Port Hazard (15 page)

The fog was
rolling out to sea at midmorning, swept as by a broom made entirely of sunshine. An old man, his face burned red over several sandy layers of brown, paused in the midst of slitting open the silver belly of a fish to point with his serrated knife toward the end of the pier, where even as I looked the fog slid away from the figure standing with arms folded atop a piling. I went out there and stuck my hands in my pockets.

“Busy harbor,” I said.

Beecher kept his eyes on the horizon, which was a spired scape of masts and complex rigging, overhung by smudges of black smoke from the stacks of the steamers, of which there were getting to be more than square-riggers. In a few years there wouldn't be a sail visible between Japan and the California coast.

“This ain't nothing,” he said. “You ought to see Galveston when the cotton's in.”

“I didn't know you got down that far.”

He looked up at me from under the brim of his hat and smiled. The smile wasn't for me.

“I worked on a packet boat one whole summer. Left home in Louisiana at twelve and didn't look back. Looking forward, that's the spooky part.”

“How'd you end up in Washington?”

“Plenty of sail and not much draw. The wind blowed north after I mustered out of the Tenth. I was headed for Vancouver, but I dropped anchor when I met Belinda. That's when I went to work for Mr. J. J. Hill.”

“Belinda, that's your wife?”

“Was last time I seen her. I can't answer as to now.”

“Ever think about going back?”

“Only every day.” He seemed to remember he had a cigarette smoldering between his fingers. He drew on it and snapped it out over the water. “How'd you find me?”

“Nan said you like to stroll down this way. I didn't know you two had gotten so close.”

“Someone's got to smoke them cigars. They won't last forever.”

A seagull landed on the next piling and began cleaning itself with its hooked beak. Beecher lit another cigarette and snapped the match at the bird, which flapped its wings but didn't take off. It resumed its search for lice.

“Bastards ain't afraid of man or fish,” he said. “Feed on garbage and carcasses. I reckon they find their share here.”

“Of what, garbage or carcasses?”

“Both. Any animal that won't run or fly from a man is just waiting its time till it can pick at his flesh. I seen 'em crawling like rats all over a dead Mexican in Galveston. Even a buzzard kills sometimes, just to keep its hand in. Not these bastards. They even stink like bad meat.”

He straightened suddenly, drew the Le Mat, and fired a shotgun round at the gull. It exploded in a cloud of feathers and fell over the side of the pier.

My ears rang. “I see you've been taking practice. That why you come down here?”

“I come for the air.” He plucked out the spent shell and replaced it with a loaded one from his coat pocket. His fingers shook a little. “Where there's sea air, there's gulls. You can take ship clear out into the middle of the ocean and there they are. Where do they roost?”

I changed the subject. I didn't think we were talking about seagulls anyway. “I just played a few hands with Pinholster.”

“How much you lose this time?” He belted the pistol.

“I broke even.”

I told him about Sid the Spunk and the next meeting of the Sons of the Confederacy. He refolded his arms on top of the piling.

“That's tomorrow night. They're carving it close with Owen Goodhue.” He drew on the cigarette. “You reckon he's still in Chinatown?”

“Sid? He's that or dead, if he didn't quit town altogether. According to Pinholster there hasn't been a suspicious fire in Barbary since he put the match to the Slop Chest.”

“Well, I doubt he left town. You heard what Wheelock said. They keep coming back.”

“I wouldn't set much store by anything Captain Dan says.”

“He's a politician through and through. You wonder why he bothers with the baby rebels.”

“Barbary's a cesspool. All the scum in the country drains into it sooner or later. That's his power base. He'll do what he can to protect it.”

“Reckon he'll send his Hoodlums after Goodhue?”

I shook my head. “Vigilantes aren't cattle, for all they look it when they're in full stampede. You can't turn them by just picking off the leaders. Some other fool with more sand than sense will step in and plug the hole. Same thing with gulls.” I jerked my chin toward a piling farther down, where a fresh bird had just landed.

He glared at it. “What you fixing to do about Sid the Spunk?”

“Well, I'm not ‘haring into Chinatown, demanding answers and evidence.' Pinholster's been reading dime novels. Luck's the only reason you and I didn't come out carrying our heads the first time. I came down here hoping you'd have an idea.”

