A Wanted Man

by Rebecca Hagan Lee

  There was nothing new in the story. Girls were bought and sold as brides, as concubines, as prostitutes, and as domestic servants in Hong Kong and the mainland of China every day. Females served their families in any way they could, just as sons supported the family as best they could. It was a tradition as old as time in China. The only thing new about it was that this time the girl sold into slavery was Su Mi, and Julie had promised her friend’s mother she would find Su Mi and bring her home.

  Julie had chosen the Silken Angel because it was new and clean and seemed to cater to a higher class of customers than the other saloons she’d skirted along the way. The name on the sign had drawn her: THE SILKEN ANGEL. It sounded like Su Mi—refined and elegant—and Julie found that entering it hadn’t been nearly as daunting as the prospect of entering the others. Su Mi spoke proper English and was well educated. Surely she would be found in a place where gentlemen who valued such things sought pleasure. . . .

  As far as I know, there are no young ladies upstairs. Only me.

  Will Keegan’s words drifted back to her. Julie hoped he was telling the truth. She hoped there weren’t any girls working above stairs in the Silken Angel. But if what he’d told her was true, why have rooms upstairs that only men were allowed to frequent?

  Her father belonged to a gentleman’s club in Hong Kong, where he drank and dined several times a week when he was in port. His club kept rooms available for its members and valets hired to attend them. A gentleman could look upon his club as a home away from home. He could rent a room or a suite of rooms at the club for a nominal fee by the night, the week, the month, or on a quarterly or an annual basis, to live there or to use as his base of operations for business. Perhaps the Silken Angel operated in a similar fashion. While it appeared to be primarily a drinking and gaming establishment, might it also provide lodging for customers who frequented it? Will Keegan lived there. Surely other gentlemen might live there as well.

  The members of the Salvationists she’d spoken with following her arrival had assured Julie that every saloon between the Embarcadero and Van Ness Avenue had girls working above stairs. She hoped the Silken Angel proved to be the exception. San Francisco was full of saloons that catered to the lower classes, and they weren’t the only establishments to do so. There were boardinghouses and bordellos on nearly every block to accommodate the large numbers of sailors, soldiers, miners, railroad workers, cattlemen, gamblers, Chinese, and ne’er-do-wells and drifters of all nationalities and walks of life.

  Will Keegan was the proprietor of a saloon. Julie didn’t like to think of him compounding his sins by dabbling in the flesh trade. She wanted him to be above that sort of commerce in human misery. Because there was something about the Silken Angel that appealed to her.

  Although she wouldn’t admit it to anyone but herself, Julie was frightened. She was alone for the first time in her life, and filled with trepidation at the thought of entering a bordello. If men could be shanghaied from waterfront saloons and pressed into naval service, wasn’t it possible for lone women to disappear from city streets and be pressed into service in the hundreds of bordellos and cribs hidden among them?

  Somehow, saloons seemed safer. In a rough, wild city like San Francisco, with bars and saloons on every corner, the Silken Angel and its handsome, dark-haired, brown-eyed, chiseled-jawed owner made her feel safe. She particularly liked the color of his eyes—not the dark brown of melted chocolate, but the sparkling golden brown of expensive sherry. She found his clean, masculine smell, his wide, hard chest, the way he’d closed his arms around her to keep her from falling, and the cleft in his chin equally appealing.

  Julie had been completely confident of her eventual success when she’d joined the Salvationists and paid for her passage to America. She had been born and brought up in Hong Kong. She knew the Chinese, knew their languages and customs. She knew about ports and waterfronts from her father, but San Francisco was proving to be much larger and more intimidating than she’d anticipated. She had spent only one night there, but she’d hated the women’s dormitory at the Salvationist headquarters.

