Hungry Ghosts (5 page)

As if to demonstrate, Tia now smiled at Jeffrey, the guy who'd told me about our building surviving the 1906 earthquake. And, with that surprised smile of a chosen one, he hurried over.

“I'm sure you all know Jeffrey Hagstrom, but I'll do the propers anyway,” she said. “Jeffrey is the histo-architectural expert on the Barbary Coast.”

He must have been in his early thirties but still had a baby face. He flushed as she spoke. It was hard to imagine him as known, much less well-known.

“He's the consultant to the producers of
Barbary Nights
.”

A rouge of embarrassment bloomed on Hagstrom's round, pallid face. “I answer their questions. What they do with my answers—”

“
Barbary
is like all companies.” The voice was tenor, the accent was British, the speaker was the central casting goon who'd come in with the college student. Was he part of the movie company? I hadn't seen him this
morning, but it wasn't as if I had been eyeing the entire crew at 5:30
A.M
. “Our aim is to entertain, not to footnote.”

Jeffrey stumbled back, all bloom gone.

“Our real Barbary Coast never loses its intrigue, does it?” Tia said, barely missing a beat, as if that had been the thug's point all along. “No district in all of San Francisco has changed as dramatically as this respectable street. But suppose”—Tia looked directly at the deflated Hagstrom, drawing her hands apart as if she were opening the possibilities—“suppose we were right here a hundred fifty years ago, what would we see?”

“A lot more of you than we do now.”

To a one we stared at Hagstrom, as if to say: did that double entendre come from your little pink mouth? Then we laughed, some of us more than others, the thug not at all.

Tia smiled, perfectly comfortable with her barnacle. “So Darcy and I are ladies of the night?”

“It's the nineteenth century; there aren't any other kinds of women here,” Jeffrey said, his color returning.

“And you gentlemen?”

“Eamon, you're just off a freighter back from the Far East. You're still lurching from two years at sea and all that gold banging around in your pockets. You can't wait to spend that money—”

“On us?” Tia asked with a wink at Eamon.

“You and drink, not necessarily in that order,” Jeffrey answered for him.

“And the abbot?” She gave a smile to Leo and let it linger a moment. She seemed the Tia of old, delectably at ease in her utter control. But I couldn't help notice her hand tighten on her cane.

Jeffrey accepted a cup of tea from a passing waiter. “Abbot, of course you'd be a preacher. There are a few missions at the edges of the Barbary
Coast, though it's such a lost cause you'll be focusing on the heathens in Chinatown.”

“Converting them?”

“Ultimately. But, more practically, setting up safe houses. Life is much, much better for the white prostitutes here than the Chinese in Chinatown. No, really—” he held up a hand to forestall my comment. “If you're Chinese, you were kidnapped or sold by your family, shipped to a strange country, plunked into a crib on the street, and screwed until you're too diseased to be worth anything. When that point comes”—he paused for effect, and a sip of tea—“your pimp carries you to a room with no window, maybe an underground storage space. He lays you on a slab, places a pot of tea and an oil lamp next to you, and walks out. You hear the door lock. The only light is the dimming glow from the lamp. You just hope you die before the oil burns away.”

I shivered and clutched my teacup tighter, trying not to feel the agony of a woman abandoned and waiting for death in total blackness. It was a moment before I realized that Jeffrey had stopped talking, that a horrified silence had descended on our group. Tia's hand jerked and for the first time she actually leaned on her cane. She was looking at Jeffrey, not with horror, or even distress as he stood in the damning silence, but with the kind of panic I had seen only on the faces of other women. After what seemed ages, she walked, now relying on that cane she had been careful to appear not to need at all. She went to Jeffrey's side and put her arm through his.

Her sweet gesture resuscitated the group. Eamon signaled the waiter to bring tea. “And you, Jeffrey?” I asked, taking pity on him, “what's your job?”

“Me? Well, I'm a small man, of the sort that needs money to protect them. I, uh, I own this building, this saloon. This room here—back then it
actually
was
a saloon. So I own the saloon and you ladies are hustling drinks here and guiding our guest upstairs, since the entire focus of the Barbary Coast is to separate a sailor from his booty.”

