Crooked Hearts

by Patricia Gaffney

  He got her about three steps down the new hall before she skidded to a stop and dug her heels in, refusing to be moved. “Nah, nah, nah!” she started up again, in a high-pitched whine.

  Reuben hunkered down to bring his face to her level. “Kai Yee,” he whispered menacingly. The two words reduced her to shuddering, terrified silence. “Where is he? Take me to him. Take me to Kai Yee.” She rolled her eyes and shook her head, and kept shaking it until, in desperation, he brought the derringer back out and waved it at her. The poor girl’s teeth were chattering; her hand trembled like a palsied old woman’s, but she got it up and out, and pointed vaguely down the carpeted hall and to the right. “Where? Show me,” he demanded. But she was just too scared. Giving her a frustrated pat on the shoulder, he left her standing there, frozen to the spot and—he hoped—too frightened to scream. At least for a minute or two.

  Unlike the hallway in the whorehouse next door, all the doors here were open, and they were all dark. He hoped that meant they were all empty. Toy Gun had pointed to the right. Thirty feet away he could see a staircase; just beyond it, light spilled out of a doorway onto the thick Persian carpet. Crouching, booted footsteps muffled by the rug, Reuben moved toward the light.

  Voices from the second floor drifted up the stairs on the odor of incense. He didn’t pause, didn’t even glance down as he passed. Flattening his back against the wall, he listened intently, but could hear no sound coming from the lighted room. He checked the pint-size derringer in his palm, and hoped he wouldn’t shoot a finger off if he had to use it. One deep breath. Using his right foot for a pivot, he spun into the doorway.

  A woman screamed. Not Grace—Grace was spread out buck naked on a huge canopied bed, propped up on her elbows and smiling at him. The other one—the one who’d shuffled in and out with tea yesterday—she was the screamer. She shut her mouth when she saw the gun, and when Reuben moved toward her, she moved back.

  “Hi,” said Grace.

  “Gus, damn it, get up and get your clothes on!”

  “Okay.” She slid her legs over the side of the bed, but when she tried to stand up, her knees buckled and she sank very slowly, very gracefully, to the floor. “Uh-oh,” she said worriedly, blinking down at her lap, her bent knees, her splayed fingers on the rug, as if she couldn’t figure out how she’d gotten there.

  Jesus Christ God Almighty. She was drunk.

  When he moved toward her, swearing viciously, the little maid ran behind him and bolted out the door. He let her go, concentrating on Grace. “Where’d you put your clothes?” he said roughly, pocketing the gun and kneeling beside her. Her head lolled back, a heavy flower on a too-thin stalk, and banged the bed frame. She didn’t even notice. He took her by the shoulders and gave her a shake. “Come on, Gus, where’s your dress? What’d you do with your shoes?” There wasn’t a stitch of clothing in the orange, opulent, overdone room that he could see, except for a yellow dressing gown that the servant girl had dropped on the floor before she ran.

  He got his hands under Grace’s arms and hauled her up so that her behind was perched on the edge of the bed. When he let go she lunged for him, winding her arms around his neck. “Oh, Reuben,” she sighed, trying to kiss him. “I’m so glad you came.” He dodged her mouth, and she settled for his cheek, planting a noisy smacker on him while she pushed her breasts against his chest.

  “That’s good, honey.” He dragged her arms away and looked her in the eye. “Stay right here and don’t move, Grace. Don’t move a muscle. Got it?”

  “Got it.” She sent him a lopsided grin and tried to salute—and smacked herself in the forehead.

  “Unbelievable,” he muttered, propping her up again, then turning away to scoop up the yellow kimono. He had it in his fingers when he heard the first shout, a high, blood-curdling war whoop that made his hair stand on end. He froze for a second, staring at the open doorway. Footsteps pounding up the stairs jolted him into motion. He vaulted to the door, slammed it, fumbled for the key and got it turned in the lock. Two seconds later, somebody’s shoulder slammed against the other side, jarring the door, the wall, the whole damn room.

  Grace was on her feet, swaying, her pretty yellow-corkscrew hair standing out like crooked sun rays. “Fire escape,” she said clearly, and pointed to a closed curtain on the wall behind her.

