Port Hazard

by Loren D. Estleman

  F’an Chu’an was a fugitive himself, having been compelled to abandon the study of medicine in Hong Kong when his father was unmasked as one of the chief conspirators in the Taiping Rebellion. While in hiding, the young student grew a queue, then took ship disguised as a common coolie. He’d sweated in a laundry on Dupont Street for two years, at the end of which his education, native intelligence, and the combat lessons taught him by his rebel father had secured him a position with the Suey Sing Tong as a leader among the boo how doy, or fighting men. His cool head under fire spared his sect from humiliation in a pitched battle with the Kwong Dok Tong in 1875, when he was barely twenty, which ended in a bloody draw, and when the Suey Sing 1eader died several days later of injuries sustained in the fight, F’an Chu’an was elected to replace him. He’d spent the last eight years maintaining his position against challenges from below and without.

  Beecher and I sipped tea and listened to the young gang leader enumerate his accomplishments in modest tones, translated with sneering bombast by Lee Yung Hay, for whom all other victories, including Yorktown and Waterloo, paled to insignificance. He was as hard to take as the tea, which was strong enough to bounce a cartwheel dollar off the surface. I broke in while he was trumpeting the Suey Sings’ role in defending the Chinese population against bullying by Hoodlums, and the historic pact, supervised by Wheelock, that kept the Hoodlums in check in return for an agreement to confine the city’s opium traffic to Chinatown.

  “What can F’an Chu’an tell us of the Sons of the Confederacy?”

  The subordinate twisted his lip, but put the question to his superior.

  “Your civil war is of no interest to F’an Chu’an. China’s most recent rebellion claimed fourteen years and twenty million lives.”

  “That isn’t the question I asked.”

  “I did not finish. These fellows who cannot unshackle themselves from things gone are as jabbering women, to whom he turns an unhearing ear. As Confucious says, ‘Things that are done, it is needless to speak about. Things that are past, it is needless to blame.’”

  I’d had enough of Lee Yung Hay. “Does he feel that way about you peddling dope in Barbary?”

  The whites of Lee Yung Hay’s eyes showed. His upper lip curled back from his picket-shaped teeth, his arm jerked. Beecher and I both clawed at our revolvers, but the hatchet was out and sweeping in a horizontal circle toward me. Then something flashed and Lee Yung Hay’s head tipped off his shoulders. A gout of blood made a roostertail in the air and splattered a tapestry. His headless trunk was falling, but the arm swinging the hatchet continued its arc, driven purely by reflex and momentum. My gun hand was in the blade’s path. Something flashed again and the hatchet dropped to the floor, its handle still gripped in a hand that was no longer attached to its wrist.

  F’an Chu’an stood holding the gold-hilted sword in both hands, his inferior’s blood sliding down the vane and dripping off the point. He’d snaked it out of its jewel-studded sheath and swung it twice in less time than it takes to describe.

  “I hnought tho,” he said. His English was good for a man with a cleft lip.

  18

  It was a situation I’d been in before—three armed men facing off across a few tense feet of floor—but this one offered some unique features, including a grinning severed head bleeding into a valuable rug, a disconnected hand lying nearby, its fingers still tightly wrapped around the handle of a hatchet, and the body that belonged to the head and the hand sprawled between them on its back, one leg bending and straightening spasmodically as if it were trying to climb to its feet.

  Oh, and a young Chinese with a visionary expression on his face, gripping a three-hundred-year-old sword.

  I pictured the pensive look on Judge Blackthorne’s face when I reported what had happened, heard his likely response:

  Really, Deputy, the hand alone would have been sufficient. What is the nature of this obsession you have with melodrama?

  At the moment, though, I was concentrating on F’an Chu’an. China’s history—and what he had told Beecher and me of the tong—suggested that once one begins lopping off parts of the anatomy it’s difficult to stop. I wasn’t sure, once he resumed swinging, whether the two of us together could weight him down with enough lead to slow his hand before our heads joined Lee Yung Hay’s on the floor of the White Peacock. He looked like a crazed butcher with the blade standing straight out from his body and a spray of blood staining his yellow robe.

