The drive from the Pacific side of San Francisco, heading east, all the way to Oakland, and therein Jingletown, is a lot like watching a city get built, to its highest peak, and then watching it again in reverse, but with a different ending. Like it starts as a wave, one with the ocean, and it ends as a particle, snotted in cement. You leave the Sunset District, full of colorful homes, head around Golden Gate Park, bright green even at night, get your ass to Market Street, and then hook a right until you can step up on I-80, glide past the glitz of San Francisco, a city fully realized, then leave it behind, across the Bay, along the Bay Bridge, over the big dark puddle, and into the Oakland mainland, where the lights return but the glow never does.
All the same, Cole liked drifting into the O. It was a city that didn’t need to impress anyone. You hitch off I-80 and onto I-880, and you pass by a version of San Francisco all over again, but now it’s a little lower, a little darker, a little less flashy. This is Oakland’s downtown. He’d never lived there, but he could imagine himself, one day, in his later years, residing in a small apartment, coming out every morning to get a breakfast burrito, read a book, flirt with the waitress, ruminate on the stories of his past, and think about the things that could’ve been on the other side of the water. Who would tell him otherwise, then? When you’re up there in age, when you’re ready to die, you get to decide all the things.
He passed the waterfront, where the Brooklyn Basin beckoned to his right. He was driving south now, heading away from downtown Oakland. The buildings shrunk. That time lapse in reverse. From a wave to a particle. One or the other. Blocky complexes and sheet metal warehouses were at his three and nine while he kept his hands at ten and two, eyes open on the lookout for his exit: 39B. 23rd Avenue. Jingletown.
He got on main roads and cruised past big gray nothing buildings while he mentally jogged to his computer screen back at Central Station, recollecting the address of the Vigilance Committee art auction.
Or hell, maybe he should just look for the damned logo.
He still didn’t fully believe it, but he couldn’t throw the idea in the garbage, either. Why would the Vigilance Committee want Chuck Hattaran dead? What had he known? And why would Chuck go to the Tenderloin, with a police body cam, in search of Vigilance committeers, or committians. Whatever.
Occam’s razor. Maybe it wasn’t the whole damn committee. Maybe it was just the one guy, with the one tattoo. A particularly passionate committee member. Someone who orgied with Mia and didn’t want to be found out. Then Chuck Hattaran found out, and he wanted to do something about it.
Ah, but Chuck had a golden ring, too. Chuck had been part of the orgy. He and Mia were a husband-wife piece of the piece, complicit in the whole damn thing. But maybe one of their orgy partners—an organ, Cole would call him—maybe one of the organs got attached. Jealous. Possessive of Mia. Maybe Mia felt the same way. They connected on a deeper level. Not as deep as Cole and Mia, but you know. It was a romantic affair hidden within a sexual orgy. It was the perfect cover.
“That bitch,” Cole muttered to himself.
Yaromir Yevseyev. Cole could picture his gray, sagging body already, hovering over Mia, his face gone purple with pleasure, his body like a blimp of flesh. One perfect woman. One disgusting man. It was like envisioning a warthog making love to a pegasus.
So Chuck Hattaran got wise to the guy. Maybe he even told Yaromir the score once or twice, but Yaromir wasn’t backing down. Mia was too valuable a prize. Then Chuck came looking for him in the Tenderloin one night, but he got the scoop on Chuck first. He shoots. Scores. Bang. No more Chuck.
But that only made sense if Chuck Hattaran had other suspicions about Yaromir, too, because why else record it? Like, Yaromir was up to something. Like, Yaromir wasn’t just an adulterer. Like, Yaromir was a criminal, hustling in the no-gang’s-land of the Tenderloin.
Maybe Yaromir was even tied up with La Mitad. Wouldn’t that be something: the man who wanted Chuck, and the man who wanted Mia, connected by golden rings and a dumb desire. It was cute.
It was stupid.
Cole looked in the mirrors of his Civic.
He was lost.
