Port Hazard

by Loren D. Estleman

  “They are never far from my side. I will not profane your ears with the names of the two wretches who came upon him and sought to win my favor by taking him to the White Peacock. They are filth beneath your feet.”

  He might have meant that literally.

  “Why would they think you’d be happy to treat him? One Spunk more or less wouldn’t make much difference here.”

  F’an Chu’an stopped pinching his lip. He was thinking. “What I say next must not leave this mbuild”—he pinched—“this building. Even the tong is only permitted to exist under certain conditions.”

  “Should I swear on my life?”

  He might have smiled. It was hard to tell with his hand in front of his mouth. He said something in Chinese to the men at his side. One of them made a noise like a terrier barking and replied.

  “Shau Chan says, ‘The white devil is not without humor.’ That is an unsatisfactory translation. I speak Mandarin, Szechuan, and Cantonese, but the delicate points of English are as a dragon.”

  I said his English was fine. It had improved since our last meeting. Judge Blackthorne had told me never to trust a man who pretended to be more ignorant than he was.

  “I am a wicked man,” he said. “I have slain innocent men, I have stolen bread from the starving, I have lain with women who were the property of other men. I poison my people for money. I offer no apologies for the path I have chosen. I submit, however, that I am not the tenth part of the nameless ogre who led the Hop Sing Tong since before I came. This beast of whom I speak lay with the virgin sister of Lem Tin, my most loyal lieutenant, and sold her into slavery, under whose torment she sickened and died. When Lem Tin went to him for vengeance, the ogre had his heart cut out of his living breast and sent to me wrapped with silk in a jade box. This was an intolerable insult.

  “I requested a meeting with the leaders of all the tongs to protest the ogre’s action and to call for his trial and punishment. I told them Lem Tin was my friend, closer to me than a brother, that he had been disgraced, and was within his rights under tong law to challenge the ogre. The other leaders conferred and reached the decision that the ogre behaved permissibly in the interest of preserving his life. I was asked to accept this conclusion and to offer the ogre my friendship. This I did, along with a pledge upon the bones of my father that I would not be the one to violate the accord. Fifteen minutes after it began, the meeting was adjourned, and the leaders went to the Rising Star Club to celebrate the peace they had made. The ogre was among them. I was not. That decision is the reason I stand before you this day.”

  The air in the warehouse felt clammy, in spite of the strong sunlight. I fought off a shudder. The men flanking F’an Chu’an would no doubt have interpreted it as a sign of weakness.

  “There was a fire,” F’an Chu’an said. “Most regrettable in this fragile place. It started, said the men who fought it, in the cellar, upon the ground floor, and atop the roof of the Rising Star Club, within minutes. The leaders of the Gee Kung and the Kwong Dock Tongs burned to death on their divans, unable to stir from their black dreams. Fong Jung of the Soo Yop escaped the flames, but the smoke destroyed his lungs and he returned to China to die in the land of his ancestors. The ogre who led the Hop Sings, Lem Tin’s assassin and the defiler of his sister, was driven by the smoke and heat to leap from a window upon the second story. He shattered his spine and has not left his bed from that day to this.

  “The gods are often indiscriminate. Three other leaders survived without injury. They joined the others’ successors in accusing me of starting the fire. I was tried and would have been executed under tong law but for fifteen men of respect who came forward to swear that from the time I left the meeting until the alarm was raised, I could be seen casting lots in the White Peacock. I was exonerated.”

  At this point F’an Chu’an made a little bow, as if Beecher and I were the ones who’d acquitted him. The cat’s smile was in place.

  I said, “Did anyone happen to ask where Sid the Spunk was when the fire broke out?”

  “His name was not mentioned during the proceedings. Chinatown is a country apart from greater San Francisco. He is not widely known within its boundaries. I remind you that we converse in confidence. It is not necessary to explain by what avenue we found each other. Perhaps you will think of him with charity when I say that he would not accept payment for his services. When I declared that I had no wish to chain myself in his debt, he said that the obligation was his, to one who had been close to him and who had been forced into degradation also. He would say nothing else beyond the fact that Lem Tin’s sister was not unique in her experience. He would not abandon this position, and having come but recently from that infamous meeting, I lacked the strength of will to turn aside his offer. Do you wonder still why I did not hesitate to exhaust my poor skills on his behalf when he was brought to me later, broken and burned?”

