew everything, or acted like they did—and bad news, it gave them plea sure.

  “That warehouse, it’s a moneymaker. You’re lucky your family got its hands on that.”

  His father and his uncle had picked it up because they were on the right side of things, because they had been friends with Mayor Rossi, back in the day, after World War II, when the waterfront was being divided up. There had been rumors back then, about how that was accomplished, but things had been simpler, more black and white, and in the end it didn’t matter so much what you did as whose side you were on. The rumors had gotten nastier in the years since, about the kind of business that went down at Mancuso’s warehouse. Those rumors, they were part of the reason he’d had to leave SFPD, pushed from the force, and ended up with the company.

  “She’s a little on the skinny side, wouldn’t you say? That girl up there.”

  “That’s the fashion,” said Marinetti.

  “I don’t like it.”

  “Times change.”

  “Fuck the fashion.”

  “I think that’s the idea.”

  When her act was done, the girl made the rounds. Dante knew the routine—from his old days working vice—and when she leaned over, he put a bill between her breasts. She dipped in a little closer, whispering into his ear.

  She smiled. “I have one more show.”

  Pesci tilted toward Dante. The old man couldn’t mind his business.

  “You want her, she’s available.”

  “Keep it down,” said Gino.

  Technically speaking, there was a no-mingle rule. You could buy the girl a drink, you could give her a tip, she could dance the air over your lap, but no touching. Those were the spoken rules. Unspoken, you gave the money to Gino, and she would meet you outside, and afterward, the two of you, you could do what you want.

  “College girl.” Pesci leered. It was what they always said about the girls, but of course, it was rarely true. “Working her way through. Maybe it’s a little rough between you and what’s her name, that girl up the hill….” Pesci gave him a knowing glance, based on nothing, on rumor, on his intuitive ability to get under your skin. “A man needs a little outside fun.”

  “Sure,” Dante said.

  He hadn’t come here for that, but let them think as they would.

  FIVE

  Dante sat by himself at one of the small tables at the back. The crowd had grown, but not by much. A tourist couple in matching Windbreakers, cameras about their necks. Three junior college kids, too young to be here, but with fake IDs good enough for Gino. Farther back, a solitary man, all by his lonesome, at a table in the shadows.

  Dante had been through this before, back when he was with the company. They sent you someplace, and no one showed; then you got another call, another place to sit. In the meantime, you waited. It was the waiting that wore you down. During his years with the company, traveling, he’d developed certain habits, and just sitting here now, waiting, brought back the hunger associated with those habits. Amphetamines kept you up and other things helped you sleep and still, other, stronger things put you in a dream that made you feel as if you had escaped it all. Then you would wake up from the dream into some ugly bit of business that you didn’t want to remember, and afterward the hunger would be sharper than before. He had indulged that hunger, more than once, dipping his long nose into the foil. It was a common malady in some lines of work.

  Dante watched the show, the girls with their clumsy dances. Mostly, he’d worked homicide with the SFPD, but he’d spent some time with vice, too, and part of his job had been to frequent places like this, undercover. The place was full of violations. Some of the girls were underage, and the Vietnamese woman sat a little too long on Pesci’s lap, and the solitary man in the back, glancing furtively at Dante, was rubbing his cock a little too vigorously by definition of city code.

  But it was the kind of thing he would have ignored back then, searching for bigger fish, and which was none of his business now.

  He watched the dancer.

  She was some kind of mixed race. She had cocoa-colored skin, but her hair was blond. Dyed probably, but for some reason the color looked all right.

  On the floor, she was artless and clumsy.

  After she finished her number, she strolled up to him out of the blue smoke and whispered his name in his ear, tilting her head back, eyes clouded in an adolescent smokiness. She had too much sloppiness about her to be his contact, too much of the kid in her face. There were other ways she could have learned his name, from Gino at the bar maybe, who wanted him to hang around and buy watered-down drinks into the small hours of the night.

  “I like your nose.”

  “How did you know my name?”

  “Your friend told me.”

  “What friend?”

  “It’s a surprise.”

  “Man or woman?”

  “Do you want to talk?”
<
br />   “Not here.”

  “Make arrangements with Gino,” she said, “and I’ll meet you outside.”

  Dante walked to the far end of the counter, around the back side of the horseshoe. The drink window, it was called, though drinks were served by the waitress on the floor. It was the place where you paid off-the-record money. Gino didn’t regard himself as a pimp. Payment was reimbursement for taking one of his girls off the floor. What arrangements you made with the girl, what you did, if money exchanged hands between you and her, how much, all that was your business.

  Dante paid Gino and waited out front.

  In a little while the girl came strutting through the side entrance on the parking lot. She was dressed in street clothes now, or something resembling them.

  “Someone described me for you?”

  “Your nose,” she said.

  The young woman wore a hip-length black vinyl jacket overtop a white skirt. She looked like a prostitute, but it was the style these days, especially among the young ones, drugged up on TV. This one was drugged up on something else. She had the sleepy look of a junkie, and it was there in her walk, and in the languid way she turned her head, the shine in the eyes. He’d seen it, too, while she danced. Could be she was older than she looked. That she was an agent after all. Half the people with the company were junked up, one way or the other, and he’d been down that path himself, unfolding the foil, eyes lowered, nose following the flame, chasing the smoke, the white tail of the dragon.

  “A party,” she said. “You’re my date.”

  “What kind of party?”

  “A small party. Just me and you. Your friends.”

  “Friends?”

  She put her finger to her lips. “It’s a surprise.”

  Dante felt something cold.

  She shrugged.

  He was tempted to shake it out of her.

  “The room’s been paid for,” she said. “I have the key.”

  She took him up the way to a tourist hotel, the Sam Wong, a midrange place, not too plush, not too shabby—that had recently been bought up by one of the chains. The place had been called the Columbus Hotel once upon a time, and the visiting Italian opera stars had stayed here. According to the old stories, there had been tunnels underneath connecting it to the Chinese brothels, and the remnants of tunnels were still down there. Nowadays, it was tourists on a budget and businessmen like his cousin’s new buddy, Dominick Greene, who stayed here—if indeed, Greene was what he pretended to be. Dante couldn’t help his suspicion of the man.