  He wasted precious seconds getting her uncoordinated arms into the sleeves of the silk dressing gown. A mighty crash made them both jump, then gasp when they saw an ax blade smash out a large chunk of the door. Reuben wrestled the curtain aside and wrenched the high window open. “Come on, come on,” he urged, supporting Grace around the waist, trying to get her to straighten her legs so he could shoot her out the window feet-first. Blows to the door were coming fast and steady, but he didn’t look back to check the hatchet’s progress. Grace said “Oof” when he ducked and caught her in the stomach with his shoulder, hoisting her off her feet. Somehow he got her and himself out the window and onto the landing of the wet, slippery, swaying, rickety fire escape.

  The ladder to the second floor dropped straight down—no angle, no safety railing. “Hold on to my belt,” he ordered, and Grace started fumbling at his crotch. “Higher, Gus. Belt.” She finally found it under his coat, and wrapped her hands around it tightly. He had to keep his left arm braced across the backs of her thighs or she’d slide off, which left him with only one hand to grab the ladder. “Don’t let go,” he advised. “Ready?” She mumbled something nasal and upside-down-sounding, and Reuben stepped out into thin air.

  The trick was holding onto the ladder without banging Grace’s dangling butt against every rung. He succeeded most of the time, and when he didn’t, she informed him of it by yelping. By the time they reached the second-floor landing, his right arm was shaking from the strain of holding their combined weight upright. He’d have set her on her feet if he’d thought she could climb down the last half-length of ladder on her own power; but she was hanging over his shoulder with all the tension and muscularity of a bag of wet cement, and he knew there wasn’t a chance. Ignoring the increasingly alarming noises coming from above, he hefted her higher on his shoulder and began the second descent.

  With both boots on the last rung, he was still ten feet above the ground. The hard ground. Various strategies for reaching the pavement without dying flitted through his mind. They narrowed to a single basic one when the metal rungs under his hands and feet vibrated violently, and outraged shouts rang out directly overhead. A gun fired. He flexed his knees, bending to grab the third-to-last rung. “Hold on,” he warned, and let his feet slide out from under him. For two seconds they hung above the misty alley—all the time Reuben needed to realize how unthinkable it would be to actually drop—drop—to the lethal cement below. Another shot sounded. His right arm was burning out of the socket. He let go.

  When his feet hit, he fell forward so Grace wouldn’t land on her face, with the result that he landed on his. His arms cushioned her fall, but she still got a pretty good whack on the bum. He rolled off her and scrambled to his knees, fumbling the derringer out of his pocket. Aiming straight up, he fired once. The gun made more of a pop than a bang, but there was a satisfying screech from overhead, followed by panicky scrambling noises.

  In the seconds-long interlude of safety, he got Grace up on her feet and one of her arms around his shoulders. “I can walk,” she assured him in a breathless pant. He gave her a test, moving east toward Kearny Street, and found out that what she could do was shuffle. A bullet smacked into the brick wall beside them, striking sparks. Reuben fired back with his last shot, then threw the gun away. Snatching Grace up in his arms, he ran.

  The fog was their best friend; before they got halfway to the corner, the fire escape was invisible. He turned left at the corner and kept close to the walls of the featureless shops and houses, pausing every few seconds to listen for sounds of pursuit. It was impossible to tell whether the dark breaks between buildings were streets or alleys or dead-end crannies in the cease
less, convoluted labyrinth of Chinatown. After a few minutes he wasn’t even sure they were still on Kearny Street, and they might’ve been heading east instead of north for all he knew—or west, or south. In the rank crevice of some foul-smelling edifice, he stopped to rest, setting Grace on her feet and pulling her back from the street. She said, “Reuben, I’m—”

  He heard a noise and covered her mouth with his hand, pressing harder when she started to sputter. “Shh,” he commanded, maneuvering in front of her to block her canary-yellow robe from the street. He didn’t turn to look, but he heard someone pass behind his back, swift and secretive on soft-soled shoes.

  Grace shivered, and he felt like shuddering in sympathy, unnerved by the eerie stealthiness of their silent follower. Neither of them moved for a full minute. He noticed that her body in his arms felt firmer, more elastic, less like a sack of jelly. She must be sobering up. He whispered in her ear, “Think you can walk now, Gus?” and she nodded. They separated, and clasped hands. There was nothing to hear on the foggy street, but he knew better than to trust the silence. “Let’s go,” he said, and led her back out into the night.

