A Wanted Man

by Rebecca Hagan Lee

  “I didn’t leave those there,” Will told him. “I thought you did.”

  Jack shook his head. “I’m afraid not.”

  They looked at each other. “If it wasn’t me,” Will continued, “and it wasn’t you, who was it? Kitchen help?”

  Jack looked at the dirty pots and pans stacked beside the sink. “Kitchen was clean when Luis left last night.” He added a spoonful of sugar to his coffee, then offered the bowl to Will. “One of the ladies, perhaps?”

  “I don’t think so.” Will waved away the sugar bowl, then added a splash of whiskey to his coffee before offering the bottle to Jack. “Hair of the dog?”

  Jack grimaced. “No, thanks.” He rummaged around the kitchen pantry until he located a tin of biscuits. Retrieving a plate, Jack arranged the shortbread on it and set it on the table between them to share with their coffee.

  Will corked the whiskey bottle and put it aside. “The ladies are all upstairs in their rooms.”

  “I left the soup and the chicken and rice in a covered bowl in the warming oven before I turned in,” Jack said. “Somebody ate it.” He met Will’s gaze. “It had to be one of the girls.”

  “The older girls are still in their beds.” Will reached for a biscuit. “I know because I checked before I came downstairs. I don’t believe any of them would leave the second floor without permission.”

  Jack knew it was unlikely, but he had to ask: “What about the younger ones?”

  “The little ones can’t reach the stove, much less handle a pot of soup. And while they were changing bedrooms upstairs, sleeping two and three to a bed, I don’t think they would have ventured this far alone at night.” Will took a bite of his shortbread.

  “They are sleeping two and three to a bed?” Jack shook his head.

  Will nodded. “Ling Yee and Ling Tsin were bunking with their sister, Ling Lau.” Will washed the shortbread down with a swallow of coffee before explaining, “And Ah Woo and Ah So were sharing Ling Yee’s bed. Wait a minute . . .” He paused. “Ah So was in her bedroom alone. And so were Ah Lo and Ah Fook.” He looked at Jack. “How many girls was that?”

  “Eight if you count Ah So twice,” Jack confirmed, grabbing a shortbread for himself.

  “I bought seven girls,” Will said. “I brought seven girls home with me. Someone else was sleeping in Ah So’s bed.”

  “So who’s number eight, and where did she come from?” Jack asked.

  “I don’t know,” Will admitted, “but I’ll wager it’s the same someone who helped herself to a bite to eat.”

  “You said there was a stowaway hiding in the corner of Li Toy’s basement during the auction,” Jack recalled. “A Kip Yee man.”

  “A person I assumed was a Kip Yee man,” Will corrected. “What if it wasn’t a Kip Yee man at all, but another girl from the auction? One trying to escape? One who followed us home because she had no place else to go?”

  Jack set his coffee cup on the table with a thump. “You said you left her sleeping upstairs. . . .” He looked over at Will.

  “Yes. In Ah So’s bedroom, with her face hidden by a pillow and the covers pulled up to her neck.”

  “Why don’t we go find out who she is?” He got to his feet.

  Will joined him, setting his mug aside and pushing his chair back from the table to stand up. “Yes. Why don’t we?”

  They heard the distinctive click of the front door latch unlocking before they reached the main salon.

  “Damnation!” Will swore when they reached the door and found it standing ajar.

  Jack hurried outside and onto the boardwalk, but whoever had slipped out of the Silken Angel Saloon at the crack of dawn was lost in the interminable fog that rolled off the San Francisco Bay, muffling sound and obscuring all but the closest buildings. “She got away.” he announced unnecessarily as he returned to the main salon. “I lost her in the fog.”

  Will gritted his teeth so hard a muscle in his jaw twitched from the strain. “Could you tell if it was a girl?”

  Jack shook his head. “Man. Woman. Great hairy ape. I couldn’t see a damn thing.”

  A sense of foreboding sent Will racing back up the stairs. “Check the girls,” he yelled to Jack. He opened Ah So’s bedroom door first. The bed was neatly made, the coverlet pulled tightly over the mattress and the single feather pillow. There was no sign that the bed had ever been occupied. If he hadn’t seen the figure sound asleep, Will would have sworn he’d imagined the whole thing. He stood in the doorway trying to puzzle it out.

