“I swear it, Chang!” Smith whined. “I told no one about tonight’s shipment.”
“That’s not true!” Foxy called out. Her childish voice made her sound like a tattling schoolgirl. “He told one of my girls all about it while he was drugged on opium.”
Chang nodded to the bordello’s madam as he shrugged off his suit jacket. The gaslight chandelier’s bright glow was reflected slickly from his bald yellow skull. His expressionless black lizard-eyes glittered like wet coal. The Tong leader’s thick shoulders and chest were even more impressive now that he was just in his shirtsleeves. The gleaming, five-taloned claw that was his right hand seemed to have some evil life of its own as Chang thrust it beneath the petrified Smith’s quivering nose.
“She says you told what you knew of our plans to a girl,” Chang hissed. His voice was dry and husky. It rattled in his throat like ancient ivory dice in a leather cup. The Tong leader glanced at Mrs. Fitzroy and Foxy Muscat. “Could this girl have informed on us?”
“The girl is just a child,” Fitzroy said from her place on the couch. “She’s talked to no one since serving him.” She pointed an accusing finger at the weeping Smith. “Now she’s with Greta Kahr.”
Chang nodded, chuckling. “Punishment enough, in any event.”
“My God,” Smith moaned. “I don’t even remember the girl.”
“Yes, I know,” Chang said. “Your brain has become so riddled with opium smoke that you remember nothing. So. You could have told our business to others. How would you know, Commissioner?” He prodded his victim with his claw.
“Oh, please, Chang, don’t...” was all the broken man could whimper.
Watching it all from their hiding place, Jessie and Moore exchanged horrified looks. It was evident that Smith was about to die. Jessie had to remind herself that this poor, frightened man was one of the enemy. But still—how could she let him be murdered?
“Jordan,” she whispered. “We’ve got to do something.”
Moore began to nod, but before he could reply, Chang once again addressed the commissioner.
“You have outlived your usefulness to my Tong!” he cried. He raised his steel claw—then thrust it into Smith’s chest!
The waterfront commissioner shrieked as the needle-sharp talons pierced his flesh. Slowly, Chang locked his elbow and began to raise his arm, lifting Smith, still tied to his chair, up into the air. The commissioner hung suspended upon the metal hooks dug into his body. Chang held him aloft like some awful trophy, until the man’s moans faded and his head lolled loosely upon his neck. Only then did the Tong leader set the dead man’s chair back upon the carpeted floor. He braced his foot against Smith’s slack body to wrench his claw out of the dead man’s flesh.
Moore looked at Jessie. “Strong son of a bitch,” he murmured thoughtfully. “I think we should get out of here—”
“It’s a bit late for that,” Greta Kahr sneered behind them. “Put up your hands!”
Jessie felt the cold, sharp point of the woman’s rapier tickling her ear. Slowly she raised her hands. Her Colt was snatched out of her fingers by the Prussian, who dropped it on the landing.
“I can’t believe you didn’t tie her up!” Moore hissed to Jessie, as Greta herded them down the stairs.
“I forgot,” Jessie shrugged.
“You had every kind of bondage implement known to mankind in that room. What do you mean you forgot?” Moore insisted.
“Look,” Jessie retorted impatiently, “my mind doesn’t work that way!”
“Silence!” Greta Kahr commanded.
“What is going on here?” Chang demanded as he eyed Moore and Jessie. “Greta? Have you taken leave of your senses?”
“That’s the girl I mentioned,” Foxy Muscat offered helpfully. “Her name’s Annabelle Willis—”
“Fool!” Greta Kahr cut her off. Her jaw was discolored by an angry purple bruise, the result of Jessie’s punch. As she spoke, she winced in pain. “This woman’s name is Jessica Starbuck.”
“B-but how could I have known?” Foxy simpered, before glaring at a perplexed Mrs. Fitzroy.
“It is beginning to make sense,” Chang smiled. He wiped his bloody claw upon Smith’s suit jacket, and then turned his reptilian face toward Moore. “And you are not who you have pretended to be, correct?”
