Black Dove (21 page)

“What makes
you
such an upstanding citizen, then?” Diana asked. “It can’t just be greed.”

“It could be . . . but for once it’s not. The truth is, my neck’s already stuck out even further than yours.”

As Charlie himself had just pointed out, he’d been far from sneaky about speaking to us. Yet now he leaned in close and dropped his voice down low.

In Chinatown, it seemed, certain things are said in whispers no matter what the circumstances.

“I crossed Little Pete. It was an accident . . . but that’s all it takes. He could put up red paper on me any minute. And if he does—”

Charlie sliced one finger across his thin neck and made a
sheee
sound that, while not English, needed no translation.

“We should hire you cuz the biggest badman in Frisco wants you dead?” I said. “I hate to tell a feller how to go about his business, but that ain’t exactly what I’d call an enticement.”

“How’s this for an enticement, then: I speak Hoisanese and Mandarin, and you don’t. Simple enough for you?”

“Not really,” I said. “What we need is someone who speaks Chinese.”

“Otto . . .” From the look on Diana’s face, I knew I’d just said something extra-special stupid, even for me. “Hoisanese and Mandarin are both Chinese dialects.”

“Oh.”

“Look,” Charlie said, “you need help, and I need running money. And I need an answer.” He locked eyes with Old Red, perhaps sensing—correctly—that my brother was the most likely to make things difficult. “
Now
.”

He didn’t get his
now
, though. Gustav made him wait while he sized him up, eyes narrowed, mouth pressed into a small, tight line.

“Well, hell,” Old Red finally sighed. He peeked over at Diana. “You’re the one with the greenbacks. I reckon it’s really up to you.”

“Right.”

Diana opened her handbag and pulled out a roll of cash.

“I’ll give you fifty now and fifty if we find Hok Gup,” she said, peeling off five bills and holding them up in the air.

Charlie opened his mouth and shook his head.

“And then there’s the tip,” Diana cut in before he could commence to bitching. “Five hundred more, wired to you anytime, anywhere.”

Charlie closed his mouth and nodded.

Stiffly, bit by bit, Diana brought down the hand with the cash in it like her arm was a drawbridge slowly being lowered. When the money was within reach, Charlie snatched it up and stashed it beneath his loose gray blouse.

My brother’s gaze remained fixed on the lady, though. And he didn’t look particularly grateful, either. In fact, he was eyeing her as he’d just eyed Charlie—and he seemed wary of what he saw.

“You wanna find Hok Gup, you need to find Fat Choy,” Charlie said. “You wanna find Fat Choy . . . come with me.”

And he started off as Gustav so often does, moving fast, not looking back, simply assuming you’re hitched up behind him. Old Red didn’t look happy to be on the other end of the harness for once, but that didn’t stop him—or me and Diana—from following.

As we hurried after Charlie, I noticed something I hadn’t seen when the Chinaman was facing us: Like Chan, he wore no ponytail “queue.”

“Just who
is
Fat Choy, anyway?” Diana asked as we caught up to him.

“Another
boo how doy
. A hatchet man. For the Kwong Ducks,” Charlie said. “He got his start over at Madam Fong’s, guarding the door.” He glanced over at me and my brother. “You know the type.”

“Oh, absolutely,” I said. “Big. Chatty. Homicidal.”

“That’s Fat Choy—especially the last part.” Charlie swung left at the corner, taking us north up Stockton Street. “In fact, that’s how he got his name.’ ”

“ ‘Choy’ means ‘killer’?” I asked.

Charlie coughed up a scoffing chuckle. “No. And ‘Fat’ doesn’t mean fat, if that’s what you’ve been thinking. ‘Fat Choy’ means ‘good luck.’ They call him that because meeting him usually
isn’t
. Get it?”

I nodded. “Oh, sure. Like if folks got to callin’ my brother ‘Mr. Sunshine.’ ”

“
So”
Old Red piped up from behind us, “Fat Choy worked at the cathouse.
And
. . . ?”

