Noir

  “It’s a Chinatown thing,” I explained further. “They have customs and whatnot.”

  “We are a mysterious and ancient people,” Eddie said to the sailor.

  “But you have seen her naked,” I said, clapping Moo on the shoulder, a ray of fucking sunshine on his dark despair.

  “On the job,” Eddie said. “So has everyone else at the club. Don’t think that makes it any easier.”

  Then I noticed that the blonde’s drink was low and it was time I paid her a visit, so I held up a finger to mark the place in Moo Shoes’s sulk. “Be right back.”

  “Another old-fashioned, cupcake?” I said with a grin, daring her to get sore at me.

  “My name’s not—” And she caught herself. “You buying, wiseass?”

  “Me? There’s a dozen guys in here already offered to buy you a drink.”

  “Maybe I was waiting for a better offer,” she said—rolled her eyes, batted her eyelashes, then sighed wistfully—well, fake wistfully—which made me laugh.

  “You know it doesn’t cost me anything if I buy you a drink, like it would one of these mooks.”

  “Which means you won’t think I owe you anything in return, like one of these mooks, right?”

  “No, no, no,” I said. “Perish the thought.” Then I leaned in, hoping to perpetrate a little conspiracy. “Although I have told my friend Eddie back there that I have seen you naked, so if he comes over, cover my bet, would you?”

  “I have a birthmark on my right hip.” She winked.

  “That’s the spirit!”

  “Shaped like Winston Churchill.”

  “That must be a sight to behold,” I said.

  “How about that drink, Gunga Din?”

  I like a dame who knows her Kipling, or any poetry, for that matter, as I am a sensitive and poetic soul. My dear ma was an English teacher, and from the time I squeaked out my first word she steeped me deeply in metaphor, simile, symbolism, alcoholism, and all the various iambs of the poetic tradition, all of which have served me greatly over the years in pouring drinks, welding ships, bird-dogging broads, and waxing poetical on both this and that.

  So I was about to say the same about the Kipling to the Cheese, when the door flew open behind her and in walked Sally Gab, aka Sal Gabelli, my boss, followed closely by an air force general with so many campaign medals on his uniform that it looked like someone was losing a game of mah-jongg on his chest.

  The bar was called Sal’s, after the aforementioned Sal, although there is no sign that says so, and over the years the joint has been known as Flossie’s, Danny’s, The Good Time, Grant Avenue Saloon, The Motherlode, Barbary Belle’s, and a half-dozen other monikers going back to 1853, when the place first opened on the same spot. I am told that the long oak bar and beveled-mirror back bar came around the Horn on a clipper ship with sailors who dreamed of striking gold in the California hills. Currently the sign read only Saloon, Sal being too cheap or too smart to put his name over the door. Sal was well known in the neighborhood, but also well known to be such a douche bag that no one would have been surprised to see a long red rubber hose and nozzle trailing out his pant leg. The joint might have survived the great quake of 1906, but Sal knew that having his name on it just might be enough to bring it down.

  “General,” said Sal, a rangy fifty-year-old who was in perpetual need of a shave, wore suspenders and an ill-fitting suit, and held a cigar in his jaw at all times, “this is Sammy Two-Toes, my guy with his ear to the ground in the neighborhood. He’ll be able to help you out with your little problem.”

  I cringed a little at the nickname, which only Sal used, and I gave the general the once-over. He was a tall fellow, pushing sixty, with a pencil-thin mustache. When he took his hat off, he revealed a jailhouse window of dark strands of hair combed over a bald pate. “Sammy,” he said, as if he wished he had a rank rather than a name to call me by. It would be a low rank, I guessed from his tone, and he just nodded, not offering his hand to shake, as I was clearly beneath his consideration.

  “Two-Toes knows all the hustlers in town, don’t you, Sammy?” said Sal, who suddenly realized he was talking over the shoulder of a dame and stepped back from Stilton to give her a gander. “Hey, sweetheart—”

  “Hold that drink, Sammy,” Stilton said, standing up and putting her finger in Sal’s face to shut him up, a red-lacquered nail a half inch from poking him in the eye. “I gotta scram.”

