by Taylor Lee
Alex followed Wan and Wyatt as they headed to Bai’s office, but came to a dead stop when Wyatt turned back and said, “Will you join us, Alex? We are going to discuss our strategy for dealing with the issues we face.”
He stared at his father as if he was crazy, then stuttered, “No, no … I …I need to get some air.”
Bai smiled a slight sympathetic smile.
“Sorry you had to hear about last night’s incident this way, Alex, but you are welcome to join us.”
Alex stared at his father and Bai in disbelief. They were acting as though they were inviting him to discuss a business opportunity like buying a goddamn bank or investing in a fucking land deal. He couldn’t hide his astonishment. He was still shaky from his injuries and felt a wave of nausea. He knew he had to get outside, away from the three of them. He started to speak, then shook his head and dashed out to the courtyard.
He sunk down on one of the benches in the side courtyard, put his head in his hands, and took deep breaths, pushing down his nausea. Goddamn, it was like he was in a grotesque house of mirrors, the distorted faces of his family looming up like circus freaks. Was he the only sane one in the bunch? Did no one else find it unusual or worthy of comment that Bai calmly came to his engagement party last night and danced with his bride to be a couple of hours after he killed a good sized contingent of men, members of the fucking mafia, no less?
Hell, he had to admit the guy was a master. He strolled into that room like a royal prince deigning to meet with his subjects. Only those subjects were the governor’s chief of staff, the mayor’s main guy, a fucking United States marshal and the sheriff, who had fifteen deputies waiting in the wings. And, Christ, he flat out taunted the lieutenant governor of the State of California, practically called him a corrupt asshole to his face!
As appalled as he was, Alex had to admit that Bai was a force to be reckoned with. There wasn’t a person in the room who didn’t know who was in command. It was the handsome elegant man at the head of the table coolly smoking a cigar that controlled the room. Never once did he raise his soft spoken French tinged voice. But, it was more than his arrogance, his wit, his calm ruthlessness; it was his power. Alex had spent his life watching his father and grandfather intimidate and overpower rooms full of important men. He knew remarkable men; he had been surrounded by them all his life. And, goddamn, even he had to admit that Bai was one fucking remarkable man.
He looked up to see Elena and Lei coming toward him and he had an overwhelming need to talk to Elena.
Elena’s face lit up when she saw him and she called out as she rushed toward him. “Oh, Alex, I’m so glad to see you. Is the meeting over? Are they all gone?”
Alex ignored Lei and grabbed Elena’s hand and pulled her down on the bench next to him.
Without preamble he said in a rushed, urgent voice, “Elena, I have to talk to you. You need to tell me. I need to understand. Do you truly know who you are marrying? Do you? Do you understand who he is? What he is?”
Elena frowned and pulled back. At first she looked surprised at his outburst, then her face hardened. To his dismay, Alex saw that she was angry and that she was looking at him in a way she never had; her expression was cold, closed.
Elena pulled her hands away and went to stand by Lei. She hesitated, as though she was going to speak to him, then changed her mind and turned to walk away.
“Elena, wait! Goddamn, I’m sorry. I don’t want to make you angry, but you need to understand what you are doing. Do you know what happened last night? What Bai did last night?”
Elena and Lei shared a strained look and both stepped away from him. Elena took a deep breath and said in a solemn voice, “It just so happens, Alex, Lei and I are on our way to see the results of what Bai ‘did’ last night. Perhaps you would like to accompany us.”
She turned on her heel and grasping Lei’s hand, the two of them stalked off without a backward glance at Alex. He shook his head in frustration and tried to stifle his hurt. He had never been estranged from either Elena or Lei, the two women he deeply loved. All his life, they had fussed over him, supported him and made him feel special. But now they were disappointed with him. Hell, it was clear they were angry with him. And it was because of that arrogant son of a bitch who had turned all of their lives upside down. Knowing that somehow he had to reach his sister before she made the mistake of a lifetime, Alex swallowed his pride and followed them to the infirmary.
