The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (54 page)

“What
does ‘Wing Sing’ mean?”

“It
mean ‘everlasting life.’ You think I want to live forever? Like this? You think
I want my daughter to live forever? Huh. Forget it, Jade Eyes.”

Daniel
comes to Zhu’s side, glancing at Wing Sing, the aurelia pinned to her collar.
“You’re supposed to come and have a drink with us, miss.”

“No,
I’ve done what I came here to do. It’s time, Daniel. Goodbye and good luck to
you. I tried to love you. I hope you fulfill your dream of making moving
pictures.”

There’s
really nothing more to say, and she turns to go. But suddenly alphanumerics
skitter and swirl in her peripheral vision, and a wind whistles in her ear.

“The
aurelia,” Muse whispers. Voices scramble into nonsense, laughter clatters.

The
eyepatch scans the crowd, his eye piercing the haze of smoke, lighting on Zhu
and Wing Sing. His hand whips out like a snake striking, tugging on the
shoulders of the wiry fellow, the fat man.

Jessie
hurries to Zhu’s side. “What’s going on, missy? Something’s strange! Like one
of Madame De Cassin’s séances.”

Muse
whispers, “The aurelia,” and an odd gleam shoots from the curve of the
aurelia’s golden wing on Wing Sing’s collar.

Zhu
looks around, confused. Suddenly Harvey, Muldoon, Kelly, and the four bruisers
surround Daniel. Harvey smiles in a friendly sort of way, though the expression
doesn’t fit on his face. He holds two drinks in tall tumblers. “So you’re
takin’ me to court, are ya, Mr. Watkins?”

“That
I am, Mr. Harvey.” Daniel smiles back. “You’ll get your due justice.”

Fear
wells in Zhu’s chest, and her heart skips.

“The
aurelia,” Muse buzzes in her ear like a mosquito. Is the monitor jammed?

“Have
a drink with me first, then. For due justice, sir.”

“Don’t
mind if I do, sir.” Daniel takes the tumbler Harvey offers. Zhu watches him
lift his arm, reach out his hand, curl his long fingers around the tumbler. He
knocks the rim against Harvey’s in a toast. The glass shimmers as he raises it
to his lips, and he swallows half, takes a breath, and swallows the rest.

Harvey
watches, not smiling, not drinking.

“Oh,
Daniel,” Zhu whispers.

Kelly
flings back his head and guffaws.

Daniel
drops the tumbler to the floor, where it shatters. Sawdust muffles the cracking
sound, but the damage is done.

Harvey
spills coins into Muldoon’s open palm.

Daniel’s
eyes roll back, and he collapses. Harvey’s thugs seize him, dragging his
crumpled body through the sawdust. Jessie whips the thugs with her handbag and
screams, “Knockout drops in his drink, you bastards!” but she’s useless. Kelly
finds a handle in the floor, tugs open a trapdoor. Zhu smells the reek of the
harbor, of things rotting in the water. Someone reaches up from a boat bobbing
beneath the trapdoor.

“He’ll
be halfway to Shanghai before he wakes up,” Muldoon says to Harvey. “
If
he wakes up.”

“Kelly’s
Shanghai Special,” the barkeep says. “Works like a charm.”

Harvey
laughs. “Teach that boy to sue me.”

“The
aurelia,” Muse whispers, “the aurelia.”

“No!”
Zhu rushes to the trapdoor, seizes Daniel’s coattails. “No, you can’t shanghai
him!”

Harvey’s
thugs laugh and shove her away.

“Do
something, ya deadbeats!” Jessie screams at the sailors. “You gonna let that
lousy crimp shanghai an honest gentleman?”

Now,
in the confusion, the eyepatch and his hatchet men stride across the bar to
Zhu. The eyepatch seizes her, shakes her. “No one cross Chee Song Tong.”

“I
never crossed you.”

“You
cross us. You steal from us.”

“Then
summon a policeman. Have me arrested.”
Never supposed to happen this way.

“This
our law, Jade Eyes.”

Zhu
glimpses a flash of silver. The eyepatch whips out a knife and slits her throat.

Harvey’s
thugs throw Daniel into the boat below the trapdoor.

Jessie
screams, “No, no, no, no!”