  The sound that brought him out of his trance might have been water dripping from the spout of a pump. The first gusher of blood that had struck the tapestry on the wall had saturated the venerable fabric, run down, and begun pattering off the bottom edge onto the floor.

  His shoulders relaxed. He let go with one hand and lowered the sword until its point rested on the rug at his feet. We let our pistols fall to our sides, but we didn’t put them away. He was still armed.

  F’an Chu’an’s vocabulary wasn’t as broad as the dead man’s and his pronunciation suffered because of his impediment, which may have explained why he kept his knowledge of English a secret from his followers. He groped for words, and a number of times we had to ask him to repeat a sentence we found unintelligible. He’d known for some time that a member of the Suey Sing Tong was selling opium outside Chinatown in violation of the agreement Wheelock had engineered between Barbary and the tongs, and had suspected that Lee Yung Hay was involved. All he’d lacked was proof, which the other man had provided by attacking me when I’d accused him. The sword was the only artifact he owned that had belonged to his father, who traced his ancestry back to a philosopher in the imperial court of Wan Li, and who had been arrested and executed by the current emperor for his part in the rebellion that had driven his son to emigrate to America; F’an Chu’an had smuggled in the sword inside a rolled rug containing the rest of his possessions, maintained the weapon in its original condition, and practiced daily the centuries-old warrior exercises for which it was intended. Lee Yung Hay’s was the first human blood it had spilled since its first owner used it to commit suicide in 1579.

  My responsibility as an officer of Blackthorne’s court was to arrest him, and give testimony at the inquest. Chances were no charges would be brought against him, acting as he had in the defense of a deputy federal marshal. It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to just to get back to where we stood at that moment, so I did nothing. I admit that my decision was affected by the facts that he was the leader of an armed gang whose number I could only guess at, and that most of Chinatown and all of Barbary lay between us and the city jail. I watched him wipe the blade on the table’s velvet cloth and put it back in its sheath and returned the Deane-Adams to leather. Beecher put away the Le Mat. His scar had lost some of its contrast, but he was the same man who had handed me a telegram across a fresh corpse on the train to Garrison. I imagine I was pale, too.

  Our host bowed and apologized for the poor manners of the devil’s son who now lay in pieces at our feet. He said he was in my debt for helping him to prevent another opium war. Then he excused himself, pulled aside a tapestry that masked an opening into another chamber behind the tearoom, and let it fall behind him. We were alone with what remained of Lee Yung Hay.

  Beecher said. “Should we go?”

  “Not without what we came for.”

  “What kind of place is this?”

  “I don’t know. Hell maybe.”

  The Chinese came back in wearing a different robe, this one faded green and if anything worn thinner than the one he’d had on before. Whatever the tongs spent their tribute money on, it wasn’t their wardrobe.

  We followed him into the cellar room where opium was prepared and consumed. He bent and whispered something to the man seated at the incense burner, who looked around through the gloom and shook his head. F’an Chu’an whispered again. The man was still for a moment; then he nodded. He got up and let himself into the room we’d just left. That made him the cleaning crew.

  F�
��an Chu’an said Horatio Flinders was not in the cellar. He started toward the stairs. As he ascended, the hem of his robe made a serpentine hiss sliding off the heels of his slippers, which were made of fine paper with gilded dragons on the toes. Once again we fell in behind him.

  The old man upstairs rose as his employer approached. He was tall for a Chinese, with the high brow and rounded shoulders of a scholar; the image of the Oriental ascetic that advertisers used to sell tarot cards and books of conjuring tricks. One of the eyes behind the huge, round spectacles was glistening white. He was half blind. When F’an Chu’an whispered, the old man bowed deeply from the waist and shuffled from divan to divan, bending over each one and examining the face of the man who lay upon it. Most of the faces were Chinese, but I thought I recognized one of the sailors I’d seen sprawled on Nan Feeny’s front porch the day we’d arrived at the Slop Chest. High tide hadn’t taken him very far.

  I was thinking this when the old man returned. He bowed again and pointed to a divan in a corner that was almost enveloped in shadow.

