The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (21 page)

Now Zhu
hears reedy voices, birdlike but ominously monotone, “Two bittee lookee, flo
bittee feelee, six bittee doee.” Tiny clapboard shacks line the alley, two or
three cribs per shack. Each crib is six feet wide and set with a sturdy narrow
door, relieved only by a small barred window. Girls in black silk blouses stand
at each window, beckoning and murmuring, “Two bittee lookee, flo bittee feelee,
six bittee doee.”

A
skinny arm snakes out between the bars and seizes Zhu’s sleeve. “China girl
nice,” the girl says. She pulls her blouse up to her shoulder, and Zhu glimpses
slack little breasts, a ribcage. Her front teeth are missing, her cheek bruised
blue. Even white face powder can’t conceal the deep, dark circles beneath the
slits of her eyes. Tuberculosis, probably. An old woman materializes out of
nowhere and smacks the girl’s arm with a stick. The girl whimpers, jerks her
arm back inside the crib. She whispers to Zhu, “China girl nice. Five bittee
doee, okay?”

Zhu
recoils, her blood boiling. Why was she sent here? Why was she sent here if she
can’t right this wrong? She reaches in her pocket, rolls the mollie knife in
her fingers. How she longs to rip open these cribs, lead these young women to
safety, to refuge, to freedom, to the light. To the Presbyterian Mission where
she was supposed to have taken Wing Sing.

“Sorry,
Z. Wong,” whispers Muse and posts the Tenets in her peripheral vision. “Please
review Tenet Three of the Grandmother Principle.”

Tenet
Three. Right. Under Tenet Three, she can’t affect any person in the past, and
that includes aiding, coercing, deceiving, deterring, killing, or saving that
person except as authorized by the project directors. She can’t take out her
mollie knife, can’t tear down these bars, can’t free these girls from their loathsome
slavery. Like Li’l Lucy, they’re on their own.

Zhu
snorts, disgusted. There’s one person, and one person only, she’s
authorized—ordered to help in 1895. And that’s Wing Sing. She tours the alley,
examining every prisoner at every barred window.

“Wing
Sing?” she murmurs. “Is Wing Sing here?”

“I
Wing Sing.”

Zhu
studies the swarthy, broad-cheeked girl. She must be Mongolian. Definitely not
the girl she met in Golden Gate Park three months ago. Zhu was certain she’d
recognize Wing Sing again but now, with every strange new face, her confidence
falters.

Another
voice, “I Wing Sing!”

And
another, “I Wing Sing!”

“I’m
sorry,” she whispers. “No. No.”

She
flees Spofford Alley. The fortune-teller gives her a reproving look, then
shrugs. She trudges on to Bartlett Alley, to Brooklyn Alley, to Stout. Always
the same shacks, the barred windows, the grim little faces posed behind those
bars reciting fee scales in a birdlike monotone.

So
many slave girls. But Wing Sing is nowhere in sight.

Zhu
rejoins the shuffling throng on Dupont, her heart heavy. Maybe Wing Sing is dead.
Maybe three months of a life like this has killed her.

“Careful,
Z. Wong,” Muse whispers.

With
a start she sees them before she registers Muse’s warning, her intuition
sounding off alarm bells. They shoulder their way through the crowd, striding
directly toward her, the wiry fellow, the fat man, and the eyepatch.
Hatchet
men.
Their hands purposefully shoved in their jacket pockets as they march
behind an elderly gentleman in a gold-embroidered cap and an air of
self-importance. The Big Boss, he’s got to be. The other men on the street
yield to their entourage.

Zhu
stands back, too. Yet instead of striding away in the opposite direction like
she ought to, she hesitates, drawn by curiosity. The eyepatch approaches, his
good eye peering about with uncanny acuity. She tries to shrink back into the
shadows, but he zeroes right in on her. She yanks the fedora over her brow,
dons the tinted spectacles, pushes them up her nose so the lenses cover her
eyes.

Too
late.

He
practically pounces on her, backing her up against a shop window. “Jade Eyes,”
he says in an ominous whisper.

“Excuse
me, sir, but I don’t know you,” she says, lowering her voice as best she can.
He stands so close she can feel the hard curve of the grip of the gun tucked in
his waistband.

“Oh,
you know me,” he says. He taps the frame of the spectacles with a long
fingernail. “Jade Eyes, that’s what the girl called you.”