He pushed himself away from the piling and took out the pistol. I stepped back automatically, removing myself from the line of fire. He wasn't looking at the seagull, however. He was facing the opposite end of the pier.

I drew the Deane-Adams as I turned. Three Chinese were standing at the end, dressed identically in long dark coats, with slouch hats drawn down over their foreheads. When they saw our weapons, the two on the ends threw open their coats and raised a pair of shotguns with the barrels cut back almost as far as the forepieces. The hammers clicked sharply in the damp air.

“Steady.” I almost whispered.

There wasn't another human in sight on one of the busiest waterfronts in the world. The windows of the brick warehouses looming behind the Chinese were blank and blind. Even the fisherman who had pointed Beecher out to me had slipped away, as quietly as the tide. The gull made a noise like a rusty shutter and flapped away.

Only the lower halves of the three Asiatic faces were visible beneath the shadows of their hat brims. The sharp cheekbones, pointed chins, and straight mouths of the armed pair looked as much alike as Orientals were said to by Occidentals who never bothered to look twice. I was pretty sure they were brothers, maybe twins. The shotguns looked as if the recoil would shatter the fine bones in their slender wrists when the triggers were tripped. Of course it wouldn't. It hadn't all the other times, and the way the men held them said there had been plenty of those.

Beecher and I were standing at the end of the pier, with nothing behind us but the Pacific Ocean and nothing below us but undertow and the bones of others who had stood there before us. The only way off was through the three men standing on the landward end. I cocked the five-shot. Beecher had already drawn back the hammer on his Confederate piece.

“The harmbor is a dangerous mplace.”

The Chinese who spoke stood in the center, a step back from his companions. He was taller and thinner, and his speech was impaired by a deep cleft in his upper lip. In Western dress he looked more like a rangy alley cat than the pampered, well-brushed variety he had resembled inside his tearoom at the White Peacock. He stood with his hands at his sides.

I wet my lips. The moisture evaporated from them as soon as I finished. “Yes. Men have been known to slip and stab themselves to death.”

F'an Chu'an—I still couldn't think of him as “Fat John,” even in those clothes and this far outside Chinatown—reached up and pinched his upper lip between thumb and forefinger. I'd seen him do that before, to aid him in his English pronunciation.

“I'm told you seek the man called Sid the Spunk.”

He made a slight motion with his other hand. The shotguns vanished beneath the long coats.

We lowered our revolvers. Beecher spat out his cigarette. It hissed when it struck the wet boards at our feet.

“We can talk
in here,” F'an Chu'an said. “I have an arrangement with the Six Companies.”

We had walked from the pier to one of the brick-box warehouses that faced the harbor like a medieval redoubt, where he'd produced a ring of keys from a coat pocket, sprung a padlock, and let us in through a side door. Inside, sunlight fell in through high windows and lay dustily on rolls of material wrapped in brown burlap and stacked to the rafters thirty feet above our heads. The air was a haze of moth powder. From here, the bolts of silk, broadcloth, wool flannel, jute, and damask would be carried by wagon to dozens of basements where Chinese immigrants bent over needles and treadle sewing machines, making dresses and suits of clothes for catalogue merchants to sell to bookkeepers in New York, shopgirls in Chicago, and farm wives in Lincoln, Nebraska: more than a million dollars' of dry goods in that one building, and not a watchman in sight. That would have taken some arranging. There were birds' nests in the rafters, and probably a couple of dozen bats suspended beneath, waiting to unfold themselves at nightfall and thread their way outside through gaps no bigger around than a man's finger. Our footsteps rang on the broad floor planks running the length of the broad aisles that separated the stacks. F'an Chu'an's bodyguards had lowered the hammers on their shotguns and Beecher and I had put away our pistols.

“I apologize for the detestable presence of my escort,” he said, pinching his lip. “Their protection is necessary whenever I venture beyond Sacramento Street.”

Beecher said. “They look like knickknacks.”

“They are my cousins, Shau Wing and Shau Chan. They have been with me since Hong Kong.”

“Did you smuggle them in wrapped in a rug?” I asked.

He didn't answer. He might not have understood. I wouldn't have taken Pinholster's odds he hadn't.