Eventually, he got his bearings and found the address he remembered from the posting. It was on Ford Street, just past an intersection with a big yellow moon and stars painted on the asphalt. Cole looked up as he got out of his Civic, parked by a dead meter. Not even a glint in the big dark sky. No crescent moon. Apparently, in Jingletown, the cosmos was upside down. Maybe Cole could turn a few other things that way while he was here.
This part of Jingletown was in the early volcanic stages of gentrification. Old, towering, industrial shacks were being transmogrified into hipster enclaves. The meter he parked at was next to a closed beanery that advertised kombucha on the window for eleven bucks a bottle. Petty crimes were still a reality here, but they were slowly being pushed out by fashion crimes instead. A street like this used to be tagged with gang graffiti. Now it was cluttered with Shepard Fairey knock-offs.
It was also cluttered with art gallery warehouses. Five on either side of him. Who knew there was so much to express, and so many people interested in viewing it? We just can’t help it. Looking at the thing.
The warehouse he was looking for was at the corner of Ford and Peterson. It was painted green like a Shamrock Shake with a roll-up garage door at the front. It was wide open, except with a curtain hanging up behind the entrance, and a little table at the foot of that. He couldn’t see who was sitting at the table yet.
The line to get inside was moving quick. It was a surprisingly diverse array of patrons, too. White, black, Latino, Asian. All dressed professionally, but not flashy. This didn’t look like a social outing.
Cole felt underdressed with his ratty, ripped jacket and his bandaged hand. Nevertheless, all his fashion concerns dropped quick as he shuffled up to the entrance and finally saw who was sitting behind the little table in front of the curtain.
It was Sibs.
The girl from the Vigilance Committee outpost in the Tenderloin, just last night. Back then, she was all casually cute and paint on her fingers. Now, she might’ve been overdressed, clad in a black, long-sleeved gown with a high, elegant collar rimmed with silver fabric. Her dark curly hair was put up in a pretty knot or whatever you wanted to call it. She was on point is the thing.
“Name?” she asked. He never did get to tell her his name.
“Holy smokes.”
“I don’t got anyone by that name. I don’t even have to look.”
Nice try, babe. He slapped his palms on her table. His bandaged hand sent a buzz up his arm like he was an anthropomorphized version of the board game Operation.
Through his teeth: “What the hell’s the matter with you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Last night. The message on my arm.” He started rustling up his jacket sleeve.
“Oh, yeah. That was fun.”
“So it was you!”
“Of course.”
“You took Moses!”
“What?”
“To the cab!”
“What cab?”
“Did you or didn’t you?” One or the other!
“You left. I closed early. The riot was tripping up the street. What was I supposed to do? I went home.” There were people coming up behind Cole waiting to sign in. She lowered her voice. “What do you think I did?”
He wouldn’t be swayed. Occam’s razor. She had to do it. It was simple. Clean.
She continued. “You think I took someone? Who’m I gonna take? And why would I do that? You’d come after me immediately. Shoot, here you are. It’s too simple.”
Occam’s razor. Don’t listen to her.
“Did y’all at the station see what it was like outside last night?” She lowered her voice, yet it felt louder. “Boys were getting shot! Boys I knew! People are dead!” She checked herself before she got out of her chair, careful to keep her cool.
Boys hadn’t just gotten shot. Little Reggie rolled through Cole’s mind again.
“I know people are dead,” he said.
She lowered her voice, sighed. “I wasn’t busting anywhere last night. I went home.”
Occam’s razor. Stand by it.
“Well?”
Don’t even reply.
“Don’t hold up the line,” she ordered. “Just get inside. We’ll talk later.”
“So you will talk to me?”
“Afterward. Sure. I got nothin’ to hide.”
“But not now. Why then?”
“Because I’ve got a piece up for auction first and I'm scared shitless.”
Cole relinquished control of the table and took a green bracelet. Stuck it around his wrist. Then it was around the curtain, into the main area, where paintings and photography big and small ran up and down walls and partitions like a quilt of canvas. There were already about fifty men and women inside, drinking wine or mixed drinks out of little plastic cups, procured from some unseen open bar. The art ran the gamut from realistic looking stuff to post-modernist looking stuff. Cole didn’t know anything about art.