  Home was north and east of Chinatown, but that was no help since they could easily be moving in circles. The fog horns bleating from the Bay were the only guide, and they were deceptive, echoing and reechoing off the cobbled streets, sounding from everywhere and nowhere. It was impossible to read a street sign in the fog unless it happened to be directly under a street lamp, and standing under street lamps was a dangerous enterprise tonight. Occasionally a walker passed by on a narrow sidewalk, or startled them at the mouth of some sinuous alley; they would freeze, and brace for the worst—and the mist-swaddled figure would walk on, harmless. But Wing’s men must be everywhere by now, and their luck couldn’t hold much longer.

  It ran out in a short, stinking, inky-black alley they stumbled into by accident. Reuben was carrying Grace again because of .the broken glass littering the dirty pavement. With no warning, fast footsteps sounded dead ahead, coming straight toward them, so quickly that all he had time to do was drop her on her feet and fall into a boxer’s crouch. The figure of a man loomed out of the dark mist and halted in front of him. His eager, youthful face looked familiar. The new recruit—the one who’d crawled under Wing’s chair to be reborn.

  Whatever revolting, sharp-edged weapon he favored was still in his pocket or tucked in his belt—so it was now or never. A peaceable man, Reuben knew only one sucker punch. He uttered an aggressive shout and came at his opponent fast, arms stretched out wide, making himself look so undefended that the only evasive action the recruit took was to grab him around the torso and squeeze. But he wasn’t as dumb as he looked—he kept his thighs locked and his hips cocked back, so it was impossible to jerk a knee up into his groin. Reuben had already huffed all his breath out to simulate defeat; now he wished he’d saved some for his second, and last, trick. His arms were still unpinned. Bringing his hands up and out, he clapped them as hard as he could on either side of the recruit’s head—flathanded, so as not to break his eardrums.

  “Eeeyow!”

  It worked. The hatchet man dropped to his knees and doubled up in pain, clutching his ringing ears.

  Reuben lacked the stomach to disable him further, although he’d seen plenty of bar fights in which the fun was just beginning at this point. “Grace?” he called softly, and she limped toward him out of the darkness. She looked stunned, as if he’d poleaxed her instead of the bad guy. “Let’s get out of here,” he suggested. She reached for him. He picked her up and started running.

  The fog wasn’t their friend anymore. It concealed the way out, and it concealed the enemy. Finally a street sign in English gave him hope. He recognized the name; it was a scabby, sordid, sin-ridden defile on the western edge of the Barbary Coast—the eastern edge of Chinatown. As vice and violence went, this neighborhood was even worse than Chinatown, but at least the whores here were white, so a barefooted blonde in a yellow bathrobe wouldn’t stand out quite as much. He hoped.

  Grace was flagging, though. She hadn’t spoken for ages, despite his constant, soft-voiced encouragement. They were resting in the dark beside a squat, sweating building, on the edge of a weak splash of light coming from a half-window in the building’s front door. The painted sign over it was too vague to read from here. He left Grace by the wall, stepped into the light long enough to read the sign, and dove back into the shadows.

  “We’re in luck,” he exulted. “It’s a hotel—the Bunyon Arms, no less. A flophouse, from the looks of it; they probably rent all the rooms by the hour. What do you think, Gus? Should we go in? We could—”

  “Yes,” she said instantly, a reflexive gulp of an answer that worried him.

  “Okay.” He touched her cheek, which was cold and wet. “How do you feel? Are you sick?”

  Her eyes were black, all pupil, and as big as saucers. She shook her head, nodded, and shook her head again.

  “Well, that’s clear.” He smiled, giving her a quick kiss to buck her up. It just made her groan, though, and his concern increased. Checking again to make sure no one was nearby, he guided her toward the entrance. “Don’t say anything,” he warned in a whisper. “Just stand there, honey, and let me do the talking.”

