The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (53 page)

Muse
whispers, “Hurry.”

A
hand seizes her shoulder, another hand yanks the strap of her feedbag purse.
Jessie and Daniel flank her, both of them breathless.

“You
gotta stop right now, missy.”

“Dear
mistress, please.”

“What
do you want from me?” Zhu cries.

“I
don’t want nothin’,” Jessie declares. “But I do know you’re lookin’ for Wing
Sing. You are, ain’t you? Well, I am, too. That chit owes me money, and plenty
of it. I bet she owes you, too.”

“No.”

“Hmph.
I know you, Zhu.” The madam’s hard eyes search her face. “You got mush for a
heart. You’re gonna give her that fancy gimcrack, ain’t you?” She touches her
fingertip to the aurelia pinned to Zhu’s collar. “You feel lousy about losin’
her precious dowry, huh? Well, forget it, missy, it was them tongs. It ain’t
your fault.” Jessie shakes her shoulder. “Don’t give them good diamonds to that
little whore. She’ll only go and blow it in on dope.”

“Indeed,
miss, give the aurelia to me,” Daniel says, “I shall take good care of it.” His
nagging plea sends shivers down Zhu’s spine.
Nothing she can do for him.

Jessie
slaps his face. “Shut your trap, you dope fiend. You’ll only go pawn it
yourself. Now you give that gold to me, Zhu, won’t you, darlin’?”

“Hurry,”
Muse whispers.

And
something snaps inside her. Something inside her has already crossed over six
centuries. “No! I’m giving the aurelia to Wing Sing. It belongs to her. It’s
her birthright. And neither of you had better interfere.” She shakes loose of them,
strides away, then pauses and turns. “You
can
help me find her, though.
That’s the last thing you can do for me. Because, you see, I really am leaving
your Now tonight. Forever.”

She
feels a strange pleasure at the look of despair on their faces. Daniel J.
Watkins and Jessie Malone, such completely different people and yet sharing the
serendipity of meeting her, Zhu Wong, in the Gilded Age.

THERE
IS A PROSPECT OF A THRILLING TIME AHEAD FOR YOU

That
was her fortune in the Japanese Tea Garden nine months ago. A thrilling time?
Or a vast unseen pattern of pain, of atrocity, and everyone—Chiron, the LISA
techs, Jessie, Daniel, even Sally Chou—has used her. Exploited her.
Tricked
her.

She
turns up Pacific Street, infuriated, Jessie and Daniel dogging her heels. So do
the four bruisers. And so do three shadows stalking out of Tangrenbu. All of
them striding into the open zone of the Barbary Coast.

No
police, no protection from the freewheeling violence, no segregation of one
race from another or of one class from another. The Barbary Coast is an infamous
sink of sin where robbers and murderers operate freely, degradation is the
norm, and the standards of quality one may appreciate in the better parts of the
town’s nightlife don’t apply. Ragtime blares from bawdy bars, seedy bagnios and
brothels beckon, the gambling dens and opium dens and shooting ranges never
close.

An
entrepreneur has set up a grimy little sidewalk show. “A penny a peep. See the live
mermaid. Just a penny a peep. See the live mermaid.”

Zhu
peers around the moth-eaten satin curtain. The live mermaid is only a very dead
female monkey, its little teats unevenly enhanced by inept taxidermy. The
amputated abdomen has been stitched to a salmon tail. The monstrosity floats in
a smeary aquarium reeking of formaldehyde.

Jessie’s
sallow face turns white at the sight. “You freak!” she screams at the
entrepreneur. “You’re the goddamn freak.”

“Ah,
go blow, lady,” the entrepreneur says.

“It’s
just a poor little fake, that’s all, Jessie,” Zhu says, puzzled by her outburst.
She takes Jessie’s elbow, steers her away.

“Don’t
you make fun of no mermaids, buster!” Jessie is nearly weeping.

“Miss
Malone has a special fondness for mermaids,” Daniel says, taking the madam’s
other arm. “Remember the painting I gave her?”

“Right,”
Zhu says, also remembering Jessie’s tantalizing hints about her and Rachael,
how they swam like mermaids at Lily Lake. She’ll never hear Rachael’s story,
she thinks with a pang. Not now.