  Our host led the way. He stood aside as I bent over the man spreadeagled on his stomach. He stank of raw whiskey, rotten teeth, unwashed flesh, urine, and excrement. The overcoat he had on was rent up the back, darned all over with thread as old and brittle as self-respect, and filthy beyond description. It was of that color, neither brown nor green, common to the clothing given out at missions.

  Horatio Flinders, one of the millionaires of ’49.

  I put a hand on his shoulder and shook him. His mouth dropped open with a wet smacking sound, informing me immediately of the decay that was going on inside, but apart from that, he didn’t stir. I braved lice, grabbed a fistful of his dirty gray hair, and lifted his head. A thread of drool spilled out one corner of his mouth and made a glistening mercury pool on the divan.

  “Slap him,” Beecher said.

  I slapped his cheek with my free hand. I didn’t like the way his skin felt. Chances were I wouldn’t have anyway.

  I called for a match.

  Beecher found one, struck a flame off the seat of his pants, and held it out. I took it and passed it back and forth in front of Flinders’s eyes. I shook it out and lowered his head to the divan.

  “Dead.”

  Beecher said. “One pipe too many.”

  F’an Chu’an grunted assent.

  I set my jaw and made an examination. The body felt cool. A man could be dead a long time in a place like the White Peacock before anyone came to check on him. My hand touched something wet on his rib cage that was as familiar as it was unpleasant. I drew out my palm.

  This time Beecher didn’t wait to be asked. He struck a match and held it close.

  “That’s two in one night,” he said. “I don’t reckon the odds are high against it here.”

  I wanted to agree with him, even if it made my job harder. There is something inevitable and comforting about unthinking evil. It’s like a natural disaster no one can do anything about. But the words stuck in my throat.

  “Pinholster was right: Never bet against the house.” I wiped the blood off on Flinders’s coat.

  19

  Horatio Octavius Flinders, it turned out, was one of San Francisco’s most beloved characters; the Call said so in as many words in a black-bordered editorial lamenting his loss. I saw no reason to question the statement. Newspapers are infallible in matters related to the community.

  Comparisons were made between the “vagabond forty-niner” and the Emperor Norton, an addle-brained tramp who’d strutted the streets of the city for twenty years, claiming to be the ruler of America and dining on the cuff in local restaurants, until he left this world in 1880. That Flinders had slept in doorways, panhandled for opium money, and only forgot the hunger that was eating him from inside when he was dreaming black dreams didn’t make it into the editorial, possibly because it would have confused the analogy. When his claim was paying off, he’d tipped waiters twenty dollars, thrown champagne parties at the Astor House that lasted three days, and sailed back and forth across the bay aboard his custom-built steam-powered yacht; that was the H. O. Flinders the Call mourned. He sold more papers than the emaciated, vermin-infested wretch the coroner’s men dragged out of the White Peacock, or the bitter rabble-rouser who advocated armed insurrection against the United States government the day Lincoln was inaugurated. Death and baptism will work miracles upon the soiled soul.

  An inquest convened two days later found that the deceased had been stabbed through the heart by a person or persons unknown, armed with a blade that penetrated eight inches. I was in the gallery in the county courthouse, and I thought immediately of F’an Chu’an’s ancient ceremonial sword. I also remembered the sword-cane carried by the Hoodlum who’d accosted Beecher and me on the train platform the day we arrived, and of the assorted knives we’d taken off Tom Tulip: Break one, confiscate the rest, it didn’t matter. Replacements were everywhere. Everything that moved in Barbary and Chinatown could skewer or shoot or bludgeon at the drop of a handkerchief. Any experienced investigator would begin by eliminating those citizens who didn’t arm themselves first thing after rising.

  That was my opinion, in any case, but I wasn’t asked. For some reason, the coroner’s court judge didn’t call me to the stand, even though I was the one who’d discovered the corpse and was the senior officer on the scene.

  The reason sat in the front row of the gallery, wearing the dress uniform, navy festooned with gold braid, of a captain in the San Francisco Fire Department.