  After spending her entire life in a fine house with a room of her own and servants and her weeks at sea in the private cabin she’d paid for, Julie was accustomed to privacy. The notion of sharing space with strangers was as foreign to her as the notion of providing every missionary and rescued soul with space of their own was unheard-of to the Salvationists. The women’s dormitory was one large open room that had once been a warehouse and was now crammed with rows of beds, each made up with two sheets, one rag-stuffed pillow, and a scratchy woolen blanket. There were wooden chests at the foot of each bed to store belongings, and pegs on the wall to hang things. There were no locks on the trunks or on the doors. Missionaries didn’t require privacy. They were not supposed to have anything to hide. Besides, missionaries didn’t pilfer through one’s belongings or take what didn’t belong to them.

  There were no dressing tables, no screens, and no armoires.

  The dormitory had a large iron stove at one end of the room for heat and a washroom at the other end of the room. The washroom contained a washbasin and pitcher, one tin hip bath, one full-length mirror, and a pump that supplied cold water. Hot water had to be heated in kettles on the stove and carried to the basin or the hip tub.

  The privy was outdoors behind the mission.

  Upward of thirty single women occupied the dormitory at any given time. There were no servants. Everyone was expected to make their own beds, carry their own water, empty their own basin, tend the stove to keep the fires lit throughout the chilly nights, and arrange for their own laundry service.

  Single male Salvationists occupied a dormitory one building over from the women’s dormitory, as the two were separated by a central building that housed the kitchen and dining facilities and rooms assigned to the married couples. Julie hadn’t seen the inside of the men’s dormitory, of course, but she suspected it had a similar setup as the women’s dormitory.

  The two meals she’d eaten at the mission had consisted of soup and bread, and porridge and bread. They were hot and filling, but had nothing more to recommend them.

  The servants at Parham House lived better than the missionaries at the Salvationist headquarters. She hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours the night before and didn’t expect to sleep any better tonight. She was exhausted, but she couldn’t get used to the sounds of other women in the room—the rustling of bedclothes, the creak of other beds, the coughing, the whispers, the prayers. As she lay in her bed staring at the ceiling, Julie fought back the hot sting of tears as she thought about her room in Parham House far away in Hong Kong. She longed for her comfortable bed and soft sheets and silk coverlet, for the warmth of the coal fireplace, and Lolly, who was as constant as the rising of the sun. Julie thought of her father sailing the HMS Gallant to faraway ports of call, and wished that he’d been home, that Lolly could have prevailed upon him to search for Su Mi instead of her.

  Remembering Will Keegan’s words, Julie thought longingly of a private room at the Russ House Hotel.

  She had turned the thirty-one dollars over to Mrs. Rowland, the secretary in charge of collections, but she wasn’t destitute without it. Secreted inside the pocket of her corset cover were documents verifying her status as an account holder at the First British Bank of Hong Kong and a letter of credit from the bank president guaranteeing her the right to draw upon her account in any amount up to ten thousand American dollars. She didn’t have to live in the dormitory. She had inherited her mother’s portion of her family’s fortune. The Gramercys were as aristocratic and wealthy as the Parhams, and upon her twenty-first birthday, Julie had become a young lady of independent means, a fact that meant she had little in common with the majority of her fellow Salvationists and nothing in common with the desperate women they fed and clothed and housed.

  As strange as it seemed, the time she’d spent with Will Keegan was more stimulating and more enjoyable than any she’d
spent with her fellow Salvationists during the journey or since her arrival in San Francisco.

  While she did her best to make friends and to fit in, the truth was that Julie wanted nothing more than to wake up in her own bed in her own room at home and discover that her journey and the reason for it were all a bad dream.

  Until that happened, there was nothing for her to do but to screw her courage to the sticking place and continue her search. With courage enough, she would not fail.

  She had made a solemn promise to Lolly, and Julie intended to keep it.

  The Salvationists had provided her with a mission, a place to stay, and valuable information about the city and its inhabitants. She would use what she’d learned from them to carry out her search for Su Mi.

