Black Dove (4 page)

“Who picks the feller?” Gustav finally asked.

“Tell you what, Brother—I’ll give you the advantage. I pick the street, then you get to pick your man. Anyone who passes by in the span of . . . oh, let’s say a minute, is fair game. You tell me what he does for a livin’, maybe three or four other things that strike you, and if you’re right on all counts, you win.”

Old Red gave me the kind of look you’d give a man offering to shake your hand after stepping from a particularly odiferous outhouse—but he didn’t say no.

I’d recently tried to buck my brother up a bit with a gift: a beat-up copy of
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes
I’d spotted in a book peddler’s stall. We were already halfway into our third read-through, and Gustav’s brain was abrimming with new nuggets of The Man’s wisdom. An opportunity to put them to use would be difficult indeed to resist.

That’s the way I had it figured, anyway—and for once, I figured right.

“Done,” Old Red said.

Our shake didn’t last long—we’d only just clasped hands when a quick-stepping swell in a checked suit and a flat-topped boater came barreling between us. But it was enough. The deal was sealed.

“I don’t like the looks of that,” Old Red said of the grin that snaked across my face.

Come on.

I led us up to Market and, from there, north up Dupont.

“You’re walkin’ like you had a particular street in mind all along,” Old Red said sourly.

“Not really,” I replied. And I wasn’t lying . . . much.

It wasn’t a street I’d been thinking of. It was a
neighborhood
—one my brother and I had passed through just once before, during an earlier visit to the city.

Gustav smelled it before he saw it. Four blocks south, and already you could catch a whiff of burning punk and hot braziers, strange spices and the rot of poverty.

“Shit,” Old Red sighed. “I shoulda guessed.”

“You know,” I told him, “you really shoulda.”

A few minutes later, we reached Chinatown.

Or, My Little Trick Blows Up in My Face . . . Literally

There was no sign
to welcome us to Chinatown—not in English, anyway. But there was a welcoming committee of sorts directly across the street.

A white fellow wearing sandwich boards was distributing leaflets and spittle-spewing ravings to any and all passersby whose skin color matched his own. The board across his chest read
PROTECT THE WHITE WORKING MAN CHINESE OUT OF CALIFORNIA
!!!

“Remember: If you’re going into Chinatown, keep your cash in your pockets!” he barked at my brother and me as we tried to scoot around him. “Every dollar you give a Chink’s a dollar you’re taking away from a real American!”

“
Was
?” I said, using the thick German accent all my siblings had perfected imitating our dear old
Mutter
and
Vater
back on the family farm in Kansas. “
Schade. Ich spreche kein Englisch
.”

To my surprise, the man just grinned and pressed one of his pamphlets into my hands.

“Have someone translate this for you, friend,” he said. “Kraut, Mick, Polack, or Frog—it doesn’t matter. Us whites gotta stick together.”

“
Danke, Herr Scheisskerl
!” I said, smiling back. “
Ich werde meinen Arsch damit bei der ersten Gelegenheit wischen
.”

The sandwich man waved me a friendly farewell—unaware, of course, that I’d just promised to make use of his little leaflet the next time I took seat in a privy.

“That just more of the same?” Gustav asked, pointing at the pamphlet.

I looked down and read out the title. “ ‘The Yellow Threat, How the Slant-Eyed Hordes Are Destroying America, by the Anti-Coolie League of—’ ”

“Yeah, yeah,” my brother cut me off. “More of the same.”

I left the leaflet where our
Mutter
taught us all such hateful things belong: in the gutter. Then Old Red and I crossed Sacramento Street, and it wasn’t just the sandwich-man’s twaddle we were leaving behind us. It was San Francisco.

With the crossing of a single street, we seemed to have stepped over the entirety of the Pacific Ocean. Mere seconds before, we might have been in the good old U. S. of A. But for all intents and purposes, we were in China now.

Colorful paper lanterns hung from every balcony like enormous, over-ripe fruit. Every other available space was covered with signs and posters, all of them adorned with the blocky, tic-tac-toe calligraphy of the Celestial Empire. The buildings fell into two camps: squat and dingy or tall-peaked and abristle with bright, elaborately curlicued woodwork.

As for the
people
, there was one camp and one camp only. The narrow streets were packed solid with Chinese men in black hats or skullcaps, loose-fitting tunics, and baggy trousers.

And it wasn’t just white folks who were scarce. There were hardly any women or kids, either. When we did happen to pass females venturing out of doors, many of the men ogled them openly, even hungrily—particularly if they were pretty and wrapped in vivid silks, as some were.

Gustav and I won our fair share of stares, too, for I was leading us as deep into Chinatown as I could, and it was unlikely the residents thereabouts had many visits from Stetson-bedecked cowpokes like my brother. Heads turned as we went striding past, and shopkeepers lingered in their doorways to gape at us. The few how-do nods I attempted went unacknowledged, though, and only one man bothered speaking to us: When I
finally settled on a spot that seemed sufficiently seedy for our deducifying “practice,” a surly looking cabbage peddler pushed his cart away muttering something that sounded like “fink why.” Whatever it meant, I assumed it wasn’t “Make yourselves right at home.”

“Alright—here we are,” I said, throwing my arms open wide. “Pick your man and let the Sherlockery commence.”

Old Red pointed at the cabbage man as he plodded away. “I could tell you what
he
does for a livin’ easy enough.”