  Wheelock had entered shortly before the court came to order, leaning on his carved ivory stick and swinging his club foot in its specially built-up shoe in a practiced circle that nearly disguised his limp. He’d taken a seat directly in the judge’s line of sight and remained silent and motionless throughout, hands folded on top of the stick, while the party in gray dundrearies behind the bench shot him frequent glances during the coroner’s testimony. No other witnesses were summoned. From gavel to gavel the proceedings took twenty minutes out of the county’s time.

  There was no uproar. Half the seats were vacant, and most of those that weren’t contained curious spectators drawn there by the editorial in the Call. That publication attended in the person of a scarecrow in frayed cuffs with an angry boil on the back of his neck, scribbling ferociously on folded sheets of newsprint with a stump of yellow pencil. Captain Dan put on his visored cap and limped out immediately upon adjournment. I tried to catch up with him, but got snared in a crowd in the hallway that was waiting to get into a more popular proceeding in criminal court. I apologized to a small, elderly gent in white handlebars for bumping into him; when he reached up to tip his bowler and tell me it was quite all right, I saw that he was handcuffed to an officer in uniform, who glowered and told me to move on. Afterward, I realized the polite little man was Charles E. Bolton, awaiting arraignment on a series of stagecoach robberies he’d committed single-handed under the name Black Bart. That made two prominent figures I’d almost knocked over during my visit to the City of the Golden Gate.

  Wheelock had buttoned down the investigation into Flinders’s murder, and for the time being, there was no approaching him about it. The pug who kept the peace at the Bella Union barred me from the stairwell to Captain Dan’s quarters, and although Beecher suggested we try manhandling another Hoodlum, I was dead certain Wheelock wouldn’t rise to that bait a second time. Truth to tell, I wasn’t all that determined to question him. It was clear to me the old forty-niner had been killed to seal the identity of whoever was paying the rent on the use of the Bella Union theater for the Sons of the Confederacy to meet, and the honorable gentleman had tipped that secret by showing up at the courthouse and directing the inquest from his seat in the gallery.

  “Ain’t that all you need?” Beecher asked.

  “Judge Blackthorne will want more.”

  “What do we do to get it?”

  “We’re doing it.”

  He grunted and drank his beer. We’d h
ad this conversation before.

  “This time the wait should be more entertaining.” I folded the edition of the Call I’d had spread out on the ruined bar and showed him the cartoon on page three.

  It was an old-fashioned rendering of leering Death, looming in his black robes like a dark cloud over ramshackle Barbary with his scythe raised in both skeletal fists high above his head. At the bottom of the panel lay a jumble of skulls, human rib cages, and other assorted bones, superscribed by numbers representing the murder toll to date, the numerals dripping black ink like the blood pattering off the tapestry in F’an Chu’an’s tearoom. The artwork was realistic enough to rear nightmares in a generation of children.

  “Looks like a tencent shocker,” Beecher said. “There anything there folks don’t know already?”

  “Knowing isn’t seeing.” I read him the editorial that covered two columns beside the cartoon. It was headed THE CARNIVAL OF CRIME.

  The Barbary Coast! That mysterious region so much talked of, so seldom visited! Of which so much is heard, but little seen! That sink of moral pollution, whose reefs are strewn with human wrecks, and into whose vortex is constantly drifting barks of moral life, while swiftly down the whirlpool of death go the sinking hulks of the murdered and the suicide! The Barbary Coast! The home of vice and harbor of destruction! The coast on which no gentle breezes blow, but where rages one wild sirocco of sin! In the daytime it is dull and unattractive, seeming but a cesspool of rottenness, the air impregnated with smells more pungent than polite; but when night lets fall its dusky curtain, the Coast brightens into life, and becomes the wild carnival of crime that has lain in lethargy during the sunny hours of the day, and now bursts forth with energy renewed by its siesta.

  “Sounds like a tencent shocker. You reckon the places around here paid for the advertisement?”

  “There’s more.”

  The article went on to rehash the details of Horatio Flinders’s untimely expiration—“the wreckage of the once-gallant Forty-Niner, pulled from the stinking heap of lost souls in the worst dungeon in Little China” and of the court action that had disposed of the tragedy in less time than required for the mayor to take tea with the governor, and called for “no less than the intervention of the U.S. Army, or, failing that, determined action by decent San Franciscans to eradicate this blight for once and all.”