Jessie thought quickly. No one had yet searched Moore for his gun. If she could manage to distract them, she might be able to keep them from remembering to do so. “Jordan, that rapier is the weapon Kahr used to kill Shanks!” she said.
“Ah, so you are Jordan Moore, the detective...” Chang nodded in satisfaction. “The late Mr. Shanks’s partner...”
Moore was too busy glaring at Greta Kahr to answer the Tong leader. His face paled with anger as he looked down at the sword in her hand.
“I am surrounded by fools!” Kahr ranted. “Chang! How dare you kill Smith without my permission!”
Chang scowled. “I need no permission! I kill who I please, woman! This is my town!”
Kahr could not meet the Tong leader’s icy gaze. “But we still need him. Or someone like him.”
“It will be no problem to buy another official,” Chang said. “But why do we quarrel, Greta? Tonight we have lost a battle, but won the war! Jessica Starbuck is in our control!” He threw back his head and laughed.
“Perhaps,” Kahr mused. “But there is still the Japanese to contend with.” She gestured with her rapier toward Jessie. “Wherever she goes, the Japanese is not far behind.”
Ki cautioned Su-ling to remain quiet. They were crouched behind the bannister railing of the staircase’s landing. It was the same hiding spot recently vacated by Jessie and Moore. Ki was so intent on gauging the scene in the parlor below he did not notice Jessie’s Colt lying in the comer. Su-ling, however, kneeling behind him, did see the gun. Silently she picked it up, to clutch it behind her back.
It was Smith’s death cry that had drawn them out of their room on the fourth floor. Ki had given Su-ling his cotton shirt to wear. It was big enough to quite modestly cover the diminutive Chinese woman. He himself was wearing just his jeans and his sleeveless leather vest.
Ki now removed two shuriken throwing blades from his pockets. “Su-ling, stay here, and keep yourself covered!” he warned. “I shall dispose of the two bodyguards, and then attack Chang. I suspect that Jessie and Moore can handle that sword-wielding bitch!”
“Before you begin,” she whispered into Ki’s ear, “I want you to remember something—”
“Nothing shall happen to me,” Ki impatiently interrupted. “We will have much time later to talk.” He stood up, his hands rising to hurl his deadly blades.
“Remember that my honor is as precious a thing as yours!” Su-ling cried, standing up beside him and aiming at Chang with Jessie’s revolver. “Steel Claw! I avenge myself upon you!”
Startled, Ki paused before sending his blades toward the bodyguards. The two Tong henchmen were well-trained and devoted men. They drew their pistols and fired not at Ki, who was only threatening them, but at Su-ling, who was aiming at their master, Chang. Their two shots punched the slight Chinese woman backwards, so that the one shot she managed to fire went wild. A moment later, the two Tong henchmen were themselves falling backward, Ki’s steel blades lodged in their throats.
Jessie, meanwhile, had launched herself at Greta Kahr. The Prussian slashed wildly at her attacker with her rapier, but Jessie ducked beneath the slicing arc of the deadly sword, to drive her shoulder into Kahr’s belly. The rapier went flying as the Prussian sat down hard upon the floor, the wind knocked out of her. Jessie tried to pin her, but Kahr managed to free herself of Jessie’s grasp. The Prussian crawled on her hands and knees to snatch up one of the fallen Tong bodyguards’ pistols. She was just bringing it to bear on Jessie when the room once again exploded with gunfire.
Kahr looked horror-stricken as she dropped her gun. She blotted wildly at the fast-spreading crimson stain marring the front of her green velvet gown, as i
f it were a glass of wine she’d carelessly spilled upon herself. She rose up on her knees, as if in supplication, and then toppled over. She was a corpse before her head hit the carpet.
“That was for Shanks,” Moore said. He turned his smoking .44 toward Chang. “Hold very still,” he warned the Tong leader.
Ki stared down at the lifeless, staring eyes of Su-ling. Blood seeped from the two bullet holes in her chest. He knelt down beside her body, and gently kissed her forehead. “I salute you,” he whispered tenderly. “Your death was a good one. Without honor there is nothing.”
The samurai was just descending the stairs when Chang made his move. His left hand flashed up to hurl a tiny blade, much like Ki’s own shuriken weapons, at Moore. The little knife caught the detective in the right shoulder.
