Jack was wary. He’d read about gangs in Chinatown—tongs, were they called?—that preyed on people who wandered down the wrong alley. And as shutters were cranked open and window shades snapped up, he heard people calling to one another in a language he didn’t know—high and nasal and peppered with strange tones. Were they talking about him? Were they planning what to do with the young intruder and the old man with him? Jack saw tentacles of fog reaching out from the narrow side streets and heard the clatter of trashcan lids as the disappointed cats scrounged up a fallback meal. He shivered.
Then a Chinese woman arranging a little table of teapots smiled warmly at him and tucked her long black hair over the gardenia behind her ear. It was the same smile and gesture he’d so often seen from his mother. Jack smiled back. The woman gave a wave and a wink, and Jack felt all his fear seep out through his feet. He wished his mother were there. She would have loved the adventure of it all.
“Shen’s gone into that building,” Hitchcock said.
They jogged up to the narrow storefront and shoed the door just before it closed. It was glass with gold letters:
XIAO LONG FORTUNE COOKIE COMPANY
EST. 1942
When they opened the door, the scent of caramelized sugar and vanilla nearly overwhelmed them. Jack’s stomach growled. All around huge, colorful tins overflowed with small golden crescents and teetered one atop the other like the models of pagodas in the shops outside.
Several rows of high wooden worktables sat in a grid behind the fortune cookie mountains. At each table a stool, several pairs of chopsticks, and a small length of thin steel pipe idled with other tools Jack couldn’t name. Here and there a disc of cookie lay abandoned, folded over on itself, or wrapped around a pipe, or merely left to harden flat. Each table had a low black metal bin filled with tiny slips of paper, some of which were also scattered about. Voices rose and fell beyond the tables. Jack and Hitchcock moved closer, careful to remain hidden behind the tables. Jack stood and leaned over the tabletop to get a better look.
A long table draped in red cloth stretched beneath high dark windows. Shen stood before it. Chinese men and women, some ancient, some middle-aged, sat behind it, shoulders sloped but spines erect. They looked harmless enough, but the young men who stood behind them most definitely did not. They were broad-shouldered, and many wore their shirtsleeves rolled up over biceps as round and hard as river rocks. Each one had a golden dragon embroidered on his shirt. Their faces were stern. There were no warm smiles like from the gardenia woman outside.
A briny sweat stippled Jack’s forehead. As he quietly lifted his hand from the table to wipe it away, a slip of paper stuck to his palm. It was lettered in red Chinese characters with an English translation. “Your fortunes will soon change,” it read. And there were several more on the table that said the same thing. “Your fortunes will soon change.” The black metal bin overflowed with more of the tiny slips. Over and over: “Your fortunes will soon change.” “Your fortunes will soon change.” Jack felt dizzy as these words carouseled in his brain.
He shook his head to break the spell, realizing the paper didn’t say whether his fortunes would change for better or worse. His little silver charm slipped out between the buttons of his shirt. It struck the bin of fortunes and set it ringing.
Jack immediately ducked behind the table, but he barely had time to turn to Hitchcock before three dragon-shirted men surrounded them.
“Who are you?” the biggest one said.
Jack pushed his way between two of the men, but there was no way to squeeze through their compact, solid bodies. The biggest man threw Jack over his shoulder in a fireman’s carry. Jack’s cheek pressed against the man’s muscled back. He felt the soft weave of his shirt and smelled again a strong scent of vanilla.
“Now see here,” Hitchcock said. “There is no need for roughhousing.” But the two other men took his arms and pushed him around the worktables to the center of the meeting.
The man lowered Jack into a seated position on the red-clothed table. The bright gold dragon embroidered on his shirt blocked Jack’s view for a moment. But when the man stepped away, he was face-to-face with Shen.
Jack’s hand arced out to paint Shen in a brushstroke of accusation. “Kidnapper!” he said.
“No,” said Shen.