“The Suey Sing Tong is one of the oldest in America,” F'an Chu'an said. “It was organized in the gold fields in order to protect Chinese mine workers from resentful Westerners. It soon became necessary to protect them from other Chinese as well. The bandit tradition in the country of my birth extends back to before the first dynasty.

“From there our numbers spread to railroad camps, laundries, and cigar manufactories. The tong is young, but it is schooled in the ancient ways of combat. They include rules of behavior, which were regrettably ignored by the late Yee Yung Hay when his perfidy was exposed. Once again I ask your forgiveness.” He bowed. The two Shaus bracing him remained as motionless as porcelain figures; Beecher had a good eye, as well as a gift for description.

I said. “Your father's sword took care of that. What became of the body, by the way? Being accessories after the fact, we ought to know.”

“Your curiosity is perhaps reckless. Knowledge is often fatal here. There is a storm drain beneath the White Peacock, which leads to the bay. It was Shau Wing's idea to construct a shaft connecting to it, shortly after we opened for business. Waste disposal is a problem in Chinatown, but not at the White Peacock.”

“If you'd used it to get rid of Horatio Flinders, today's situation might be different.”

He bowed again. “With respect, Deputy Mur Dok, it was you who sent Deputy Bee Chu'r for the police.”

“I know. Every now and then that star gets heavy in my pocket. Two unreported killings in one night and I wouldn't have been able to lift it.”

“Yin and Yang.”

That was one I didn't understand, but I let it float past. “How did you find out I'm looking for Sid the Spunk?”

“I have ears in many places.”

I tried to remember who was in the saloon when I was talking with Pinholster. Most of them were strangers. You can lower your voice almost to a thought and still be overheard by an experienced eavesdropper.

I said, “I thought of you right off, when I heard a man who might have been Sid was carried away from the fire at the Slop Chest by two Chinese. How many people in Barbary know you studied medicine in Hong Kong?”

“There are few secrets here. Even death cannot conceal them utterly. It grieves me to report that Sid the Spunk is dead.”

“You're not the first who's told me that. A lot of people seem to want to think he's a corpse. I wouldn't have expected a common Hoodlum to attract so much interest.”

“I wish they were wrong. Everything possible was done to deliver him from his fate. I am a deplorable novice, and what skills I once had have withered through disuse. The injury was too great, and there was not time to put him in more competent hands.”

Beecher spoke up. “The storm drain?”

F'an Chu'an affected to have noticed him for the first time. The class system that had produced the tong leader was older than ours by a thousand years.

“It was unfortunately the only recourse. The bay accepts without judging.”

“I got to wonder how the ships make it in and out for all them bones.”

“Who brought him to you?” I asked. “The Shaus?”

“They are never far from my side. I will not profane your ears with the names of the two wretches who came upon him and sought to win my favor by taking him to the White Peacock. They are filth beneath your feet.”

He might have meant that literally.

“Why would they think you'd be happy to treat him? One Spunk more or less wouldn't make much difference here.”

F'an Chu'an stopped pinching his lip. He was thinking. “What I say next must not leave this mbuild”—he pinched—“this building. Even the tong is only permitted to exist under certain conditions.”

“Should I swear on my life?”

He might have smiled. It was hard to tell with his hand in front of his mouth. He said something in Chinese to the men at his side. One of them made a noise like a terrier barking and replied.

“Shau Chan says, ‘The white devil is not without humor.' That is an unsatisfactory translation. I speak Mandarin, Szechuan, and Cantonese, but the delicate points of English are as a dragon.”

I said his English was fine. It had improved since our last meeting. Judge Blackthorne had told me never to trust a man who pretended to be more ignorant than he was.

“I am a wicked man,” he said. “I have slain innocent men, I have stolen bread from the starving, I have lain with women who were the property of other men. I poison my people for money. I offer no apologies for the path I have chosen. I submit, however, that I am not the tenth part of the nameless ogre who led the Hop Sing Tong since before I came. This beast of whom I speak lay with the virgin sister of Lem Tin, my most loyal lieutenant, and sold her into slavery, under whose torment she sickened and died. When Lem Tin went to him for vengeance, the ogre had his heart cut out of his living breast and sent to me wrapped with silk in a jade box. This was an intolerable insult.

