I looked at Beecher and lifted a shoulder. He went to the writing table, pulled the stopper out of a square bottle of ink, and tilted it over the sheets of closely written foolscap spread out on top.
“Stop!” said Quinn. “You make a convincing point.”
Beecher righted the bottle. A single drop had spotted the corner of one page.
“Letter home?” I asked.
Color stained Quinn’s sallow cheeks. “I’m composing a novel. I don’t intend to remain a secretary my entire life.”
I nodded at Beecher. He resealed the bottle and returned it to its brass stand.
Quinn said, “The man’s name is Flinders. Horatio Flinders. He was one of the first Forty-Niners to strike it rich, but he lost it all in the Panic.”
“Copperhead?”
“There are rumors about his activities during the war. I don’t think a case was ever made against him.”
“The Bella Union can’t come cheap. Whose money is he using?”
“I don’t know.”
I signaled to Beecher, who reached for the ink bottle.
“It’s the truth! He pays in cash and I enter it to the Sons of the Confederacy. He’s a foul-mouthed old tramp, filthy in his habits. One is hardly tempted to engage him in conversation.”
“Where does he live?”
“I doubt he has a home. He sleeps in doorways.”
“Not good enough.”
Quinn kneaded his hands. “He’s a slave to the pipe. He spends most of his time in an opium den on Sacramento Street. The White Peacock. It’s a tong place, run by a man they call Fat John. I don’t know any more than that.”
“Chinatown?”
“Yes. You’ll want to bring your man.”
“He isn’t my man,” I said, before Beecher could open his mouth. “Give him your belly gun. We’ll leave it outside.”
He dangled it by its fob. “It isn’t loaded. I’m not skilled with firearms.”
Beecher took it and broke it open. He nodded.
I said. “You must be the only unarmed man in Barbary.”
“There’s one other. Mr. Wheelock.”
Beecher returned the weapon. I stood and holstered the Deane-Adams. I asked Quinn where he was from.
“New Jersey. I came out here to apprentice in a law office. It burned down before I got here.”
“What made you hire on with Captain Dan?”
“I thought it might lead to public office. I’m too good at what I do, evidently. If I quit, he won’t write a reference, and he refuses to sack me.”
“I’m indispensable myself. I haven’t had a holiday since the last time I got shot.”
“I hate it here. I hope to sell the rights to my novel for enough money to set myself up back home. Horace Greeley was a charlatan.”
“What’s the book about?”
He colored again. “It’s a romance. It’s about a charmaid who falls in love with a mining magnate.”
“What are you calling it?”
“Nancy’s Knickers, or the Amorous Adventures of a Girl of the Serving Class.”
I looked at him.
“It’s a working title,” he said.
We left. Out on the landing, I grinned at Beecher. “The ink bottle was a good idea. There’s no quicker way to a secretary’s heart.”
“You be the renegade next time. If this gets back to Mr. Hill, he’ll have me throwing tramps off freight cars.” He started down.
17
The old-timers called them “Forty-Eighters.”
There weren’t many left to call them that, the first wave having either made its fortune and built marble mansions on Nob Hill or gone bust and drifted on, and those who were still stuck in shanty San Francisco were hard put to find anyone who would listen to what they had to say. Those who managed to attract an audience recalled aloud that the first three Chinese to land at California walked down the gangplank of a brig called the Eagle a scant five months after the first cry of gold rose at Sutter’s Fort, well before the true horde of bearded western prospectors took to the hills with their picks and pans in ’49.
What happened to those three adventurous celestials—two men and one woman—was unknown even to the old-timers, but officials counted ten thousand the next year, and by 1870, the census reported that the Chinese population of California had exceeded seventy thousand, with half that number settled in San Francisco. Dreams of wealth had forsaken them. They operated laundries—more than a thousand were going full steam during my visit—worked construction projects, performed domestic chores for well-to-do whites, made cigars, sewed in sweatshops, and peddled opium in an area three blocks wide and seven blocks long, known intermittently as Little China, Chinatown, and Chink’s Alley. They were governed by a merchants’ association called the Six Companies, which in return for paying their passage from the land of their ancestors claimed a percentage of their income from the jobs it obtained for them upon arrival. But a government was a poor thing without the means to enforce its rules of conduct; hence the tongs, about which more later.