  I shook my head. “What about the bones of your father?”

  “It is my belief they lay where they were buried.”

  I searched his face for amusement, or contempt, or some other sign that the words he spoke were connected to what he was thinking. I gave it up as a bad job. “Why risk leaving Chinatown to tell me, with your name on Owen Goodhue’s list?”

  “For that, you have Lee Yung Hay to thank. You cannot know the extent of the catastrophe had his activities in Barbary become known generally.”

  “I’d have thought saving our lives discharged that debt,” I said.

  “You force me to contradict you; a necessity I find most painful. My debt was increased by the act. In the country of my birth, to spare a man’s life is to make that life one’s own, with all the responsibilities that entails. When I learned of your interest in Sid the Spunk, I saw the opportunity to relieve myself of the burden. I could not guarantee your safety should your natural instincts lead you across Sacramento Street. That you did so once and survived was more fortunate than you know. I consider that you and I stand upon equal ground when I warn you that to venture again into Chinatown will be to resign yourself to merciless fate.”

  This time I said it. “The storm drain?”

  “The bay accepts,” he repeated. “without judging.”

  Beecher said. “I reckon we’re even.”

  “That is my belief.”

  F’an Chu’an glanced from side to side. The Shaus stirred and the three of them headed toward the door. Beecher and I followed them out. F’an Chu’an fixed the padlock in place and left us without a word. Seconds later he and his companions disappeared around the corner of the warehouse. Later I wasn’t sure I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing.

  25

  On the last night but one for Barbary, Beecher and I set out with determination to get as drunk as we could and still find our way home to the Slop Chest.

  Although the second part was problematic, the first was a dream easily obtainable anywhere within thirty blocks of our bug-infested berths. There were upwards of three thousand aboveboard drinking establishments in the City of San Francisco, most of them on the shady side of Nob Hill, and Nan Feeny estimated that an additional two thousand operated without licenses. These “blind tigers” sold home-brewed beer, whiskey cut with creek water—Beecher found part of a crawdad floating in his glass the first place we stopped—and turpentine laced with brown sugar to give it the color and approximate flavor of rye; the sightless beggars who tapped their way along the boardwalks and sat in doorways rattling the coins in their cups hadn’t all lost their eyes at Shiloh, despite the signs around their necks identifying them as crippled veterans. An article in Fremont Older’s Call placed the annual income from the local sale of intoxicants above ten million dollars, roughly three times what Congress shelled out to outfit the U.S. Army. Witnessed at first hand, it looked like more.

  “I forget.” Beecher looked up blearily from a glass recently evacuated of freshwater life. “Is this a dive, a bagnio, or a deadfall?”

  I looked around. We were in the cellar of a
warehouse stacked with barrels of sorghum, with greenwood tables and benches crowded to one side to make room for dancing. A glum-faced fiddler and a pianist with an eyepatch made a respectable job out of “Cotton-Eyed Joe” for the benefit of sailors, miners, and probable Hoodlums who were stepping on the toes of female employees of the establishment in short skirts and provocative blouses. I’d heard the blouses were a suggestion contributed by the police, who had raided the cellar a month or two earlier for parading the women around with nothing above the waist. I tried to remember where I’d been a month or two earlier and decided that wherever it was, it didn’t compare.

  “I think it’s a dance hall,” I said.

  There was a brief interlude when one of a pair of customers who had each seized an arm of the same hostess smashed a bottle on the edge of the bar and threatenened his rival with the jagged end. A bartender resolved the situation by slamming two feet of loaded billiard cue across the skull of the unarmed man, who then dropped out of the competition. The man with the broken bottle blinked, then discarded his weapon and dragged the young lady out onto the dance floor as the musicians struck up something lively.

  “Reckon I’m drunker than I knew,” Beecher said. “Looked to me like the barkeep hit the wrong man.”

  “He was closer. It came out the same either way.”