  As far as she knew, there were no rules against a member of the Salvationist movement joining other organizations with similar goals—like the Women’s Suffrage and Temperance League.

  What she couldn’t do through the Salvationists she would have to do on her own. . . .

  Chapter Four

  “When we are planning for posterity, we ought to remember that virtue is not hereditary.”

  —THOMAS PAINE, 1737–1809

  SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA

  WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 17, 1875

  The monthly meeting of the San Francisco Saloon and Bordello Owners’ Association met on Wednesday, nearly a fortnight after the beginning of the Chinese New Year in the basement of the Lotus Blossom, one of the nicest of Madam Li Toy’s boardinghouses. The association, made up of a dozen or so saloon and bordello owners, had been formed three months earlier in order to protect independent business owners from the gangs, or fighting tongs, made up of Chinese members of the criminal underworld seeking to control all gambling, opium, prostitution, protection, and enforcement in the city.

  The Kip Yee and Gee Kong tongs specialized in the extortion and intimidation of business owners and the theft of shipments of goods. The aim of the fighting tongs was to force the independent operators out of business and to assume possession of their establishments.

  Will had formed the association of the San Francisco Saloon and Bordello Owners during the building of the Silken Angel. Representatives from the Kip Yee and the Gee Kong fighting tongs had paid him repeated visits to demand money in exchange for protection from the other neighborhood tongs they had been hired to destroy in a power struggle to acquire more territory in Chinatown. There were benign tongs that served as cultural and social outlets for their members and fighting tongs that were the enforcers and assassins for the criminal tongs. Because members of the Chinese community often belonged to cultural and criminal tongs, Will seized the opportunity to learn the hierarchy of San Francisco’s criminal underbelly—and to find out who allied with whom—by forming the association of business owners operating in the seamier parts of Chinatown and greater San Francisco.

  He sold the saloon and bordello owners on the idea of strength in numbers. Individual businesses might not be able to withstand the change in ownership the tongs were forcing on them, but an association made up of business owners united in a common cause might.

  There were half a dozen fighting tongs vying for control of San Francisco’s lucrative liquor, flesh, opium, and gambling trades , and Will needed to know which ones wanted control of which operations. To that end, he’d begun keeping track of the visits tong members paid to the businesses operating on Dupont Street, recording the dates of the extortion demands and the payments. He started with his own business and expanded his ledgers to include the businesses closest to the Silken Angel. At the first meeting of the association, Will shared his information with the other business owners. By the close of the first meeting, he found himself appointed treasurer of the association, responsible for the account ledgers. He was so good at keeping the ledgers that several of his fellow association members had asked him to help with their books—particularly the businesses with imports to track.

  Imports were the topic of discussion for this morning’s meeting. Li Toy, the most notorious and prosperous madam in Chinatown, had purchased a shipment of girls from the Kwangtung province in China. A select few of the girls would work at Li Toy’s boardinghouse, and the others would be sold at auction to the highest association bidder. Today’s meeting had been called to inform the other members of the association of the time and place of the auction. Shipment arrivals and auctions were kept as quiet as possible to avoid theft at the hands of Kip Yee and his men or the leaders of the other mercenary fighting tongs seeking to strengthen their power.

  Li Toy was anxious about the shipment and speaking rapid-fire Cantonese in a shrill, high-pitched voice that had earned her the nickname “Madam Harpy” among the Chinatown locals. Will struggled to follow her mixture of singsong English and Cantonese as the madam related the times, dates, and places of her payments to tong collection men and to San Francisco policemen, attorneys, and judges for him to record in the ledger.