“Act
friendly,” Muse whispers in her ear. “Ask him where the girl is.”

Great
advice from her monitor. At last.

“We.
. . .we are all strangers here in Gold Mountain, aren’t we,” Zhu says. She
tries a little smile. “All far from our homeland, from mother China. You and me
and Wing Sing.”

“So
we are,” he says, a glimmer of surprise lighting up his eye. He looks her up
and down, checks out her
sahm
, the fedora, the sandals. He shakes his
head, and then an astute look springs into his eye.

Okay.
Maybe he’s not such a thug and a murderer. She takes a deep breath. “Sir, I’m
looking for Wing Sing.”

“Why?”

“I
need to talk to her.”

“Why?”
he says again. The wiry fellow and the fat man gather behind him, peering over
his shoulder. The Big Boss waits, annoyance creasing his brow.

“She’s
my friend.”

The
eyepatch shrugs. “She got no friend. She our girl. We pay gold.”

“I’ve
got money.” Zhu fumbles in her pocket for her coins. Jessie gave her a double
eagle after their tiff at breakfast. Mr. Parducci tipped her another bit for
the large order of wine. “How much for her?”

The
eyepatch laughs when he sees her coins. “We pay two thousand in gold for her,
Jade Eyes. She sixteen. And pretty. Pretty girl earn much gold for Chee Song
Tong.”

Zhu
gasps. Two thousand dollars in gold for Wing Sing! Zhu has earned exactly
fifteen dollars over the past three months as Jessie’s bookkeeper while her
services pay off the hundred in gold Jessie paid for her indenture. She shoves
the coins back in her pocket, feeling ridiculous. “It’s just that I miss her. I
want to talk to her.”

“Talk
of what?”

“Talk
of mother China. Talk of family.”

“Ah.”
Now an unexpected sheen clouds the eyepatch’s eye. Then he frowns, tosses words
over his shoulder at the others. Dismissed by him, the wiry fellow and the fat
man rejoin the Big Boss, who resumes his haughty promenade.

“We
are all strangers in Gold Mountain. Yes. And you pretty girl, too, Jade Eyes,”
he says. “You should not walk about in rags.” He touches her cheek, her lip. “I
should not sell girl like you to Jessie Malone. I should keep you for myself.”

Suddenly
she’s aware of his fierce masculinity. Aware of the value in gold he places on
her femininity. He’s one of the bachelors, too, after all.

“Where
is Wing Sing?” Zhu whispers. “Please tell me.”

“She
not in Tangrenbu,” the eyepatch says. “You go to Selena’s. You go to Terrific
Street.”

He
turns on his heel and rejoins his entourage.

*  
*   *

“Muse,”
Zhu whispers as the hatchet men stride away, “look up ‘Terrific Street.’ Look
up ‘Selena’s.’”

“I’m
on it,” Muse whispers back. Alphanumerics flicker in her peripheral vision as
Muse scans its Archives. Zhu watches a directory zoom by, dizzying. All kinds
of file and folder names, with strange extensions. She glimpses her
instructions holoid,
Zhu.doc
, thirty-six GB. She blinks. Wait, that
can’t be right. The holoid is thirty-five GB. Muse locates and opens a file,
San
Francisco.1895.geography
, and searches the data.

“’Terrific
Street.’ He means Pacific Street,” Muse reports back. “And Selena’s? He means a
‘chop suey palace’ on the border of Tangrenbu and the Barbary Coast. The women
are Chinese or Japanese, maybe some Koreans or Filipinas. But the male
clientele is all white. Your disguise won’t work there, Z. Wong.”

“Hah.
I won’t be a client.”

Zhu
hikes north on Dupont to Pacific, turns east.
Bang, bang, bang.
She
whirls at the muffled sound of gunfire, crouches against a shop. She sniffs for
gun powder, but there’s only a faint whiff of it. Okay. There must be a
shooting gallery in a basement below the cobblestone street, one of the
cavernous illegal halls where white men mingle with Chinese to practice their
skill with firearms. And there. Denim-clad bachelors in an uncharacteristically
jovial mood stream in and out of another doorway set below the street level, jingling
coins in their fists. A sentry stands watch at the door. Oh, yeah. Must be a
gambling den down in that basement.

