by Arlette Lees
“Oh, I really don’t think…” He tries to keep his eyes on her face, but they drift to the bodice of her dress. She stands on tiptoe and kisses him lightly on the mouth, brushing against him sort of accidentally on purpose. Her eyes are dark and sparkling, her lips the color of deep red wine.
“Be honest, Cho. I know when a man is die to play with fire. Eight o’clock. You no come, I cry like baby.”
CHAPTER 6
Leland Dietrich waits for the clock in the foyer to strike two, then seeing no light beneath Frances’s bedroom door, coasts his yellow bomb down the driveway. At the bottom of the hill, beyond earshot of the house, he fires up the engine. He streaks through town, over the railroad track, beyond the packing house and into Chinatown. He parks near the Dragon Gate, then ventures on foot into the hutongs…the narrow alleys no wider than a man’s arm span.
He walks through passageways smelling of garbage, urine and insense. Buildings list and crumble, each rickety floor tacked above the shaky level beneath. Bright paper lanterns are strung from balcony to balcony. Over the decades Chinatown has been destroyed by quake and arson, the inhabitants decimated by angry mobs, cholera and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1872, but each time, it rises like a Phoenix from the ashes.
Dietrich passes the silk shop, the apothecary and an opium den that sends clouds of sweet smoke into the night. Behind a grocery store window he sees shriveled black mushrooms as big as a man’s fist, bouquets of dried herbs, two live geese in a wire cage, a pan of frog legs and a dozen smoked cats hanging from their hind legs like laundry on a line.
At the end of the alley, he turns sideways and squeezes through an opening between two buildings into a circular cobblestone courtyard. This is the dark heart of Chinatown. Sing-Song girls, indentured to years of slavery, beckon from barred cages containing a candle, a cot and a wash basin. Music from their lips is one of carnal invitation and infinite melancholy.
Black-clad men, with long braids down their backs, recognize the fair-haired man who enters their world. They exchange disapproving glances as he pushes to the front of the line.
Shu Ling reaches through the bars of her cage and tugs at his sleeve, but he ignores her. She used to be his favorite pleasure girl when she worked out of the master’s house, but at fifteen, she’s used up and no longer of interest to him. He claps his leather-gloved hands and calls for Fu Gang, the richest man in Chinatown.
A coolie trots across the square to a red-pillared house with gilded cornices. Within moments the fat slave-monger appears with an obsequious bow. Fu Gang detests the arrogant foreigner, but he likes his money and would like to have more of it. In the entry a servant takes his coat and gloves and he enters a parlor decorated with ornaments of ivory and gold, carved dragon chairs and painted screens imbedded with semi-precious stones. The family has done well in their chosen profession.
A young girl pours tea for an old woman who studies Dietrich over her opium pipe. The girl wears the cropped hair of childhood and teeters gracefully on tiny velvet-slippered feet, her eyes cast downcast.
“What’s her name?” asks Dietrich.
“That’s my mother.”
“The other one.”
“Dong Lan.”
“And its meaning?”
“Winter Orchid.”
“Winter Orchid. I like that. It has such a cool, chaste ring.”
“She’s my youngest daughter and she’s not for sale.”
Dietrich cuts his eyes to Fu Gang’s face.
“Everything is for sale if the price is right. You told me that yourself.”
The girl’s grandmother waves a hand to silence her son. Her wrinkled fingers are ringed in lapis lazuli and carnelian and in her eye is the unmistakable glitter of greed.
“This child is worth an emperor’s ransom,” she says. “Look at the nice man, Dong Lan.” The girl looks up. Her eyes are a startling emerald green set in white porcelain features… not the first child he’s seen of Irish-Chinese ancestry… but the loveliest.
As soon as Fu Gang opens his mouth to speak, the old woman barks at him. “Don’t be a fool! She is only a female child.” She smiles and demands American money, double the usual rate and he agrees without hesitation. “You may have the Cherry Blossom Room at the top of the house,” she says. Dietrich smirks as Fu Gang bows his head and silently withdraws.