  Before I could say anything or make a move, she kept her one finger in Sal’s mug while she threaded her other hand through the strap of her pocketbook and held it up to put the halt on me, which I did. “I’ll see you later, handsome,” she said, and in a single move she dropped both arms, pirouetted, and slid out the door while her skirt was still twirling, leaving me, Sal, and the general not a little dumbfounded, and me feeling like luck took a powder on me. Lost, is what I’m saying.

  “Extraordinary,” said the general, still looking at the spot Stilton just vacated. “Now that’s exactly the type of young woman—”

  “The gimp is your guy, then,” said Sal, cutting him off.

  Just then Eddie Moo Shoes came sliding behind the general along with a couple of other guys. The evening crowd tended to clear out when Sal was around, as many found him revolting, going back to the war, when he gouged military guys for the privilege of buying watered-down hooch past off-limits hours.

  “Catch you after work for a bite,” Moo Shoes said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Meet you at the club.”

  Eddie waved and was gone. Sal said, “I told you no fucking Japs.”

  “He’s Chinese,” I said.

  “Same difference,” said Sal.

  Now, Sal knew his place was only a block out of Chinatown, and that the Chinese were in San Francisco long before the Italians, and that his Italian fisherman ancestors had been selling fish to Moo Shoes’s Chinese forefathers for five generations, but he chose to ignore that in favor of showing his patriotism to the general with indiscriminate discrimination. But the douche bag is my boss, and he gave me a job after the war, when jobs were not easy to come by, and under somewhat phonus bolognus circumstances that I would rather not have revealed to the general public and law enforcement in particular, so I let it pass.

  “What can I get you, General?” I said, looking past Sal.

  “Scotch, neat. Single malt if you have it.” He looked around the joint and assessed it as the kind of place that wouldn’t have a single malt. Most bars these days don’t. The Scots had to suspend distilling it during the war and it’s not a quick process, but I remembered seeing something . . .

  “I’ll see what I can find.”

  As I rummaged around under the bar, Sal said, “General Remy’s just in town for a few days, meeting with some mucky-mucks, but he’s coming back next week.”

  “I’m hoping to make some arrangements for some—some—social company upon my return.” For a military guy, the general seemed a little uncomfortable being in a bar. Maybe it was just Sal’s bar, and how those two ended up together was a mystery to me as well.

  Sal said, “The general is commander of a base back east.”

  “Oh really?” I said, my head still down with the spiders and the dust, looking for Scotch. “Where is that?”

  “Roswell, New Mexico,” said the general.

  “There it is.” I popped up from under the bar with a dusty bottle of Glenfiddich. “Never heard of it.”

  “No reason you would,” said the general. “Nothing ever happens there.”

  “Right,” I said, uncorking the bottle. “Double?”

  “Please,” said the general.

  So I poured, thinking not at all about New Mexico, but about the Cheese, and how she walked out without my getting her number, or even finding out if she lived in the neighborhood, and wondering if she’d just jitterbugged out into the great beyond, never to be seen again. But then I thought, No, she stood up, and stood up to Sal on my behalf. And even though I didn’t know where
she came from, where she went to, or how to find her, it felt like I was going to see her again, and when I did, something was going to happen—something big and strange and hopeful, and there wasn’t a goddamn thing I could do about it.

  2

  Tall House of Happy Snake and Noodle

  The fog lay spread across the city like a drowned whore—damp, cold, smelling of salt and diesel—a sea-sodden streetwalker who’d just bonked a tugboat . . .

  “Fog’s a little slutty tonight,” said the cabbie, leaning against his hack at the curb outside Sal’s.

  A foghorn moaned out on the bay.

  Sammy flipped his coat collar up until it met the brim of his hat. “A little tart,” he agreed.

  “Take you somewhere?”

  “Nah, I’m just heading down a few blocks.” Sammy pointed across Broadway, which was the border between North Beach, the Italian neighborhood, and Chinatown. “Thanks.”

  The cabbie tipped his leather cap. “Cookie’s later?”

