“Exactly what have you in mind?”
“It must be somebody who has a house out in the country, the farther the better, the more secluded the better. They would phone one of the Chinese employment offices that they needed three servants—cook, house-man, and chauffeur. We throw in the cook for good measure, to cover the game. It’s got to be air-tight on the other end, and, if we’re going to catch our fish, we have to give ’em time to investigate. So whoever does it must have some servants, and must put up a bluff—I mean in his own neighborhood—that they are leaving, and the servants must be in on it. And we’ve got to wait a couple of days, so our friends here will have time to investigate. I think we’d better use Fong Yick’s employment agency, on Washington Street.
“Whoever does it could phone Fong Yick tomorrow morning, and say he’d be in Thursday morning to look the applicants over. This is Monday—that’ll be long enough. Our helper gets at the employment office at ten Thursday morning. Miss Shan and I arrive in a taxicab ten minutes later, when he’ll be in the middle of questioning the applicants. I’ll slide out of the taxi into Fong Yick’s, grab anybody that looks like one of our missing servants. Miss Shan will come in a minute or two behind me and check me up—so there won’t be any false-arrest mixups.”
The Old Man nodded approval.
“Very well,” he said. “I think I can arrange it. I will let you know tomorrow.”
I went home to bed. Thus ended the first day.
III
At nine the next morning, Tuesday, I was talking to Cipriano in the lobby of the apartment building that employs him. His eyes were black drops of ink in white saucers. He thought he had got something.
“Yes, sir! Strange Chinaboys are in town, some of them. They sleep in a house on Waverly Place—on the western side, four houses from the house of Jair Quon, where I sometimes play dice. And there is more—I talk to a white man who knows they are hatchet-men from Portland and Eureka and Sacramento. They are Hip Sing men—a tong war starts—pretty soon, maybe.”
“Do these birds look like gunmen to you?”
Cipriano scratched his head.
“No, sir, maybe not. But a fellow can shoot sometimes if he don’t look like it. This man tells me they are Hip Sing men.”
“Who was this white man?”
“I don’t know the name, but he lives there. A short man—snow-bird.”
“Grey hair, yellowish eyes?”
“Yes, sir.”
That, as likely as not, would be Dummy Uhl. One of my men was stringing the other. The tong stuff hadn’t sounded right to me anyhow. Once in a while they mix things, but usually they are blamed for somebody else’s crimes. Most wholesale killings in Chinatown are the result of family or clan feuds—such as the ones the “Four Brothers” used to stage.
“This house where you think the strangers are living—know anything about it?”
“No, sir. But maybe you could go through there to the house of Chang Li Ching on other street—Spofford Alley.”
“So? And who is this Chang Li Ching?”
“I don’t know, sir. But he is there. Nobody sees him, but all Chinaboys say he is great man.”
“So? And his house is in Spofford Alley?”
“Yes, sir, a house with red door and red steps. You find it easy, but better not fool with Chang Li Ching.”
I didn’t know whether that was advice or just a general remark.
“A big gun, huh?” I probed.
But my Filipino didn’t really know anything about this Chang Li Ching. He was basing his opinion of the Chinese’s greatness on the attitude of his fellow countrymen when they mentioned him.
“Learn anything about the two Chinese men?” I asked after I had fixed this point.
“No, sir, but I will—you bet!”
I praised him for what he had done, told him to try it again that night, and went back to my rooms to wait for Dummy Uhl, who had promised to come there at ten-thirty. It was not quite ten when I got there, so I used some of my spare time to call up the office. The Old Man said Dick Foley—our shadow ace—was idle, so I borrowed him. Then I fixed my gun and sat down to wait for my stool-pigeon.
He rang the bell at eleven o’clock. He came in frowning tremendously.