Moore clutched at the knife hilt protruding from his upper arm. His Colt fell from his trembling fingers. “Stop him!” he cried as Chang bolted for the door.
Ki was upon the man in a flash. He spun Chang around, at the same time delivering a shuto-uchi, or “knife-hand strike,” to the Tong’s leader’s neck. It would have killed any normal man, but Chang was not a normal man.
He shrugged off Ki’s blow, and raised his taloned weapon in order to rake it down across Ki’s face. Ki managed to lock his own left hand about Chang’s extended right wrist.
“I took what you wanted, Japanese,” Chang mocked as the two men struggled together, testing each other’s strength. “I had her, and spoiled her—”
“And now I shall avenge her,” Ki said quietly, but his almond eyes burned. He began to squeeze Chang’s wrist.
The veins cording the Tong leader’s bald head began to bulge and throb, and sweat began to stream down his lizard-skinned face. He stared up at his steel claw, but‘he could not move it. Ki kept applying his awful pressure around Chang’s wrist.
“L-let go!” Chang at first demanded, and then began to plead. The first clicking sounds of his wrist bones being crushed were heard by the now silent, awestruck witnesses. “My wrist! Let go-o-o!” Chang wailed. His steel claw now hung from the end of his outstretched arm like a dead leaf on a withered branch. Chang’s wrist bones had been squeezed into shards by Ki’s steely fingers.
Ki released the Tong leader, stepped back, and drove his fist full force into the man’s solar plexus. Blood spurted from Chang’s mouth as he fell forward, to twitch facedown upon the carpet for several seconds, before settling into death.
“You—you tore his heart open with that punch of yours...” Foxy Muscat whispered fearfully from her place on the couch. She and Mrs. Fitzroy were huddled there together beneath Jessie’s watchful scrutiny.
Ki slowly stared up at Su-ling’s body on the landing. “It is fitting,” he said softly. “Chang has torn mine...”
Chapter 15
Jordan Moore waited for Jessie in the lobby of the Palace Hotel. His stitched-up right shoulder ached slightly, and the sling the doctor was forcing him to wear to cradle the injured limb was a nuisance, but his arm would be as good as new in a couple of weeks.
The detective managed awkwardly to extract a cigar from the sling-shrouded breast pocket of his gray herringbone suit, and struck a match on the heel of his boot. He’d blown no more than one smoke ring before a waiter appeared to proffer a clean copper ashtray to replace the one Moore had “dirtied” with his spent match.
Moore thanked the man, and at the same time shifted in his armchair, trying to ease the pressure of the Colt .44 wedged into his waistband. Wearing his gun this way was a worse nuisance than wearing the sling, but at least he’d be able to paw it out with his left hand, should the need arise. He was a clumsy shot with his left, but a clumsy shot was better than nothing. Since Chang’s death, the Steel Claw Tong had dissolved into ten feuding clans bent on waging war with each other over the disputed Chinatown territory. Most likely, they’d end up killing each other off, but until that happened, Moore wanted to make sure he could handle the situation if some opium-crazed Tong fellow should decide to avenge his master’s death...
He glanced at the front page of the newspaper spread out on the table before him. It was filled with stories about the “opium and sex murder” of Waterfront Commissioner Smith. Between himself and Arthur Lewis, they’d been able to pull enough strings to keep Jessie’s name out of the stories. The dead bodies of Greta Kahr, Chang, and Smith were certainly not going to implicate her, and both Foxy Muscat and Mrs. Fitzroy were more than willing to go along with whatever was required of them, in exchange for train tickets out of San Francisco. Their bordello had been closed down. The scandal had put the house off limits to the wealthy clientele who had frequented the bordello and enjoyed its pleasures. Of course, another house would soon be open. After all, this was San Francisco...
Moore flipped through the paper until he reached the business section. Taking up a quarter-page was the sweetest news of all, as far as he was concerned. It was a large advertisement, offering for sale the waterfront warehouse of the Prussian cartel. Jessie had told him that with Greta Kahr’s death, the loss of their clipper, and the scandal brought on by the exposure of their links with the Tong and opium trafficking, the cartel had lost all of their legitimate business connections. They’d declared their local offices bankrupt. The Prussians were finished in San Francisco.