In the beginning, the immigrants were herded into bungalows manufactured in China and assembled by the workers who had accompanied them. Tiny and crowded, they were by all accounts comfortable for the coolies who had known worse conditions back home; but they were gone, gone. Fire had devoured them, and the survivors and their descendants now lived in board-and-batten shacks, tumbledown lean-tos, and rat-infested cellars, the last entered by means of ladders and filled with poisonous smoke when flames raged, and plague when they didn’t. These billets were rented, not owned, by their inhabitants, most were anonymous, and those that had names did not advertise with even so much as a sign with crudely painted Chinese characters. There was no reason for that, with hundreds more Chinese looking for lodging than there were lodgings, and still more every day. Such names as they had were given them by wags and journalists, and were far more colorful than the dreary reality inside: Devil’s Kitchen, Ragpicker’s Alley, the Dog Kennel, the Palace Hotel.
The streets were narrow and twisting and made of the same soup of mud and excrement, animal and human, that visited raw boomtowns everywhere, but which in this case had not changed in thirty years. Planks were provided here and there for crossing, but Beecher and I had barely stepped over the invisible line that separated Chinatown from Barbary proper when we saw an ancient woman, indescribably wrinkled, hoist her skirts and wade across Dupont in the middle of the block, up to her knees in muck.
We made our way by moonlight and such illumination as spilled out through the cracks of shanties on either side; there were few windows and no gas lamps this side of Portsmouth Square. At corners, we took turns shinnying up posts and striking matches to read the signs. We got lost twice—several streets were unmarked, the posts fallen over or chopped down for kindling and never replaced—and we walked with pistols in hand. I’d felt more secure patrolling wide-open cowtowns on the wrong side of the deadline with a reward on my head, posted by the local association of Regulators.
In those places I was most vulnerable in the deserted sections. In Chinatown, the busy boardwalks in front of the laundries left me feeling open and unprotected. Even at that hour the better-lit streets were alive with pedestrians, male mostly, hurrying along in their plain tunics and pillbox hats, carrying baskets of sodden clothing or firewood and elaborately paying no attention to the only two Occidentals in sight. I’d put in my time among Indians and Mexicans and immigrant settlers and had sacrificed most of my ingrained opinions of people who didn’t look like me or speak my language, but in that alien country buttoned into the middle of a sprawling American city, I was grateful for the extra pair of eyes I’d brought along. How Beecher felt, I couldn’t tell, but he made no attempt at conversation and his face was so taut the scar stood out as if it were fresh.
As anticipated, the White Peacock was not as grand as its name. Like the crowded rooming houses that bordered it, it bore no sign, and like them, it didn’t need to; its sm
ell was apparent before the building came into sight. Opium had had its fashion in mining camps and ends-of-track I’d visited, and I recognized the odor, not unpleasant, of pills softening in the flame and of the prepared substance converting to smoke. It was like baked poppy seeds.
Beecher sniffed. “Don’t need directions from here.”
“You know the smell?”
“From the other side. It was the only place in Spokane where I dreamed about anything but little Lucy. I didn’t take the habit, though. It felt bad, not feeling bad. You ever chase the dragon?”
“Once. I threw up.”
The building itself might have been another rooming house except for the smell and a number of soporific Chinese sprawled inside the sheltered entrance, oblivious to the two Westerners who stepped over them to knock on the door. It had no windows, and the flat roof, which smelled of fresh tar, was low enough for a man to reach up and grasp the edge without straining.
I had the advantage of the Chinese who opened the door. He didn’t know me, but I recognized him.
He looked from white face to black and back to white and made no sign of either familiarity or surprise.
“Chinee papah, mistuh man?” I said.