“Music. Literature,” espoused Cole’s mom, years ago, before she gave in to the cancer. Cole was just a kid then. “These are the writing instruments of the soul.”
“Not paintings, though? Art stuff like that.” That was Cole, before his voice dropped.
“God, no. A painting is just an imitation of what something looks like. And it doesn’t matter what it looks like. Right? What it feels like. That’s the thing.”
Culture Sundays with mom back in the day, back when his pop worked the day shift. Blake was too young to partake, to understand, at the time. Then she died. Culture Sundays along with it.
Imitations everywhere here in the art auction. That went for the people, too. All dolled up, sophisticated on the outside. Rotten as mold in a coffee maker inside. And a lot of the faces in his vicinity were awfully familiar. If he didn’t know any better, he’d swear he saw the skinny white guy to his left on a photo on a corkboard down in Special Projects at Central. And the Latino woman to his right. Wasn’t she involved, or “involved,” with La Mano Negra, a gang out of Hayward? He even saw a biker he knew, or “knew” from photos, New Duke he called himself, from the Rangers MC, based way out in the sticks. His hair was slicked back and he wore an all-black suit, instead of his leather chaps. He was talking—nah—he was arguing with some black guy over by a corner near a big red impressionist (or whatever). And Cole definitely knew that black guy:
That was Four Fingers. Real name: Damian Buchanan. Street name originated from the way he liked his whiskey. A Jamaican in his mid-forties, been in Oakland for a decade and a half, running his own crew, under his own street name: Four Fingers’s Crew. His generals and lieutenants, in particular, were dangerous people. Known for eliminating enemies with creative capital punishment. Oakland Homicide shared stories all the time. It was practically a weekly newsletter. The 4FC allegedly killed one guy via rug burn. Another guy had to sit patiently while his executioner microwaved baby oil, then poured it on his cranium until it bled right through the skull. One guy had his wrists slit with a plastic baby spoon. But as notorious as Four Fingers was, no one had ever arrested the guy for as much as a right on red. He managed legit businesses, or “legit” businesses, like an off-track betting joint called Arlington Millions. Like a string of pawn shops all through the O. Like a dozen or so food trucks, from Mexican to Thai to Philly cheese steaks. He knew how to do good business without ever doing too well, which is how he did really well, but without the I.R.S. ever getting wise to it.
Well, apparently, he was interested in art, too. Apparently, a lot of gangsters were interested in art. Maybe it was a fad. Maybe it was something else. Got to put your dirty money into something.
The thunderous thump of a microphone being tested brought the ocean of conversation down to rest while heads turned toward the other end of the warehouse. There, on a small stage, an easel and a podium awaited whoever was in charge. There was a Vigilance Committee logo on the podium. Cole scratched his forearm.
“All right. We’re okay?” That was a Russian voice.
Then a guy came out from around the curtain by that stage. The guy had the mic in his hand. Who was it?
“Yaromir,” muttered Cole, under the ensuing applause. While it all calmed down, Yaromir took to the podium and fastened the microphone to the slot on top of it.
He wore a gray pinstriped suit with a red handkerchief and tie. The suit was thick in the middle, sweaty under the pits, visible even from Cole’s vantage point. In fact, he was sweaty everywhere. He better sweat.
He held his hands high to quell the last of the mumblers. No wedding ring tonight. Then he pounded a little gavel.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and a very, very warm welcome to the generous benefactors of the Vigilance Committee.”
That was an applause line. Applause followed.
“First, I want to congratulate all of our bidders from our last auction. We had seven artist records in one night, and an outstanding sell-through rate that I hope we can beat this evening.”
Another applause line. More applause.
The auction got started after that. Yaromir had a couple of bodyguards shuffle paintings up to the easel one after another, just from stage left, wearing special gloves so they didn’t actually touch the thing in question.
