The Second Achmed Abdullah Megapack

by Achmed Abdullah

  For again, now that he was alone, fear of Yang Shen-hsiu had rushed upon him full-armed; and here—with the sodden, pitchy blanket of night painting the shadows with deeper shadows, and the rain-whipped streets deserted by everybody—was the very place where murder might happen, had happened in the past, in Tong war and private feud—the corner saloons with their lurking side entrances, where a man might slip in and out like a rabbit through the tunnels of its warren; the inky, prurient, slimy halls and areaways; the sudden, mysterious alleys cutting edge-wise into mazes of buildings; the steep cellars that yawned like saturnine, toothless maws; the squat, moldy, turgid tenements, with the reckless invitations of their fire escapes.

  Ng Ch’u shivered. Should he turn back, make a run for his home?

  And—what then?

  Tomorrow was another day. Tomorrow the sun would shine golden and clear. True. But tomorrow the Manchu would still be the Manchu; and Ng Ch’u was sure of two things: that Yang Shen-hsiu would plot his speedy death, and that, even supposing he broke the unwritten law of Pell Street, it would be quite useless to go to the police of the red-haired devils and ask them for protection.

  For could he, the merchant, accuse the other, the great Chinese dignitary sent to America on a diplomatic mission? And of what? What could he say?

  Could he make these foreigners believe in this tale of China, of forty years ago? Could he tell them that he and the other had been in love with the same girl, that she had preferred the coolie to the aristocrat, and that the latter had sworn revenge? Could he tell them that those had been the days directly after China’s war of eighteen hundred and sixty against France and England, when the imperial court had been compelled to leave Peking and flee to Jehol, when the Summer Palace had been taken and sacked by the barbarians, when a shameful treaty had been forced on the Middle Kingdom, and when the Kuang T’ai Hou, the Empress, the Old Buddha, had issued an edict that, until a “more propitious time” the lives of foreigners should be sacred in the land of Han? Could he tell them how he had found out that the Manchu, in a fit of rage, had murdered, and quietly buried, a British missionary; how thus, by threatening exposure to the Peking authorities, he had held the whip-hand; how, discretion being the better part of valor, he and the Moon-beam had emigrated to America; and how now, today, forty years later, he had met the Manchu here, in New York—still the same Manchu—hawkish, steely, ruthless—?

  Ng Ch’u shook his head.

  He could imagine what Bill Devoy, detective of Second Branch and Pell Street specialist, would say,

  “Cut it out! Ye’ve been hittin’ the old pipe too hard. What? Manchu? Dowager Empress? Moon-beam? Missionary? Revenge? Say—ye’ve blown in too many dimes on them—now—seven-reelers! Keep away from the movies, Chinkie—see?”

  * * * *

  Ng Ch’u shivered. He jumped sidewise rapidly as he heard a rustling noise. Then he smiled apologetically—it had just been a dim stir of torn bits of paper whirled about by a vagabond wind—and turned, at a sudden right angle, toward Nag Hong Fah’s Great Chop Suey Restaurant where it slashed the purple, trailing night with a square of yellow light.

  A minute later, his heart beating like a trip-hammer, he was up the stairs. Two minutes later, outwardly composed, he bowed, his hands clasped over his chest, to the company of merchants who were gathered in the Honorable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity, some quietly smoking or sipping tea, others gossiping, still others playing at hsiang ch’i chess and ta ma.

  The soft, gliding hum of voices, the sizzling of the opium lamps, the sucking of boiling-hot tea drunk by compressed lips, the clicks of the copper and ivory counters—it was all tremendously peaceful and reassuring; and Ng Ch’u sighed contentedly as he dropped into a chair by the side of Ching Shan, his silent partner, and began talking to him in an undertone about a shipment of Sheba pottery which could be picked up at a bargain in San Francisco.

  Presently, business over, he asked a question.

  “Brother very old and very wise,” he said, “what are the protections of the day and the night against an evil man?”

  Ching Shan was known throughout Pell Street for his stout wisdom—a reputation which he upheld by quoting esoterically and didactically from some hoary tome of learning, whenever asked a question, and then reinforcing his opinion by a yet lengthier quotation from another book.

