Tenderloin Panchatantra

Waraj Sind

The Tale of the Fox

Thursday, March 19th, 2020, at 11:50pm

Rain falls from a cold black sky, turning the streets and sidewalks outside into a impressionistic panorama of glittering facades and faceless pedestrians. From within the comfortable confines of the car, the world outside is rendered down to little more than a distant slideshow as the Bentley Mulsanne slides through the narrow streets of the Tenderloin. Warm air and cool jazz circulate through the Mulsanne's cabin lulling Waraj Sind into a comfortable lassitude. The Tenderloin had been his home for over seventy years, and in the flashing strobe of oncoming headlights his mind drifted back to those first early nights after his unnoticed arrival like so many other post-world war refuges seeking to escape their pasts and reinvent themselves on this distant shore.

Long before his arrival the Tenderloin had been a Mecca for nightlife and sin, home to some of the city's best brothels. The 1906 Earthquake and Fire had erased all that and like a phoenix risen from the ashes the Tenderloin was immediately rebuilt, populated by apartment buildings and hotels. But it was Prohibition that made the Tenderloin notorious with boxing gyms, gambling, billiard halls, speakeasies and all the varieties of nightlife. And the hard-boiled detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett and his most famous character Sam Spade from the Maltese Falcon made the area more famous still and ushered in a new kind of fiction.

All of that had been before his arrival in 1945. The city had been crowded cheek by jowl with returning servicemen who sought out the Tenderloin for its many entertainments and found comfort in the vices of prostitution and drug use that had been driven out of the Barbary Coast by the Red Light Abatement Act. After the war, musicians flocked to bars and clubs, burlesque houses and theaters of the Tenderloin and a new wave of jazz was born. Shortly thereafter the region became home to the Musician's Union and San Francisco's most famous jazz club, the Black Hawk where Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, and other jazz greats recorded live albums for Fantasy Records in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

It had been into this decadent hive of culture and vice that Waraj Sind had settled himself. The Ventrue prince of the city, Vannevar Thomas had grudgingly accepted the presentation of a sufficiently foreign Ravnos neonate given that the city was choked to overflowing with mortals from around the Pacific Rim, game was plentiful. And Waraj had made himself scarce, rarely appearing in Elysium or other districts, instead concentrating all his efforts within the Tenderloin. Slowly, over years and then decades, he insinuated himself into every form of vice imaginable until his power within the Tenderloin was essentially unquestionable.

Hunting was quite easy in those long ago nights where his victims were often seen leaving town or who left convincing suicide letters for bereaved loved-ones. His first followers had come from the ranks of the disaffected, disenfranchised and of course criminals. Over time he learned greater patience and thus his servants lived longer and he came to understand he needed not only money and followers, but information. The 1960s and 70s saw an economic downturn and people slowly moved away from the Tenderloin until there were many vacancies in the district's single room tenement houses that supplied so many of Waraj's early victims. But the decades of police action and unrest also brought large numbers of refugees from Southeast Asia: Vietnamese, ethnic Chinese, Khmer from Cambodia and Hmong from Laos who recognized him from the legends of their homelands as a shape-shifting demon whose presence could be felt more than seen.

The end of the Vietnam War brought two other things to the Tenderloin, heroin and hunters. Heroin a derivative of Opium, Waraj knew well and from its distribution he grew wealthy, but the hunters from the East were another matter and perhaps he had been a trifle too arrogant in his dealings with them. In the end, the Asian hunters who called themselves Shih had died to his tricks and traps, but they had in turn grievously wounded him. And so he had slunk back to his resting place and gone into the sleep the Kindred call torpor. When next he awoke a decade had past and the Tenderloin had shrunk, a victim of capricious zoning, but it had also grown more crowded with tenements that held entire villages of eastern folk. The Asian peoples were significantly more industrious than the previous inhabitants and once again Waraj carefully insinuated tentacles of influence into every vice and trade.

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