“Eight hundred on my right. Eight hundred fifty on my left. Eight hundred fifty in the room. Nine hundred, new bidder,” blabbered Yaromir. When he auctioneered, his Russian accent vanished.
What else could he make vanish? A murder weapon? Witnesses? Like Moses? How else did he fit into this cockamamy pair of blue jeans? To wit:
Moses is at the scene of the crime, but he’s not the killer.
Yaromir might be the killer, on the other side of Chuck Hattaran.
Moses flees. Yaromir wants to clean up loose ends. Yaromir works with the Vigilance Committee. Sibs works for them, too. Sibs sends out the S.O.S. for the guy. Yaromir gets the word. Yaromir finds Moses, throws Moses in a cab, but he doesn’t kill the gun-lover because Moses is important somehow. He’s working as fast as he counts bids at an auction. Sibs never even knew what she was involved in.
That might work. Maybe it wasn’t Occam’s razor, but hell, it was Cole’s razor.
“Number seven is the Sybil Jackson.”
A couple of guards brought out the next painting. It was about a yard tall and maybe a little more than half that wide, depicting a kid’s shallow sandbox in a recess yard, with a bucket and bulldozer half-consumed by sand. A dark shadow blanketed the top of most of the thing. The shadow was part of the painting.
“Number seven is entitled ‘Girl in Sandbox.’ You think the shadow is a boy. No? Because you are sexist. No?” The bidders chuckled.
“Bidding starts at five hundred dollars.” Yaromir pointed at some john. “I have five hundred. Six hundred on my right. Seven hundred. Eight hundred on my right. Nine hundred, new bidder. One thousand.”
Someone exhaled sharply to Cole’s left. It was Sibs. All of her cool disaffected put-ons were put off. Her eyes were glued to the bidding gangsters close to the front. Her glossy nails nearly shook off her fingers.
Sybil Jackson. Sibs. There it was.
“Fourteen hundred in the room. I have fourteen hundred. Fifteen hundred to my right.”
It kept going like that. With every new number, Sibs’s face contorted in a new direction. Cole was transfixed. His eyes on her lips. He’d never seen joy quite like that. It was cute.
It was stupid.
How high was this gonna go?
“I have nineteen thousand four hundred. I have—twenty-five thousand.”
That wave-pooled the room. Sibs stomped the heel of her pumps on the cement floor, either out of misplaced indignation or because otherwise she was going to lose her balance.
“Come on!” she shouted.
“Twenty-six thousand. I have twenty-seven thousand. Twenty-eight thousand in the room. Twenty-nine thousand. Thirty-five thousand!”
“Come on!” she shouted again, her voice gone shaky.
The bidder in the lead was Four Fingers, his little paddle going up before Yaromir could ever say more than two syllables. It was automatic. It was crazy. It was so much money.
“I have sixty-four thousand dollars. The bid is at sixty-four thousand dollars …”
Yaromir did a final wave across the room then slammed the gavel on the podium.
“Sold. Thank you. Thank you very much, indeed.”
And Sibs clutched her chest. Cole thought she was going to fall over. He put a hand on her arm. She batted him away.
“Get off of me, white knight!”
All right.
Sibs stormed up through the crowd in her pumps toward the stage. Each step lifted her grin a little further.
Yaromir said something about her into the mic. Cole couldn’t make it out. But apparently it was an applause line. Applause followed.
Then Yaromir was at the step of the stage, with a hand out, ready to help her up. She didn’t need it. She did a little wave. It seemed like she wanted to say something into the mic at the podium.
That wasn’t in the cards. The two bodyguards from before came out and pulled Sibs to the back of the stage. One of them was a little too handsy.
She tried to bat him away.
Cole stepped forward.
He pulled her again.
No one else seemed to be concerned, but Cole started heading for the stage. That’s when he realized who one of the bodyguards was.
It was Sandí, the guy with the wrinkly head, the guy from the church casino, the guy who worked with La Mitad, who gave Cole a handful of bad news and a broken phone twenty-four hours earlier. Different suit. Same bad news.
Sibs was in trouble.