The
broken streets are slippery with filth, the gutters ripe with raw sewage and
rank mud. Sailors throng the streets and saloons, emaciated sunburned fellows
with terrible teeth and tattoos, sick with drink or scurvy, hapless victims of
the great shipping companies that press them into the hard labor of crewing
transoceanic ships.

“Watch
out for that Muldoon,” Jessie says in Zhu’s ear, pointing out a man passing by,
a weasel in a cheap scarlet cutaway. “He’s a damn crimp.” Muldoon yammers at a
gang of drunks like a tobacco auctioneer pitching a bid on a bale. A gold
earring flashes against his swarthy neck. “A slaver for them clipper ships, he
is. Kidnaps them stinkin’ fools right off these streets.”

Daniel
circles around Jessie and slings his arm around Zhu’s shoulders, grinning down
at her. Zhu smiles back, her lips trembling. Daniel. He looks so young and
innocent in the gaslight, his dark hair spilling over his high starched collar,
his pale skin stretched tight over his cheekbones. His eyes glisten as if slick
with tears, and the premonition strikes her a second time, strikes her hard.
He’s
going to die.

They
stride by an establishment, the Lively Flea, and Zhu runs to the swinging
doors, peeks in. Is Wing Sing here? Where is she? As Zhu searches the crowd, she
glimpses a row of stages, the acts performed there. A brown-skinned woman,
naked except for a mask, lies at the hooves of a stud pony. On the next stage,
another masked woman grapples with a huge dog, the beast’s tongue lolling. An
ivory-skinned woman tangles her limbs with a man the color of onyx, and on the
next stage a white woman tangles with a brown woman. There’s a woman and a bull
calf, a woman and another dog, a woman embracing what looks like the corpse of
a man contorted in rigor mortis.

Men
guffaw or stare, transfixed. Zhu turns away from the lurid spectacle, stunned
and horrified. Someone lurches toward her, and she backs away, fingers pressed
to her throat. She darts out into the street, but Daniel and Jessie are nowhere
in sight. She dashes down toward the wharves where the surf sprays saloons
situated on docks built out over the water.

Alphanumerics
strobe in her peripheral vision.

“Heads
up, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers.

And
there she is, tottering painfully along the waterfront.

Wing
Sing.

Zhu
would know her moon face anywhere, her delicate cheekbones, her tall slim figure
in apple-green silk, only a slight swell in her belly to show that she’s
pregnant. Zhu can see her bound feet from here, wrapped in white binding,
strapped into peculiar little shoes the size of a child’s shoe. A green satin
bandeau binds her forehead, her thick black braid swings down her back. She
leans on the shoulder of a blond woman. Li’l Lucy? No, the blond is much too
thin. Wing Sing and her companion duck into a Stick commercial building
cantilevered precariously over the shifting waves—Kelly’s Saloon & The
Eye-Wink Ballroom.

Suddenly
Jessie’s hand grips her elbow like a vise. “Let’s don’t go in here, missy.”

“Why
not?”

“Nothing
but trouble in Kelly’s.”

“But
I need to see Wing Sing. It’s urgent.”

“Yes,
indeed, let’s go in.” Daniel sweeps past them, opening the swinging doors. “I
need a nip. Just a tiny one, of course. I don’t need the drink when I’ve got
the Inca’s gift.”

But
Jessie balks, her face taut with tension.

“Do
not tell me the Queen of the underworld is shy tonight,” Daniel says. He
impatiently holds the doors open for them.

“I
got a bad strange feeling,” Jessie says. “A premonition. Missy, please. Let’s
wait for the chit to come out.”

Zhu
glances at the grandfather’s clock behind Kelly’s bar. Nine minutes after
eleven. She has less than an hour to return downtown, catch the cable car up
California Street, and find the intersection at Mason. Find the tachyonic shuttle.
She can’t miss her rendezvous, not this one.

“Jessie,
I can’t wait.”

“In
a hurry?”

“Yes!
I told you. I’m leaving tonight.”

“Leaving
for where?” Daniel demands. “I thought you were coming with me to Paris.”

“I’m
leaving for the future,” she says, impatient. “For my Day in the future.”

“Jar
me, missy,” Jessie says. “Enough is enough.”

“I
thought you believed me.”

“Sure
I do. Like I believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy.”

“What
about everything I’ve told you?”

Jessie
shrugs. “Tall tales like Mr. Wells.”