“Surely a sailor—Eamon—couldn't spend it all in one night, even on one of us.” Tia's laugh sounded only a bit forced. She freed Jeffrey's arm and let her hand rest in his pocket, as if to assure him she was still there.

“Even on both of us,” I said.

“I'll have a helluva time trying,” Eamon said, grinning at Tia.

Jeffrey didn't smile. “Not spend, Eamon, be relieved of. You're lured in here by my barker.” Jeffrey nodded at the thug. “Darcy entices you upstairs. Or maybe—sorry, Eamon”—now he did smile—“you don't even get that far. Maybe my bartender gives you a Mickey Finn and drops you through— You know back then the Bay was just a few yards from here?”

“You mean it's all filled land for the next four blocks to the Bay, right?” Tia asked helpfully, without looking up from fumbling with her cane and purse and shawl. She gave Jeffrey a small pat on his side, the way a mother might to assure her child he was fine, then she moved far enough to be out of his limelight.

“Filled land is a slippery concept,” he said with a little grin. “This—my saloon—was—is—on the waterfront or close to it. Let's say close to. Close enough for me to invest in a subterranean alley from the basement to the docks. For the likes of you, Eamon. I knock you out, drop you through a trapdoor onto a cart waiting there, on top of the other victims. The cart rattles down the rail and dumps the lot of you into a ship's hold. By the time you wake up, all you see is the Golden Gate slipping away behind you and the whole Pacific ahead. You've been on land for an hour, max.” Jeffrey Hagstrom was back in his stride now, as if Tia's touch had transfused him.

“Shanghaied,” Leo said.

Everyone laughed. The volume of its sound made me aware that our circle had grown, with Jeffrey now holding court before half the guests.

I had assumed that Tia was with Eamon. They had walked in as one; they looked perfect together, their contradictions creating balance: his tall sturdiness grounding her fragility, her plain khaki shawl and long skirt grounding his expensive jacket with the narrow band of navy and chartreuse handkerchief just peeking from the pocket, her understated beauty reflecting back on his flair.

“The way to the dock was just large enough for the carts,” Jeffrey went on. “Luckily the ground slants downhill to the Bay.”

Jeffrey had that about-to-make-it look as he held forth on the tunnel.

“It's still here, isn't it?” Leo asked.

“Oh no, those carts—”

Leo grinned. “No, no. I mean, the tunnel. It's still down there, right beneath us, right?”

C
HAPTER
5

T
HERE WASN
'
T
even time for Jeffrey Hagstrom to offer Leo directions to the old tunnel. Instantly, Eamon Lafferty led the charge out of the zendo into the courtyard. The light in the hall was slightly brighter than in the zendo, marking the edges of Tia's body as I walked out behind her. She used her cane, and I could see the slight quiver in her arm as she leaned against Jeffrey, letting him support her in a way that would once have horrified her. She paused at the door, turned back momentarily, then moved on. Her jaw was tighter than I'd ever seen it.

In school, I hadn't known her well, but I'd run into her a lot, at the kind of parties we didn't mention to parents, at track meets and tests, and, for a month our senior year, in a play. Not once had a wrinkle of hesitation lined her face. She had skated on her ability to see things before they changed and to adjust so fast that she was on to the future while those around her were clambering out of the past.

But now it was not that she had seen the end of the tunnel, rather that she'd realized it had an end.

I felt so sad for her. Or was I imagining her distress? Truth was, I was still so unnerved from the instant of “seeing Mike,” I was hardly a decent judge of anyone else's emotions.

We all kept walking, out the door into the courtyard.

The potted trees threw fingers of darkness across the stones as our group followed Eamon behind the building to the fire escape I had used this morning. There were fewer than a dozen of us left now.

“It'll be back here,” Eamon announced, and the rest of us piled up behind him. He moved sideways, hands behind his back, scanning the base of the back wall and murmuring monosyllables that suggested impending discovery. I kept expecting Jeffrey to take over again. But Jeffrey seemed content to let Eamon drag out his failure.