  “The girls are safe.” Jack placed his hand on Will’s shoulder. “All seven.”

  “Did you . . .”

  Jack nodded. “Yeah, I checked to make sure they were breathing.”

  Will exhaled the breath he’d been holding. He’d prayed he was overreacting, but it wasn’t uncommon for the tongs or disgruntled competitors to threaten a rival’s business by doing away with the new merchandise. There had been instances where men from the warring tongs had gone into the cribs and suffocated, strangled, or cut the throats of the girls as a warning to the owners.

  “Find anything?” Jack asked.

  “Just that.” Will pointed to the dresser.

  Jack followed Will’s lead and spotted several coins on top of the dresser. Stepping inside the room, Will walked over, scooped the coins off the furniture, and counted the money. One dollar and fifty cents American to cover the cost of one night’s food and lodging, as posted on the sign on the wall at the foot of the stairs. He weighed the coins in his palm. “Whoever it was wasn’t one of Li Toy’s girls.” He looked at Jack. “They don’t have access to money. Li Toy collects the fee in cash before customers go upstairs or enter the cribs, and issues them a token. The only way one of her girls could have gotten this much money is if a customer gave it to her.”

  “And she was able to keep it hidden from Madam Harpy and her coworkers,” Jack added. “She left money to pay for the use of the bed and for the food she ate, so she wasn’t here to steal.”

  “The correct amount of money,” Will pointed out. “Which means she knew how much we charge for a meal and one night’s lodging, or she was capable of reading the posted rates.”

  “How many languages are represented?”

  “English, French, Spanish, and Chinese.” Will named the most frequent languages spoken in the Silken Angel Saloon. The gold rush of ’forty-nine had brought an influx of humanity from all parts of the globe that had all but overwhelmed the original Spanish settlement. The result was a cosmopolitan city with a variety of languages. The common men spoke their native languages with a range of dialects, some of which Will had a rudimentary vocabulary in and comprehension of. With the exception of tradesmen, almost no Chinese ever entered the saloon, but the Silken Angel routinely posted signs using Chinese characters.

  “So our guest could be male or female and one of several nationalities,” Jack mused.

  “That’s the sum of it,” Will agreed, “except that I have the distinct feeling that our unexpected guest was female.” He couldn’t distinguish much about the figure sleeping in Ah So’s bed except curves. Will remembered the curves and the slender arm hugging the pillow. “What man would sleep alone when there are two or three of-age females sleeping next door?”

  “Other than you?” Jack asked.

  Will shot him a withering look. “Other than me.”

  “Me, of course,” Jack said, easing the tension they were both feeling and the rush of adrenaline that came with fear.

  “Of course,” Will acknowledged Jack’s teasing. “Present company excluded. Any idea?”

  “Not unless you’re wrong about her being a female . . .”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “But it’s possible?”

  Will nodded. It wasn’t likely, but theoretically it was possible.

  “Then we’re back to your Kip Yee man,” Jack said.

  Will paced the length of the room, stopping at the locked second-floor window. “Maybe,” h
e conceded. “But would a Kip Yee man leave girls purchased at auction as prostitutes unmolested?”

  “He would if Kip Yee dictated that the merchandise remain untouched.”

  “True. But why leave them?” Will paced back to the door. “If the object was to remove them from the Silken Angel and install them in one of the tong’s establishments, why leave them behind?”

  “Maybe the object of the exercise wasn’t to take them tonight,” Jack suggested. “Maybe he was simply reconnoitering the layout of the building, seeing if gaining entrance was possible. . . .”

  Will looked over at Jack. “Which brings up the question, how the devil did he get in?”

  “The saloon was open for business until two a.m., Will,” Jack reminded him. “And you and I were preoccupied with getting the girls settled into their rooms and fed. He could have walked in the front door and stayed hidden somewhere until we locked up and went to bed.”

  “Then crept into the kitchen and helped himself to a meal while a former Pinkerton detective slept a few feet away.”

