“It’s a sound bet,” I said. “I wouldn’t take it up.”
“You’d be wise not to. However, I’m persuaded to do so, by a piece of intelligence that recently came my way from the direction of Captain Dan’s own firehouse.”
He’d dealt me two cards, one up, one down. I left them.
“Since you’re not a blind better, I’ll assume the game is finished.” He gathered it in, shuffled the deck, and placed it on his side of the table. “The alarm was delayed going into the firehouse. That was what was reported in the Call, and the veracity of a free press is above question. In any case, by the time the brigade reached the scene, the building was engulfed, and there was no help for it but to extinguish the blaze before it spread through the neighborhood. The volunteer I spoke to was not in the firehouse when the alarm came in, but came running toward the flames and smoke from the establishment across the street, where he had been taking his leisure with a woman of flexible reputation. I don’t mind telling you I lost a substantial amount of money to the fellow in the course of winning his confidence, nor that it was the hardest work I’ve ever done, because he was an abomination with cards in his hands. You aren’t the only man in this city who has cheated against himself, though I’ll take an oath there aren’t three.”
“Play your card.” I was losing patience with him, lesion or no.
“The young man swore he saw two men carrying a body away from the blazing building; which would signify nothing, except no casualties were reported in the fire, in the columns of the Call or anywhere else. I quite believed the fellow, for what would he gain from a lie? He already had most of my money.”
“You think Sid died in the fire?”
“With the possible exceptions of a cannon loose aboard a ship at sea and the heart of a woman, nothing is less predictable nor more capricious than a fire in full blossom. Even an experienced arsonist, lingering to ensure the success of his enterprise, can find himself standing in the wrong place when a beam falls or a chimney collapses. Do I think Sid died in the fire? I have serious doubts. Why should anyone risk the victim’s fate removing a corpse from the scene? Even money says he survived; or in any event that he did not expire on the site. He was injured, possibly fatally, but if so his condition was not so obvious his rescuers didn’t think him worth saving. Was it Sid the Spunk? A steeper bet, perhaps, but not so steep I wouldn’t hazard the odds. The man’s very existence is a secret. Life is cheap in Barbary; one more struck down is unworthy of even a paragraph on the same page with the ships’ arrivals. A life saved is a rarer thing altogether, and even a naysayer like Fremont Older could hardly be expected not to keep the details alive through three editions. Who but the man responsible for the fire could expect to remain invisible under the circumstances? Will you take the bet?”
I said. “I haven’t seen your hole card.”
“It’s a common one hereabouts; but even a deuce can claim a pot if you know how to play it. My fire volunteer insisted the two men he saw carrying away the injured party were Chinese.”
I don’t know how long I sat there without moving or speaking. It was long enough I thought I might be attracting the attention of others, who would wonder why two men were sitting at a gaming table with a deck of cards sitting between them undisturbed. Pinholster thought so, too. He swept up the deck and began shuffling.
I anted, not bothering to look whether I was laying down a dollar chip or a twenty. “Your man could have misinterpreted what he saw. For all he knows, he was looking at two men carrying away a drunken friend.”
“It’s possible. It’s probable.” He dealt. “It’s probable I don’t have blackjack on this ten-spot. The hole card would have to be an ace, which is a chance of one in forty-six. What would you bet?”
I folded my hands on top of my cards. I hadn’t even looked at what I had in the hole.
He turned his up. It was a seven.
“Too bad,” he said, gathering in the chips. “However, cards are not life; and life in Barbary is not life anywhere else on earth. Sid the Spunk lives, and may even now be mastering the mystery of chopsticks in Chinatown.”
“What if he does? That’s good for you, but nothing to me. Why even bring it up?”
“It’s nothing to me as the situation stands. I’m an undercover man, the hole card in this game, and as we’ve just seen, the hole does not always conceal the solution. I’m nailed to this table, whereas a face card such as yourself is free to act. I can’t go haring into Little China, demanding answers and evidence. You can; you have, and the fact that you’re here now proves you’re the straight flush in this game.”