~~~
Years later, Alex would see groups of innocent young children playing together and he would remember that day in the infirmary with fresh anguish. There were twenty beds in the infirmary and in each of them was a young Chinese girl, none more than twelve or thirteen years old, many seemed younger. They looked like dolls, quiet little wide-eyed girls cowering under their blankets in beds that dwarfed them. Uniformed aides and healers moved through the room talking softly, occasionally plumping a pillow or holding a child upright to help them swallow an herbal drink or take medication.
In the dining room next door, another thirty girls were sitting at tables, many of them staring blankly at the food in front of them. Given their ages and the number of girls, at first glance, it looked like a dining hall in a girl’s school, but the lack of laughter and absence of girlish chatter was unsettling. What was more unsettling was knowing that less than twenty four hours earlier, all of these girls had been prostitutes; their small bodies for sale to grown men twice their size and many times their ages. Even the Chinese servants waiting on the girls were silent, as if words weren’t enough.
Alex leaned against the wall, trying to absorb the meaning of what he saw. He had heard Bai castigate the dignitaries for allowing child prostitution in their city and refused to turn the girls over to the sheriff and his fifteen deputies. But until he saw the girls lying in the infirmary beds or sitting quietly at the dining tables, he had not understood the magnitude of last night’s events. Fifty young girls being used as prostitutes were an abstraction, but the girls in front of him were real. If Alex felt horror before knowing what Bai had done, he couldn’t begin to explain the feelings roiling over him now.
To make matters worse, he saw the girls at the tables physically cower and pale when he walked in and realized with a start that they were afraid of him. He was a man, and a white man at that. The nausea he had felt earlier threatened again and he choked down the rising bile that bubbled in his throat.
Alex stood in the doorway between the two rooms and watched Elena walk through the infirmary kissing each of the girls who lay in the beds. She whispered softly as she tucked their blankets tightly around them. After she spoke to each one, she joined Lei in the dining room and moved from table to table, talking to the girls in a soft pleasant voice. Most of them continued to look down at their hands, but several who at first hesitated began answering her. She had a note pad and a pen and as each girl said her name, Elena wrote it on the paper and pinned it to the front of the girl’s ragged dress. Alex saw that Elena and Lei had written their names on papers and pinned them on their blouses. Alex doubted that any of the girls spoke English and knew that Elena spoke only a little Chinese, but her gracious smile and soft voice seemed to cross the linguistic divide.
After an hour of standing back watching his sister and stepmother, but not moving away from the safety of the wall, Alex saw Lei in the corner talking to a young woman he first thought was a Chinese servant, but then realized from her tattered clothes that she was one of the prostitutes. In addition to looking older, she was stunningly beautiful and Alex was thunderstruck. She was small, slender, perfectly proportioned. Thick black hair fell in shining waves around her shoulders and every feature on her lovely face had been crafted with a delicate touch. Only the hard lines around her eyes and lips and her tight unsmiling mouth spoke to the pain and injury she had suffered. But to Alex, taking in her wide almond shaped eyes fanned by thick black lashes, high cheekbones and dainty chin, she was ethereally beautiful.
Lei motioned to Ele
na to join her and the young woman and the three of them walked over to where Alex was standing.
“Jeng Ming, this is Elena, my stepdaughter, and this is Alex, my stepson. Elena is in charge of the infirmary and will marry Bai the day after tomorrow. ”
Jeng Ming bowed low to Elena and looked dismissively at Alex, then turned back to Lei.
Lei said to Alex and Elena, “Jeng Ming speaks several languages including English, and has been helping the healers with the girls. Many of them are so frightened they won’t talk to anyone except Jeng Ming. She has agreed to help us reach the girls and also to give us a list of the personal things they will need.”
Lei turned back to Jeng Ming and said, “I am glad that you just arrived at Madam Torrento’s and hadn’t yet been put to work, but your story of how you came here is horrific. If you are willing, I would like you to meet with Bai in the morning. You have information he needs and he will be grateful for your help.”