“I requested a meeting with the leaders of all the tongs to protest the ogre's action and to call for his trial and punishment. I told them Lem Tin was my friend, closer to me than a brother, that he had been disgraced, and was within his rights under tong law to challenge the ogre. The other leaders conferred and reached the decision that the ogre behaved permissibly in the interest of preserving his life. I was asked to accept this conclusion and to offer the ogre my friendship. This I did, along with a pledge upon the bones of my father that I would not be the one to violate the accord. Fifteen minutes after it began, the meeting was adjourned, and the leaders went to the Rising Star Club to celebrate the peace they had made. The ogre was among them. I was not. That decision is the reason I stand before you this day.”

The air in the warehouse felt clammy, in spite of the strong sunlight. I fought off a shudder. The men flanking F'an Chu'an would no doubt have interpreted it as a sign of weakness.

“There was a fire,” F'an Chu'an said. “Most regrettable in this fragile place. It started, said the men who fought it, in the cellar, upon the ground floor, and atop the roof of the Rising Star Club, within minutes. The leaders of the Gee Kung and the Kwong Dock Tongs burned to death on their divans, unable to stir from their black dreams. Fong Jung of the Soo Yop escaped the flames, but the smoke destroyed his lungs and he returned to China to die in the land of his ancestors. The ogre who led the Hop Sings, Lem Tin's assassin and the defiler of his sister, was driven by the smoke and heat to leap from a window upon the second story. He shattered his spine and has not left his bed from that day to this.

“The gods are often indiscriminate. Three other leaders survived without injury. They joined the others' successors in accusing me of starting the fire. I was tried and would have been executed under tong law but for fifteen men of respect who came forward to swear that from the time I left the meeting until the alarm was raised, I could be seen casting lots in the White Peacock. I was exonerated.”

At this point F'an Chu'an made a little bow, as if Beecher and I were the ones who'd acquitted him. The cat's smile was in place.

I said, “Did anyone happen to ask where Sid the Spunk was when the fire broke out?”

“His name was not mentioned during the proceedings. Chinatown is a country apart from greater San Francisco. He is not widely known within its boundaries. I remind you that we converse in confidence. It is not necessary to explain by what avenue we found each other. Perhaps you will think of him with charity when I say that he would not accept payment for his services. When I declared that I had no wish to chain myself in his debt, he said that the obligation was his, to one who had been close to him and who had been forced into degradation also. He would say nothing else beyond the fact that Lem Tin's sister was not unique in her experience. He would not abandon this position, and having come but recently from that infamous meeting, I lacked the strength of will to turn aside his offer. Do you wonder still why I did not hesitate to exhaust my poor skills on his behalf when he was brought to me later, broken and burned?”

I shook my head. “What about the bones of your father?”

“It is my belief they lay where they were buried.”

I searched his face for amusement, or contempt, or some other sign that the words he spoke were connected to what he was thinking. I gave it up as a bad job. “Why risk leaving Chinatown to tell me, with your name on Owen Goodhue's list?”

“For that, you have Lee Yung Hay to thank. You cannot know the extent of the catastrophe had his activities in Barbary become known generally.”

“I'd have thought saving our lives discharged that debt,” I said.

“You force me to contradict you; a necessity I find most painful. My debt was increased by the act. In the country of my birth, to spare a man's life is to make that life one's own, with all the responsibilities that entails. When I learned of your interest in Sid the Spunk, I saw the opportunity to relieve myself of the burden. I could not guarantee your safety should your natural instincts lead you across Sacramento Street. That you did so once and survived was more fortunate than you know. I consider that you and I stand upon equal ground when I warn you that to venture again into Chinatown will be to resign yourself to merciless fate.”

This time I said it. “The storm drain?”

“The bay accepts,” he repeated. “without judging.”

Beecher said. “I reckon we're even.”

“That is my belief.”

F'an Chu'an glanced from side to side. The Shaus stirred and the three of them headed toward the door. Beecher and I followed them out. F'an Chu'an fixed the padlock in place and left us without a word. Seconds later he and his companions disappeared around the corner of the warehouse. Later I wasn't sure I hadn't dreamed the whole thing.