Gold Mountain (34 page)

When he did show up, the afternoon sky had just begun to dim; I had been imprisoned for a full day. My jailer brought me a bowl of a disgusting liquid in which floated solid but unrecognizable chunks of what might have been meat and while my first thought was to shove it right back at him, I was sensible enough not to do so. Instead, I took the bowl in both hands and tilted the contents into my mouth, trying not to give much thought to what exactly I was eating. I knew I might need my strength in the future and couldn’t afford to be finicky. The man then threatened to tie me to the bed if I didn’t stay away from the window, and I feared he would do exactly that. I thought I could best him if it was just the two of us, but if he brought in reinforcements, I didn’t stand a chance, and I craved mobility, even in my limited space. Still, the small window held a mystical allure—freedom beckoned on the other side of those bars, freedom and safety and relief from fear. The street’s traffic had increased as the day progressed, and I had the unfulfilled hope that another passer-by might come close enough to hear a call for help. Unfortunately, I was never left alone long enough to attempt another contact. August heat turned the room into a reeking oven, and I wanted to stay near the window for fresh air, too, even though the smells of Morton Street that breezed in were not much of an improvement. All I could do, however, was sit on the edge of the bed and stare at the window with the same fixed expression a cat might have assumed in front of a mouse hole.

Once that afternoon the door opened to allow a figure I recognized to enter—the man Jake and I had first seen at Wing Chee’s, the one wearing two black armbands and his queue bound on the top of his head, the man who had followed Suey Wah and me the day of the dock strike. The highbinder Chong Lin. He stood in the open doorway legs akimbo, arms crossed across his chest, staring at me impassively. Only his eyes sparked with emotion. I found him terrifying, and to make up for that initial debilitating feeling of fear I took the offensive.

“How dare you keep me here against my will?!” I spoke sharply and with much more self-assurance than I really felt. “Kidnapping is an offense punishable by death. Do you really want to risk that? The men at whose bidding you have committed this crime will not be able to save you.” Not a muscle moved on his face. I might as well have been speaking to granite. When I moved closer to him to speak again, he casually put his hand to the center of my chest and pushed me backwards with enough force that my legs caught on the edge of the bed and I sat down with an unceremonious grunt.

His action angered and frightened me at the same time, and I did not immediately try to stand again. Chong Lin maintained his posture and continued to stare at me. I didn’t speak again but finally rose to my feet once more, not willing to sit before him any longer in a pose that indicated a slave before his master, but we both realized that for the time being he was indeed master of the situation. At his side he wore a long, curved saber, a Chinese
dao
, and to show he understood why I had risen to my feet, he rested his hand on the weapon’s handle. His mute return message was clear to me: he could take off my head whenever and wherever he chose. I lifted my chin and met his look as fearlessly as I was able—probably not all that convincing a gesture because fright and panic were making my stomach churn and my heart beat so hard that its pounding threatened to cut off my air supply. I know he must have seen the fear in my expression and posture despite my intention to the contrary because he gave a small, self-satisfied smile before exiting. The fact that he had remained wordless the entire time intensified his superiority. I was the supplicant at his mercy and regardless of my false bravado, we both recognized the truth.

Just as I remembered the restless frustration of being forced to stay within an area too small for comfort, and as I recognized the smells of human habitation in the heat of summer, I also recalled the familiar, bitter, shameful taste of fear and the dead, staring eyes of Corporal Alfred Betterman. After Chong Lin’s departure, I lay down on the bed and wept—just a little bit—offered an inarticulate prayer for rescue, and drifted into a brief and fitful sleep.

When the door next flew open, I must have been having a terrible dream because I fully expected to see Chong Lin standing in the doorway with his
dao
raised to lop off one of my body parts—my head if I were lucky. Because I stood too quickly, the room went black for a moment and when I could finally see who stood in front of me, it wasn’t the terrifying turtle man of the black dragons, it was Jake Pandora. My Jake Pandora, for better or for worse, the man I’d known would come for me. Worry and anger made his face a little less perfect than usual but I was content with what I saw there. Those emotions were on my behalf, and the way he said my name told me even more than his expression. Hardly a time to feel a rush of romantic feeling and recognize that I loved the man, but there it was.