Moore stood up as Jessie crossed the lobby and approached his table. The detective couldn’t help noticing how every man in the lobby followed her with his eyes, but Moore had long ago given up any thoughts of jealousy. It made no sense for a man to think he could ever own Jessica Starbuck.
“You look beautiful,” Moore grinned as Jessie kissed his cheek. “Do we have time for a drink?”
“Later. I want to go down to the waterfront. You’ve got to see the cartel’s warehouse!” she chattered excitedly.
“But why?”
Jessie tapped the newspaper lying on the table. “That ad the Cartel placed is old news, Jordan. We’ve already bought up their waterfront holdings!”
“I’d think the last thing the Starbuck business needs is another shipping dock,” Moore replied, now genuinely puzzled.
“You’ll understand when you see it,” she laughed, tugging him along out of the sitting area of the lobby, to the area where they could flag a carriage.
Moore considered himself a tough interrogator, but he was no match for Jessie. She successfully resisted all his questions until their hack was wheeling its way along the Embarcadero.
“Oh, we don’t need the property,” Jessie finally began as their carriage came to a halt. “Actually, buying it was Ki’s idea.”
They exited the carriage to stare at the ramshackle dock building. “Great!” Jessie exclaimed. “We were just in time!”
Moore watched as the cartel’s pennant was lowered from the building’s flagpole, and as the Starbuck flag was hoisted up. The Circle Star emblem looked lovely, fluttering in the breeze against the clear blue sky. The detective looked around. “Jessie!” he suddenly blurted. “All the workers are Chinese!”
“Yes!” she laughed. “That’s Ki’s idea. He suggested that we sublease the building to Chinese workers. They’ll handle the loading and unloading of our ships, and we’ll pay them a percentage of the profits, until they’ve saved enough to buy the building outright. Then they can go into business for themselves.”
“Ki thought up all of this?” Moore asked slowly. “For the Chinese? Unusual behavior for a samurai...”
“Oh, well,” Jessie assured him. “He’s a very special man. Ki says that this way, Chinese Americans can begin to establish themselves outside of Chinatown and, at the same time, maintain their dignity.” Jessie paused. “His exact words were, ‘their sense of honor... ”’
It was hidden deep in the darkest place of Chinatown. It was hidden in a subbasement, and reachable only by a rickety, steep, twisting set of wooden stairs.
One had to pass through several locked and barred doors to get to it. No white man had ever been down there. In
deed, there were many Chinese who had no inkling of its existence.
No Tong headquarters was so securely hidden; no opium den enjoyed such security. But if one were allowed to descend the rickety steps and pass through the doors, one would find oneself in another world.
It was a world of dim candles and sweet smoke wafting through the air, a world where men quietly sat in trancelike states of awareness. The smoke here, however, rose not from opium pipes, but from sticks of burning incense, and the men were not drugged. Far from it, for this was a Buddhist prayer hall.
Today it was crowded, for all of the monks who belonged to the sect were anxious to catch a glimpse of the stranger who had been brought here to pray for his loved one’s departed soul. For a white man to be in this Chinese place was astounding, for a Japanese to be here was incredible, but for a half-white, half-Japanese—
Well, all of the shaven-headed, burlap-robed monks knew that the samurai named Ki was indeed an astounding and incredible man. Word of his exploits on their community’s behalf had spread all across Chinatown. It was illogical, but nonetheless true—even Zen masters had a hard time accepting it:
A Japanese had proven himself the champion of the Chinese. He was their samurai.
Ki sat cross-legged on the polished wooden floor. He’d refused the offer of an interview with the hall’s master, just as he’d refused to light the ceremonial incense. He was not sure why he had come to this place. He was not a religious man, but a warrior. He meditated not for enlightenment, but the more forthrightly to meet the enemy ...
He was not sure why he came here. Temples were bad for warriors. Too many kami, too many ghosts could surround one. So many ... One blade could never cut them all ...
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