by Megan Chance
“We’ll go to the police. You’ll tell them what you know.”
She laughed. “You think the police will listen to me?”
“Why not? You know I was in the kitchen when she died. You’re my only witness.”
“Then you might as well plead guilty. It is the same thing.”
I was taken aback by her insistence. “I don’t understand.”
“Look at me.” She gestured, shortly, impatiently. “Look at what I am, Miss May. No one here believes a Chinaman. You will be putting yourself in your uncle’s hands once more. Is that what you wish? Better to be dead.”
I remembered now something Goldie had said about Chinese lies, about the police not trusting them. I had not questioned my cousin, but coming as it did now from Shin’s mouth, I found it ludicrous that I had so simply accepted that a whole race could be liars. And yet, Shin was right—I’d been naive to think she could save me. I had seen only that she was my ally. I’d been too blind to understand that because she was Chinese, it wouldn’t matter. Neither did I want to admit it now. I was too desperate; I’d pinned my hopes of clearing my name on her.
“But you know I didn’t kill my aunt.” I pulled the button from my pocket and held it out to her. “I found this in her hand. My uncle’s vest button.”
Shin glanced at it briefly. “Yes. They fought. I heard them.”
“You heard? Then we must go to the police—”
“The police will not help you! He knows the police! Why don’t you understand?” She quieted. “I am dead if we go to the police. He can’t afford for you to be dead, but you will be locked away. This time forever.”
“What do you mean, ‘he can’t afford for me to be dead’? You said that last night.”
“The asylum burned, along with the papers. There is no record of who was there and who was not.”
I had no idea why that was relevant. What did it matter if there was no record? The Sullivans knew I was there. “You’re speaking in riddles.”
“Your money. If you are dead, it must be returned.”
“To whom?”
Shin shrugged. “Whoever gave it to you.”
I struggled to understand. “You’re saying that if I’m dead, my inheritance has to go back to my father’s family?”
“Yes.”
I grappled with that, with the sheer—I didn’t know what to call it.
“No one can say if you are dead or alive, and so . . .” Shin trailed off.
And so this netherworld was exactly where I should stay if I wanted to be safe. But safety was not what I wanted, was it? I wanted justice. I wanted back what was mine. I wanted revenge.
I asked, “Why are you still with the Sullivans? You know what they are. You know what they did. Why do you still work for them?”
She glanced away uncomfortably.
I studied her the way I’d studied Costa and O’Rourke, the same way I’d studied Mrs. Donaghan. Everyone did things for a reason. Everyone wanted something. “It’s not because you like the job too much to leave it. If that was so, you wouldn’t have risked it to help me.”
She said nothing.
I said, “Where are the rest of them? Mr. Au? Petey? Nick? The cook?”
She shrugged. “When the earthquake came, they ran. They didn’t return.”
“But you did.” That was the key. “You have no fondness for Goldie, and if you cared for my aunt, well, she’s dead, so she’s not the reason, either. It’s not lack of opportunity. Everyone needs a maid; you could get a job in another house easily. The others left. You stayed. Why?”
She turned her gaze slowly to me; some emotion I couldn’t read flickered within it.
“It’s because you have to.” I knew when I said it that I was right. My uncle held Shin imprisoned in some way. I didn’t know how and it didn’t matter then. If I destroyed him, then she was free. She had been my ally; I wanted her to be one again. So I simply said, “Help me, and we’ll destroy my uncle together. You’ll be free. Is that what you want?”
Shin laughed shortly and shook her head.
“Why not?” I asked. “What aren’t you telling me?”
I don’t know what she heard in my voice. I don’t know why she gave me the look she did. Grave, testing.
I said, “By all rights, I should be dead. I escaped an asylum and an earthquake and a fire. I promise I can help you.”
“Maybe,” she said slowly. “Maybe you can do it.”
“I can. Tell me what I must do.”
I did not expect what she said next, nor the chill it sent through me.
“We must see China Joe.”
China Joe. That disturbing face, the sense of danger, the fear that had sent me running. I remembered my cousin, sleepy and languid and anxious when I’d returned from the opium den. “Does Goldie still go to him?”
Shin did not look surprised that I knew. “She did. But there have been no ships and no opium. She suffers.”
It did not pain me to know that. I had meant to use Goldie’s secret against her, but I did not like the thought of China Joe, and I liked less the thought of paying him a visit. “We can do this without seeing him, surely? Why do we need him? What has he to do with you?”
“He has to do with everything in San Francisco. He knows everything about everybody.”
I truly did not like the sound of that.
Again, that small smile. “Miss Sullivan needs opium. Mr. Sullivan needs property. Who do they go to?”
“You’re saying that China Joe knows secrets about my uncle as well.”
“Mr. Sullivan wanted Chinatown gone, and China Joe with it. There is a reason for that. There are many things that do not get done without China Joe, Miss May.”
