Li-Ling asked him a few questions, and Master Yu shook his head.
“I have trouble understanding you,” said Master Yu, broaching the obvious, he thought. “I cannot understand very well the language of the peasantry. So do not be offended if I do not speak with you during our travels.”
It was his view that Li-Ling should now bow graciously, and then remain silent for the balance of the ride.
“You can understand me,” she said, flicking the reins a bit in frustration.
Although the poet’s thoughts were arrogant and elitist, Li-Ling knew that they were not unusual for a man of his class; furthermore, his handsome eyes betrayed an intriguing capacity for growth and for compassion that seemed perhaps yet untapped. Whether genuine or not, these compassionate eyes made his handsomeness complete, and irresistible, and her anger grew at a slower pace than it might have otherwise.
So she continued speaking, giving my friend Master Yu a detailed tour of the business district, whose border they were just crossing. She pointed out the low-rent trade businesses that lined these first streets, giving a rather lengthy disquisition on the square, functional two-story gray buildings and the businesses inside, Foster & Co.’s Grocery, for example, at the corner of Drumm Street, which sat next door to Wm. Lewis and Co. Cigars, and a few doors down, the boarded up façade of the Kimball Manufacturing Company.
They wobbled along on the lopsided wagon.
“Any questions so far, Master Yu?” she asked with a smile.
Master Yu smiled back, charmed against his will, though he recognized what a loss of face this was, for a man of his stature and reputation to ride in a carriage with a peasant girl.
“I’m a poet, and a beneficiary of the Governor,” he whispered gently.
“And a fine one, I am sure,” she said politely, “although I am not familiar with your work.”
They clopped past the aptly named “Son Brothers” business, which, according to a splashy billboard atop its roof, sold “fancy notions, stationery etc.” Back then, in another time and world, the Son Brothers business used to sit at the north side of the avenue, on the corner, just past Sansome Street. But as I write these words it lives no more; unremembered, unmourned.
Li-Ling continued to speak, and, she believed, to defuse the tension of this awkward predicament, this clash of cultures, this unsought meeting of useless intellect and practical world experience on a chilly night.
Words continued to drop out of her mouth and float above the cobblestoned street on golden wings.
“You are having an easier time understanding me,” Li-Ling said.
“Perhaps not,” Master Yu replied.
“You still cannot understand what I am saying?”
“No,” said the poet.
“Not a single word?” asked the peasant girl.
“Not a single word.”
Master Yu was quite certain of this.
“But are you enjoying the ride? Do you at least find the sights interesting?”
“A bit interesting,” he said, “yes.”
“You have never seen anything this new in China,” she said. “A few years ago, there was nothing here. This entire city rose up, as if by magic.”
“Magic?”
“Yes,” she said. “It is a pity you cannot understand me. It is an interesting story.”
“Hmm. A pity indeed.”
Across the avenue, the gold-fueled, columned castles of Leidesdorff Street finally came into view, glistening in the starlight, but neither the untalented poet nor the Southern girl noticed.
“You are a handsome man with lovely eyes,” Li-Ling said, “but without a sensible thought in your head. Master Yu, only the commoners are carrying on the uninterrupted traditions of yore and saving the nation, from within and without. If not for us, China would be a three-legged dog, a monkey with no arms. If you reject us, the nation is doomed.”
Master Yu did not respond for two reasons. First, he was quite convinced that he had not understood a word she said, because if he knew anything for sure it was that a man of his station could not understand even a word of the peasants’ language. Second, he found her assertion ridiculous. He believed – no, he knew – that the ruling class, the intellectuals, had always been and would always be the foundation of the Middle Kingdom, without which the nation would crumble, and who managed to support the vast legion of country imbeciles only through the grace of Heaven. Then he smiled a bit. I do have beautiful eyes, he realized, as though a revelation.