“I don’t know what t’ hell to make of it, kid,” he spoke importantly over the cigarette he was rolling. “There’s sumpin’ makin’ down there, an’ that’s a fact. Things ain’t been anyways quiet since the Japs began buyin’ stores in the Chink streets, an’ maybe that’s got sumpin’ to do with it. But there ain’t no strange Chinks in town—not a damn one! I got a hunch your men have gone down to L. A., but I expec’ t’ know f’r certain tonight. I got a Chink ribbed up t’ get the dope; ’f I was you, I’d put a watch on the boats at San Pedro. Maybe those fellas’ll swap papers wit’ a coupla Chink sailors that’d like t’ stay here.”
“And there are no strangers in town?”
“Not any.”
“Dummy,” I said bitterly, “you’re a liar, and you’re a boob, and I’ve been playing you for a sucker. You were in on that killing, and so were your friends, and I’m going to throw you in the can, and your friends on top of you!”
I put my gun in sight, close to his scared-grey face.
“Keep yourself still while I do my phoning!”
Reaching for the telephone with my free hand, I kept one eye on the Dummy.
It wasn’t enough. My gun was too close to him.
He yanked it out of my hand. I jumped for him.
The gun turned in his fingers. I grabbed it—too late. It went off, its muzzle less than a foot from where I’m thickest. Fire stung my body.
Clutching the gun with both hands I folded down to the floor. Dummy went away from there, leaving the door open behind him.
One hand on my burning belly, I crossed to the window and waved an arm at Dick Foley, stalling on a corner down the street. Then I went to the bathroom and looked to my wound. A blank cartridge does hurt if you catch it close up!
My vest and shirt and union suit were ruined, and I had a nasty scorch on my body. I greased it, taped a cushion over it, changed my clothes, loaded the gun again, and went down to the office to wait for word from Dick. The first trick in the game looked like mine. Heroin or no heroin, Dummy Uhl would not have jumped me if my guess—based on the trouble he was taking to make his eyes look right and the lie he had sprung on me about there being no strangers in Chinatown—hadn’t hit close to the mark.
Dick wasn’t long in joining me.
“Good pickings!” he said when he came in. The little Canadian talks like a thrifty man’s telegram. “Beat it for phone. Called Hotel Irvington. Booth—couldn’t get anything but number. Ought to be enough. Then Chinatown. Dived in cellar west side Waverly Place. Couldn’t stick close enough to spot place. Afraid to take chance hanging around. How do you like it?”
“I like it all right. Let’s look up ‘The Whistler’s’ record.”
A file clerk got it for us—a bulky envelope the size of a brief case, crammed with memoranda, clippings and letters. The gentleman’s biography, as we had it, ran like this:
Neil Conyers, alias The Whistler, was born in Philadelphia—out on Whiskey Hill—in 1883. In ’94, at the age of eleven, he was picked up by the Washington police. He had gone there to join Coxey’s Army. They sent him home. In ’98 he was arrested in his home town for stabbing another lad in a row over an election-night bonfire. This time he was released in his parents’ custody. In 1901 the Philadelphia police grabbed him again, charging him with being the head of the first organized automobile-stealing ring. He was released without trial, for lack of evidence. But the district attorney lost his job in the resultant scandal. In 1908 Conyers appeared on the Pacific Coast—at Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, and Los Angeles—in company with a con-man known as “Duster” Hughes. Hughes
was shot and killed the following year by a man whom he’d swindled in a fake airplane manufacturing deal. Conyers was arrested on the same deal. Two juries disagreed and he was turned loose. In 1910 the Post Office Department’s famous raid on get-rich-quick promoters caught him. Again there wasn’t enough evidence against him to put him away. In 1915 the law scored on him for the first time. He went to San Quentin for buncoing some visitors to the Panama-Pacific International Exposition. He stayed there for three years. In 1919 he and a Jap named Hasegawa nicked the Japanese colony of Seattle for $20,000, Conyers posing as an American who had held a commission in the Japanese army during that late war. He had a counterfeit medal of the Order of the Rising Sun which the emperor was supposed to have pinned on him. When the game fell through, Hasegawa’s family made good the $20,000—Conyers got out of it with a good profit and not even any disagreeable publicity. The thing had been hushed. He returned to San Francisco after that, bought the Hotel Irvington, and had been living there now for five years without anybody being able to add another word to his criminal record. He was up to something, but nobody could learn what. There wasn’t a chance in the world of getting a detective into his hotel as a guest. Apparently the joint was always without vacant rooms. It was as exclusive as the Pacific-Union Club.