Jeng Ming nodded and asked, “Will you and Elena be there?”
“Of course, we will, if you want us to be,” Lei said and Elena agreed.
Alex was so taken with her beauty that he couldn’t stop staring at Jeng Ming. He jumped in eagerly and said, “I just got back from China and speak Chinese fluently. If I can help you in any way, I will be honored.”
In a haughty voice tight with distain, Jeng Ming said in perfect English, “I can’t imagine that would be necessary.”
She bowed low to Elena and Lei, then turned to go back to the infirmary. Alex tried to convince himself the dismissive look she gave him was due to shyness, but her sharp retort removed any doubt. As compared to the way he was reacting to her, Jeng Ming was decidedly unimpressed with him.
Two days that Alex thought could not get any worse had just proven him wrong. Dismissed out of hand by the most beautiful woman he had ever seen, he watched Elena and Lei walk back to the hacienda together, leaving him standing alone – very much alone.
~~
Chapter 11
Manchu and his coterie of Sing Leon guards formed a tight phalanx guarding the entrance to Bai’s complex. The sheriff’s deputies clustered in a group fifty feet away, waiting for the sheriff and the others to join them for the return trip to San Francisco. Even though the number of guards to deputies was equal, there was no question who was in control. Compared to the fierce Kung fu warriors with their hard bodies and equally hard eyes sitting astride incomparable horses, the deputies were a ragtag bunch. In truth, except for the three men who worked with the sheriff as genuine deputies, the other men were strays, pickups looking for a fast dollar and the excitement of recapturing the stolen prostitutes and winning one over the Frenchman. It wasn’t the triumphant adventure they had expected. The farthest they got to glory was tea and scones in the servants’ dining room before being escorted to the road by warriors they would be loath to confront. This was not the tale they had intended to regale their drinking buddies with at the saloon tonight.
Nianzu and Quitin accompanied the five dignitaries to their waiting followers. From the time they left the conference room and in the process of retrieving their horses and being unceremoniously escorted off Bai’s property, Greg Forester maintained a one-sided conversation with Nianzu about the range and reach of Bai’s enterprise. To hear Greg’s affable chatter, one would think that he had led a successful mission rather than being ignominiously dismissed by the man he despised. Nianzu responded to his questions succinctly, more often than not in monosyllables. With a concerted effort, he hid the scorn he and Bai shared for the pompous public servant.
~~~
After being released by the sheriff, the deputies gratefully galloped off, not wanting to prolong the humiliating experience any longer. Greg and Martin Quince said their goodbye’s to Bai’s men and rode up beside Sheriff Thompson. Done acting as if they had accomplished a strategic coup, and furious that the sheriff had caved to Bai, Greg accosted the sheriff.
“What the fuck was that about, Jim?”
The sheriff, who had as much tolerance for the overbearing governor’s chief of staff as Bai and Nianzu did, pushed his Stetson back off his forehead and said, “Care to be more specific, Greg?”
“Goddamn it, Jim. You know what I am talking about. How exactly do you expect me to report to the governor that the San Francisco County Sheriff and a U.S. marshal and fifteen goddamn deputies were unable to bring back a bunch of prostitutes who were stolen in plain sight after the perpetrators burned down the most prosperous fucking San Francisco brothel in front of – what would you say, 200 witnesses--or was it closer to 300?”
“From what I’m told, it’s more likely there were 500 eyewitnesses,” the sheriff said with a sardonic grin.
“Fuck you, Jim. You may think this is a joke, but you just got your ass handed to you by a goddamn Chink criminal who perpetrated the crime of the century right under your fucking nose. The bastard as much as told you to suck his dick and get the hell off his property.”
With a laconic toss of his head, the sheriff replied, “It’s a little early in the century, Greg, to give last night’s event that degree of infamy, but who knows, you might be right. Tell you one thing I do agree with you on, and that is that it took one hell of a pair of cajones to do what the Frenchman did.”
