“You find her? You find her?” she panted as she drew up close. She jerked her head back at Woon, who was clumping up the path after her. “Fat one tell me nothing.”
She stopped directly in front of Old Red, eyes on him alone.
“Ummm . . . you see . . . the thing is, miss . . . Hok Gup’s . . .”
Gustav looked away, as if the girl’s hopeful gaze was the noonday sun—something so bright it pained a man to face it.
“Hok Gup’s gone,” he said. He forced himself to look at her again. “That’s all I can say. That . . . and I’m sorry.”
Ah Gum’s slight shoulders went into such a slump it took a full inch off her height—and she didn’t have much height to spare, teeny thing that she was.
She blinked up at my brother, brow knit in confusion.
“And now you buy me?”
“Oh, no no no no no,” Old Red stammered. “We . . . uhhh, well . . . we kinda talked this acquaintance of ours into buyin’ you off Madam Fong. Not for hisself, you understand. For you.”
“Ol’ Woon here’s gonna take you to the Presbyterian Mission House,” I said, giving the detective a slap on his broad back as he lumbered up to join us. “Over there, you can learn you a trade, pick up some more English. Maybe even scrape up enough money to get back to your family in China.”
Ah Gum finally spared me a glance—or a glare, more like. To her, it seemed, I was just something that dragged along after my brother, a glob of muck stuck to his heel.
“Thank you,” she said. To Gustav, of course.
Woon shrugged my hand off his shoulder and said something to the girl in Chinese. “Time to get a move on,” apparently, for she nodded and started toward him. After a couple steps, though, she whirled around, dashed back to my brother, and planted another kiss on him, just as she had the day before. She even whispered in his ear again.
The blushes Diana had slapped across Old Red’s face the past few days had nothing on the one he was wearing now. Ah Gum may as well have slathered his cheeks with strawberry jam.
“Yeah, alright . . . uh-hum . . . that’s mighty sweet of you,” he croaked hoarsely as the girl backed away. “Good-bye, now, miss. And fat choy to you.”
All Gum gave him a little curtsy—and a little smile—before turning and walking off with Wong Woon. Needless to say, I didn’t get so much as a wave or even a “Good riddance.”
I turned toward Gustav set to needle him about his newfound way with the ladies, but the expression on his face stopped me cold. I was expecting embarrassment, relief, chagrin, maybe even satisfaction, for once—just about anything other than the bitter disappointment I saw.
Old Red didn’t just look like his dog had died. He looked like he’d just lost his favorite horse. And that’s about as glum as a cowboy can get.
“That’s it, then,” he said. “It’s over.”
It wasn’t over for him, though. I could see that. It wouldn’t be for a long while.
Diana sensed it, too.
“Gustav . . . ,” she began.
“So what’re you gonna tell your boss, Col. Crowe?” he asked. “We solved us a mystery but got a girl killed in the process? An old man and the cop that done him in, too? But it all balances out fine in the end . . . cuz we got one little chippy out of the whorin’ business?”
“I’ll tell the colonel what I always tell him,” Diana said. “The truth. And I don’t think he’ll see it as a failure. He knows these sorts of things rarely work themselves out neatly.”
“Oh, is that what you’d call what happened last night?” Old Red snipped. “A lack of ‘neatness’? A wee spot of untidiness?”
“Solving mysteries and solving problems are two very different things. You can’t blame yourself because—”
“Well, who should I blame, then? Last three ‘cases’ I’ve stuck my nose in, I’ve got myself shot, a train wrecked, and a woman drowned. I may as well go back to punchin’ cattle for all the good I done!”
“You’ve done a lot of good with your deducifyin’, Brother. If not for you—”
“Feh!” Gustav said.
Then he waved his hands over his head and barked it out again. Not just to me, but to Diana, to the Plaza, to the world, to creation. It was a declaration, that one little sound. A regular manifesto.
“Feh!”
He was done.
My brother spun on his heel and stomped off toward the southeast corner of the square—and most likely the Ferry House a ways beyond it.
“I’m sorry. I gotta go after him,” I said to Diana. “My brother, he’s . . . well, he’s just . . . .”
“I understand.”
I surprised her—and myself—with a smile.
“You know,” I said, “I truly believe you do. That’s one of the things I love about you, Diana Corvus.”
The lady flushed so pink she could’ve passed for a flamingo.
“Otto,” she said as I turned to go. “If I can’t find you again . . . find me.”
“Miss, you got yourself a deal.”
As I hustled after my brother, I spotted another familiar figure up ahead of him. The Anti-Coolie League sandwich-board man was planted just outside the Plaza handing out pamphlets.
“Well, if it isn’t my Kraut friends!” he called out when he saw us. “Do me a favor, Fritz—don’t run me down this time, huh?”