  Jack smiled. “While an exhausted”—he paused long enough to emphasize the word—“former Pinkerton detective slept a few feet away. I was probably snoring loud enough to wake the dead. And in fairness to our intruder, he’d have no way of knowing I was once a detective. Or your assistant at Craig Capital. As far as our sneak thief is concerned, I’m simply a barman.”

  “It’s a brassy move just the same,” Will said. “Whoever it was had to know there were two grown men in the place. He had to know he could have been discovered at any moment. By the girls. By you. Or by me.”

  Jack scratched his head. “Could be an act of desperation.”

  Will disagreed. “Desperate men don’t leave money behind.”

  “Then it has to be Kip Yee replying to your message.”

  “I’d believe that if our intruder hadn’t availed himself of a meal and a few hours of sleep.” Will raked his fingers through his hair. “It just doesn’t feel right. And I don’t know that Kip Yee received my message.”

  “True,” Jack agreed. “But you do know that by now, the tong knows the auction went off without a hitch and that you purchased a large portion of the merchandise they meant to steal. And if they know that, they’re likely to retaliate. The gossip around Chinatown had it that Kip Yee wanted Madam Harpy’s cargo. Badly.”

  Will considered the implications. “You’re right, Jack. This must be the tong leader’s way of letting me know that he can get to me—get to us—get to the girls—anytime he pleases.” He looked at Jack. “At any rate, one thing is certain. . . .”

  Jack winced.

  “We need better security,” Will concluded.

  Chapter Ten

  “When it is obvious that the goals cannot be reached, don’t adjust the goals, adjust the action steps.”

  —CONFUCIUS, 551–479 B.C.

  Julie was breathing hard and soaked to the skin by the time she made it to Wu’s Gum Saan Laundry on Mission Street. Zhing Wu greeted her as soon as Julie entered the lean-to shack, where Zhing was pulling clothes from the rinse water and wringing them by hand.

  The lean-to belonged to Zhing. She’d built it herself from her meager earnings. She worked in the laundry with her father-in-law, cooked and cleaned and ran errands for him, but she’d never felt comfortable sharing his living space. Craving privacy, she’d built her lean-to on the opposite side of the laundry, away from Wu’s slightly larger lean-to. It allowed her to be close enough to her father-in-law to see to his needs, but afforded her a measure of independence and privacy for the first time in her life.

  “Jie Li, you’re all wet. Where have you been?” Zhing demanded in her native tongue, her voice high and tight with strain. She called Julie by name, but gave it the Cantonese pronunciation. “I have been so worried since I woke up and saw that you did not come back for your ugly mission dress.” She tossed a rolled-up shirt into a basket to await hanging, dried her hands on a towel, and pulled a bamboo screen away from the wall and positioned it so it would catch heat from the stove. “Get out of wet clothes while I make you some tea.”

  “I was trapped in the cellar of the Jade Dragon,” Julie told her.

  Zhing Wu shuddered. “How did you get trapped in that evil place after you collected dirty laundry and brought it to my husband’s honorable father?”

  Julie stepped behind the screen, toed off her cloth shoes, and began peeling off her wet socks and trousers. “I went back late yesterday afternoon to deliver the clean linen and got trapped.” She hung her black trousers on the top of the bamboo screen, then placed her white socks beside them. She stood shivering in her tunic, waiting for Zhing to toss her a towel.

  “You don’t deliver clean linen to cellar of the Jade Dragon.” Zhing whisked Julie’s wet trousers and socks off the screen and replaced them with a dry towel. “You don’t go in the Jade Dragon to deliver. You knock on back entrance door and give to girl who answers.”

  Julie took a deep breath. “You don’t go in the Jade Dragon to deliver. I take the linens inside and put them in the cupboard for the girls.”

  “You do too much,” Zhing scolded. “You spoil loungei girls.”

  “Don’t call them that,” Julie objected. “It’s vulgar.” The term was one of the commonly used Cantonese words for prostitute, but literally translated, it meant “woman always holding up her legs.” “Besides . . .” Julie paused long enough to pull her sodden tunic over her head and drape it over the screen. “But for the grace of God . . .” Never overtly religious, despite her affiliation with the Salvationists, she was compelled to make the sign of the cross before undoing the length of cloth she used to bind her breasts and placing it on the top of the screen beside her tunic. She dried herself and wrapped the towel around her.