  “Maybe,” Sammy said. He made his way across the deserted boulevard. The streetlights floated above in their vaporous auras like lost spirits, never reaching the pavement. The shops on Grant Avenue—groceries, souvenir stands, restaurants, butchers—were dark except for the odd stripe of neon cutting the night here and there: closed; massage; a coca-cola sign; a happy glowing dragon holding a bowl of chop suey.

  It was only seven blocks from Sal’s to Club Shanghai, where Eddie worked, not even half a mile, but after three blocks the damp and cold made Sammy’s foot ache and he’d wished he’d taken the cabbie up on his offer. June gloom in the city, or as Mark Twain had put it, “Summer in Frisco makes a guy want to snatch a flounder up by the lapels and slap the damp off of him.” (One of Twain’s lesser-known quotes.)

  As he paced his path out with his walking stick, Sammy thought about the Stilton dame, the Cheese. Something about her. Not that she wasn’t easy on the eyes, she was, although not a knockout—but kind of sweet-looking, the type of broad you could take home to Mom then ravage in the spare room under urgent whispers while Mom harrumphed her disapproval to Dad about just what manner of floozie would allow herself to be named after a stinky English cheese. In short, he liked her, and by getting up and putting the chill on Sal and General Remy when she did, she’d showed him a kindness, although a sneaky and crooked kindness, which he also liked. He wanted to see her again and he was a little sad he didn’t know how to make that happen other than by showing up for work and hoping she came in.

  When he stepped into the deep carpet and red velvet elegance of Club Shanghai, Sammy saw Eddie Moo Shoes standing at the host’s station next to a younger guy in a tux who was working the book. It was two thirty in the morning, and while the band was on break, a Glenn Miller record was playing. Smoke and the sound of conversation were streaming out of the club’s big main room.

  “Hey, Sammy,” Eddie called. “You met Lou?”

  “Low,” the kid corrected.

  “He’s learning,” Eddie said with a grin. None of the employees at Club Shanghai used his Chinese name, the entire theme of the club being Asian players in Anglo roles, which had kept Shanghai and a half-dozen other clubs of its type going strong through much of the Depression and all of the war.

  Sammy was shaking the kid’s hand when Lois Fong tiptoed up in a gold pair of pinup Mary Janes and a sequined gold sheath of an evening gown unzipped to the small of her back. “Be a doll, Eddie, would you?” she said, presenting the creamy V of her back for his ministry. Eddie worked the zipper halfheartedly, like he was closing the casket on an erotic dream, then patted her on the bottom to signal the deed was done.

  “There you go, kiddo,” Eddie said.

  Lois pouted at him over her shoulder. “Not all the way, sweets. A girl’s gotta show a little sample.”

  Now Eddie pouted as he pulled the zipper back down a couple of inches.

  “Thanks, pal,” she said. She kissed the air by his cheek and ran a fingernail under his chin as she scampered off toward the lounge.

  Sammy cleared his throat. “Hey, Eddie, if you want to stay and take care of business we can catch a bite another time.”

  “Nah.” Eddie pulled some keys from his pocket and threw them on the host’s stand. “She says I cramp her style when she’s working the lounge. Let me get my coat. What’s it like out there?”

  “Chilly,” Sammy said.

  “Yeah, in here, too,” said Eddie.

  They walked side by side up Grant Avenue until Eddie took a sharp right into an alley.

  “Shortcut?” Sammy asked. Normally they went to Cookie’s Coffee, a diner in the Tenderloin, one of the few places open all night, but Eddie was headed in the wrong direction.

  “New place,” said Moo Shoes. He dodged between trash cans and abandoned crates and Sammy did his best to follow, navigating in the haze by trying to stay on the dim shine of wet bricks, like trying to follow a stream of black oil through a maze of shadows. The smell of fish and rotting onions clung like cobwebs, letting go for a brief few seconds when they stepped out into Kearny Street, before Eddie dove down another alley.

  “Moo, are you taking me someplace to murder me? Because I’d prefer to be croaked someplace a little less dank.”

  “Relax, we’re here.” Eddie pointed down the alley to a small curl of orange neon that flickered open, buzzing like a dying bee, next to a battered red metal door. “You said you wanted to learn about Chinese culture.”

