Fogtown Read online

  Copyright © 2004 by Peter Plate

  A Seven Stories Press First Edition

  All characters and places in this novel are fictitious, and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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  Cover design by Krista Vossen

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Plate, Peter.

  Fogtown : a novel / Peter Plate.—Seven Stories Press 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-60980-216-5

  1. San Francisco (Calif.)—Fiction. 2. Inner cities—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3566.L267F64 2004

  813′.54—dc22

  2003027062

  v3.1_r2

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  About the Author

  ONE

  AT SUNRISE on the last day of summer an armored car exited the freeway near the police station and rumbled down Market Street toward the Embarcadero. Inscribed in blue letters on the transport’s sides was the name of the company it belonged to: Brinks. In smaller red-inked lettering were the words: subsidiary of Pittston.

  Fog was murdering the street. Blotting it out with a greasy haze that was no higher than a foot off the ground. The fashion boutiques and chi-chi restaurants that lined the avenue were ghostly white in the mist. The imported trees planted in front of the tourist hotels were forlorn and wet. The beggars, pickpockets, hookers, and bicycle thieves who habitually worked the sidewalks from dawn until twilight were no place in sight.

  While waiting for the Social Security office to open, Mama Celeste watched the Brinks truck pass the Warfield Theater. A San Francisco Giants baseball hat sat on top of her dreadlocks; a faded knee-length purple smock hung from her thin, stooped frame. Dead leaves swirled around her feet and flirted with her orthopedic shoes. Her favorite Vietnam-era green army jungle jacket wasn’t doing much to ward off the morning’s chill.

  Mama’s high-yellow face was a billboard of disappointment. It was the third week of the month and she hadn’t received her retirement check yet. The check was supposed to be in the mail. Maybe someone had stolen it. Or maybe it had gotten lost. It was all a mystery. What the post office did. What the government did.

  She threw a wry glance at the other retirees in the Social Security line. There must have been eighty people. Old men and women dressed in winter clothes because the San Franciscan summer was cold enough to freeze the marrow in your bones. The queue snaked past the boarded-up Saint Francis Theater, an abandoned movie-house that was being torn down for condominiums, and went around the corner onto Sixth Street. “What a bunch of fools we are,” Mama muttered.

  The night before, Mama Celeste had been visited in her sleep by a demon. She had been in bed shortly after midnight. A foghorn was sounding near Point Bonita in the bay. She opened one eye and there was the demon, naked with wings on his back. His eyebrows were shaved. His hairline had a widow’s peak. His flinty orbs gleamed with a luminosity that made Mama think his presence was a prelude to death. Her death. She coughed and smelled brimstone. She was terrified. She wasn’t ready for the afterlife. She had things to do here on earth.

  The demon passed wind, a viscous green-tinted cloud that scorched the wallpaper. He leaned over her, his chin chaffing her teats. “You virago,” he harped, “why are you so stubborn? You have to come with me. It’s time.”

  Willing herself to be strong, Mama replied, “I ain’t going anywhere.”

  The dybbuk had laughed uproariously at her defiance and then vanished.

  Mama continued to stare at the Brinks lorry as it inched by the Social Security office. The taillights bled into the fogginess. Oversized tires swished against the damp asphalt. A line of smoke hissed from the exhaust pipe.

  Out of nowhere, a Ford Taurus sedan careened onto Market Street. The car drunkenly crossed the yellow dividing line in the road. Instead of doubling back, the Taurus sliced in front of the Brinks truck and clipped the front bumper. Recoiling from the impact, the sedan boomeranged onto the sidewalk, crashing into a fire hydrant.

  The Brinks vehicle fared no better. The driver lost control of the steering wheel and bumped his head against the bulletproof windshield, knocking himself unconscious. The truck went up on two wheels and rolled over on its side with tires spinning, raising red and white sparks, and mashing a telephone pole. The pole caved into a Payless Shoe Store window. A salvo of glass shards ripped into the store’s awnings.

  The guard watching the money in the back was thrown to the floor. The armor-plated rear door cracked open and piles of cash somersaulted onto the macadam. Stacks of brand new one-hundred-dollar bills destined for a bank scattered over the roadbed, blending in with cigarette butts, beer cans, used condoms, and cigar wrappers.

  Bills lay in heaps on the pavement. Pushed by the breeze, money clogged the doorways of Bora’s Café and the House of Blue Jeans. Dunes of Andrew Jacksons rested on sewer grates. One-hundred-dollar bills decorated the sidewalk, along with used syringes, empty crack bags, and McDonald’s hamburger cartons. A column of black smoke rose from under the Brinks truck’s hood. One of its giant wheels kept turning.

  Being a religious woman, Mama Celeste was convinced she was having a vision. The money had to be an omen. It was a sign from God, a message from Him to everyone. Judgment day had finally come.

  From three blocks away, police sirens keened.

  The cash and the pensioners were gone by the time the cops arrived at the scene of the accident.