  “Everything’s backwards here. I don’t get out soon I’m going to start thinking this is the way the world works.”

  “It is the way the world works. You and I get paid to spin it the other way.”

  “Speak for yourself. I ain’t seen so much as a nickel since we left Gold Creek.”

  I got out my poke, opened it under the table, and passed a few banknotes across his knees. “That’s as much as I can spare. I wired Judge Blackthorne for expenses, but the hinges on his safe need oiling. You’d think it came out of his own pocket.”

  “It did, if he owns property.”

  “He owns twenty linen shirts, a dozen frock coats, and a bunch of books by a fellow named Blackstone. Whatever else he had burned with his chambers. It wasn’t much. The grateful citizens of Helena gave him the house he lives in with his wife in return for defending civilization. I don’t know how much the federals pay him, but he doesn’t spend any of it. He’s the property of the U.S. government, just like that monument they’re building to George Washington.”

  “You feel that way, why don’t you quit?”

  “He’s the best man I ever worked for.”

  “That’s the way I feel about Mr. Hill; not that we ever met or that he wouldn’t throw me downstairs if I showed up in his office.” He gave me one of his rare grins with the cigarette he was lighting stuck between his teeth. Then he looked troubled. “Ain’t one of us ought to stay sober? How we going to stand behind each other’s back if we can’t tell it from the front?”

  “Take a look around. Shantytown’s got a death sentence hanging over it. All the Hoodlums and cutthroats are too busy trying to have a good time while they still can to bother with two law dogs from out of town. I don’t know about you, but I think we’ve earned a holiday.”

  “This got anything to do with Sid the Spunk being dead?”

  “Don’t be a jackass. Sid isn’t dead.”

  Just then one of the dancing girls let out a stream of language that would have curled the edges of a slate roof and swung into a pirouette with nine inches of curved steel sticking out of her dainty fist. The brute she was dancing with saved his throat by stumbling and falling. As it was, the blade took off the top of his right ear. Bright blood arced out, ruining the costumes of two other dancers who were trying to get out of the way. The bouncer, a short, stocky albino with too much muscle bunched around his neck to accommodate a collar, sprang away from the wall, got hold of the woman’s knife arm, twisted it behind her back, and hauled her off the floor with both satin-shod feet kicking. The bartender who had broken up the other fight threw a towel at the man on the floor, who jammed it against his lacerated ear. The other bartender, small and wiry in an apron that brushed his shoe tops, came out from behind the bar with a mop to clean up the carnage. Another brute built along the same lines as his friend helped the injured man to his feet and escorted him outside, the towel still held in place and staining bright maroon.

  All this took place in about twenty seconds. The staff had rehearsed all the actions many times before, and even the two civilians had been through enough similar scrapes to take themselves out of the action without stopping to file a protest.

  “Let’s move on.” I got up and slapped a dollar on the table to take care of the drinks. Beecher followed.

  On the boardwalk in front of the dance hall, I put a hand on his arm. “Wait a minute.”

  The bleeding brute and his companion were standing in the middle of the street, sunk in mud to their insteps. The man holding the towel to the side of his head made a violent gesture with his free hand. They were shouting over each other’s words. Other pedestrians, accustomed to such scenes, crossed the street on either side of the pair without pausing or even turning their heads. In Barbary, non-involvement wasn’t just a policy; it was a law of survival.

  The two men closed suddenly, as if embracing. They parted, and the man holding the bloody towel turned and came back toward the dance hall, leaving his friend standing in the street with his hands hanging empty at his sides. He looked after his departing companion, then shook his head, turned, and waded off through the mud toward the other side of the street.

  I saw the squat-barreled pistol in the other man’s hand as he mounted the boardwalk. I nudged Beecher and we parted to clear his path to the door. I let him pass, then drew the Deane-Adams, spun it butt-forward, and tapped him firmly on the back of the head with the backstrap. His knees bent, the short pistol clunked to the boardwalk, and I kicked it into the street, where the mud sucked it under in less than a second. It was out of sight before the man hit the ground.

  “Slicker’n snot,” said Beecher as we walked away. “I thought you was fixing to put a hole in him.”