“I’m all right,” I told him quickly. “I’m not hurt. How did you—?” I peered past him at a prone figure outstretched on the floor of the hallway. “Is he—?” Apparently unable to finish a sentence, I shrugged helplessly and to my surprise felt my eyes well up with tears.

“For God’s sake, don’t cry, Dinah, or I won’t be able to focus on getting us out of here. How you ended up on Morton Street must be quite a story.” His tone was nowhere near as rough as his words.

“I am not going to cry,” I began and then over his shoulder caught the flash of something that made me shout, “Jake, behind you!”

He turned fast enough to escape the full strength of Chong Lin’s blow but not so fast that the blade missed him entirely. The
dao
hacked across Jake’s face, his perfectly beautiful face, slit open a gash that curved from the corner of his eyebrow to the edge of that classical mouth and with the same deadly intention continued down to connect with Jake’s upraised forearm, cutting through cloth and skin. Blood splattered everywhere, Jake Pandora’s bright red blood, and he stumbled against me.

I screamed Jake’s name and threw myself between him and the
dao
that Chong Lin had raised for another slash. The turtle man repeated the humorless smile he’d given me earlier that day, the smile that said I am master here, and turned the direction of his blow toward me.

Injured as he was, Jake still tried to push me to the side, mumbling words I could not understand, but I refused to budge.

“I am not a coward,” I said out loud and still standing between the unsteady Jake and the murderous Chong Ling, I stretched out my arms palms forward toward the poised knife with the same gesture I might have used to halt carriage traffic, my hands the only shield before that deadly, diabolical blade. I knew he meant to kill us both and waited to feel the slice of metal through skin and bone.

Jake, still losing blood, began to slump against me, and I remember feeling so tender toward him and so very sorry that he would die because of me. As if Alfred Betterman weren’t enough to have on my conscience and carry into eternity, now I must drag along Jake Pandora, too. The thoughts seem lengthy in the writing, but in reality they were just a flash of something unarticulated and fragile as I prepared to die.

Obviously, I did not die. At the moment Chong Lin would have sliced through my neck, someone shot him from behind. For one quick moment, the deadly turtle man looked astonished and then he toppled forward, fell against Jake as I struggled to support him, and knocked both Jake and me backwards through the doorway and into my little prison of a room. I reached for Jake with both arms and purposefully fell with him so I could cradle his body and protect it from crashing against the floor. Surprisingly, I landed in a comfortable position, my legs under me, my skirts billowed out, and Jake’s bleeding face and arm lying squarely in my lap.

“My darling,” I said softly. “Don’t you dare die,” and then remembered that a shot—and thus a shooter—had rescued us. Lifting my head, I started to say thank you, but the words caught in my throat as I stared directly at Colin O’Connor. My heart leaped, literally leaped, with joy at the sight.

“Oh, Colin, how did you find me?” and then as Jake stirred in my lap, added, “Can you help me? He’s terribly injured.” I glanced down at Jake’s bleeding face briefly and then looked back at Colin, who did not move a step from the open doorway where he stood still holding his gun, the shot’s acrid smoke just beginning to dispel. Because I had been without food for a full day, because I’d been ill from the effects of chloroform, and because I believed the man I loved was bleeding to death in my lap, I was not quick to understand what was happening. I repeated Colin’s name, only this time with hesitant uncertainty. He should be helping me, I thought with confusion, not standing with a look on his face that indicated he had just uncovered a disagreeable truth.

“Is he the one then?” Colin asked, his Irish brogue unmistakable.

“The one—?” I began, even more confused, then picked up strength to add, “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but I need your help, Colin. I’m afraid Jake’s going to bleed to death if we don’t do something.”