“Liar. I found your brass button on the floor the night my aunt disappeared. What have you done with her?”
“Nothing,” said Shen, “yet.”
“So you admit to having her.”
“No, of course not. We don’t have her yet,” said Shen. “Yes, I was in the room that night, but your aunt was already gone.”
“Then why were you there?” said Jack.
“For this.” Shen held up the silver-framed picture. “I had it in my hands that night, but when I saw the message on the bed, I got scared and ran.”
Jack jumped from the table, snatched the frame from Shen, and cradled it to his chest. “Thief!” he said. “Thief, liar, and kidnapper!”
“I’m no kidnapper!” Shen yelled. “Your aunt is the kidnapper. Your aunt is the thief who stole people’s lives.”
“You stole my silver frame,” Jack cried. “So don’t say you aren’t a thief.”
“Frame?” Shen said. “Why would I want a cheap silver-plate frame. It’s the picture of your aunt I needed.”
“You kidnapped her!” Jack said again.
“If your aunt has been kidnapped, she deserved it. It is a case of the chickens coming home to roost.”
“ENOUGH.” IT WAS ONE OF the middle-aged men at the table. He wore a suit and a beige porkpie hat. “Sharon, perhaps if you hear the boy out, we will learn something.”
Hitchcock placed his hands on Jack’s shoulders. “Perhaps that is advice we, too, might benefit from following. There is obviously more going on here than we think.”
“And just what do you think is going on?” Shen asked.
“Well . . . ,” Jack began, “my aunt disappeared Sunday night.”
“We know,” Shen snapped.
“Sharon, please,” the man said.
Shen nodded to him. “Yes, Father.”
“That night I found a brass button on the floor,” Jack continued. “Just like the ones on Shen’s jacket. Except she is missing one.”
“And what do you think this means?” Shen’s father asked.
“That she was there that night. In the room. That she kidnapped my aunt.”
“And would your aunt have come along willingly? She is much bigger than Sharon,” he said.
Jack looked at Shen. She was quite small. “Maybe she had a gun,” he said. “Or help from her tong.”
“Tong? Did you say ‘tong’?” Shen asked. “What tong?”
Jack pointed at the men with the dragon shirts. A beat of silence followed. Then the men and women, young and old, all began laughing at once. Even Shen smiled. Jack had never seen her do that before.
“So this is my . . . tong?” Shen said.
“Well,” Jack replied, “they all have the same shirt, like a gang would.” More laughter.
“And the name of my tong is . . . the Dragons?” said Shen.
“Why not?” asked Jack, though he felt a bit foolish in the face of the continuing sniggers.
“You are very backward,” Shen said. “Tong! Hmph. Did you read the sign on the door when you came in?”
Jack remembered. “Xiao Long Fortune Cookie Company.”
“Do you know what Xiao Long means?” Shen asked.
Jack shrugged.
Shen tapped the dragon on one of the men’s shirts. “ ‘Little Dragon,’ ” she said. “These men work here. They’re bakers, not gangsters.”
Flour did streak some of the men’s shirts. And the dragon sported a friendly, smiling cartoon face. It was holding a fortune cookie.
“So what were you doing in his aunt’s room?” Hitchcock asked. “Why did you . . . borrow . . . that picture?”
Shen’s father stood.
“I know you,” he said to the director. “You are the one who tells on the television the true stories of the dark side of men.”
“Well, yes,” said Hitchcock, “though the tales are fiction.”
“Fiction can sometimes speak truer than fact,” the man said. “Your stories are true.” This was exactly how Jack felt. He wished he had been able to think of how to say it before. But now he knew.
“So,” Shen’s father continued, “I have a tale for you. A true tale, but one for which an ending has not yet been written. Perhaps you two can help us find it.” He placed his palms on the table and let his weight lean into it. The other men looked to him from either side. The laughter had died, and a somber tone wrapped like a shawl around the room. “Have you ever heard the word ‘Shanghai’?” he asked.