The
sting is excruciating, but the sudden blood loss from her severed jugular sends
Zhu into shock so sudden and intense, dying almost feels like pleasure.

Muse
says forlornly, “The aurelia, the aurelia, the aurelia.”

Then
silence.

Blackness.

Nothing.

*  
*   *

Jessie
seizes Wing Sing and together they back away from the terrible scene. Harvey’s
thugs secure the trapdoor, kick sawdust over it. A couple of beat cops wander
in to investigate the cries of murder. But this is the Barbary Coast and the
fresh corpse is only a woman. Only an anonymous Chinese woman in a gray silk
dress without any station in life. The black wagon of the county morgue pulls
up to the saloon and the coroner hauls the body away.

Sure
and where is Mr. Watkins’ body? Knocked out and on a rowboat to hell.

“She’s
dead, Mother of God,” Jessie says, crossing herself. “Rachael, my sweet innocent
angel, you look out for that girl in the Summerland, you hear me? I loved her,
too.”

“Poor
Jade Eyes,” Wing Sing says, clasping her hand to her throat. She covers the
gold thing, what Zhu called the aurelia, with her other hand.

The
beat cops saunter up to the bar and order drinks, which the barkeep dispenses,
free of charge. Jessie would dearly love a drink, too--she feels faint with
shock and her stays are killing her—but she don’t dare order one in this
accursed saloon. Damn Kelly to hell! The boat bearing Daniel J. Watkins is
likely to be halfway across the bay to a clipper ship bound for the Far East.
When he wakes from the laudanum Kelly dosed him with, the ship will be well out
to sea. If kickin’ the dope don’t kill him, the hard labor will.

Should
she write a letter to his father in Saint Louis? Maybe the old man can send for
help. Then she decides against it, after everything Daniel has said. The
eminent Jonathan D. Watkins would never take the word of a fallen woman like
her.

Jessie
drags Wing Sing out of Kelly’s, rips the aurelia off her collar.

“That
mine!” Wing Sing cries.

“You’re
just gonna sell it for dope.”

“No,
Jade Eyes say it for me. For me and my daughter.”

Jessie
slaps the girl’s belly. “Liar. You’re not really pregnant.”

“But
I am, Miss Malone. I not get monthlies.”

“That’s
just the opium, you fool.”

“No,
I make little girl. Jade Eyes say.”

Jessie’s
fingers curl around the gold, the diamonds. The bauble feels hot, but she
refuses to drop it or hand over such a valuable thing to a tramp like Wing
Sing. Anyway, it’s too beautiful for the likes of her.

“Tell
you what. I’ll keep it safe for you.”

In
July of 1896, Wing Sing gives birth to an underweight female infant and dies
three days later of internal hemorrhaging. Jessie takes the infant to Donaldina
Cameron at the Presbyterian mission. It’s the least she can do in memory of Zhu
Wong, who had cared so much for the baby’s pathetic mother. Not that Jessie
likes the Bible thumper, but who else will raise a Chinese girl with nothing
but the clothes on her back in anything like decency?

That
summer, Chee Song Tong escalates the war with Hop Sing Tong. On Bastille Day, an
assassin hacks the eyepatch to death with a butterfly knife in Bartlett Alley. On
that same day, Mr. Heald suffers a heart attack and dies alone in Sutter
Hospital. Jessie’s new connection to the mayor’s office quadruples her civic
contributions.

In
September of 1896, Mariah invites Jessie to go with her to the National
American Woman Suffrage Association meeting. It turns out that Mariah has been
stealing away from the boardinghouse over the years to attend meetings of the
local chapter. Jessie declines the invitation, pleading exhaustion, though
secretly she believes Mariah’s friends won’t take kindly to her. During the
rest of that autumn, Mariah works every spare moment she has on the committee
supporting the state referendum for woman suffrage in California but, to her
bitter disappointment, the measure is defeated.

In
the spring of 1897, Mariah leaves San Francisco for good, having hoarded her
salary in a savings account at Wells Fargo Bank. She returns to her family in
Boston—Jessie never knew Mariah was from Boston—opens up her own boardinghouse,
and begins to write for
The Woman’s Era
. She is appointed by Josephine
St. Pierre Ruffin to be the treasurer of the National Federation of
Afro-American Women, which in the summer of 1897 renames itself the National
Association of Colored Women.