Colin came forward and crouched down next to me, Jake seemingly invisible to him, lifted my face with a finger under my chin, and stared into my face. Then he abruptly stood.

“I’ve thought there was someone else for a while, and I see there is. Dammit, Dinah, I didn’t deserve for you to treat me like that.”

Nothing in all my experience had prepared me for such a moment, and I had no idea what to say or how to act, didn’t understand Colin’s words or why he felt compelled to say them just then, didn’t comprehend that he could ignore Jake Pandora’s blood as it soaked into my skirt. Then Colin took a single step backward directly into a low shaft of late afternoon sunlight that stole between the bars of the window, and I suddenly understood everything so clearly it might as well have been written on the wall. The stream of sunlight gleamed off his hair and off the double rows of gold tone buttons on Colin’s uniform and off the bright metal policeman’s star he wore on his chest. Here was Suey Wah’s shiny man. I could see it in his face and wondered if what was there had always been there and I had simply been too self-absorbed to notice it.

“Colin,” I said gently, desperately, “you just did a very good thing. A noble thing. You saved our lives. Everything can be worked out. Don’t spoil it for yourself.”

Just as gently, Colin O’Connor replied, “I just saved
your
life, Dinah, because those were my orders. They don’t want you dead. Not yet, anyway. I was told to make sure you stayed alive at all costs.”

“Who told you?”

Colin shrugged. “To tell you the truth, I don’t know. I have a contact who knows someone who knows someone. That’s how the business works, how it’s always worked.”

I thought with despair that he was not going to do anything for Jake and allowed that despair to creep into my voice, “Help us get out of here, Colin. At least help Jake. Please. Do it for me. You saved his life. Please get us out of here.”

“I’m sorry, Dinah, I can’t do that. I wasn’t told you were allowed to go anywhere, only that they don’t want you dead.” He spoke with slow, deliberate words so I wouldn’t misunderstand. “But in my own way, I care about you, and I’m glad someone’s fighting to keep you alive. I’m in so deep that I don’t have the will or the way to argue about anything, but I don’t believe I’d ever recover from having to hurt you. It worked out all right, my being here at the right time and being able to save your life, but you should understand that I don’t give a damn what happens to him.” To demonstrate his words, he nudged Jake’s gashed arm with the toe of his boot hard enough to make Jake moan. “I guess that’s what a man gets for loving you, gets to die in your arms. We should all be so lucky.” He stepped into the hallway and pushed the door shut behind him. I heard sounds that I recognized as Colin dragging Chong Lin’s body away down the hallway. The little man who’d been my jailer seemed to have completely disappeared.

Later, I told myself firmly, I will reflect on Colin O’Connor, the part he apparently played in the human smuggling business, and how I had managed to miss the level of depravity he must certainly possess. Later. What I intended to do first and foremost was keep Jake Pandora alive. Without conscious planning, I removed my shirtwaist, ripped off both sleeves at the seam—an old blouse, fortunately, and not as hard a job as I’d expected—and laid one piece over the cut in Jake’s arm and the other over the slash that stretched from the corner of his eye, across his cheek, and down to the corner of his mouth. The fabric I wrapped tightly around his arm drew the edges of the cut together and had the same effect as impromptu stitches, but the injury to his face was harder to work with. I sat on the floor for what seemed a long, long time with the heel of my hand pressed hard against the material that I’d folded into a thick pad and placed against the bleeding wound, sat and prayed and willed the bleeding to stop. Head wounds bled a lot, I knew, but usually they appeared worse than they really were. Please God, let that be the case here, a terrible wound for sure, but one that looked worse than it really was. When my hand cramped from the strain of remaining motionless, I changed posture and resumed the pressure. At first I feared it was just wishful thinking, but after a while I could tell the bleeding had slowed. I looked regretfully at the rest of the blouse before tearing it into broad, bandage-like strips. When we’re rescued, I’ll be in my chemise, I thought, and ended up chuckling at the foolishness of vanity.