“I suppose so. But what else could you come up with? Betcha ol’ Holmes could tell us his age, weight, height, religion, hat size, favorite color, and the last time he trimmed his toe-nails. What do
you
see? Is he married? Does he have children? Does he smoke cigars? Gamble? Pick his nose in bed? What did he have for breakfast? Who irons his underwear?
Is
his underwear ironed? Hell, does he even
wear
underwear? Tell me something.
Anything
.”

“Now just hold on!” Gustav snapped. “I ain’t picked that feller for sure. I still got me a minute to choose, don’t I?”

“More like thirty seconds, now,” I started to say.

I stopped myself, though. I was starting to feel a mite guilty about how sky-high I’d stacked the deck. Yes, I’d meant to befuddle my brother. How could he possibly make head, tail, or anything in between from what he’d see in Chinatown? But I wasn’t out to make him feel like a fool. I just wanted to give him a little giddyup—and point him toward Diana Corvus.

“Take
two
minutes,” I said.

“That’s mighty goddamned generous of you.”

Old Red stalked away a few paces, moving his gaze slowly from one end of the block to the other.

The street was paved with cobblestones, as in the rest of the city, but the sidewalks were mere wooden planks—and rotting ones, at that. And that wasn’t all that was rotten, for there was garbage and grime everywhere.

The businesses along the block weren’t nearly as gawdy-exotic as the fruit stands, butcher shops, restaurants, and stationers lining Dupont and the other big thoroughfares. Here the stores were dingy and dank-looking, and the main stock-in-trade seemed to be shadows and dust.

Most of the men in sight seemed worn out and gray, as well—not to mention utterly unreadable. A smile or a frown or a raised middle finger I know how to interpret. But all we were getting were long, blank-faced looks, neither friendly nor hostile.

Only one fellow out of the bunch could I draw a bead on at all: the cabbage man. There’s nothing particularly mysterious about disgust. The peddler quickly disappeared, though, wheeling his cart around the nearest corner.

Old Red’s most promising subject was gone, and he knew it.

I could see my brother’s growing frustration in his clenched fists, the tense, pinched set of his shoulders, the herky-jerky way he swung his stare from one doorway to the next in search of a man he could study. A man he could
know
.

“God damn,” he spat.

Time was running out. His minutes had turned into seconds.

Then he snapped to his full height and said it again: “God
damn
!”

But the words sounded different this time. Not just louder. Brighter. Almost gleeful.

“That feller. There.”

Old Red pointed across the street at a man who’d stepped from one of the grungy little stores just a moment before. He was a smallish fellow, but that was about all I could tell, for he turned and scurried away before I could see his face. He was clearly dressed American-style, though, in a dark suit and spats—and with no queue hanging down his back.

Now, a Chinaman without his ponytail’s about as common as a horse without hooves, a fish without fins, or a banker with a heart. So it looked like Gustav had found himself a white man. And lickety-split he was Holmesing him up.

“He’s a doctor,” he said, starting across the street in pursuit. “Respected in his community, well off—until recently. He’s had him a run of bad luck that put him in a bind money-wise. Got himself knocked around, too. Bodily, I mean. But he’s pickin’ himself up again. He might not look like it, but he’s one tough little bird.”

We reached the other side of the street side by side and began hustling up the rickety sidewalk.

“Alright, I’m impressed—assumin’ it ain’t pure bullshit,” I said. “Now you wranna tell me how you deduced all that?”

“No deducifyin’ necessary,” Old Red said, and he shot me a cocked eyebrow that was, for him, the same as a cocky grin. “We know him. That’s Dr. Gee Woo Chan.”

I gaped at my brother. “Doc Chan? From the Pacific Express? It couldn’t be.”

But it could, I saw when I looked again at the man we were chasing.

He seemed stockier around the shoulders and thicker around the middle than the polished, polite Chinaman we’d met during our one and only train run as Southern Pacific police. The height was right, though, as was the hair: Chan was the only Chinaman I’d ever seen who didn’t wear a queue. The man was even limping slightly, and the last we’d heard of Dr. Chan, he’d been bashed over the head and tossed off the express we were supposed to be protecting.

“Well, hell’s bells. I do believe it
is
him.” I picked up my pace to a near sprint. “Hey, Doc! Stop!
Doc!
”

The fellow didn’t even turn around to look at me, and I started thinking Old Red was wrong after all. I kept after the man, though, already savoring the vexation I’d see on my brother’s face when “Dr. Chan” turned out to be Dr. O’Grady the dentist or Mr. Stein the encyclopedia salesman.

“Doc? Is that you? Yoo-hoo!”

I was almost close enough to reach out and touch the man now, and he finally stopped and started to turn toward me.

“ ‘Scuse me, sir,” I said. “I was wonderin’—”

I didn’t finish my sentence for two reasons.

First off, it
was
Dr. Chan.

And second, I was interrupted—by the derringer in his hand and the blast of gunfire in my face.

Or, Chan Tries to Make Amends and Avoid Explanations

Fortunately, it was only
the literal gun
fire
I felt on my face—the sting of scorched powder in my eyes and a flash of heat upon my forehead. The
bullet
pierced not flesh but felt, tearing through the crown of my bowler and whipping the hat right off my head.

“Shit, Doc!” I shrieked, instinctively crouching down and throwing up my hands. “It ain’t our fault you got throwed off that train!”

Chan’s
eyes
bulged behind his round-wired spectacles.