  “Ng Ch’u,” he replied, “it has been reported in the Shu King that the sage Wu once spoke as follows: ‘I have heard that the good man, doing good, finds the day insufficient, and the night, and that the evil man, doing evil, also finds the day insufficient, and the night.’” He paused, looked around him, made sure that not only Ng Ch’u but also the rest of the company were listening to him attentively, and continued: “Yet, as to the evil man, and the good, has it not furthermore been said that the correct doctrine of the good man is to be true to the principles of his nature and the benevolent exercise of these principles when dealing with others?”

  “Even when dealing with evil men?” asked Ng Ch’u.

  “Decidedly, little brother.”

  “Ah—” smiled Ng Ch’u, “and the principle of my nature has always been to see that I have pork with my evening rice—to bargain close and tight—to know the worth of money—”

  “Money,” said Nag Hong Fah, the restaurant proprietor, “which is the greatest truth in the world—”

  “Money,” chimed in Yung Long, the wealthy wholesale grocer, “which is mastery and power and sway and shining achievement—”

  “Money,” said Ching Shan rather severely, since he had retired from active business affairs and was not worried by financial troubles, “which is good only when used by a purified desire and a righteous aim—”

  “What aim more righteous,” rejoined Ng Ch’u, “than peace and happiness and the evening rice—”

  And then, quite suddenly, a hush fell over the Honorable Pavilion of Tranquil Longevity. Tea cups were held tremblingly in mid-air. Pipes dropped. Voices were stilled.

  For there, framed in the doorway, stood three figures, lean, tall, threatening; faces masked by black neckerchiefs; pistols held steadily in yellow hands.

  “Oh—Buddha!” screamed Nag Hong Fah. “The hatchetmen—the hatchetmen—”

  “Silence, obese grandfather of a skillet!” said the tallest of the three. “Silence—or—” His voice was terse and metallic; his pistol described a significant half-circle and drew a bead on the restaurant proprietor’s stout chest. He took a step nearer into the room, while his two colleagues kept the company covered. “My friends,” he said, “I have not come here to harm anybody—except—”

  His eyes searched the smoke-laden room, and, as if drawn by a magnet, Ng Ch’u rose and waddled up to him.

  “Except to kill me?” he suggested meekly.

  “Rightly guessed, older brother,” smiled the other. “I regret—but what is life—eh:—and what is death? A slashing of throats! A cutting of necks! A jolly ripping of jugular veins!” He laughed behind his mask and drew Ng Ch’u toward him with a strong, clawlike hand.

  The latter trembled like a leaf.

  “Honorable killer,” he asked, “there is, I take it, no personal rancor against me in your heart?”

  “Not a breath—not an atom—not a sliver! It is a mere matter of business!”

  “You have been sent by somebody else to kill me—perhaps by—?”

  “Let us name no names. I have indeed been sent by—somebody.”

  Ng Ch’u looked over his shoulder at Ching Shan who sat there, very quiet, very disinterested.

  “Ching Shan,” he said, “did you not say that the correct doctrine of the good man is to be true to his principles and the benevolent exercise of these principles?”

  “Indeed!” wonderingly.

  “Ah—” gently breathed Ng Ch’u, and again he addressed the hatchetman. “Honorable killer,” he said, “the nameless party—who sent you here—how much did he promise you for causing my spirit to join the spirits of
my ancestors?”

  “But—”

  “Tell me. How much?”

  “Five hundred dollars!”

  Ng Ch’u smiled.

  “Five hundred dollars—eh?—for killing me?” he repeated.

  “Yes, yes!” exclaimed the astonished hatchetman.

  “Five hundred dollars—eh?—for killing me?” he rebroke into gurgling laughter. “Correct doctrine to be true to one’s own principles! Principles of barter and trade—my principles—the coolie’s principles—Ahee!—ahoo!—ahai! Here, hatchetman!” His voice was now quite steady. Steady was the hand with which he drew a thick roll of bills from his pocket. “Here are five hundred dollars—and yet another hundred! Go! Go and kill him—him who sent you!”

  * * * *

  And, late that night, back in his neat little flat, Ng Ch’u turned casually to his wife.

  “Moon-beam,” he said, “the little trouble has been satisfactorily settled.” He paused, smiled. “Tomorrow,” he added, “I shall eat my evening rice from a pale-blue Suen-tih Ming bowl with red fish molded as handles.”