His expression went even flatter. He knew me then. He started to close the door, but I leaned my shoulder against it. I showed him the star.
“Horatio Flinders,” I said. “He’s a regular customer. Five minutes.”
He shook his head. “No unnerstan.”
I grinned. “‘Stubble your red rag, Jack Sprat!’”
He considered this direct quote. Then he smiled, and I wished he’d go back to deadpan. His teeth were a uniform shade of amber and filed to razor points. He flung the door wide.
We entered a low room, smelling of fust and the odor already described, lit only by the small flame in an incense burner in the center of the floor. It was as dark as a cellar. As I stood waiting for my eyes to adjust, my right hand began to ache, and I realized I was squeezing the butt of my pistol in its holster hard enough to crack the gutta-percha grips. I relaxed my grasp, but only to restore circulation. I’d spent time in black alleys that felt more friendly.
The Chinese closed the door. The current of stirred air made the flame wobble and nearly go out. My hand began aching again. I was as afraid of the dark as any small boy.
Clothing rustled nearby. A moment later, sudden as lightning, a T-square of yellow light cracked the blackness at the opposite end of the room. A shadow fluttered inside it, then the light vanished. A door had opened, then closed, swallowing the Chinese and leaving us in greater darkness than we’d known.
“I’d rather be dragging a drunk through a day-coach than here,” Beecher said.
In a little while I realized we weren’t alone in the room. Customers lay like piles of clothes on wide upholstered benches—divans, they were called, lending the name to the dens they furnished, which then was shortened to dives by addicts whose tongues were too thickened by smoke to manage two syllables—and an old Chinese with a corn-silk beard and owlish turtle-shell spectacles sat cross-legged on a cushion on the floor, turning a bead of opium on the end of a long needle over the incense flame. Pipes, made of cheap bamboo, ornate jade, and everything that came between, lay about on the floor and on the divans where they’d slid from the smokers’ hands. No one appeared to be paying us any attention, although I was sure the old Chinese was aware of us and every movement we made. He looked the part of a tong leader and I wondered if he was the proprietor Quinn had told us about.
The door opened again, and this time it didn’t shut. The young Chinese stood in the opening. “F’an Chu’an say he see you.”
I asked who F’an Chu’an might be. He showed his pointed teeth.
“Some white men call him Fat John.”
“Horatio Flinders is the man we came to see. Does F’an Chu’an sound like Horatio Flinders?”
“He see you.”
I looked at Beecher, who shrugged. We followed the man through the door.
It opened onto a flight of steep narrow steps leading into a shallow cellar, lighted by a paper lantern on a hook screwed into the sloping plank ceiling. The steps were blackened at the edges from an old fire and the stairwell smelled of char.
The cellar was indistinguishable from the ground floor, except for the absence of the old Chinese. In his place, a man half his age sat at an identical incense burner, stirring a thick brown syrup in a tiny crock with a needle. This was the raw opium, from which a dollop would be extracted and allowed to crystallize into a bead suitable for burning. More customers sprawled on divans and pallets, smoking, dreaming, and waiting for their next pipe. The atmosphere was thicker here, where decades of smoke had had nowhere to go but deep into the earthen walls and floor joists inches above our heads. A man had only to lick any surface to enter the astral plane.
We passed through another door and found ourselves in a room ten feet square, hung with faded tapestries. In them I recognized the same designs I’d seen on Daniel Webster Wheelock’s silk walls, only much, much older, embroidered by hands long since gone to earthly corruption. Oriental rugs, nearly as ancient, covered the floor three deep, obscuring the chamber’s subterranean nature; it could have been a tearoom in any of the Chinese hospitality houses in the larger Western cities. In the center stood a small square table draped in black velvet, behind which a young Chinese stood pouring what looked like very strong tea—if it wasn’t axle grease—into a tiny, handleless porcelain cup from a proportionately small pot. A gold-hilted sword in an ornate sheath studded with jewels, older than California, lay across the backs of a pair of ruby-colored china figures made to represent pug dogs, the table’s only decoration. More paper lanterns, perched in niches hewn into portions of wall not covered by tapestries, shed light adequate to what looked like a delicate and possibly ceremonial decanting operation. It was enough to dazzle those of us who had just come in from the cave outside.