A slit-eyed eunuch, with painted lips, a flower behind his ear and a dagger in his sash, appears from behind a drape and carries Dong Lan up the stairs. Before Dietrich takes a second step the withered hag holds out her hand. “The money first.” He hands it over. When you have a rich wife, money comes easily, like water from a spigot. Their hands touch, hers cold and reptilian. When he jerks away, her laughter sounds like the crackle of dry parchment.
The upstairs hall is sweet with incense, the silvery sound of wind chimes floating up from the garden. He takes a deep breath and opens the first door on the right. The bed is big and satiny and strewn with gold-embroidered pillows. It is also empty.
Instead of the girl, he finds himself looking down the barrel of Fu Gang’s gun. The eunuch jumps from behind the door and his curved dagger slices through Dietrich’s shirt, leaving a long, red scratch on his soft white gut. He flees down the hall with a bullet whistling past his ear.
Dietrich is on the ground floor before he takes his next breath. Winter Orchid is gone and so is his money. He bolts from the house, a second bullet whining over his head. He hears the uproarious laughter of the men lined up at the cribs and squeezes back between the buildings into the hutong.
After a quarter mile Dietrich stumbles to a stop. If anyone in the Fatherland had dared laugh at him, he’d have cut them down with impunity. He leans against the wall of a grand house to catch his breath. Visible through the window he sees fringed red and gold lanterns hanging from the ceiling, laughter and music drifting into the street.
A slice of light spills into the alleyway and a willowy young courtesan passes through a beaded curtain. She’s a painted doll with glittering ornaments in her hair. She smiles sweetly and in a tongue that needs no translation, invites him inside. Dietrich, still burning with shame and humiliation lets out a guttural bellow. He punches the girl in the face as hard as he’d hit a man and runs wailing into the night.
* * * *
In the hour before dawn, the phone rings at Frances Dietrich’s bedside.
“What?” she says, snapping on the bedside lamp.
“It’s Darrell Singleton, ma’am, from the Pinkerton Agency. You asked me to call as soon as I had something to report.”
“Yes, yes, go on.”
“Tonight I followed Mr. Dietrich into Chinatown. I hung back as he entered the courtyard of the Sing-Song girls. When he left, half an hour later, he was being fired upon.”
Frances pulls herself up on her pillows and grabs her cigarettes.
“As in gun fire?”
“Yes. It appears he’s worn out his welcome in the hutongs.”
“Will I have the pleasure of wearing widow’s weeds?” she asks, coughing a light mist of blood onto the bedspread.
“Not this time, but I’m afraid his carnal indiscretions are only the tip of the iceberg.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“When you met him on your grand tour, you said he was a German guest lecturer at the university.”
“Yes, he was quite cosmopolitan, educated at Oxford, spoke the Queen’s English like a native Londoner.”
“Which makes him all the more dangerous, Mrs. Dietrich. According to our research he was dispatched to England to spread anti-Semitic propaganda.”
“How can you know that?”
“The documents in my report have been checked and rechecked. There’s talk in Europe that the Nazi’s are gearing up for another war.”
“There’s one more thing you need to know. The man you married was born Ludwig Gerhard von Buchholz. Usually people who change their names have something to hide.”
“Now you’re stretching my credibility.”
“I deal only with the facts. His father Heinz holds a high position in the SS.”
“Oh, come now, you can’t mean he’s one of those Nazi clowns who struts around with a riding crop and a Doberman Pincher at his heels.”
“The Schutzstaffel. They’re men of enormous influence. Let me remind you, an apple doesn’t falling far from the tree.”
“That’s all very intriguing. I’d be crushed if I hadn’t ceased loving Leland ages ago. I wonder why he was so eager to come to America?”
“Your money may have been a motivating factor.”
“Daddy told me when I was just a girl that any man I married would be proposing to my money. I wasn’t much of a looker and I can’t say I much cared. I bet Red’s up there laughing his butt off.”