Once
again Zhu approaches the invisible boundary between Tangrenbu and the rest of
San Francisco. No longer does she see colorful touches of Oriental splendor. No
longer can she smell that distinctive stench. From here, the Barbary Coast
stretches down to the docks and the waterfront, a dense collection of
dancehalls, saloons, gambling dens, opium dens, hideouts, low-end brothels, and
bagnios.

Poised
near the corner of Dupont Street and Columbus Avenue like a halfway house
between Oriental and Occidental vice is the plug-ugly Stick Victorian with its
brass plaque announcing “Miss Selena.” The sporting house boasts neither the
excesses of the Parisian Mansion nor the calligraphy above the cribs on
Spofford Alley. The red lamp over the door is not lit, and Miss Selena hasn’t
yet stationed a red lampshade by the window. Zhu
does
notice lace
bloomers dangling from the sill of a second-story window.

Right.
She knows her way around a brothel by now. She pulls the fedora low over her
forehead, pushes up the spectacles. She seizes the heavy brass door knocker
cast in the shape of a rooster, squares her shoulders, and tries on a manly
frown.

A
middle-aged Chinese woman, her golden skin tight over her cheekbones and chin,
peers suspiciously out the door, still secured inside by a chain lock. “What
you want?”

“You
Miss Selena?” Zhu mutters. “I need to see Wing Sing.”

“This
place not for you, boy. You go to Tangrenbu. You go to Spofford Alley.”

“No,
I’m her brother. Cousin. I’m her cousin from Shanghai. I have news of our
family. May I speak with her, please?”

“Her
time not free, brother cousin.”

“I
have money.” Zhu produces the double eagle.

Selena
studies her contemptuously, then slams the door. The chain lock clangs. She
swings the door open and stands aside.

Zhu
enters a parlor far more elegant than she would have expected from the street.
There’s rosewood furniture, painted porcelains, the usual red velvet drapes
mixed with unusual swathes of pink and purple silk. Chinese carpets with
calligraphic and floral designs in muted pastel shades. The heady scent of plum
incense makes Zhu’s head swim. A musician sits cross-legged in a corner on the
floor, softly playing a moon fiddle, the strange lilting keen like mother China
herself singing.

The
wall hangings and painted screens are also a departure from Jessie’s obsession
with female nudes. Here Oriental couples copulate on mountainsides, by brooks,
in barnyards, in the midst of battlefields strewn with bloody corpses. Zhu
knows from her t-port training that the European erotic art of the fin de
siècle seldom shows the Caucasian man explicitly engaged in carnal pursuits.
Asian art, apparently, doesn’t have a problem with that.

She
hears whispers, soft laughter. Slowly—feeling just like the country bumpkin she
actually is six hundred years in the future—she turns away from the
pornographic scenes. Now she faces golden-skinned girls lounging about in
embroidered silk robes of scarlet or black, the half-open robes showing plenty
of décolleté and leg. They wear thick white pancake makeup, glossy black eye paint,
vermilion lip paint so shiny it looks like lacquer. Their shiny ebony hair is
impeccably styled in astonishing waves and winglike coiffures.

Dolls.
They look just like Chinadolls.

A
black door maid in uniform serves plum wine, coconut pastries, bits of meat or
fish wrapped in wontons. A portly gray-haired gentleman relaxes in his shirt
and vest on a scarlet velvet divan, drinking and smoking, snacking on the hors
d’oeuvres as he makes his selection from among the Chinadolls. Zhu glances at
him. Oh, no! Could that be Mr. Heald? Jessie will be miffed! She keeps her head
down. He can’t possibly recognize her in this getup, can he? She pushes the
spectacles up her nose again, peers at the girls more closely.

“Wing
Sing?” she says in a husky voice. “I want to see Wing Sing,” she repeats to
Miss Selena.

“She
right there in front of your face, brother cousin,” Selena says sarcastically.
The madam points to a girl. “You pay five dollar now.”

Zhu
pulls out more coins. She goes to the girl and anxiously studies her. White
makeup is spread so thickly over her face, red lip lacquer defines her mouth so
falsely, her hair is so bizarrely styled that Zhu isn’t sure it’s the girl
she’s searching for. After that dirty little face, that disheveled braid? She’s
not sure, at all. The girl barely looks human, let alone sixteen years old.