He laughed at his own funny, then stepped into Old Red’s path. “Thought I spotted you back there in the square socializing with a couple Chinks.”
He shook his head reproachfully, and when he spoke again he did it in the slow, overenunciated manner folks use when addressing the village idiot.
“Remember, boys: No . . . mixee . . . with . . . Chinee . . . ja?”
“Otto,” Gustav said as he sidestepped the man. He hadn’t even looked back to see if I was behind him. “Would you mind?”
“Not at all, Brother.”
“Hey,” the sandwich man said, “you two speak—” That was as far as he got.
I did him the favor he asked: I didn’t run him down.
I just flattened his damn nose.
40
THE BEGINNING
Or, Gustav and I Turn Chicken, and a Long-Lost Bird Comes Home to Roost
My brother and I said nary another word to each other all the way back to Oakland. Gustav didn’t even want to hear a Holmes tale to help him get across the bay without barfing. Nor did he ask me to read him anything that night or the next day or the day after. I didn’t ask him why.
Old Red’s feelings are like a rabbit in its hole. You don’t draw either out with prodding or coaxing. You just have to wait. They’ll come out in their own good time.
Eventually, we got our hands on a new Harper’s, and the lure of Doc Watson’s latest story—“The Greek Interpreter”—was more than Old Red could resist. I was immensely amused to discover that of Sherlock had a brother . . . who was smarter than him, but I resisted the urge to guy Gustav about it. Even weeks after Gee Woo Chan’s death, my brother was still mopey and morose—and damned tired, too, for the only times I actually saw him sleeping he was twitching like a Mexican jumping bean.
“Very neat. Very tidy,” he said when I finished the new story for the first time (though the tale actually struck me as neither).
Neat, tidy endings were much on both our minds by then. This very manuscript was well under way, and I knew I couldn’t carry it through to its conclusion without cooking up some kind of bunkum. We had Hok Gup’s leprosy—not to mention a small handful of murders—to keep mum about. I couldn’t very well go blabbing it all out in the pages of some dime novel . . . assuming someone published the thing in the first place.
“Just put it down like it happened,” Old Red said when he saw me struggling over my pencil and paper one day. “You can tack on some bullshit happy ending later.”
“Yeah, I suppose. That’s the big advantage of writin’ it rather than livin’ it, ain’t it? You can always go back and change the ending.
”
My brother just grunted and wandered away.
Despite his advice, I couldn’t push my way through to the end of the book. When our last pennies left our pockets, we drifted up to Sonoma County hoping to hire on as hands at one of the cattle spreads thataway. Unfortunately, it was autumn by then, and the ranches were letting men go for the season, not filling the bunkhouse with more. So the only work we could find was sexing chicks and sweeping floors in a factory-scale hatchery. It was a chickenshit job, literally, and I ended each day with eyes and back athrob. We’d always thought cowboying was tough, but it turned out birdboying wasn’t any easier.
I didn’t have much extra time or pep for the hard work of writing, and our only day off I always spent the same way: taking the train down to Oakland to check for messages at our old haunt, the Cosmopolitan House. (I didn’t trust the management there to hold mail for us more than a few days, let alone forward it.)
In the first month after our move, my weekly pilgrimage paid off twice. The first time it was with a package: my first stab at a book, returned (at my expense) from the offices of Harper & Brothers Publishers in New York City. The second time it was a telegram, short and not altogether sweet.
HELLO BOYS STOP COLONEL NOT BITING STOP BEING MY MOST QUOTE PERSUASIVE UNQUOTE STOP HOPE YOU ARE STILL INTERESTED IN DETECTIVE WORK STOP WILL HAVE GOOD NEWS ONE DAY STOP DIANA C FULL STOP
Full stop indeed. That’s what it seemed like things had come to—until the day I found a letter awaiting me at the Cosmo.
“Pack up your war bags,” I told Gustav when I got back to our little boarding house room that night. “Tomorrow mornin’, we are on our way east.”
My brother looked up from the issue of Old Sleuth Library he’d been flipping through on the bed. He had nothing but disgust for Holmes’s detecting rivals, yet he had to admit their picture-packed magazines were easier “reading” for an unlettered man like himself.
“What are you talkin’ about?”
I pulled the letter from my pocket and opened it with a crisp snap of the wrist.
“Dear Mr. Amlingmeyer,” I read out. “Thank you for sending us your book, On the Wrong Track, or Lockhart’s Last Stand, An Adventure of the Rails. We would like to publish it immediately, and stand ready to wire to your bank the sum of two hundred dollars for the right to do so. Please contact us via telegram as soon as possible if you find this acceptable. Enclosed is a contract, which we will need you to sign and return to us without delay. In your book, you mention other works that you have written about yourself and your brother, and we request that you send any and all such material to us for possible publication. Everyone here at Smythe House feels as though we have made a great discovery in you, and we have high hopes for a long and mutually beneficial partnership. Sincerely yours, Urias Smythe, Proprietor, Smythe & Associates Publishing Ltd.”