“It’s a city in China,” Jack said.
“And another name for kidnapping,” added Hitchcock darkly.
“But did you know the second meaning originated here in our city?” Shen’s father said. “In the decades of the Gold Rush, sailors jumping ship to search for their fortune left ship after ship without a crew. Their captains began paying for men—willing or not, conscious or not—to fill the ranks. Men who ran boardinghouses for sailors found a way to increase their profits and open more beds for the next wave of shore leave. These men, these ‘crimps,’ as they were called, used various methods to render their victims unconscious—a blackjack to the head as the poor seaman slept, a few drops of laudanum in the beer, a cigar (on the house) laced with opium. The unlucky sailor was thrust through the trapdoor behind the bar, or the window facing the pier, or the front door on a dark night, and into the Whitehall boats that ferried them to the waiting ships. By the time the sailor woke up, he was on his way to Shanghai, or some other Far East port, his first month’s wages paid to the man who’d turned him over to the captain. Soon it wasn’t just sailors who found themselves in this position, but any able-bodied man not affluent enough to avoid it. There are even stories of corpses being sold to the ship captains, with rats sewn into their clothes to make them twitch enough to look alive.”
“What’s all this got to do with my Aunt Edith?” Jack asked. “The Gold Rush was way before she was born.”
“The last official shanghai happened in 1915,” Shen’s father continued. “The Gold Rush was over, and decent people demanded a crackdown on the practice. Laws were passed.” He paused. “No one wanted to be a victim.”
At the word “victim” there were small nods of the head and deeply drawn breaths around the room. Shen touched her father’s hand. He smiled at her and went on. “But partnerships had been established, contacts made, a pipeline opened. And there was still a demand for slaves of one type or another. There were places where the city fathers turned a blind eye. Places whose population they thought undesirable, and whose land they felt was too valuable for those who lived there.”
“Like Chinatown,” Shen broke in. “Close to where Edith Crowley, the daughter of Paddy Crowley, one of the most notorious crimps, converted his boardinghouse into an orphanage. She found there a new supply of labor to sell in the form of children no one would miss.”
“My aunt?” said Jack.
Shen shrugged. “Maybe. We think. We know she is Edith Smith. The question is, was she once Edith Crowley? My father was one of those in the ‘care’ of this woman. As were several other gentlemen seated at this table. Eventually the Feds shut her down and she went into hiding. But not before many children were enslaved here or overseas.”
Shen’s father sighed. “How we won our freedom would make for many long tales. But know this: We survivors have formed a league sworn to answer the wrongs done to us, and to prevent them from happening to others. We have been tracking members of the kidnapping ring for twenty years.”
“So you kidnapped my aunt?” said Jack, softer now.
“No,” the old man said. “When the fish hunts the cat, it is no longer a fish. We do not wish to become like our quarry. Times have changed. We have found men in the police force we trust. Men we work with. Now we and our operatives gather information, here and across the ocean. We find ways to see that justice is done. But we don’t go to the police until we are sure we have the right person.” He sat down. Suddenly he looked like the oldest man there.
“It’s why we need that photograph,” Shen said. “My father saw your aunt when we were having lunch at Blum’s. He thought he recognized her. But thirty years is a long time. He remembers the matron as a slender young woman.”
Jack clutched the frame to his chest. He knew his aunt was harsh, but he’d never imagined she was as evil as all that. And what if he gave Shen the photo? What would become of his aunt then? Even if they found her, she’d be taken away—again. And Jack would have no one—again.
But if the photo was the proof they needed, he didn’t have to give it to them. It was his after all.
“It was decades ago,” Jack said. “Even if my aunt is the woman you’re looking for, who does it help if you put her in jail?”
There was an exchange in Chinese between Shen and the old-timers at the table, a brief debate that Jack couldn’t understand. Finally the old man said, in English, “This boy is young, but he has seen very much. Tell him, Sharon. He should know so he can choose, even if the burden will make his sleep unsound.”
