Peter Maravelis - San Francisco Noir

Their hosts were going to treat them to a banquet and took them to a restaurant that resembled a union hall. Michael and Ariel and a group of men in blue suits sat around a table and ate and drank. One of those in attendance, Michael believed, was Wang Hung-wen, the former Shanghai cotton mill worker who had been promoted by Mao to the number-three position in the party hierarchy, and who later joined Chiang Ching in promoting the “Criticize Lin Piao, Criticize Confucius” campaign.

Their hosts ordered a number of “delicacies.” There was an ugly thing that felt like eating a dead rat. Then they ordered a round of sea slugs, which didn’t have any taste at all. It was like sucking down snot. What fucking culture considered this sort of thing a delicacy? Michael thought their gracious hosts were bringing out these dishes out of sheer perversity-they weren’t delicacies at all. By the end of the night, their hosts had drunk them under table with moutai , a clear liquor that tasted like turpentine. They repeatedly toasted the Americans in Chinese and laughed, and the whole time Michael thought they were saying, “ Don’t hold your breath waiting for the revolution in the U.S.A. This is the best we got! Ah ha ha ha! ”

That was their last day in China.

Michael picked up his luggage at the carousel. There was the suitcase he’d originally packed, and following, the suitcase he’d received in Vancouver, which he hadn’t seen since he’d checked it in for the Pan Am flight to Tokyo. It felt heavier than he remembered, but that was hard to say. He looked at Ariel once he had it, expecting some kind of response, a raised eyebrow, smirk, or nod, but Ariel had his poker face on. They went through customs. The officer checked his luggage ticket and waved him through.

They entered the arrivals lobby. There was no one to pick them up.

In the seconds that he scanned the crowd again, looking for the people who should have been there but weren’t, a flood of thoughts went through Michael’s mind. He was sure the exact same thoughts were now going through Ariel’s mind. Michael was carrying the suitcase. It wouldn’t be hard for him to outrun the old man. Pushing him down or hitting him would only cause a disturbance that would draw attention to him. If he just ran, it would take the sparse crowd around them awhile, whatever Ariel’s response, to realize what was going on, and even then, if that, security was light. Ariel didn’t have a chance.

He could lie low in Canada. There would be a lot of people out to kill him. It was a lot of money. He could steal the money and become a capitalist.

The two men from the Seattle group came running up.

“Sorry we’re late. Traffic.”

They followed them to their car.

In Seattle, the four met another two, and the money was handed over. The two with the money left in a separate car. Michael and Ariel were driven back to Seattle HQ.

Michael thought he was driving to San Francisco with Ariel, but Ariel told him he would be staying on.

At the curb, Ariel stopped him. “You weren’t thinking about running off with the money back there, were you?”

Michael just smiled. They didn’t say goodbye or shake hands. It was the last they saw of each other.

In 1983, long after he’d stopped being a Communist, Michael came across an obit in the Chronicle . Ariel Rabenstein, a patient who had suffered from Alzheimer’s, passed away in a Jewish old folk’s home in East Oakland.

Some time after that, on a trip very unlike his first one there, Michael stepped into a bar in Vancouver and saw behind the counter a woman he believed to be Candy Dong. Her youthful beauty had long since withered away, but the vitality she had displayed that night in Chinatown was still in force.

He reintroduced himself, and she remembered him. He told her this story and mentioned how he had passed up a chance to run off with the money.

“I was going to take it and find you. I still kept the chopstick wrapper with your friend’s phone number on it.”

She looked at him with an unreadable expression. Then she mentioned she had left for Vancouver shortly after they’d met and hadn’t been back to San Francisco since. Was the restaurant still there?

He had tried looking for it, but couldn’t find it. Chinatown hadn’t changed much, though. In that way it seemed to exist in cyclical as opposed to linear time, life went on there much as it had before. Of course, politically, everything had changed. All the old battle lines that had been drawn up and which they’d all fought over so heatedly had been irrevocably erased. Things that used to matter, like the Kuomintang, now mattered little. The old I-Hotel, he didn’t know if she’d heard, had been torn down after a great struggle. All that was left on the corner of Jackson and Kearny was a hole in the ground that had remained for almost twenty-five years.

“And your friend Francis? How’s he doing?” she asked.

“He went to jail and kind of disappeared from view after that. What about your brother, the filmmaker?”

“He went into real estate,” she said. “He bought up properties all over the avenues, and now he’s immensely rich.”

Bernal Heights

It was the beginning of October and it felt like the height of summer, even way the fuck up on the rotting hillside that was my Bernal Hill neighborhood. Not that the weather would dry my moldering basement apartment; we’d need a year of San Francisco Octobers for my home to become livable, to staunch the flow of moisture that dappled my crumbling walls-my own little waterfall, I liked to think of it. This was when I wasn’t depressed, when I had some levity to spare. My own little waterfall, like I’m living in the tropics.

And it’s true that my back door opened up to a lush backyard, it’s true that though it was horribly overgrown and almost entirely weeds, it was green. On the days when my depression had receded like a landlord’s hairline, I could appreciate it all-the chest-high weeds tossing in the perpetual wind, the sheen of dew pimpling the walls of my subterranean apartment, my overall fungal existence. I was some sort of elf, a smallish person dwelling in a mushroom, which bloomed on the gloomy backside of Bernal Hill.

Two things happened that first week of October, and they both involved breaking and entering. First, I was the victim, later, the perpetrator. I’d come home from a call and I was feeling cranky. It was an early-morning client, unusual, a business guy from Seattle in town for a conference. I should pay more attention to what my tricks do. Some of them are almost certainly controlling the world-balding white businessmen, past middle age, with a lot of cash to blow on hookers. Their suits are expensive and their briefcases look like they come from the leather of a superior cow. I visit them at the Fairmont, at the Mandarin, at every single downtown hotel; a blur of elevator buttons and soft-carpeted hallways that muffle the clack of my heels. These guys are involved in dirty business, they’re profiting from the war, are Republican, are getting rich on the backs of girls like me, I know. Sometimes, I think I should be a spy, fuck them better, make them like me, seduce them into telling me the secrets of their occupations so that I could do-something. So close to these rulers, in plush locked rooms, with their curdled white bodies. Surely I could do something; a certain sabotage seems close, so close, but no. I zone out when they speak to me, leave my body when they climb onto me, give them the dullest fuck, and they don’t bat an eye. They’ve been having lousy sex since they were fourteen, they’ve been getting it on with women who want nothing to do with them since puberty, they can’t tell the difference. They roll off me and I’m gone. Down the elevator, I’ve got my hand jammed into my purse, wrapped around the money, counting the bills from touch, discretely. I’ve already forgotten what he looked like.