Well, readers of the 20th and 21st centuries know that if my yarn were one of your romantic comedies, this conversation would have devolved into a witty shouting match, followed quickly by a passionate yet comical embrace, or at least a comical complication, but just then a few gunshots suddenly rang out in the stillness of the night. One bullet snapped into the wagon’s front left wheel, and the other grazed the mule’s croup. The wagon collapsed, the mule reared up, and both Li-Ling and Master Yu toppled to the soft grass of the now-neglected, overgrown garden that encircled the Bank of California building. Roses and flowering vines grew unrestrained around and over the dark, now rusting iron fence.
How did the Bank of California look to Yu Dai-Yung? A golden emperor’s two-storied palace of shining blue stone bedecked by Venetian medallions, with forty-two white marble columns fronting the façade alternating with arcaded windows, a roof of burnished copper lined by a balustrade crested with finial-topped orbs, the Bank of California looked, to Yu Dai-Yung, as though it had been imagined and then sent to Earth by the Goddess of the Chinese Moon. It looked like a beautiful woman who had just died. It looked like a supernatural blue-marble temple that lived in the night.
It looked like a place to hide.
The heavy but neglected bronze door collapsed easily under pressure, and Yu and Li-Ling slipped into the cavernous, moonlit bank. Beneath high frescoed ceilings, kneeling on floors made of black and white marble blocks, the two peered out plate glass windows into the adjoining garden. They could see five sturdy gunmen, dark in the shadows, cross California Street and take cover behind the purple-leaf plum trees that ringed the garden.
Keeping one eye on the window, Master Yu backed away, holding Li-Ling’s arm lightly (gentlemanly). They passed forty mahogany desks that stood empty on the great marble floor, then they stopped beneath fierce bronze sculptures of growling watch dogs, which topped the nearest vault, whose door sat ajar. The vault was room-sized, but empty.
Master Yu checked the inside lever, which moved freely.
“Vault opens from the inside,” he whispered to Li-Ling. “So no one gets stuck inside and dies. But no one can get in.”
He unzipped his travel bag and pulled out two small revolvers.
“I know how to shoot and kill people,” he remarked with a modest smile. “Before I came to America, I learned how to shoot and kill people.”
He flipped open the cylinder, checked the ammunition.
“Stay in the vault till I give the signal,” he whispered. “Open the door a crack if you feel short of breath. Don’t let yourself sleep, or you will suffocate. If I have not returned by daybreak, then I am dead. Hide another day, let yourself out, and run away.”
He handed her his canteen.
“Water,” he said, unnecessarily. “With water, you can last without food.” Then: “It’s the air,” he cautioned. “The air will be the biggest problem for you.”
He shut the vault door, and he spun the lock.
Bird-eye maple wainscoting ringed the room, running beneath glistening black marble mantels. The Bank of California was modeled after the Library of St. Mark in the Piazza di San Marco in Venice, although Yu Dai-Yung didn’t know this.
A nice, tomb-like temple in which to die, he mused to himself.
The front door creaked open. He heard the gunmen whispering to each other. They sounded frightened, which buoyed his confidence.
He scampered beneath and behind the floor desks, creeping backwards on his stomach
to the office at the very farthest edge of the bank. He slid through the doorway without being seen. It was a long thin boardroom, the walls painted with scenes of an infinite canyon and a towering, frozen waterfall. In the corners of the room, stone statues of draped female figures supported dark and lifeless wall lamps. Who had designed this room? Who had loved this waterfall, this infinite canyon?
A bullet zipped through the building, shattering the wooden door, which splintered over his left shoulder. Yu kicked out one plate glass window and tumbled out into the chilly night, grabbed hold of one of the marble columns and scurried up like a squirrel, flipped onto the second floor balcony and crouched behind a great Romanesque vase.
One gunman looked through the broken window, Yu Dai-Yung shot, and the gunman’s head exploded like a balloon. His body shook and teetered for a moment, then collapsed, tumbling unrestrained back into the Bank building. Yu now flipped up and over the balcony railing, slipped his thin fingers into the crack between two great blue marble blocks and tossed himself up into the sky like a bouncing ball. He caught the balustrade, hoisted himself over it, and landed with a clatter on the Bank’s moon-dappled copper roof.