“What
about my mollie knife?”

“I
was sippin’ evil absinthe that night. So were you and Mr. Watkins.”

Zhu
is silent. Of course she’d never touched the absinthe. What if Jessie is
insisting on a reality that’s different from what she remembers? What if she’s
entered a different timeline and she doesn’t know it?

“Come,
my little lunatic,” Daniel says, laughing. “Let’s have a toast to the future.
Miss Malone? Come along. It’s on me.”

“On
you, indeed. What about my rent, buster?”

“Let’s
discuss the rent over a shot of rye.”

“Get
in there, Z. Wong,” Muse whispers. “Find Wing Sing
now.
”

“Yeah,
okay, let’s toast the future,” Zhu says, her heart pounding in her throat. She
takes Daniel’s and Jessie’s hands and sweeps them into Kelly’s.

The
bar stinks of cheap beer and rotgut. The air is hazy with tobacco smoke, the
clotted sawdust ankle deep. Games of faro are conducted here and there and a
sizable crowd crouches around games of dice. There’s no ballroom dancing Zhu
can see, despite the sign, but plenty of lap dancing transacted in little
plywood booths set across the back. The place is mobbed with sailors.

And
there. There! Posing before a table, her crippled foot propped up on the seat
of a chair, arms akimbo, giggling, bantering stands Wing Sing. She negotiates
with sailors who wear the grizzled, famished look of men months at sea with no
female company. An anomalous sight she is, too, a young Chinese woman in apple-green
silk, walking the Barbary Coast, imprisoned by neither crib nor parlor. And
although she is degraded by her trade, robbed of her future, denied the simple
comforts of an ordinary life other women either savor or endure, certain to
meet a violent unsavory end, for a moment, just for a moment, Wing Sing stands
triumphantly before Zhu, a woman on her own in the Gilded Age.

Zhu
seizes her arm, but Wing Sing shrugs her off. The sailors guffaw.

The
four bruisers who’ve been shadowing them all night stride in through the
swinging doors. A small man accompanies them. Black hair, black beard, black
pools for eyes. Harvey walks arm in arm with Muldoon the crimp. Harvey and his
entourage saunter up to the bar, exchange ribald greetings with the barkeep,
Mr. Kelly himself. Harvey spots Daniel, tips his top hat. Jessie tugs on
Daniel’s sleeve, worry stitching her face, but Daniel ignores both her and his
debtor’s greeting.

“Please,”
Zhu says to Wing Sing. “I have something to give you.”

Now
three Chinese men in black slouch hats drift into Kelly’s. The eyepatch and his
hatchet men step up to the bar.

“You
give me something?” Wing Sing arches her eyebrows and arranges her face in a
caricature of surprise. She says to the sailors, “Excuse please, gentlemen.”

She
marches indignantly to the table where the skinny blond sits nursing a shot of
whiskey. No, she’s not Li’l Lucy. Dark blotches rim both women’s eyes, and
their skin has that sallow cast Zhu has seen on the faces of opium addicts in
Tangrenbu. “Jade Eyes, I not take nothing from you.”

“It’s
something nice.”

“You
bad luck to me, Jade Eyes.”

“Please
take it.” Zhu unpins the aurelia from her collar. The gold and diamonds linger
in her fingers. The tiny golden woman is impassive, lifeless, a sacrifice on
the cross of destiny.

Wing
Sing’s mouth drops open. She gapes, wide-eyed. “What this?’

“This
is real gold. Real diamonds.” Zhu pins the brooch on Wing Sing’s collar. “You
take. You keep. To make up for your dowry. For you and your daughter. Rusty’s
baby.”

Wing
Sing shrugs. “If my baby is girl, I sell her to Chee Song Tong. Clear my debt.”

Protest
swells on Zhu’s tongue, but she bites back anger. There is nothing she can say,
nothing she can do. She will step across six centuries tonight, never to
return. She only smiles and says, “Ah, but you won’t. You’ll love her. You’ll
keep her.”

Wing
Sing vigorously shakes her head. “I not keep girl.”

“She’ll
look just like you,” Zhu says. “You can name her Wing Sing, too.”

“I
not name girl for me,” Wing Sing says contemptuously. “You so smart, Jade Eyes,
know reason for everything. But I bet you not know what ‘Wing Sing’ mean in the
tongue of my village.”