“Now that his infidelities are well-documented, shall I send you a closing bill?”
“No. Keep digging. This is getting interesting.”
“By the way Mrs. Dietrich, he’s just now pulling onto your street. I’ll be in touch.”
CHAPTER 7
SAGUARO CORRECTIONAL
EARLY MAY 1936
Penelope Hanover makes sure the lights are out in Hedy’s cabin. In the distance, the Alamillo Escarpment is dark and foreboding, coyotes yipping from the summit of the pinnacles. She fingers the cameo broach at the throat of her blouse. For a girl who follows the rules, she’s made a decision that could get her in big trouble. On the other hand, if she unravels the mystery of the missing girls, she’ll be a hero. She slips quietly outside, carrying her flashlight and key ring, locking the door behind her. She picks her way over the stony ground to the administration building.
The janitorial staff has arrived, their truck parked outside the main entrance. She enters the double doors and sees no one in the hall, just a broom and floor buffer against the wall, the crew busy on the second floor. She hurries to the records room, closes the door and snaps on the desk lamp.
Patty Gregson. Velma Becker. Sarah Levin. Once she heard the names spoken into the short wave she couldn’t get them out of her head. She’s convinced that something other than their disappearances links the three girls. They’re listed as runaways, but she doesn’t think it’s that simple.
Penny sets her key ring and flashlight on the desk. In the top drawer is the key that opens the metal file cabinet. She pulls the girl’s charts and takes a seat at the desk. She starts with Patty Gregson and flips through the text. Age thirteen. Grade seven. After giving birth to Patty’s little sister, Patty’s mother kept repeating, “Thank God, I finally have a perfect child.”
Feeling worthless and rejected, Patty smothered the baby in retaliation. She attempted suicide twice before confessing to the crime. After counseling at Saguaro, she’d become less self-destructive and her grades went from straight F’s to D’s and C’s. Penny studies the snapshot in Patty’s file. Patty is a waif with limp blond hair and a purple birthmark that covers the entire right side of her face, not the child her mother felt she deserved.
Penny sets the file aside and opens Velma Becker’s chart.
Velma Becker, age fifteen, grade nine, smashed the statue of St. Bernadette and poured bleach in the grotto, killing the goldfish at St. Sebastian’s Church in Dry Rock. She accused Father Jerome of seducing her and her mother of aborting her when she became pregnant with his child. Both the priest and mother vehemently denied the accusations. Since her incarceration, Velma has developed a violent stammer and finally stopped talking entirely. Her photo reveals a bitter, smoldering fury… the look of a child betrayed.
Next is Sarah Levin, the only girl with whom Penny is acquainted. Sarah is endowed with Biblical beauty: deep brown eyes, shiny black hair and golden-olive complexion. When Sarah’s mother died, she left Sarah a college fund. When her father remarried, his new wife purchased a sable coat, draining the account. Sarah sent the fancy fur through the wash cycle of the Maytag and squeezed it through the ringer. The girl was a straight A student and only had a month to go before release from Saguaro. Why run away with only 30 days to go? It made no sense.
The three girls are different from one another in age, grade and offence, yet they vanished at the same time. Before that night it’s doubtful they came closer to one another than passing in the hall. Mrs. Coleman, the dorm matron, said they never made it to roll call on the night they went missing. It was assumed they hid on the grounds, then fled under cover of darkness. Penny doubts that scenario.
She examines each file one more time, squinting at photos, rereading the text. She closes her eyes and concentrates. Patty had a birth mark, Velma, a stutter. That’s a vague connection, but only between the two. Sarah has neither disfigurement nor disability.
Blut. Reinheit. Mangel.
The words spin inside her head.
Blood. Purity. Defect.
Penny lets out a gasp and tosses the files back in the cabinet. She turns off the lamp, drops her flashlight and retrieves it. When she rises, her heel catches her hem and rips her skirt. Suddenly, everything makes sense and a frightening, almost incomprehensible, theory takes shape.