  But registering at the Bunyon Arms wasn’t the least bit tricky. The white-haired desk clerk was half asleep; Grace in a silk kimono and nothing else didn’t so much as raise one of his eyebrows. “Two bits.” He yawned, reaching behind him for a key from a board covered with hooks.

  “We want the cleanest room in the house. Clean sheets, and a bathroom that connects.”

  His hand veered away to a different key. “Four bits, and there ain’t no connecting bath. Have to go down the hall.”

  Reuben grunted. “We need a bottle, too.”

  “I ain’t no liquor salesman.”

  Reuben laid a dollar on top of the desk.

  The clerk reached under the counter and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. “Folks have a nice night.” By the time they got to the stairs, he was snoring again in his chair.

  12

  True passion is a consuming flame, and either it must find fruition or it will burn the human heart to dust and ashes.

  —William Winter

  THE BATHROOM WAS IN the middle of the hall on the way to their second-floor room. Reuben stood guard at the door while Grace made a lot of splashing sounds inside. They went on for so long he finally tapped at the door and called, “Say, Gus, you didn’t go for a swim, did you?”

  Abruptly the door opened. “Sorry,” she said in a strained voice, not smiling.

  “That’s okay.” She looked scrubbed and fresh, and the floor in front of the enameled iron lavatory was wet; he guessed she’d been taking a stand-up bath. He took her hand to lead her down the hall to No. 8, wondering at her mood. She looked tense and brittle, as if she was holding something dangerous in check. As soon as they were inside the room, she left him and went straight to the window.

  There was a scorched oil lamp and a box of matches on a bureau in the far corner. He set the whiskey bottle down and lit the lamp, then surveyed the room in its dim, flickering light. “Lovely,” he pronounced, for the sake of something to say. It was small and ugly, with a low ceiling and no rug on the unswept floor. The only furniture besides the bureau were a washstand and a bed. The mottled walls might’ve been blue once, but now they were the color of the fog outside, only dirtier. The door had a foot-shaped chunk of wood missing below the knob, and somebody had filled in the hole with piaster. The lock worked, though. And the sheets covering the thick, lumpy mattress on the iron bedstead looked clean, at least from here. All in all, he thought, things could be worse.

  Grace still had her back to him. She was holding the broken paper shade away from the window so she could stare out at the shifting mist. The fog had turned her curly hair into an enormous halo. He stared at her thin, fragile shoulders and her pretty back. She’d belted the yellow robe tight around her wa
ist, which emphasized the sexy, womanly flare of her hips. Her blue-veined white feet under the hem looked cold, and unbelievably naked. He remembered how she’d looked tonight, languid and nude in Wing’s bed, and wondered how much longer he was supposed to go on like this.

  “Can you see anything?” he asked.

  “Fog.”

  “We’ll stay here for a couple of hours, then find a way to get home. Wing’s men can’t stay out all night looking for us.” He hoped.

  She didn’t move or speak; he wondered if she’d even heard him. After a while she dropped the shade and hugged herself, rubbing her arms hard under the wide kimono sleeves.

  He said, “Grace?” She didn’t turn. “What was it all about?” She didn’t answer. He went closer. A shadow crossed his mind—an awful thought. “Did he hurt you? Grace, did he touch you?” Despite what he’d seen, for some crazy reason he’d made an assumption that nothing had happened yet between her and Wing. Now he feared the worst.

  She still wouldn’t talk. He reached out for her. “Honey, did he—”

  She spun around at his touch. The look on her face startled him. “Reuben,” she said indistinctly, and began to rub his arms the way she’d been rubbing hers.

  “Are you okay? How do you feel?”

  “I’m on fire,” she whispered. She threw her head back and moaned—a long, tortured sound that shocked him. He took her in his arms and started to say something comforting. She pushed against him with her whole body, her hands clutching at his coat. “I’m on fire,” she repeated, desperate, mashing her pelvis against his thigh.

  He blinked at himself in the watery mirror over the washstand. “Well, now.”

  “Touch me,” she pleaded. “No, don’t. Oh, God.” She buried her face in his shirt. “He gave me something.”

  “He—what?”

  “You like me, don’t you? You always—nnnh.” She gritted her teeth and ground her forehead against his breastbone. “Reuben, I’m burning up. If you don’t touch me, I’m going to burst out of my skin.”