“You don’t have the bank to offer. Why should I sit in for you?”
“I can see you’ve never played bridge. No patience with partners.” He fanned the cards out in a straight line, flicked one with a glossy nail, and flipped them all back the other way so that the suits showed. “You haven’t seen my bank. I know where the Sons of the Confederacy are holding their next meeting.”
“So does everyone in town. No one knows when.”
He looked at me. His face didn’t slip.
I sat back. “Oh.”
He swept up the cards, reshuffled, and laid out two hands of bridge. “I’ll teach you the basics. It’s a civilized game, unknown in Barbary. Keep your cards high and your voice low.”
23
The fog was rolling out to sea at midmorning, swept as by a broom made entirely of sunshine. An old man, his face burned red over several sandy layers of brown, paused in the midst of slitting open the silver belly of a fish to point with his serrated knife toward the end of the pier, where even as I looked the fog slid away from the figure standing with arms folded atop a piling. I went out there and stuck my hands in my pockets.
“Busy harbor,” I said.
Beecher kept his eyes on the horizon, which was a spired scape of masts and complex rigging, overhung by smudges of black smoke from the stacks of the steamers, of which there were getting to be more than square-riggers. In a few years there wouldn’t be a sail visible between Japan and the California coast.
“This ain’t nothing,” he said. “You ought to see Galveston when the cotton’s in.”
“I didn’t know you got down that far.”
He looked up at me from under the brim of his hat and smiled. The smile wasn’t for me.
“I worked on a packet boat one whole summer. Left home in Louisiana at twelve and didn’t look back. Looking forward, that’s the spooky part.”
“How’d you end up in Washington?”
“Plenty of sail and not much draw. The wind blowed north after I mustered out of the Tenth. I was headed for Vancouver, but I dropped anchor when I met Belinda. That’s when I went to work for Mr. J. J. Hill.”
“Belinda, that’s your wife?”
“Was last time I seen her. I can’t answer as to now.”
“Ever think about going back?”
“Only every day.” He seemed to remember he had a cigarette smoldering between his fingers. He drew on it and snapped it out over the water. “How’d you find me?”
“Nan said you like to stroll down this way. I didn’t know you two had gotten so close.”
“Someone’s got to smoke them cigars. They won’t last forever.”
A seagull landed on the next piling and began cleaning itself with its hooked beak. Beecher lit another cigarette and snapped the match at the bird, which flapped its wings but didn’t take off. It resumed its search for lice.
“Bastards ain’t afraid of man or fish,” he said. “Feed on garbage and carcasses. I reckon they find their share here.”
“Of what, garbage or carcasses?”
“Both. Any animal that won’t run or fly from a man is just waiting its time till it can pick at his flesh. I seen ’em crawling like rats all over a dead Mexican in Galveston. Even a buzzard kills sometimes, just to keep its hand in. Not these bastards. They even stink like bad meat.”
He straightened suddenly, dr
ew the Le Mat, and fired a shotgun round at the gull. It exploded in a cloud of feathers and fell over the side of the pier.
My ears rang. “I see you’ve been taking practice. That why you come down here?”
“I come for the air.” He plucked out the spent shell and replaced it with a loaded one from his coat pocket. His fingers shook a little. “Where there’s sea air, there’s gulls. You can take ship clear out into the middle of the ocean and there they are. Where do they roost?”
I changed the subject. I didn’t think we were talking about seagulls anyway. “I just played a few hands with Pinholster.”
“How much you lose this time?” He belted the pistol.
“I broke even.”
I told him about Sid the Spunk and the next meeting of the Sons of the Confederacy. He refolded his arms on top of the piling.
“That’s tomorrow night. They’re carving it close with Owen Goodhue.” He drew on the cigarette. “You reckon he’s still in Chinatown?”
“Sid? He’s that or dead, if he didn’t quit town altogether. According to Pinholster there hasn’t been a suspicious fire in Barbary since he put the match to the Slop Chest.”