After that things moved quickly and bloodily. One gunman followed his colleague out of the window. Yu Dai-Yung shot him, and he died in the hydrangea bushes. A clank sounded behind him – a boot-heel striking copper – and Yu Dai-Yung spun about and shot a third gunman, who clutched his chest but seemed determined not to die, and so Yu Dai-Yung shot him again, and he expired, toppling backwards off the edge of the roof.
Master Yu sat on the roof for a long time, jumping at noises real and imagined, a revolver in each hand, pointing his guns here and there, trembling.
At length he crawled to the edge of the roof and peered over. But he saw nothing.
He dropped to the second-floor balcony, kicked in a window and descended the interior stairs in the darkness.
Li-Ling stepped out of the quiet shadows of the vault.
“I think that’s it,” she said. “I think you killed them.”
“There were five,” he said. “I killed three.”
He wished that he could have said he took no pride in this, that he took no pride in killing these three men. But had he said it, it wouldn’t have been true. He had enjoyed it, and it had made him proud.
“You killed three men, Yu Dai-Yung,” she said. “Others ran away. I mean, they must have. Yes or no?”
She stayed silent for a moment.
“No one here, Master Yu. The Bank is dead.”
She was right, and he could feel it in the air. Utter, angry lifelessness, an echoing death.
“Let’s go, Yu Dai-Yung,” she insisted. She took his elbow and gave him an imploring tug.
He held up one finger.
“Wait,” he said.
He listened to the silence. He looked into the stillness.
“Please,” she begged him.
“No.”
In the corner, in the hazy-hidden umbra behind the clerks’ desks lay a suspicious double-lump of shadows.
Master Yu stared, squinted, stared again, and turned to Li-Ling.
“I sneaked up on them,” she shrugged timidly. “I imagine I had the element of surprise to my benefit.”
“I told you to wait in the vault,” he said.
“And I did not obey you,” she replied.
“Hmm,” he muttered. Then: “Dead?”
“Apparently so,” she whispered. “You are not the only one in the world who knows how to kill people, I am sorry to say. This will be our secret, eh?”
They slipped out through the front window, and they hid beneath the plum trees, behind the bushes in the green courtyard that surrounded this empty tomb of a building.[10]
Li-Ling trained a gun on the Bank. Master Yu trained a gun on the street.
“You are a good mark,” she said, “for a great poet.”
He shook his head.
“Don’t tell anyone,” he said, “but I am a terrible poet. A great gunman, it is true, but a terrible poet. I am more gunman than poet.”
She smiled.
“Lucky for you, at moments like these?”
“No,” he disagreed. “I am not lucky to be a gunman rather than a poet. I would rather bequeath the world even just one great poem, rather than live on a few more months or years.”
“But what about me?” she insisted. “You have saved me as well. Aren’t you grateful for that? To have saved a blameless life?”
“The world needs more immortal poems,” Yu Dai-Yung said. “It has enough pretty girls, who are all mortal. A poem will last forever, if it is great. Even the greatest human being will die very soon, in a matter of decades at most. Where is the lasting glory in postponing the inevitable by mere moments?”
And even though she had nearly lost her life, and Yu Dai-Yung had just told her that the world didn’t really need her, still Li-Ling smiled, because the terrible poet had told her, off-handedly, that she was pretty.
“Well,” she said. “You have been sent by the Empress as foretold by her wise men, to save humanity, and I have been chosen as your guide. So perhaps the world needs us after all. Perhaps the world needs us more than it needs one more great poem.”
At that moment, unheralded by trumpets or thunder, a great winged lizard fluttered out of the murky night sky from behind a cloud. The beast settled on the top of the Bank, stretched his great neck and looked out over the garden and the deserted streets. He seemed to smile, according to Yu Dai-Yung, who described the scene to me later, even though, as Master Yu himself realized, dragons cannot smile. A reptile’s mouth is not designed for smiling. This does not mean that a dragon is never happy; it just means that, like a newborn baby, he cannot smile. Still, the dragon seemed to be smiling. The scaled beast wore the head of a camel with a demon’s eyes, a cow’s ears, antlers like a deer, the neck of a snake, a clam’s belly, a tiger’s paws and an eagle claw on each of its five legs.