This, then, was the proprietor of the hotel Dummy Uhl had got on the phone before diving into his hole in Chinatown.
I had never seen Conyers. Neither had Dick. There were a couple of photographs in his envelope. One was the profile and full-face photograph of the local police, taken when he had been picked up on the charge that led him to San Quentin. The other was a group picture: all rung up in evening clothes, with the phoney Japanese medal on his chest, he stood among half a dozen of the Seattle Japs he had trimmed—a flashlight picture taken while he was leading them to the slaughter.
These pictures showed him to be a big bird, fleshy, pompous-looking, with a heavy, square chin and shrewd eyes.
“Think you could pick him up?” I asked Dick.
“Sure.”
“Suppose you go up there and see if you can get a room or apartment somewhere in the neighborhood—one you can watch the hotel from. Maybe you’ll get a chance to tail him around now and then.”
I put the pictures in my pocket, in case they’d come in handy, dumped the rest of the stuff back in its envelope, and went into the Old Man’s office.
“I arranged that employment office stratagem,” he said. “A Frank Paul, who has a ranch out beyond Martinez, will be in Fong Yick’s establishment at ten Thursday morning, carrying out his part.”
“That’s fine! I’m going calling in Chinatown now. If you don’t hear from me for a couple of days, will you ask the street-cleaners to watch what they’re sweeping up?”
He said he would.
IV
San Francisco’s Chinatown jumps out of the shopping district at California Street and runs north to the Latin Quarter—a strip two blocks wide by six long. Before the fire nearly twenty-five thousand Chinese lived in those dozen blocks. I don’t suppose the population is a third of that now.
Grant Avenue, the main street and spine of this strip, is for most of its length a street of gaudy shops catering to the tourist trade and flashy chop-suey houses, where the racket of American jazz orchestras drowns the occasional squeak of a Chinese flute. Farther out, there isn’t so much paint and gilt, and you can catch the proper Chinese smell of spices and vinegar and dried things. If you leave the main thoroughfares and show places and start poking around in alleys and dark corners, and nothing happens to you, the chances are you’ll find some interesting things—though you won’t like some of them.
However, I wasn’t poking around as I turned off Grant Avenue at Clay Street, and went up to Spofford Alley, hunting for the house with red steps and red door, which Cipriano had said was Chang Li Ching’s. I did pause for a few seconds to look up Waverly Place when I passed it. The Filipino had told me the strange Chinese were living there, and that he thought their house might lead through to Chang Li Ching’s; and Dick Foley had shadowed Dummy Uhl there.
But I couldn’t guess which was the important house. Four doors from Jair Quon’s gambling house, Cipriano had said, but I didn’t know where Jair Quon’s was. Waverly Place was a picture of peace and quiet just now. A fat Chinese was stacking crates of green vegetables in front of a grocery. Half a dozen small yellow boys were playing at marbles in the middle of the street. On the other side, a blond young man in tweeds was climbing the six steps from a cellar to the street, a painted Chinese woman’s face showing for an instant before she closed the door behind him. Up the street a truck was unloading rolls of paper in front of one of the Chinese newspaper plants. A shabby guide was bringing four sightseers out of the Temple of the Queen of Heaven—a joss house over the Sue Hing headquarters.
I went on up to Spofford Alley and found my house with no difficulty at all. It was a shabby building with steps and door the color of dried blood, its windows solidly shuttered with thick, tight-nailed planking. What made it stand out from its neighbors was that its ground floor wasn’t a shop or place of business. Purely residential buildings are rare in Chinatown: almost always the street floor is given to business, with the living quarters in cellar or upper stories.