Short
on cash in July of 1897, Jessie takes the aurelia down to Colonel Andrews’
Diamond Palace, intending to pawn the thing. The good colonel, supercilious as
ever in his immaculate tuxedo and top hat, tells her the piece is old-fashioned
and tenders a ridiculously low offer. Jessie tosses the aurelia into her
handbag and stalks out, mightily displeased.

On
Columbus Day of 1897, the police call Jessie down to the morgue to identify a
blond prostitute who has been found beaten to death outside of Kelly’s. Jessie
cannot positively tell if the thin poxy corpse is that of Li’l Lucy. The face
is too disfigured, the arms riddled with needle tracks. If it is, Li’l Lucy
didn’t live to see her twenty-first birthday.

Eight
years after the turn of the century and endless trouble with the police, the
clientele, the girls, and her unflagging appetites, Jessie learns that she is
ill with liver cancer. It’s bad. Her doctor tells her she has a month, maybe two
months, left to live.

And
that is when Miss Jessie Malone, her face and bosom fallen, her waist excruciating
beneath the corset that is still fashionably in style, deeply in debt, deeply
in drink, and unable to rest by night or by day, goes up to Nine Twenty
Sacramento Street.

The forbidding
red brick edifice looks exactly as it always has.

Donaldina
Cameron, much grayer and much more gaunt, answers the door.

“I
got something,” Jessie says, wheezing from the uphill climb, “for the kid.”

“I
will not let you near her,” Cameron says. “Not after what you did to her
mother.”

“Miss
Cameron,” Jessie says. “It’s her goddamn inheritance. I was keeping it safe for
her mother. Sure and I don’t need it no more as I’m about to kick the bucket.”

Cameron’s
eyes soften and she reluctantly lets the old madam inside. And that is when
Jessie gives the aurelia to Wing Sing’s daughter.

“I
know it’s old-fashioned, kid, but it meant something to the girl I got it from.”
Jessie hands over the bauble. “Maybe one day you’ll figure out what that was.
She often told me about a red-haired man who tricked her. Jar me, what a tall
tale. She said he was from six hundred years in the future, can you beat that?
And that one day, many years from now, you will meet this man with red hair in
Golden Gate Park and give it to him. Maybe that’s who the aurelia really belongs
to.”

Wing
Sing’s daughter has grown up to be a sturdy girl with wide green eyes from a
father she never knew, a moon face from a mother she never knew, and black hair
chopped off  the way Miss Cameron approves of. She takes the old-fashioned
golden bauble. Her hands are chapped from washing dishes. Prim in her gray wool
dress, disdainful and a touch frightened of the ugly old woman she says, “Thank
you. Good-bye.”

June
21, 2495

A
Premonition is Just a Memory of the Future

“And
Donaldina Cameron?” the Chief Archivist says. “She died in 1968. Lived to be
ninety-eight years old. Good Scotch genes, you know? No DNA tweaking in those
days.” The Chief Archivist, herself the same age, runs slender fingers over her
shiny bald scalp. She’s got an elastic bandage wrapped around her ankle, the
ankle propped up on a stool. She twisted it playing racquetball with her
skipdaughter, a sprightly kid of thirty-eight. The Chief Archivist is grumpy
today. She’s snapped at Chiron twice during their conference.

He
sighs. “You’re sure that’s Cameron.”

“No
doubt about it.”

He
clicks the viewer and closes the file. The holoid of the old woman in the
wheelchair and her elderly Chinese companion fades into a field of gleaming
blue. The field shrinks to the size of a luminous blue ping-pong ball and winks
off, leaving him and the Chief Archivist sitting in the soft golden light of
the conference room. The room rocks gently back and forth. The bay is rough
from a summer storm, whitecaps slapping against the hydroplex of the Luxon
Institute for Superluminal Applications.

“By
the way, happy anniversary,” says the Chief Archivist, breaking open a neurobic
and sniffing greedily. “June 21, the summer solstice. It’s been twenty-eight
years since we sent you on the Summer of Love Project. And look at you. Still
those implants, red hair to your butt.”