“You see that?” Master Yu asked.
“The dragon?” Li-Ling said.
Now the terrible poet laughed.
“Yes,” he said, still laughing. “The dragon.”
“He comes here some nights, just watching over the city. Only since the bank closed, and Ralston died. Not everyone can see him. The dragon, I mean.”
“I think it is safe to go,” said Master Yu. “I think the dragon is an omen. I think it means it is safe to go.”
Li-Ling considered this.
“You may be correct. But you might be wrong. The dragon could be an omen of great danger and our imminent death,” she suggested.
He shook his head.
“The way the lights and shadows play on his face,” he said, “creates an illusion that the dragon is smiling. So this is an omen that it is safe for us to go.”
The mule had escaped – now the stupid creature was limping along somewhere on the city’s cobblestones, in pain but filled with joy, as though true freedom were his at last – so Yu Dai-Yung grabbed his bag, and the two crept out of the deserted garden and onto California Street. They crept past Mr. Wainwright’s Pantheon – the finest saloon in San Francisco, according to gourmands of the era, where, earlier that day, San Francisco’s big bugs had dined on turtle soup and roast pig – which sat silent and dark and as lifeless as the corpses reposed on the blood-stained, black and white marble floors of the Bank of California and in its hydrangea bushes.
They slipped through the night, out of the lights of the financial district and descended into the darkness. To the northwest, at Jackson Street, the road narrowed, and the musty murk of Chinatown came into view. “Why would they want to kill us, whoever they were?” he asked, in a low whisper, and Li-Ling replied, “Agitation against the Chinese, perhaps, Yu Dai-Yung? After the swift failure of the Bank, and the collapse of the local economy, the locals are blaming Chinese immigration. They are rising up against us everywhere.”
He raised an eyebrow skeptically.
“Mor
e to it than that, I expect.”
“I expect there is,” she agreed. “And I expect that there will be more to come.”
He turned to her as they walked.
“But listen to me, young woman,” he said. “Why did the Bank have no money? Why were the vaults open and empty?”
“We know what happened,” she said. “Sidonia withdrew her support. When Sidonia smiles on the Golden Mountain, the gold flows like water. When Sidonia frowns on the Golden Mountain, the spigot runs dry.”
She pointed knowingly to her eyebrows.
“Red Eyebrows,” Master Yu said. “The Sidonians are the Red Eyebrows.”
“The very same Hell-on-Earth,” she said. “The peasant warriors from your great-great-grandfather’s nightmares have returned from their graves.”
The Red Eyebrows. Silent for two thousand years. Ostensibly a Chinese peasant rebellion from the countryside, in reality a demon insurrection from the realm of the damned, which came to Earth and laid waste to the land back in the days of the Hsin Dynasty, around the Year One. The Empress Dowager had warned him of this during their brief meeting in the Tower of the Fragrance of Buddha at the Summer Palace on Longevity Hill. This diminutive Empress was a tiny, volcanic terror by any subjective criteria, with a foul temper and long sharp fingernails with which to dispense her wrath with both style (of a sort) and maximum efficiency. But the Emperor of Heaven had granted her temporary possession of his Mantle, and so Master Yu loved her without doubt, and he was loyal without question. For many years, she had told him, the secret of the Red Eyebrows has remained hidden, this terrible secret that can change the course of mighty rivers and make the earth crack – and so much more, terrible things… The Palace hid a dragon, she told him, and, for the last two hundred years, a tall, green-skinned man born on a planet far away, who drank tea on occasion in the Summer Palace garden with one of the imperial advisors. But she told Master Yu that the most important and dangerous secret in the basement of the Summer Palace was the secret of the Red Eyebrows, which could never be allowed out into the world. Never never, she had whispered, displaying a most un-imperial fear on her regal, red-rouged face. But it has been, she said. We must get it back, before it destroys everything.
Watt O'Hugh Underground: Being the Second Part of the Strange and Astounding Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh the Third (The Memoirs of Watt O'Hugh III Book 2) Page 5