I went up the three steps and tapped the red door with my knuckles.
Nothing happened.
I hit it again, harder. Still nothing. I tried it again, and this time was rewarded by the sounds of scraping and clicking inside.
At least two minutes of this scraping and clicking, and the door swung open—a bare four inches.
One slanting eye and a slice of wrinkled brown face looked out of the crack at me, above the heavy chain that held the door.
“Whata wan’?”
“I want to see Chang Li Ching.”
“No savvy. Maybe closs stleet.”
“Bunk! You fix your little door and run back and tell Chang Li Ching I want to see him.”
“No can do! No savvy Chang.”
“You tell him I’m here,” I said, turning my back on the door. I sat down on the top step, and added, without looking around, “I’ll wait.”
While I got my cigarettes out there was silence behind me. Then the door closed softly and the scraping and clicking broke out behind it. I smoked a cigarette and another and let time go by, trying to look like I had all the patience there was. I hoped this yellow man wasn’t going to make a chump of me by letting me sit there until I got tired of it.
Chinese passed up and down the alley, scuffling along in American shoes that can never be made to fit them. Some of them looked curiously at me, some gave me no attention at all. An hour went to waste, and a few minutes, and then the familiar scraping and clicking disturbed the door.
The chain rattled as the door swung open. I wouldn’t turn my head.
“Go ’way! No catch ’em Chang!”
I said nothing. If he wasn’t going to let me in he would have let me sit there without further attention.
A pause.
“Whata wan’?”
“I want to see Chang Li Ching,” I said without looking around.
Another pause, ended by the banging of the chain against the door-frame.
“All light.”
I chucked my cigarette into the street, got up and stepped into the house. In the dimness I could make out a few pieces of cheap and battered furniture. I had to wait while the Chinese put four arm-thick bars across the door and padlocked them there. Then he nodded at me and scuffled across the floor, a small, bent man with hairless yellow head and a neck like a piece of rope.
Out of this room, he led me into another, darker still, into a hallway, and down a flight of rickety steps. The odors of musty clothing and damp earth were strong. We walked through the dark across a dirt floor for a while, turned to the left, and cement was under my feet. We tu
rned twice more in the dark, and then climbed a flight of unplaned wooden steps into a hall that was fairly light with the glow from shaded electric lights.
In this hall my guide unlocked a door, and we crossed a room where cones of incense burned, and where, in the light of an oil lamp, little red tables with cups of tea stood in front of wooden panels, marked with Chinese characters in gold paint, which hung on the walls. A door on the opposite side of this room let us into pitch blackness, where I had to hold the tail of my guide’s loose made-to-order blue coat.
So far he hadn’t once looked back at me since our tour began, and neither of us had said anything. This running upstairs and downstairs, turning to the right and turning to the left, seemed harmless enough. If he got any fun out of confusing me, he was welcome. I was confused enough now, so far as the directions were concerned. I hadn’t the least idea where I might be. But that didn’t disturb me so much. If I was going to be cut down, a knowledge of my geographical position wouldn’t make it any more pleasant. If I was going to come out all right, one place was still as good as another.
We did a lot more of the winding around, we did some stair-climbing and some stair-descending, and the rest of the foolishness. I figured I’d been indoors nearly half an hour by now, and I had seen nobody but my guide.
Then I saw something else.
We were going down a long, narrow hall that had brown-painted doors close together on either side. All these doors were closed—secretive-looking in the dim light. Abreast of one of them, a glint of dull metal caught my eye—a dark ring in the door’s center.
I went to the floor.
Going down as if I’d been knocked, I missed the flash. But I heard the roar, smelled the powder.
My guide spun around, twisting out of one slipper. In each of his hands was an automatic as big as a coal scuttle. Even while trying to get my own gun out I wondered how so puny a man could have concealed so much machinery on him.
The big guns in the little man’s hands flamed at me. Chinese-fashion, he was emptying them—crash! crash! crash!
Corkscrew and Other Stories Page 10