Shen turned to Jack. “It may not be a decades-old story. As I said, many children were shipped overseas. Our vow for justice stretches across the ocean, and many of those victims are now our operatives. Overseas we have seen signs that the pipeline is opening again. Some weeks ago a ship, the Aventure Malgache, left port from Madagascar. The ship and its captain were among the worst of the traffickers connected to the orphanage. Last night the ship anchored in the waters out past the Farallons.”
“Their old pickup point,” her father said, pain in his eyes.
“On this side of the Pacific we have seen some of Edith Crowley’s crew putting new locks on old warehouses. And shadowy figures pushed into cars, taken from place to place. And plates of food pushed through the space beneath bolted doors.”
“So you think she’s in business again,” Jack said. He thought of the “bill” they had found. He might have reason to believe this too.
“So you see,” Shen concluded, “this is important. Now. Today.”
Jack looked at the picture of his aunt. She was young in the photo. Thin. She was smiling. But it was a smile with a cruel twist. She may have gotten bigger, but it seemed her heart hadn’t grown with her. She was mean at any size. But could she really be someone who sold kids into slavery? Besides, she was family, even if only by law. And she was the only wall that stood between Jack and a state orphanage.
But was she also a trapdoor, leading one-way to slavery for her victims?
“Please, Jack,” Shen said. “We need the photo.”
Jack slid his aunt’s wedding photo out of the frame, as he had every evening since she had put it there. He handed it to Shen. “You don’t really need the picture,” Jack said.
“We do,” said Shen.
“No,” said Jack, “I mean, my aunt once told me she ran an orphanage. And the photo is less important than her maiden name. It’s written on the back.” He turned the photograph over. Glued there was the wedding invitation he had seen many times:
You are cordially invited
to the wedding celebration
of Miss Edith Crowley
to Mister Timothy Smith.
St. Paulus Lutheran Church
San Francisco
at one o’clock
March twentieth
Nineteen hundred and thirty-eight
“It’s her,” one of the men behind Shen said in accented English.
“Yes, of course,” replied Shen. “My father always thought she was the one who ran the orphanage. And now we have proof.” Jack felt his stomach somersault, knowing that giving over the photo meant he was alone again, after all his efforts.
But
the man wasn’t looking at the wedding invitation.
He was looking at the picture still in the silver frame.
Jack’s drawing of his mother.
The man pointed.
He said something in Chinese.
Then again, “It’s her.”
Shen gently took the silver frame from Jack and showed it to the man. Then she spoke to him in Chinese.
She turned back to Jack and held out the picture.
“He says that’s the woman held captive. The woman we believe they’re sending to the Aventure Malgache.”
THE WORDS ECHOED DOWN the bottomless pit inside Jack. But now he was dragged with the words, falling into himself. It was as if everything outside his own body dimmed and warped and stretched before him. He sank into blackness. He reached out, but Shen, holding the picture of his mother, receded above him, dragging all the light with her. The world was dizzying, disturbing, twisted.
But an answer boomed from the pit as he fell. An insistent drumbeat echoed from below, pounding Jack with wave after wave, slowing his fall. Time had stopped. All was perfectly still for an instant. Jack floated, weightless, disconnected. Then the pounding renewed, stronger, as it bounced off the walls, until Jack was being born aloft. Time began to flow again. As the sound pushed Jack upward, it sharpened and clarified into a word. A word that reverberated around Jack until he surfaced and said it out loud.
“Alive.”
Jack found himself surrounded again—by the bakers of the Xiao Long Fortune Cookie Company, the older Chinese men and women, Shen, and Hitchcock.
And then the word became a question.
“Alive?” Jack said. He took the picture of his mother. “This woman, my mother, is alive?”
The young man who had spoken nodded. “She was. Weeks ago.”
A Hitch at the Fairmont Page 13