  They did not discuss the particulars. Li Toy wouldn’t reveal the names, ages, or home villages of the girls from Kwangtung province until the auction. Will jotted that information down in a separate, private ledger he kept locked in the safe at the Silken Angel. That ledger documented everything he learned about the girls Li Toy and the other members of the association imported, including the amounts paid for each and the names of the buyers who purchased them at auction. The private ledger was Will’s way of tracking as many of the girls who inhabited second-floor bedrooms and cribs throughout Chinatown as possible, as well as those who were sent to the mining camps or sold to pimps and madams in other cities. The members of the association knew he made notes during auctions, but they had no idea how much he detailed, and Will meant to keep them ignorant of it by using an almost indecipherable form of personal shorthand he’d perfected during his time as a clerk at Craig Capital. His health and welfare depended upon it, as well as the health and welfare of the girls whose names and personal information were written inside his ledger.

  Li Toy looked tiny and fragile, although she was anything but. She had survived famine and disease, transportation from China, and years as a prostitute before becoming a madam. She owned houses of pleasure and a series of long, narrow, one-story shacks called “cribs” that were sparsely furnished and divided into two curtained compartments. The cribs had three solid walls and a door set with bars that resembled the door of a jail cell. There were cribs throughout the city and in high-country mining camps as far away as Seattle and Gastown, across the border in British Columbia, housing two to six girls apiece. Every crib girl wore a black silk blouse banded by a row of turquoise embroidered flowers that was the traditional costume of prostitutes. They were allowed to wear black silk trousers in cold weather, but most of the time the girls in the cribs wore blouses only and were required to show themselves at the bars of the door and call out to customers night and day.

  Arriving in San Francisco shortly after the gold rush, Li Toy catered to the common man and had clawed her way to the top of her profession. Any empathy she felt for the girls who worked for her was buried along with the girls who displeased or disobeyed her. As far as she was concerned, China was full of girls. What did it matter if three or four disobedient and stupid ones disappeared from San Francisco each month?

  Reaching out, she poked Will in the arm, and he realized that while he’d been woolgathering, Li Toy had been seeking information about a solution to a different threat to her enterprises. “How much?”

  He blinked, then fixed his attention on Li Toy. “How much what?”

  She showered him with a flurry of foreign-devil insults, disregarding the fact that in America, she was as much a foreign devil as he was, before repeating her demand. “How much you pay to shut down mission?”

  “I didn’t pay to shut down the mission,” Will told her.

  “You paid to stop ‘Bringing in the Sheaves,’” Li Toy insisted. “How much?”

  Will frowned. He’d managed to put a temp
orary halt to the constant barrage of “Bringing in the Sheaves.” But if Li Toy knew he’d paid to keep the Salvationists from invading the Silken Angel, he’d bet that she also knew exactly how much he’d paid. “Thirty-one dollars.”

  She gave him a knowing nod. “For how long?”

  “One month.”

  Li Toy cackled in delight. “In two weeks, you have to pay another thirty-one dollars to keep the mission singing away. I offer to pay man thirty dollars to shut mission up permanently.”

  “What?” Will sat up straighter in his chair, giving the madam his undivided attention.

  “You paid thirty-one dollars to stop singing for one month.” She pointed a finger at him. “I offer thirty dollars to stop nosy missionaries from interfering with business and asking questions forever.”

  “To whom?”

  “Policeman,” Li Toy replied. “He needed money to pay Lo Peng. I need relief from nosy missionary girl. I paid him to quiet her.”

  Lo Peng was a fighting tong leader and the owner of a string of opium and gambling dens. Will fought to keep the unease roiling in his stomach from spilling over into his conversation with the madam. “Quiet her how?”

  “However.” Li Toy gave an elegant shrug of her silk-clad shoulders. “I do not care.”

  Unease quickly became dread. “You cannot dispose of a missionary without someone noticing,” Will replied in a calm, businesslike tone, despite the fact that the hair on the back of his neck was standing up in alarm.

  Li Toy gave a derisive snort. “Foolish girls disappear every day in Chinatown. By the time nosy girl is missed, auction will be over. My girls will be working in my houses and other girls will be sold.” She gave Will a meaningful look. “I help you, too. I get rid of fire-haired missionary; you buy upstairs girls for the Silken Angel.”