  “It seemed drastic just for stepping on a girl’s foot.” I inspected the revolver for damage to the frame and stuck it back in its holster.

  “How’d you know he’d come back heeled?”

  “Wouldn’t you, for an ear?”

  Gunshots rattled a street or two over, traveling swiftly on the fog drifting in from the harbor.

  Beecher said, “You’re dead on about this place. Like a kid getting in his licks before someone boxes his ears.”

  “I saw it in Abilene, just before the city fathers voted to ban the cattle outfits from town. It’s like a fever.”

  “You deputied Wild Bill?”

  “It was after his time. Part of the hell being raised was mine. I was punching cows then. I hadn’t got the call yet.”

  He shook his head. “We ain’t the same, you and me. I’ll have had my life’s portion of hell after we leave here. From here on in, I’m polishing spitoons and liking it.”

  “Who for, J. J. Hill?”

  “No, sir. For the first hotel or saloon I come to in Spokane that’s hiring. Or some other town, if Belinda won’t have me. I’ve had itchy feet since I left Louisiana. I want to see what it’s like to stay put for forty or fifty years.”

  “You’re a smart man. I wasn’t too sure when you took me up on this offer.”

  “I didn’t exactly have a choice.”

  “You could have left that chair standing where it was in that caboose.”

  He said nothing for several yards. I had the impression he was wishing he’d chosen differently.

  When he spoke, however, it was to introduce a different subject. “You really think Sid the Spunk’s alive?”

  “Whenever someone goes out of his way to tell me something, my policy is it’s a lie. F’an Chu’an owes Sid more than he owes me, and a debt to a dead man isn’t worth paying. Also, a corpse doesn’t need protecting.”

  “What about Pinholster? He lie, too?”

/>   “No reason. His man saw what he said. Our Chinese friend is modest. He’s a better doctor than he made out. He pulled Sid through, and he’s either hiding him in Chinatown or covering up his tracks.”

  “Sid might of quit Frisco.”

  “Then there’d be no reason to convince us he’s dead.”

  “We fixing to go on looking for him?”

  “That’s Pinholster’s cradle. Let him rock it. Judge Blackthorne already thinks we’re off chasing rabbits.”

  “Not tonight, though.”

  “Not tonight. Tonight we’re getting drunk.”

  We entered a place called the Slaughterhouse, on the southern end of Battle Row. There, the patrons were gathered around a little platform built for musicians, where a red-bearded Irishman with leather lungs was auctioning off a drunken naked girl. Her ribs showed and she had tiny breasts, but there were no visible scars and the bidding was up to fifty dollars. Each new bid was louder than the one before.

  Beecher leaned in close and shouted in my ear. “I thought this ended in sixty-three.”

  “I don’t think it’s a full sale,” I shouted back. “Just an overnight rental.”

  The whiskey was a little better than turpentine, although it might have been useful in loosening rusty bolts. It burned furrows down our throats and boiled in our stomachs. A balloon opened in my head, making sounds echo and multiplying everything I looked at. The skinny girl went to a sailor for sixty-two-fifty and was replaced on the platform by three fat girls, or maybe it was just one, who was quickly stripped with some assistance on her part, and upon whom the bidding soared rapidly; the air outside was nippy and there’s nothing like cuddling up to a heap of naked flesh on a cold night. A couple of sailors got into a fistfight over a fifty-cent raise, and part of the audience peeled away to form a circle around the brawlers. No attempt was made on the part of the establishment to separate them.

  “Should we take a hand?” Beecher asked.

  “I’ll put a dollar on the little fellow.”

  I didn’t see how the fight came out. Things and people were losing shape and time passed on a sliding scale. Two other customers argued over a spilled drink; one smashed the other in the mouth, and I thought I was only a witness until I woke up the next morning with my right hand swollen and throbbing and extracted a shard of broken tooth from the third knuckle. In order to examine the hand, I had to pull it out from under the naked woman who was lying on top of it, and half on top of me in my narrow berth at the Slop Chest. I extricated myself from the snoring creature, dressed, and wobbled out into the saloon, where Beecher grinned at me from the end of the bar.