My brother blinked at me a moment, so stunned the magazine he was holding actually slipped from his hands.
“You’re pullin’ my leg,” he finally managed to say.
“I’m nowhere near your leg, Brother. This is the real thing. You are about to become an honest-to-goodness dime novel hero.”
Old Red scowled at that.
“I ain’t no hero.”
“You are in my book.”
I glanced over at the teeny writing desk crammed into one corner of our cramped room. Atop it was my unfinished opus, The Black Dove—which wouldn’t remain unfinished much longer, I knew then.
“Correction. You are in my books.”
“Yeah, well . . . things in books ain’t always what they seem,” Gustav muttered. “So what was that you said about us headin’ east?”
“Don’t you see?” I waved Urias Smythe’s letter over my head like a rallying flag. “This works out, we finally got options for once in our lives. We could go to Ogden and stick this under Col. Crowe’s nose, see if it changes his mind about hirin’ us. Or we could go to Denver or Dallas, whatever town we like, and do what we never even thought about doin’ before: start our own detective agency. Hell, we could even go to Kansas, buy back the family farm, and just get to sodbustin’ again, if that’s what you really want.”
“Well, which’ll it be? It’s your money.”
“Feh, as you like to say. It’s our money. And there’s no way I’m decidin’ what to do with it solo. I choose the wrong way, you’ll never let me hear the end of it. Naw. I’m leavin’ it up to you.”
I headed for my writing table and took a seat. I hadn’t done any work there in days, but a fresh pencil was waiting for me, I found. It had been sharpened to a needle’s point, no doubt by my brother’s pocketknife.
“You can’t decide right now, fine,” I said as I picked the pencil up. “Sleep on it.”
I found where I’d last left off—Chapter thirty-three, our gruesome discovery in Yee Lock’s shop—and put pencil to paper. The words came easily, perhaps because I’d found a sort of happy ending at last, and I only paused to resharpen the pencil or relieve my bladder.
Every time I turned around, I saw Old Red stretched out on the bed, eyes wide open. He didn’t say a word for hours, not until sometime in the middle of the night.
“Brother?”
“Yeah,” I said without turning around.
“Congratulations. I’m . . . I’m proud of you, you know.”
“I didn’t know that, actually. So thank you for sayin’ it.”
“Yeah, alright. Just don’t get all swell-headed about it.”
I grunted out a chuckle and shook my (swollen) head. Then I got back to work.
Just as I find myself reaching the end here, the light of a new day has started streaming in the window. A minute ago, I put down my pencil—it’s little more than a stub now—and stood up for a stretch before tackling the last lines of this book. Gustav, I saw, had finally fallen asleep.
It was a silent slumber, with no tossing or turning. The most peaceful sleep my brother’s had in ages.
When he wakes up, I’ll ask him what he dreamed of.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The author wishes to thank:
Dashiell Hammett and Robert Towne—for inspiration.
Crafty Keith Kahla, editor, poodle rancher (retired)—for picking up the ball and running with it.
Elyse Cheney, agent, butt kicker (still active)—for getting the ball rolling (and not letting it stop).
Sally Richardson, Andy Martin, Matthew Shear, and everyone else at St. Martin’s—for keeping the faith.
Ben Sevier, Big Red’s Posse (especially Don Collins, “Hungry Bob” Bartlett, Joan Gallo, Lee Ann Nelson, and Matthew Szewczyk), and more booksellers than I can list here (and I’m afraid I’d leave someone out if I tried)—for giving us something to keep faith in.
The Mystery Writers of America, the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association, the Private Eye Writers of America, and the always-fabulous folks of Bouchercon—for noticing.
Herbert Asbury, author of The Barbary Coast; Richard H. Dillon, author of The Hatchet Men; Evelyn Wells, author of Champagne Days of San Francisco; and last but not least (most, in fact, because she’s willing to answer incredibly strange questions from total strangers), Judy Yung, author of Unbound Feet: A Social History of Chinese Women in San Francisco—for lighting the way.
(Additional light was shed by Tom Carey of the San Francisco Public Library’s San Francisco History Center, Doris Tseng of the San Francisco Public Library’s Chinese Center, Robert Crowe of the Telephone Exchange Name Project, Linda Lee of All About Chinatown Tours, and Fisher L. Forrest of . . . well, he’s just a guy, but he sure knows a lot about guns.)
Helen Chin and Cecily Hunt—for helping me look good (no easy feat).
Mark and Alyssa Nickell—for helping me stay sane.
Billie Bloebaum, Aldo Calcagno, “Cap’n Bob” Napier, and Matt Nigro—for getting me there.
Kate and Mojo and Mar—for being there.
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