“Well, I doubt he left town. You heard what Wheelock said. They keep coming back.”
“I wouldn’t set much store by anything Captain Dan says.”
“He’s a politician through and through. You wonder why he bothers with the baby rebels.”
“Barbary’s a cesspool. All the scum in the country drains into it sooner or later. That’s his power base. He’ll do what he can to protect it.”
“Reckon he’ll send his Hoodlums after Goodhue?”
I shook my head. “Vigilantes aren’t cattle, for all they look it when they’re in full stampede. You can’t turn them by just picking off the leaders. Some other fool with more sand than sense will step in and plug the hole. Same thing with gulls.” I jerked my chin toward a piling farther down, where a fresh bird had just landed.
He glared at it. “What you fixing to do about Sid the Spunk?”
“Well, I’m not ‘haring into Chinatown, demanding answers and evidence.’ Pinholster’s been reading dime novels. Luck’s the only reason you and I didn’t come out carrying our heads the first time. I came down here hoping you’d have an idea.”
He pushed himself away from the piling and took out the pistol. I stepped back automatically, removing myself from the line of fire. He wasn’t looking at the seagull, however. He was facing the opposite end of the pier.
I drew the Deane-Adams as I turned. Three Chinese were standing at the end, dressed identically in long dark coats, with slouch hats drawn down over their foreheads. When they saw our weapons, the two on the ends threw open their coats and raised a pair of shotguns with the barrels cut back almost as far as the forepieces. The hammers clicked sharply in the damp air.
“Steady.” I almost whispered.
There wasn’t another human in sight on one of the busiest waterfronts in the world. The windows of the brick warehouses looming behind the Chinese were blank and blind. Even the fisherman who had pointed Beecher out to me had slipped away, as quietly as the tide. The gull made a noise like a rusty shutter and flapped away.
Only the lower halves of the three Asiatic faces were visible beneath the shadows of their hat brims. The sharp cheekbones, pointed chins, and straight mouths of the armed pair looked as much alike as Orientals were said to by Occidentals who never bothered to look twice. I was pretty sure they were brothers, maybe twins. The shotguns looked as if the recoil would shatter the fine bones in their slender wrists when the triggers were tripped. Of course it wouldn’t. It hadn’t all the other times, and the way the men held them said there had been plenty of those.
Beecher and I were standing at the end of the pier, with nothing behind us but the Pacific Ocean and nothing below us but undertow and the bones of others who had stood there before us. The only way off was through the three men standing on the landward end. I cocked the five-shot. Beecher had already drawn back the hammer on his Confederate piece.
“The harmbor is a dangerous mplace.”
The Chinese who spoke stood in the center, a step back from his companions. He was taller and thinner, and his speech was impaired by a deep cleft in his upper lip. In Western dress he looked more like a rangy alley cat than the pampered, well-brushed variety he had resembled inside his tearoom at the White Peacock. He stood with his hands at his sides.
I wet my lips. The moisture evaporated from them as soon as I finished. “Yes. Men have been known to slip and stab themselves to death.”
F’an Chu’an—I still couldn’t think of him as “Fat John,” even in those clothes and this far outside Chinatown—reached up and pinched his upper lip between thumb and forefinger. I’d seen him do that before, to aid him in his English pronunciation.
“I’m told you seek the man called Sid the Spunk.”
He made a slight motion with his other hand. The shotguns vanished beneath the long coats.
We lowered our revolvers. Beecher spat out his cigarette. It hissed when it struck the wet boards at our feet.
24
“We can talk in here,” F’an Chu’an said. “I have an arrangement with the Six Companies.”