  By eight in the morning the police were frantic to find the Brinks money. The first reports of its whereabouts were not encouraging. No witnesses had come forward. Both Brinks personnel had been hospitalized. The driver was in the intensive care unit at St. Mary’s Medical Center on Hayes Street and was unable to talk. The guard was in a coma in the trauma unit. The guys in the Ford Taurus had evaporated, leaving behind their car, which turned out to be stolen from a repair garage in Daly City.

  Market Street cuts the city in half, running east from Twin Peaks down to the San Francisco Bay shoreline. From Twin Peaks you can see Mount Diablo thir
ty miles away in the East Bay, the blue and brown Sonoma hills to the north, and the Farallon Islands in the Pacific Ocean. A typical day on Market Street has at least one shooting, or if nothing else, a stabbing and an armed robbery.

  The Allen Hotel sat in the middle of Market Street halfway between the Castro district and the Tenderloin. A hundred-year-old flophouse that had fallen upon less than prosperous times, the brick hotel was five stories tall. The security gate was useless, hanging from one hinge. The windows that dimpled its facade were fusty. An unemployed flagpole protruded from the tarpaper roof. Dance studios, art supply stores, cafés, and nouveau cuisine restaurants—new businesses that were central to the chamber of commerce’s drive to revitalize and spruce up the neighborhood—surrounded the boarding house and took the shine out of it.

  A widow with no children, Mama Celeste had dwelled on the Allen’s top floor for seven years. Her room was furnished with an iron-frame queen-size bed, two folding chairs, a table, an oak chest, a woven straw rug, and a dozen watercolor paintings on the walls.

  Mama was aggravated. Rummaging through the chest’s drawers, her salt-and-pepper eyebrows were knitted in a single line. Her iron-gray dreadlocks were pulled back from her lined, tallowy forehead with a thick red rubber band. Her printed frock, a twenty-year-old gift from her late husband, was shapeless from frequent laundering. Being half Jewish and half Puerto Rican, the rich color of Mama’s skin and her regal nose had been inherited from her father. Her bad feet and kinky hair came from her mother’s side of the family. They were from Warsaw in Poland.

  Nearly eighty years of age, Mama was forgetful. Her memory waxed and waned. She had good days when she remembered every small thing. She had bad days when the lights in her head were switched off. She misplaced items, and she was unable to remember where she’d put things.

  For a split second, Mama didn’t know where she was. She didn’t hear the traffic on Market Street. She didn’t hear her neighbors fighting next door. She didn’t hear the mice scrambling under the floor. She didn’t hear the clock tick-tocking on the nightstand. She didn’t smell the mold in her room. She didn’t see the cockroaches skitter across the carpet. She didn’t feel the lumbago in her back. She felt and saw nothing. Then sensed what she’d been searching for, a Safeway supermarket shopping bag tucked underneath a tablecloth in the chest’s bottom drawer, and she snapped back to reality.

  The bag was coated with grease spots and had a tear down one side. She pried it from the drawer and lugged it across the room and tossed it on the bed. The bedsprings squealed in irritation as she plopped down on the mattress beside the bag.

  Light-headed, she went blank for a moment. Her heart pounded. Was she getting a stroke? Maybe she was catching a cold. That would lead to pleurisy, and then she’d end up in the hospital. Since she was alone, no family or anyone, who would come to her rescue? She didn’t want to think about it.

  Mama had ended up at the Allen for the reasons most people washed up at a residential hotel—she had little money. A room didn’t cost much. It gave you the space to contemplate your life. It was also someplace to get injured in. If the weather wasn’t warm, your room was an icebox. The mold in the walls got in your lungs. You contracted asthma. The last stop was pneumonia.

  Pneumonia’s earmarks were an orchestra. You were hot and cold at the same time. You were hypersensitive to the touch. Because you had a blistering fever, a trip to the bathroom was no less arduous than rappelling up a mountainside. The disease preyed on the isolated and sought out the weak. If you were old, it was a murderer.

  Fishing in the bag, she extracted a bleached muslin cloth sack emblazoned with bloodstains. The thing was heavy and she grimaced with the effort it took to get it out. Printed in bold blue letters on the sack was the inscription: Property of Brinks.

  She opened it and turned it upside down. A stack of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills fell in her lap and onto the blankets. A dozen other Ben Franklins frolicked to the rug in a lazy poetic trail. Mama Celeste laughed as she stooped over to retrieve them. The money was manna from heaven.

  A yell in the hall interrupted her. Holding her breath, Mama was afraid. She listened carefully to every sound in the room. The faucet in the sink was dripping. The floorboards were creaking. The light bulb on the ceiling sizzled. Monstrous green flies buzzed at the window.

  She couldn’t recall a day when she hadn’t been scared. Fear was in her blood. But it was odd how rapidly things changed. Two hours ago she’d been at the Social Security office on Market Street without a dime in her pocket. Then a miracle had occurred—God had communicated with her. He had done it for a reason.

  Mama closed her eyes and replayed the Brinks crash. Money had poured out of the vehicle, more cash than she’d ever seen before. The guard inside the truck had been deathly pale; his khaki uniform was drenched with blood. Mama Celeste had felt bad for him, but when she saw the Franklins stacked ankle-deep on the pavement, she felt even worse for herself. Being hungry all the time could do that to a person. So could being penny-poor. It made you selfish.