The housekeeping staff starts down the stairs to the clatter of buckets and mops. Penny snaps off the light, bolts down the hall and out the door. It isn’t until she’s outside that she realizes she’s left her key ring behind and the key to the unlocked file cabinet is still in her hand.
* * * *
Hedy Greiss watches Penelope hurry from the building. The girl has a dangerous condition known as, ‘insatiable curiosity.’ The accountant steps from the shadows as the housekeeping staff arrives in the lobby.
“Jesus,” she says. The head janitor turns her way.
“Si, Senorita?”
“I just saw a woman flee the building.”
“You’re the only one I see tonight, Senorita Greiss.”
“I distinctly saw Miss Hanover leave the records room.”
“At this time of night?”
“That’s what concerns me. I’d better make sure everything’s in order. From now on, lock the doors when your crew is at work.”
“What about you?”
“You needn’t worry, Jesus. I have my own key.”
Hedy snaps on the overhead in the record’s room. The file cabinet is closed, but not locked. Even if Penny looked at the files, she wouldn’t know what to look for. Then again, it’s a chance Hedy isn’t willing to take. On the desktop is a metal ring with Hanover’s car key and the key to Bungalow 5. How considerate of the little idiot to leave her calling card at the scene of the crime. Now she’s locked out of her cabin and her car.
Hedy goes through the drawers of the desk, not sure what she’s looking for. She finds a jar holding petty cash. There’s about twenty dollars in bills and a handful of change. She pockets the bills, hides the jar inside her coat and returns to the lobby.
“I’m afraid we have a thief in our midst,” she says, dangling Penny’s keys from her fingers. Now the petty cash is missing.”
“You want I should wake up Mr. Churchwell?”
“I’ll take care of it, Jesus. You may, however, be asked to sign a witness statement.”
CHAPTER 8
Five days out of Oklahoma and Ed Thompson pulls the flatbed next to a ditch outside Santa Paulina. If the truck holds up, they’ll turn west at Manteca, go through the Altamont Pass and on to Castroville to work the winter crops.
Ed’s wife, Anna, and his three daughters climb stiffly from the back of the truck while Ed and son Frankie raise the hood. The e
ngine snaps and pings in the stillness. Frankie wraps his hand in a mechanic’s rag and carefully works the radiator cap, releasing a rush of angry steam.
The girls double over in breathless laughter as their terrier, Speedy, gives the one-legged salute to every roadside weed. Anna smiles behind the Bible that seldom leaves her hand. The dog bounds down the side of the ditch, lapping and splashing in the few inches of water at the bottom. Within minutes he’s worked his way thirty feet down the highway.
Father and son light their corncob pipes and give the truck a rest, the radiator hissing at their backs. They talk quietly and study the map, the breeze blowing cinders from the bowls of their pipes. They smoke in comfortable silence while the engine cools, then tap their pipes clean. Ed tops off the radiator from a jug of water and Frankie tightens the ropes that secure the sum of their worldly possessions to the shell of the truck… bed frames…wash tubs…a crate of laying hens…you name it.
“Okay, everyone back in the truck,” says Ed.
“Speedy won’t come, Daddy,” says Dona.
“Go fetch him, Frankie. We gotta get going.”
Frankie walks along the roadside, slides down the bank and finds Speedy pawing at a raggedy blue jacket in the few inches of water at the bottom. He kneels down for a closer look and nudges Speedy aside. Inside the jacket is a small, thin boy, cold and lifeless. A knit cap and school book lie nearby. The dog looks up at Frankie and whines.
“It’s okay, Speedy,” but it isn’t okay at all. Speedy noses the dead boy’s hand and licks his cheek, the same way he wakes the girls for school back home. Sensing something isn’t quite right, Ed walks down the gravel shoulder. Frankie looks up, shakes his head and gives his father a silent communication so as not to upset his little sisters.
“Come out of the ditch, son, and leave things as they are,” he says. Frankie gathers up the dog and climbs to the road.