  “Yes, Great One,” came the Moon-beam’s calm, incurious reply.

  THE HATCHETMAN

  A barrel-organ had just creaked up the street, leaving a sudden rent of silence in the hectic clattering of the Pell Street symphony and lending a slow, dramatic thud to the words of Yung Long, the wholesale grocer, that drifted through the gangrened door.

  “Yes,” he said. “Wong Ti—” and Wong Ti, on his way through the hall, stopped as he heard his name—“is a killer, a hatchetman. In the whole of Pell Street there is none more skilled than he in his profession. He is old and withered. True! But his mind is sharp, his hand is steady, and he knows the intricate lore of drugs. He could put poison in your belly, and your lips would be none the wiser. Too, he is fearless of the white devils’ incomprehensible laws. He has killed more often than there are hairs on his honourable chest. Yet has he never been punished, never even been suspected.”

  “Then—why—?” came the slurring, slightly ironic question.

  “Because,” replied Yung Long, “he is a philosopher and a just man, a sane man, a tolerant man. He knows that when the naked dance, they cannot tear their clothes. He knows that a dead mule cannot eat turnips. He knows that there is no beginning and no end to the beard of the beardless. He knows that one cannot cure a woman’s heart with powder and ball and steel, nor heal the canker of jealousy with poison. He is a most honourable gentleman, gaining a great deal of face through his wisdom and the guile of his charming simplicity.”

  “The guile of his simplicity, O elder brother?” stuttered a naive voice, belonging both as to question itself and the throaty, faintly foreign inflection to some young, American born Chinaman.

  “Indeed!” the grocer gurgled into his pipe, amongst a ripple of gentle, gliding laughter.

  Then other voices brushed in, quoting the polished and curiously insincere sentences of ancient Chinese sages in support of his contention; and Wong Ti, the hatchetman, stepped back from the door and vanished behind the curtain of trooping, purple shadows thrown across the length of the narrow hall by the great, iron-bound tea chests in back of Yung Long’s store.

  * * * *

  He turned and walked up the stairs with that furtive step which, since it was the scientific accomplishing of murder that brought him the glitter of gold, the shine of silver, the jangling of copper, and the pleasant, dry rustle of paper money had become second nature to him: heels well down, toes slowly gripping through soft duffle soles, arms carefully balanced, hands at right angles from the wrists, and fingers spread out gropingly, like the sensitive antennae of some night insect, to give warning of unfamiliar objects.

  As he passed the first floor, he stopped.

  There, beneath a flickering double gas jet, Doctor En Hai, A.B., Yale, M.D., Columbia College of Physicians and Surgeons, member of the American Society of Clinical Surgery, corresponding member of the Paris Société de Chirurgie and of the Royal British Association of Surgery and Gynecology, flashed the incongruous modernity of his brass shingle through the musty, moldy labyrinth of Chinatown.

  * * * *

  In his post-graduate year, a famous New York surgeon fainting across the white enameled table at the crucial moment of a hypogastric operation when the fraction of a second meant the difference between life and death, En Hai had taken the scalpel from the other’s limp fingers and had carried on the operation, in the same breath as it were, to a brilliantly successful finish. Immediately his name had become a household word in medical circles. He had received offers from the New York Post-Graduate Medical School, Johns Hopkins, and the Boston Polyclinic, but had refused them, saying he preferred to go back to his native Pell Street and work amongst his own people—“because they need me.”

  At the time—it coinciding with dog days in matters political, social, and hysterical, and there being neither election, nor divorce scandal, nor sensational double murder to be blurbed across the front pages of the metropolitan dailies—Doctor En Hai’s altruistic decision had caused considerable stir. All the “sob sisters” in Newspaper Row had interviewed him. They had covered reams of yellow flimsy calling him a Modern Martyr and a Noble Soul. They had compared him to Marcus Aurelius and several of the lesser saints. They had contrasted the honours and fortune and fame which might have been his to his life in the reeking, sweating Chinatown slums which he had chosen “because they need me.”