  Crossing the street, she went to the truck’s door. Taking a Kleenex, she’d dabbed at the gash in the guard’s forehead to staunch his wound. But seeing that it didn’t do him any good, she clawed a sack of cash out from under his boots. That put her in a trance. The money had her head swimming. The other pensioners flitted over to the truck from the Social Security office. Moving fast, Mama stashed the bag under her coat. While everybody else was busy fighting over what cash there was on the ground, she beat a path homeward to the Allen Hotel.

  Back in her room, Mama hid the legal tender in the chest and then fell on her knees to pray. She screwed her eyes shut, pressed her palms together, and asked God what she should do with the loot. Mama had been a non-unionized nurse’s aide for most of her adult life. She’d toiled in hospices and rest homes. Having a ton of money was unfathomable. The question she posed to Him was on basic economics.

  “Well, Lord,” she incanted, “what do you want from me?”

  God didn’t waste any time getting back to her. He answered her prayers in a jiffy and instructed her what to do with the dough.

  Mama gathered the money on the bed and then loaded it into an empty Reebok shoebox. Placing Ben Franklins in the box, she lost count of how much was in it after two hundred thousand dollars. Big numbers made her dizzy.

  After filling up the shoebox to the brim, she threw the remaining cash back in the muslin Brinks sack. Dropping the sack in the Safeway shopping bag, Mama heaved herself off the bed. Her feet hurt like the dickens. So did her knees. She had worked hard for forty years, and this was what had happened. Her body was an assortment of pains and sometimes she hated it. The bag in hand, she slogged over to the oak chest and returned the booty to its hideout.

  She made a cup of chamomile tea on the hot plate and then sat in a chair by the window and drank it, watching the butterflies cavort outside. The fog had lifted; the sun was getting higher, reaching over the rooftops. She rinsed the cup, put it on the counter next to the sink, set the shoebox by the door, and donned her army coat. As she did that, she had a glimpse in the mirror. What she saw disappointed her.

  Her punim was a road map of seven-plus decades. Her nose was too large for the rest of her face. Her eyes were close-set and made her seem angry even when she was happy. The grooves in her mouth never expressed joy. Her chin was sharp as an axe. The furrows on her forehead were deep enough to plant corn in. No wonder she had no one to keep her company nowadays. With a punim like hers, who would want to?

  She buttoned the coat to the collar, tied a yellow cotton handkerchief around her dreads, and crowned the ensemble with her Giants baseball hat. Safety-pinning her house keys to the coat’s inner sleeve, Mama Celeste picked up the shoebox, shuffled to the door, and opened it.

  The melody of Oliver Nelson’s jazz standard “Stolen Moments” greeted her in the dusty hallway. A neighbor had the tune on upstairs. A baby’s high-pitched weeping wafted in from
the airshaft. A man was singing while taking a shower in the communal bathroom. Mama Celeste shut her rickety door and keyed the deadbolt.

  Certain the shoebox was snug in her arms, she went down four dark flights of stairs. She stopped at the landing on the third floor to catch her breath. A calico cat nipped past her and went out the window and onto the fire escape. The feline’s orange-flecked fur glinted in the sun that was getting through the fog.

  The Allen Hotel’s lobby was a postage stamp–sized rectangle of marble floor. The walls were spray-painted with graffiti. Uncollected bags of trash garrisoned the corners. Cobwebs choked the ceiling. Judging by the number of them on the floor, letters to hotel occupants from the probation department at the Hall of Justice were the most popular kind of mail.

  Enthroned on a milk crate in the foyer was the building’s manager, a stocky, middle-aged ex-con named Jeeter Roche. Attired in a chartreuse polyester leisure suit and tan buck loafers, and smoking a hand-rolled Bugler cigarette, Jeeter was reading a paperback novel by Tadeusz Konwicki, the dissident Polish writer from the 1970s.

  He pored over a sentence, taking pleasure in the author’s writing style. The lobby’s dim light burnished Jeeter’s shaved pate. Tobacco smoke bedeviled his pointed ears. The paperback’s pages were annotated with ballpoint pen markings, scoring his favorite passages. Books were Jeeter’s obsession. His jacket pockets always bulged with a tatty paperback or two. The hotel lobby, along with everything else at the Allen, was his private kingdom. Every week Jeeter collected one hundred and seventy dollars in rent from each of the hotel’s eighty tenants. A hundred and sixty was for the owner; the other ten was for Jeeter.

  In addition to the fee he charged the tenants, Jeeter had another enterprise at the Allen. The owners, the city’s premier slumlords, in exchange for his managerial services, had given him and his wife Chiclet a rent-free room on the second floor. Jeeter was using it and the rest of the hotel to sell a variety of drugs. He had some joints in his shirt pocket, one-papered reefers sprinkled with Peruvian coke flakes. Nobody in the building wanted them, so he’d smoked one for breakfast. The buzz had his head in a vise grip. Made his teeth ache from grinding them.