  “You keep it in this dump?” Sammy looked at the doorway. It led into a brick building jammed between two other buildings, the entire structure no more than eight feet wide, but going up the same four full stories as the buildings flanking it—as if someone had seen a very narrow alley and thought, Now that’s a place I’d like to stack some bricks, a place where they can’t possibly fall over.

  Eddie pulled the door open, releasing a rush of yellow light, steam, tobacco smoke, and a cloud of vapor that Sammy would identify later as the odor of dusty old guy. He didn’t know how he knew that, but that’s what it put him in mind of. Inside he could see a long counter running all the way to the back of the building, ending at what looked like a dumbwaiter hatch. Along the counter sat a row of perhaps thirty very old Chinese guys, dressed in everything from traditional silk jackets to yellow fisherman’s macs, but most in dark Western wool suits. They were either hunched over steaming bowls of soup or smoking pipes and cigarettes—most of them so wrinkled and desiccated they could have been constructed entirely of scrotal skin. A younger guy in an apron was making his way up and down the service side of the counter carrying a big steaming pot and a ladle. A dozen of the old guys looked to the door.

  “Gwai lo,” one of them muttered.

  “Gwai lo,” the rest mumbled down the line, then turned their attention back to their soup.

  “What’s that?” Sammy whispered.

  “Nothing. Follow me.” Eddie took a step into a very narrow stairwell to his left. He listened for a second before ascending the stairs. Four steps up, turn, four steps, turn, four steps, turn. It was like climbing a staircase in a phone booth. They emerged into another long narrow hallway with another counter inhabited by more old Chinese guys, although this bunch seemed somewhat younger than the nut-sack crew below. Sammy was the only Anglo in the joint, but he was used to being the outsider, so he just followed Eddie’s lead.

  “Gwai lo,” several of the old guys mumbled, before going back to their conversation or their soup.

  “What? What?” said Sammy.

  “There’s two empty stools,” Eddie said, shimmying behind the diners.

  When they were seated in the middle of the counter—so tight their shoulders were touching along their neighbors’ shoulders on either side—another guy in an apron came by with his steaming pot and ladle and said something in Cantonese to Moo Shoes.

  “You want jook or noodles?” Eddie asked.

  “I want a cheeseburger,” Sammy said.

  Eddie said something to
the apron guy, who tossed a couple of empty bowls, chopsticks, and spoons in front of them, then skulked away, muttering.

  “We’re having noodles,” Eddie said.

  Sammy looked around at various old guys’ soups. “The fuck is jook?”

  “It’s rice porridge. Very hearty. This place is a jook house. Been here since we built the railroad. Guy’s working, runs in here, slurps some jook—maximum food, minimum time.”

  “And we’re here instead of Cookie’s because?”

  “Culture?” Moo Shoes ventured.

  “Yeah, no,” Sammy said.

  “My grandmother said that jook warms the heart.”

  “Which is why we’re having noodles . . .”

  “Fine,” Eddie said. “I want to go back to the club when Lois gets off at four and I’m hungry and this is the only place open in Chinatown this time of night.”

  “You coulda just waited for her.”

  “I woulda loved to, but the ponies are encouraged to hang out with patrons in the lounge between and after shows. She thinks I’m going to get in the way of her finding some rich gwai lo sugar daddy.”

  “Wait, what’s gwai lo? That’s what all these guys said when we came in.”

  “Uh, it means ‘new friend.’”

  “I don’t think so,” said Sammy.

  The old guy next to Sammy leaned over and said, “‘White devil.’”

  “No,” said Eddie. “Don’t listen to him, he doesn’t even speak English.”

  “Can mean ‘ghost person,’” said the old guy on the other side of Moo.

  Sammy looked from one geezer to the other. “Hey, screw you guys! I am not a white devil!”

  “Calm down,” said Moo Shoes. “It’s just an expression. No one thinks you’re actually a white devil.”

  “White devil very touchy,” said the old guy next to Sammy.

  Sammy turned to the geezer and balled his fist under his chin. The old guy grinned, maybe six teeth total. Sammy laughed and patted the old guy’s shoulder. “Yeah, a little too touchy, pops.”

  To Eddie he said, “So you’re going to go back to the club just in time to see her leave with some white devil?”