“And he fell in love with one of the sing-song girls. I assume professional detectives like you can figure out which one.”

Charlie gave us a few seconds to do our figuring—not that we needed it.

Still, the break in the chatter was good for something beyond dramatic effect: It gave me a moment to notice all the looks we were getting . . . and how they’d changed.

Before, Chinatown folk had felt free to gape at us openly, brazenly. But now it was more like they were peeking, stealing little glimpses before looking away—or even ignoring us altogether in that stiff-necked, staring-at-nothing way that can be every bit as obvious as a pop-eyed gawk.

It gave me the uneasy feeling there was something all those Chinamen didn’t want to see. Something that might happen at any moment.

“Fat Choy tried to buy the girl himself a while back,” Charlie said, picking up his tale again. “Couldn’t afford her. The Black Dove’s a big draw for Madam Fong. Her best earner. A smart mack like the Madam doesn’t give that up easily. But it looks like Fat Choy wasn’t ready to give up, either.”

Old Red stared at Charlie so hard he would’ve walked smack into a streetlamp had one appeared in his path.

“Meanin’ what, exactly?”

“Gee Woo Chan was seen bringing Hok Gup home with him this morning,” Charlie said. “And Fat Choy was seen storming into Chan’s place less than half an hour later.”

“And who was doing all this seeing?” Diana asked.

Charlie shrugged. “Everybody.”

“And nobody’d tell us that?” my brother fumed. “Nobody’d even tell the damned po-lease?”

“Nobody around here trusts the damned po-lease.”

Charlie veered right, steering us into what felt like the fiftieth dark, dank alleyway we’d entered that day.

“Anyway, everybody saw Fat Choy go in, but nobody saw him come out. The front door was wide open, so after a while, one of the neighbors went in to check on Chan. You know what he found upstairs: the gas on, Chan dead. The back door was left open, too, so it looks like Fat Choy took the girl out that way. But that’s just a guess. No one’s seen them since this morning.”

Charlie finally came to a stop.

“And here we are.”

“Here” was a mere hole in the ground—a pit dug out beside a dilapidated, grime-blackened tenement house. It was on an incline, ramp-style, and one could walk down into it and keep on going right under the building itself.

This was no storm cellar, though. There were no stairs, no doors, no frame, no indication of structure of any kind. It was like the entrance to a huge dugout or den—the home, perhaps, of the world’s most colossal gopher.

At the end of the pit was . . . nothing.
Black
nothing.

Oh, there was more, that we could tell from the sour smells that came seeping out from beneath the building. There were voices, too—muffled grunts that could have been words or groans, either or. But it was as if these were the scents and sounds of the blackness itself, for it was hard to believe there could be anything down in that pit but oblivion.

And in a way, that’s all there really was.

“Fat Choy took it hard when he couldn’t buy Hok Gup,” Charlie said. “He tried to dull the pain with—”

“
Opium
.”

Diana was staring down into the hole. For the first time since I’d met her, I saw something on her face that looked a little like fear.

“That’s an opium den?” I asked.

“The worst in Chinatown. Which makes it just about the worst anywhere. A man wants to disappear”—Charlie nodded down into the darkness—“that’s the perfect place to do it. You really want Fat Choy, this is where to look first.”

I think Charlie was expecting a moment of tremulous reflection, a
little pause while the white folks fussed and fretted and reappraised their commitment to their little crusade.

And I would’ve given him all that, too, if it had been up to me. But, as is so often the case when my brother’s around, it wasn’t.

“Well, what are we waitin’ for?” Old Red said, and he marched straight into that ditch and disappeared into the shadows.

“Someone to talk us out of it?” I called after him.

Our squabblings aside, I’ve always said I’d follow my brother to hell and back. Now it looked like that was being put to the test . . . literally.

I dropped into the pit and walked into the abyss.

Or, A Tourist Trap Lives Up to the Name

One surprising thing about
hell: There’s not nearly so much headroom as you’d expect.