Painfully aware that he was the one who had to explain their defeat not only to the governor but to the goddamn mob, Greg bit back his fury and upped the ante with the sheriff. By Christ, if Jim Thompson wasn’t afraid of Aldo Marcello, he goddamn well better be.
“Since you are sanguine about this whole affair, Jim, I presume you have an explanation for the New York business leaders who not only had their property razed to the ground and twenty of their employees burned to death, but, as an aside, had over $100,000 of merchandize stolen from them.”
The sheriff openly guffawed.
“For Christ’s sakes, Greg, would those ‘business leaders’ you refer to be the goddamn mob? And those employees? Any chance they were the same ’employees’ who shot to death five johns last week and were being arraigned for murder? Think about it, Greg. If it hadn’t been for their ‘employers’ who put up an astronomical bail, the unlucky assholes would have been in my jail instead of being charred like roast pigs on a barbecue spit in last night’s fire.”
At that point, Sheriff Thompson pulled his horse to a stop and positioned himself in front of the Martin and Greg. His face was tight with anger and his eyes flashed a clear warning.
“Even though you are a lawyer, Greg, you may need a refresher course in the limits of the law. As you well know, we didn’t have a subpoena and had no legal right to go on Bai’s property without his permission. And one more thing, Greg, I don’t know any law in this land or any other civilized country that would classify fifty children forced to work as prostitutes as merchandise.”
Greg knew he was treading close to the edge of the sheriff’s infamous temper, but Martin Quince, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, jumped in.
“For Christ sakes, Jim, you aren’t that stupid. You know goddamn well that the mob will want answers and they will want the Frenchman and his band of Chink hooligans held accountable for the crime they committed. I can assure you that on behalf of the governor and myself, we will make it clear to the New York business leaders that our local lawmen weren’t up to the job.”
Sheriff Thompson moved his horse up within inches of the insufferable lieutenant governor. His voice was soft, controlled.
“Are you threatening me, Martin?”
Martin’s face reddened and he mumbled something under his breath.
“Look, Jim, all Greg and I are saying is that you had the guy dead to rights and you let that arrogant prick ride roughshod over you. And someone is going to have to pay the consequences.”
The sheriff didn’t respond. Instead, he turned his horse back to the road and made a point of riding up next to Marshal York and Tom Creighton, who chose not to get involved in the angry conversation between Greg
and the sheriff.
Greg was furious with the sheriff. His refusal to arrest Bai or retrieve the young girls made his job exponentially more difficult. By God, he would find a way to make sure that the sheriff got the blame, not him. But at this moment, he wasn’t about to let the son of a bitch have the last word
Ignoring the sheriff, he caught up with Marshal York.
“Do you have anything to say, marshal, since your colleague seems to have thrown in the towel and has more respect for a Chink warlord than he does for the law?”
The sheriff snorted at Greg’s outrageous comment and replied with a derisive grin.
“I gotta say, Greg, you seem to be taking this incident a mite personally. While I don’t appreciate your misstatement of my position, I will ignore it and chalk it up to your obvious envy of Bai. But then Elena McManus is without a doubt the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen. It must rankle like hell that she chose a Chink warlord, or was that a Chink hooligan, over a fine, upstanding full blooded American like you.”
Chuckling at the flush of rage on Greg’s face, the sheriff’s grin spread across his wrinkled face.
“But I will grant you one of your assumptions. Given a choice between aligning with the mob or the Frenchman, you can be damn sure I will choose the Frenchman. You might want to take Bai’s advice and seek his protection. Marcello isn’t gonna take this lying down. They are going to need scapegoats and upstanding politicians like our fair lieutenant governor here and even you might be temping candidates. As for myself, I will take the Frenchman up on his offer of protection. He’s done a hell of a job to date, and if the mob gets their heads outa their asses, they will know they’ve been outmanned.”
Greg didn’t try to hide his anger. Ignoring the sheriff, he turned again to Pete York.