  Miss Edith Rutter, the social settlement investigator who specialized in Mongols and had paid for the young doctor’s education out of her own pocket, wrote to a friend in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, interested, financially and otherwise, in her pet subject, that she had not laboured in vain, that here at last was a yellow man willing to bear the white man’s burden.

  If Pell Street knew different, it did not tell.

  If Pell Street had its tongue in its cheek, nobody saw it.

  But when, at night, the day’s toil done, grave celestial burgesses met in the liquor store of the Chin Sor Company, the “Place of Sweet Desire and Heavenly Entertainment,” to retail there the shifting gossip of Chinatown, it was recalled with compressed lips and eyes contracting to narrow slits, that Doctor En Hai’s deceased father, En Gin, had been for many years a hopeless addict to the curling black smoke, a paralyzed, spineless ne’er-do-well, and an object of material Pell Street charity.

  But, being Chinamen, they had spiced their charity with crude jests, with floweringly obscene abuse, occasionally with a blow and a kick; and since to a Chinaman a family, including its dead and buried progenitors, is an unbreakable entity while the individual counts for nothing, young En Hai, then a wizened, underbred, sloe-eyed lad of eight, had been included in the blending of harsh contumely and harsher charity which had been heaped upon his father’s head.

  Then Miss Rutter had sent him away, first to a good school, afterwards to college, and now he was back amongst them, in well-cut American clothes, clean, suave, polished, smooth—a successful man—almost famous.

  And Pell Street knew—and did not tell—why he had returned.

  “He will sneer at us, but he will cure us,” Nag Hop Fat, the soothsayer, had crystallized the prevailing sentiment, “ thereby accumulating much face for himself, his father, and all his ancestors. With every drop of medicine, will he give us two, perhaps three, grains of contempt. And we, knowing that he is a great doctor, will not be able to refuse the medicine—nor the contempt. A most proper and wise man is En Hai!” he had wound up with honest admiration.

  * * * *

  Wong Ti stopped and looked at the brass plate which had the doctor’s name both in English letters and Mandarin ideographs. A keen-eared listener might have heard a deep, racking intake of breath, almost a sob, and something like the crackle of naked steel, quickly drawn, as quickly snapped back into the velvet-lined scabbard.

  Then the hatchetman passed on to his own apartment on the second floor of the house, that squinted back toward t
he Bowery with malicious, fly-specked, scarlet-curtained windows, and out toward Mott Street with the bizarre, illogical contour of an impromptu bird’s-nest balcony where homesick blossoms of remote Asia were waging a brave but losing fight against the flaccid, feculent Pell Street sough.

  A dwarfed, gnarled lychee tree with glistening, blackish green leaves; a draggle-tail parrot tulip, brown and tawny and gamboge yellow, in a turquoise blue pot; another pot, virulently crimson, dragon painted, planted with anemic Cantonese frisias; a waxen budding narcissus bulb bending beneath the greasy, stinking soot—and the whole characteristic of Wong Ti, killer, red-handed assassin; yet a philosopher and a gentle, just man.

  For—the which would have condemned him as viewed through a white man’s spectacles and, by the same token, enhanced his civic and moral value in the slanting eyes of his countrymen—he only killed when he was paid for it, and never out of personal spite, personal revenge, personal passion.

  His footsteps became muffled, then died, as he opened the door to his apartment. The silence crept back again, like a beaten dog.

  Only the murmur of singsong voices from the grocery store downstairs; a sound of metal clinking against metal from the doctor’s office; and a woman’s tinkly, careless laughter.

  “Chia Shun!” called the hatchetman, his aged voice leaping to a wheezing crack. “Ahee! Chia Shun!”—just a little petulantly.

  But Chia Shun—which is a woman’s name and means “Admirable and Obedient”—did not reply; and Wong Ti shrugged his shoulders. Doubtless, he said to himself, she was on the lower floor, in the doctor’s office.

  Doing—what?

  Talking about—what?

  He made a slight motion as if to retrace his steps. His hand reached for the sheathed dagger up his loose sleeve.

  Then again the tinkly, careless laughter, a man’s echoing bass, and a deep blush of shame suffused the hatchetman’s leathery, wrinkled cheeks. He dismissed the sounds, and what the sounds might portend, as something altogether negligible, opened an inlaid, carved sandalwood box, and took out his opium layout.