The trench I’d hopped down into quickly turned into a tunnel, and before my eyes could adjust to the dark, I scraped my already-tender scalp against the slats of rotting wood that were either the ceiling or the ground floor of the building above. The little yelp I let out didn’t slow Gustav, though. The tunnel jogged off to the left, and he jogged with it.

A dull orange-yellow light was leaking out around the corner Old Red rounded, and I moved toward it stoop-shouldered and sore-headed.

As I came around the curve, I found my brother stopped before a small, long-whiskered Chinaman who was even more bent-backed than me. I would’ve thought he was trying to touch his toes if he hadn’t been glaring up at Gustav, his head cocked at such an extreme angle it almost seemed to be fitted to him backwards. The man jabbered at us in Chinese, then twisted his neck even further to eye something behind us.

“Give him five dollars,” Chinatown Charlie said. Diana was beside him. “That’s his usual fee when I bring people down here.”

“You’ve done this before?” I asked.

“Oh, only about eighty or ninety times.”

“Hold on,” Old Red said. “You mean to say you’re a . . . a . . . a . . .”

“Tour guide?” I offered.

My brother snapped his fingers. “Yeah, that’s it. You’re a tour guide?”

Charlie shrugged. “Among other things. What did you think I was? A streetcar conductor?”

“And you actually get
tourists
who want to see a place like this?” I asked.

“Every day. The only place they enjoy more is the slave market under St. Louis Alley.”

I waited for a smirk that never came. If Charlie was joking, he was doing it with a face as straight as a razor.

“Go on.” He nodded at our hunchbacked host. “Pay the man.”

Diana looked at Gustav, and he gave her a sharp nod. As she fished out her bankroll, the hunchback scuttled toward her, clearing the way for my first good look at a genuine opium den.

I’d read of such things in magazine stories, of course—one of them being “The Man with the Twisted Lip” by Sherlock Holmes’s pal Dr. Watson. And though the good doctor had been writing about a “vile murder-trap” in faraway London, most of his description fit our new surroundings snug enough.

The den he’d depicted was “a long, low room, thick and heavy with the brown opium smoke, and terraced with wooden berths, like the fore-castle of an emigrant ship.” Ours was just as tubelike and smoky, lit only by two low-burning lanterns and the orange-red coals of a small brazier. But there were no “berths,” just tattered canvas cots, and it felt less like the hold of a ship than a coal mine converted into a flophouse. Or a peanut mine, perhaps—opium smoke, it turns out, smells almost exactly like burnt goobers.

The far end of the room was cordoned off by a series of dingy-gray curtains, for the purpose, I assumed, of affording the classier clientele a little privacy. The other customers got none whatsoever—nor did they seem to care.

While Watson wrote of “bodies lying in strange fantastic poses, bowed shoulders, bent knees, heads thrown back,” I just saw a dozen logy-looking Chinamen. The sudden appearance of a Stetson-topped cowpoke and a red-haired giant who had to bend at the knee just to keep from
scalping himself on the ceiling seemed to make as much of an impression on them as a beautiful sunset makes on your average cowpie. They had eyes only for the long-stemmed pipes they occasionally rousted themselves from their cots to pack with gooey gray paste and light up, fingers all afumble. A few seconds sucking up the acrid fumes from the gurgling pipe, and they had no need for eyes at all—their bodies went slack, their faces vacant as they beheld wondrous visions invisible to all but themselves.

“I’ve seen that look before,” I said.

Gustav was walking slowly between the opium eaters’ bunks, headed for the back of the room. “Yeah?”

“Sure. On your face. Every time you get to cogitatin’.”

I dropped my jaw and went cross-eyed.

“These fellers here ain’t tryin’ to think,” Old Red muttered. “They’re tryin’
not
to.”

“Like Holmes with his cocaine?” Diana asked, taking a cautious step deeper into the den.

Gustav threw a scowl back at her.

We’d only learned of the great detective’s not-so-great habits recently, from the stories in
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
. At first, the revelation that his hero had been a hophead bothered my brother, but he’d shrugged it off soon enough.