We had walked from the pier to one of the brick-box warehouses that faced the harbor like a medieval redoubt, where he’d produced a ring of keys from a coat pocket, sprung a padlock, and let us in through a side door. Inside, sunlight fell in through high windows and lay dustily on rolls of material wrapped in brown burlap and stacked to the rafters thirty feet above our heads. The air was a haze of moth powder. From here, the bolts of silk, broadcloth, wool flannel, jute, and damask would be carried by wagon to dozens of basements where Chinese immigrants bent over needles and treadle sewing machines, making dresses and suits of clothes for catalogue merchants to sell to bookkeepers in New York, shopgirls in Chicago, and farm wives in Lincoln, Nebraska: more than a million dollars’ of dry goods in that one building, and not a watchman in sight. That would have taken some arranging. There were birds’ nests in the rafters, and probably a couple of dozen bats suspended beneath, waiting to unfold themselves at nightfall and thread their way outside through gaps no bigger around than a man’s finger. Our footsteps rang on the broad floor planks running the length of the broad aisles that separated the stacks. F’an Chu’an’s bodyguards had lowered the hammers on their shotguns and Beecher and I had put away our pistols.
“I apologize for the detestable presence of my escort,” he said, pinching his lip. “Their protection is necessary whenever I venture beyond Sacramento Street.”
Beecher said. “They look like knickknacks.”
“They are my cousins, Shau Wing and Shau Chan. They have been with me since Hong Kong.”
“Did you smuggle them in wrapped in a rug?” I asked.
He didn’t answer. He might not have understood. I wouldn’t have taken Pinholster’s odds he hadn’t.
“The Suey Sing Tong is one of the oldest in America,” F’an Chu’an said. “It was organized in the gold fields in order to protect Chinese mine workers from resentful Westerners. It soon became necessary to protect them from other Chinese as well. The bandit tradition in the country of my birth extends back to before the first dynasty.
“From there our numbers spread to railroad camps, laundries, and cigar manufactories. The tong is young, but it is schooled in the ancient ways of combat. They include rules of behavior, which were regrettably ignored by the late Yee Yung Hay when his perfidy was exposed. Once again I ask your forgiveness.” He bowed. The two Shaus bracing him remained as motionless as porcelain figures; Beecher had a good eye, as well as a gift for description.
I said. “Your father’s sword took care of that. What became of the body, by the way? Being accessories after the fact, we ought to know.”
“Your curiosity is perhaps reckless. Knowledge is often fatal here. There is a storm drain beneath the White Peacock, which leads to the ba
y. It was Shau Wing’s idea to construct a shaft connecting to it, shortly after we opened for business. Waste disposal is a problem in Chinatown, but not at the White Peacock.”
“If you’d used it to get rid of Horatio Flinders, today’s situation might be different.”
He bowed again. “With respect, Deputy Mur Dok, it was you who sent Deputy Bee Chu’r for the police.”
“I know. Every now and then that star gets heavy in my pocket. Two unreported killings in one night and I wouldn’t have been able to lift it.”
“Yin and Yang.”
That was one I didn’t understand, but I let it float past. “How did you find out I’m looking for Sid the Spunk?”
“I have ears in many places.”
I tried to remember who was in the saloon when I was talking with Pinholster. Most of them were strangers. You can lower your voice almost to a thought and still be overheard by an experienced eavesdropper.
I said, “I thought of you right off, when I heard a man who might have been Sid was carried away from the fire at the Slop Chest by two Chinese. How many people in Barbary know you studied medicine in Hong Kong?”
“There are few secrets here. Even death cannot conceal them utterly. It grieves me to report that Sid the Spunk is dead.”
“You’re not the first who’s told me that. A lot of people seem to want to think he’s a corpse. I wouldn’t have expected a common Hoodlum to attract so much interest.”
“I wish they were wrong. Everything possible was done to deliver him from his fate. I am a deplorable novice, and what skills I once had have withered through disuse. The injury was too great, and there was not time to put him in more competent hands.”
Beecher spoke up. “The storm drain?”
F’an Chu’an affected to have noticed him for the first time. The class system that had produced the tong leader was older than ours by a thousand years.
“It was unfortunately the only recourse. The bay accepts without judging.”
“I got to wonder how the ships make it in and out for all them bones.”
“Who brought him to you?” I asked. “The Shaus?”
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