It was Leo who spotted a grunge-encrusted half door behind one of the tree pots. Eamon leapt forward to do the pulling, and the effort took all of his body weight and the help of a crowbar someone fetched. The door was only thirty inches high. A tiny flashlight materialized and its straw of illumination shone into a shaft narrowed with slick, hardened black substances. It looked about ten feet long. I'm not claustrophobic, but what came to mind were those grim stories of children falling into wells and fire departments lowering ropes and drilling parallel holes and none of it ever able to save them. Similar foreboding thoughts must have crossed half the dozen minds here as we all peered down into the blackness. One woman said something about wearing high heels, a man muttered about it being better by daylight, someone else stammered of dinner plans and made a beeline for the street. Flashlights glistened off slimy walls. Jumping into that chute would be like going through a mummy's wrappings with a hole in the bottom. As unappealing as it looked, still the seduction of the tunnel's lurid history kept us poised on the edge, that and the unwillingness to be the first to admit fear. I glanced hopefully over at Leo, but there was an odd look of determination on his face. It wouldn't be Leo who'd save us. Tia tottered at the edge. Her jaw was set, her gaze unwavering, like the Tia of old. “It can't be more than ten feet down!” She pulled off her shawl and thrust it into the nearest hand.

I couldn't let her do it. “Make way!” I called out. “Professional here. Stunt double into the hole!” I held a hand out for one of the torches.

“Stop!” Jeffrey called from behind us. “You're in the wrong place. The entrance is here.”

I stepped back so fast I smacked into Leo.

“It's over here, on this side of the courtyard,” our expert insisted.

We hurried to the front of the courtyard, in the corner behind a five-foot-high brick wall that connected to the entry arch. Two of the potted maple trees stood on the metal doors. Relieved as I was, a dull wave of disappointment washed through me at the sight of this prosaic entryway, the type of loading hatch found in sidewalks in all big cities.

“Then what was that back there?” Tia demanded sharply.

“Sewer, probably.” Jeffrey bit his lip. “Or just a hole. This area is sprinkled with little holes like that, particularly here where rock meets fill. Tunnels made it worse.”

“You've been in the tunnel?” Tia demanded.

“Well, no.” He moved another step back. “You know I'm not crazy about closed spaces. The entry to the tunnel's here. I can tell you all about it, but, well, I'm not going to go down there with you.”

“You could have told us before Darcy almost jumped into God knows what.” Tia grabbed her shawl from his hand and nearly smacked his face with it as she flung it around her shoulders. It was almost as if all her concern for him earlier had never been.

“Here! I've got it open!” Eamon pulled the big metal sheet up, letting it clank open to the cement. Again the flashlight circled around, but this chamber was the size of a boxcar, with a metal ladder—clearly a later addition—on the wall. Tia was over the edge so quickly the metal cover was still reverberating. Lowering herself onto the same leg step after step, she steadied herself with arms that were working over capacity. Eamon
followed, then I, and Leo and four others, till the tunnel was crowded and the small rhomboid of dusky light wasted in illuminating our own bodies. The odor of must and decay was so thick it was hard to breathe and made it seem as if everybod
y
who'd passed here on his way to death had left a part of himself, a part I was pulling up my nose.

“To your right,” Jeffrey called down. “The tunnel slopes toward the Bay. If you look down, you can still see track marks from the carts, I know.”

“Uh-uh! I've seen enough,” a woman said. “I'm not staying in any grave till I have to.” She grabbed on to the ladder and was up over the edge before anyone reacted.

A narrow band of light shone on the damp earth and stone walls. The stone was encased in an unnatural grime that must have been the residue of the nineteenth-century traffic and its passengers' blood and vomit. The still-damp mud clung to our shoes, as if trying to hold us here in the same earth as the long-dead sailors and dying prostitutes. I started to breathe through my mouth, but it didn't cut the stench. Someone aimed a light around the edges of the floor and ceiling and held it overhead to scan the tunnel roof for signs of the trapdoor. The dark sucked up the tiny beam of light and the chill echoed the icy water of the Pacific.