  Zhing was waiting with a long flannel robe and slippers when Julie stepped from behind the screen. “What does that mean, Jie Li?”

  Julie lifted an eyebrow in query. “What?”

  “‘But for the grace of God.’”

  “It means that the gods have favored us by not allowing us to become one of the unfortunate girls who live and work at the Jade Dragon,” Julie translated.

  “The gods may not always favor you, Jie Li,” Zhing reminded her. “Not if you go into the Jade Dragon.”

  “I have to find my friend,” Julie told her. “I have to know if Su Mi is trapped in that life. I had to see the auction for myself.” She looked over at Zhing. “I had to know if she was there.”

  “Was she?” Zhing asked.

  Julie shook her head. “No.”

  “Then you risk much for nothing, Jie Li. If you are caught, Wu and I may suffer for helping you.” She placed a pot of tea and a cup on the small kitchen table, along with a bowl of noodles and chopsticks, and urged Julie to sit. Glancing at Julie’s pile of wet clothes, Zhing clucked her tongue. “Clothing will not dry this morning.” Retrieving the tin box she kept hidden under a floorboard near the stove, Zhing reached inside for the coins needed to buy Julie a new set of clothes. “I go to tailor shop to get you more Chinese clothes.”

  “Not this morning,” Julie told her.

  “What will you wear?” Zhing asked.

  “My gray wool uniform dress.”

  Zhing sighed. “Today you go out as an English lady instead of a laundry girl?” That meant that Zhing would have to collect the day’s dirty laundry from the boardinghouses without Julie’s help.

  Julie swallowed a mouthful of noodles. “I have to do missionary work today.”

  Zhing dragged a bathtub from beneath the kitchen table and positioned it near the stove, pulling the bamboo screen around it to shield it from the drafts. “I’ll heat water. For English lady costume, Jie Li must bathe and wash hair.”

  Zhing Wu had helped Julie transform herself into Jie Li, the laundry girl, and back to Julia Jane Parham, missionary, several times over the past few days. The transformations were equally time-consuming. One required cosmetics and hair
color; the other required the removal of cosmetics and hair color. Both meant more work for Zhing. Julie paid her well for her assistance, but she couldn’t help feeling guilty for increasing Zhing’s workload instead of decreasing it.

  But Zhing didn’t seem to mind. She enjoyed Julie’s company. They were close in age, and Zhing appreciated Julie’s offer of friendship and the opportunity to practice her English, and was genuinely grateful for the extra income she earned, which allowed her to purchase little luxuries for herself and for Wu that she would not have been able to afford otherwise.

  Julie finished her bowl of noodles, drained the last of her tea, and got up from the table to help Zhing with the bath preparations, pumping water to add to the large pot Zhing kept on the stove to boil water.

  Running a laundry was hard, hot, backbreaking work, but the one by-product was plenty of soap and hot water. Julie had brought bars of her favorite soap to use in her bath and for Zhing to use on her laundry. Zhing’s lean-to wasn’t much of a house when compared to the walled mansion Julie called home. It wasn’t nearly as nice as the Russ House Hotel or as large as the mission dormitory, but because it functioned as a laundry, it had water from the city’s wells delivered right to the kitchen pump. And unlike the women’s dormitory at the mission, the only two women who shared it were Zhing Wu and Julie. “When you go to the apothecary shop for Wu, would you get a better temporary dye for my hair for my laundry girl disguise? I’ll need it and my disguise tonight.” Julie poured a final pail of water into the pot on the stove as Zhing beckoned her to the sink. Julie pulled her hair forward and bent as Zhing pumped water over it. “I’ll leave you money to purchase enough for me and for Wu.” The fact that Zhing’s father-in-law dyed his hair to hide the silver strands in his queue was a closely kept secret Zhing had confided to Julie the day before, when she’d offered Julie the use of his dye. It was, Zhing assured her, better than the coffee-and-vinegar concoction Julie used, easier to apply, and did not run like bootblack, but could be washed out with soap and water and a vinegar rinse. “Why need disguise tonight? We do not collect or deliver laundry at night. And why you pay for Wu’s hairdressing when you already help at laundry for free?”