Our escort bowed and said something in Chinese to the man behind the table, who responded with one syllable. The other man bowed again and turned to face us.
“F’an Chu’an asks his visitors to seat themselves.”
We hesitated. The man pouring tea was, if anything, younger than the man who had brought us, thirty at the oldest. Small and slender—“Fat John” was obviously as close as most Western tongues could come to pronouncing F’an Chu’an—he wore a yellow robe of plain silk, washed so many times I could make out the lean musculature of his arms and chest, and a black silk mandarin’s cap with a jade button on top. His queue was black and glossy, carefully plaited, and hung nearly to his waist. His upper lip was cleft, a deformity of birth rather than the result of an injury sustained later in life. It affected his speech, so far as I could determine, not knowing the language, and reminded me of the infernal smile of a cat.
Finally we selected a pair of painted wooden stools from a collection of them scattered about and drew them up to the table. The two Chinese remained standing. The man behind the table finished filling the cup and started on another. He said something in a low, pleasant voice that suggested he was accustomed to speaking aloud without interruption. His impediment failed to embarrass him.
“F’an Chu’an apologizes for his inexcusable ignorance of English and asks me to translate. My name is Lee Yung Hay. He invites you to sample his disappointing tea.”
I noticed that Lee Yung Hay had abandoned his pidgin dialect, which was not to be confused with his command of the local gutter slang. I said we’d be honored. I didn’t add that since he’d already started pouring I wasn’t in a position to decline. F’an Chu’an spoke again.
“You are the men called Mur Dok and Bee Chu’r. You waylaid the man called Tom Too Lip and gained an audience with Captain Dan Wee Lok. Both these things have impressed him.”
I said, “Tell him I admire his intelligence system, as well as his hospitality. Wheelock took away our weapons.”
The answer came almost before L
ee Yung Hay finished translating. In response, the subordinate raised his right hand as if in greeting. It was holding a short-handled hatchet. He moved again and it was gone. I suspected he wore some kind of belt rig under his smock.
“F’an Chu’an is aware of the white man’s reliance upon percussion weapons and that he would not presume to deprive you of their succor. He is grieved to add that I am capable of separating your hands from your wrists before you can cock your hammers.”
I smiled. “Mine’s a self-cocker.”
“Thank you. I should be honored to begin with you.”
F’an Chu’an finished filling a third cup and spoke.
“While you share his roof you are under the protection of the Suey Sing Tong. No harm shall come to you if you respect the customs of his house.”
“We appreciate that. If he’ll let us see Flinders, we’ll be on our way and he can drink his tea in peace.”
I heard Flinders’s name in the translation and in the answer.
“You honor him with your association. The man Flin Dur is a guest as well and entitled to his protection also.”
Beecher spoke up. “Fat John likes to hear himself talk, don’t he?”
Lee Yung Hay interpreted this before I could break in. Our host smiled his cat’s smile and set a cup in front of Beecher.
“F’an Chu’an apologizes for his disagreeable chatter. He is a man who enjoys conversation for its own sake.”
I said, “Tell him it’s a quality he shares with a number of Indian chiefs I’ve met. Good tea should be sipped slowly.” I lifted my cup; apparently an unfamiliar custom, since the toast was not returned.
Our host was encouraged, however, and for the next twenty minutes entertained us with a history of the tong, a society that did not exist in China, but had been organized to protect immigrants from American oppression, and incidentally to ensure that the Six Companies were not forgotten by the laborers they’d brought over come payday. He did not explain why seven separate tong affiliations were necessary, nor why they occasionally went to war with one another, and no mention was made of the fees the expatriates were forced to pay to protect themselves and their property from the tong.
Port Hazard Page 11