I sighed. “Very well. Do you know where to find him?”
Shin nodded. “Yes. But we cannot go now. I must get back.”
“Tomorrow then. Can you go tomorrow?”
“Yes,” she said.
But I was impatient; now that there was something to be done, I wanted to get started. I felt I had waited forever. I did not want to wait another day.
“Do not stay on Nob Hill,” she warned. “It is too dangerous for you.”
“No, I won’t.” I was nervous enough in the Fairmont.
“Meet me in Chinatown,” she said.
“There is no Chinatown,” I said grimly.
“The burned-out trolleys—did you see them?”
There had been a line of them along Pacific Avenue, nothing but twisted metal now. I nodded.
“Meet me there tomorrow morning. At eleven.” She left with a final warning: “Do not be caught here, Miss May.”
I needed no more warnings. The moment I could, I sneaked from the Fairmont, and left Nob Hill far behind me. I would be happy never to return.
I decided to look for Dante after the visit with China Joe. Better to have all the information in my hands when I met with Dante, to present him with a story he could not resist, and so I spent a sleepless night wondering about Shin’s connection with Goldie’s opium procurer, and both dreading and anticipating what I might learn.
The next day, I waited for what seemed endless hours at the wrecked cable cars. The collapsed roof of one, still bearing its clanging bell, tilted over what were left of wheels and a piece of painted side. The ones linked to it were only wheels and the metal rails that held them together, bits of flooring. I leaned against the standing brick wall of a hollowed building, rolling the gold button in my pocket between my fingers, staring up into the bright overcast beginning to show now through a lazy fog.
“Miss.”
When Shin arrived, she looked as tense and strained as I felt. It was not reassuring. We spoke little as we walked down the hill and into Chinatown with its trophy hunters gleefully pulling teacups from still warm embers and men exclaiming over bits of cracked jade and soldiers watching as they leaned idly on their rifles. We passed a charred telephone pole bearing an order for every able-bodied man and woman to serve on work crews—an unbe
lievable irony, given that not only did Chinatown provide most of the domestics and low-wage workers in San Francisco, but also because the many whites here were digging not to clean up or to help rebuild this part of the city, but to steal whatever they could from it. I felt uncomfortable and ashamed. I could not look at Shin.
We went a twisted route, through a break in a wall, down a passageway made of other broken walls, this way and that, until it seemed some secret route like those rumored to lead to subterranean grottoes in Chinatown—Dens of Vice and Degradation! The earthquake had given the lie to those stories, though the tour guides still found them irresistible. Before long Shin stopped where a street had partially fallen in, creating a cavern beneath. Rugs had been strung up to turn the shallow cave into a shelter. Shin stepped carefully down a slide of gravel and refuse, and I followed, slipping as stones rolled beneath my boots. There, where a carpet flapped before a makeshift entrance, sat a man I recognized from the opium den, the one with the scarf, who had called for Joe. Shin spoke to him in Chinese. He only grunted a reply. She gestured for me to come with her and dodged beneath the carpet.
Inside, a candle spilled a wavering light. It smelled of dirt and stone, smoke and damp. The small space clung to the ash and destruction of Chinatown; the air was gray with it. The corner held a tumble of blankets and clothing, but the walls were lined with stacks of items, some scorched, others cracked, obviously relics retrieved from the ruins, and again I thought of all those people carting off their baskets of melted bronzes and blackened china. Then I saw that these items were marked with price tags. Souvenirs for sale. Obviously China Joe meant to compete with other San Franciscans in profiting from Chinatown’s destruction.
A wooden box, a pull wagon, and a chair served as the only furniture in the cramped space. Sitting on the chair was China Joe, looking impatient.
He listened as Shin spoke to him, again in Chinese. Then he held up his hand, stopping her midword, and looked at me. The candlelight made his already high cheekbones sharp, and buried his dark eyes. He considered me in a way that made me shiver. “Goldilocks’s cousin, hmmm?”
I nodded, momentarily stripped of the ability to speak.
A half smile. “Ah yes. You ran from me before I could give you what you needed. Poor frightened little hen.”
That he remembered me was unnerving.
“Chen Shin says you have something to offer me. She says we will all help one another, yes?”
I glanced at Shin, who nodded. I had no idea what I could offer him, but I said, “I hope so. Yes, I think so.”
“Tell me what you want, little hen.”
“Remember who you are.” “The Sullivans have stolen from me, and I want back what’s mine.”
“Ah,” Joe said. “Yes, I see.”
It was only when he reached for it that I saw the book beside him. It was large and fully stuffed. He pulled it into his lap and opened it. The pages had pockets, each pocket full of papers, or photographs, or letters—I could not tell exactly. He leafed through it until he found what he wanted, and then he set it in the bed of the wagon between us. He gestured for me to look before he sat back again.
I glanced at Shin, who watched without expression, and then I looked down at the book. The pocket on the page had Chinese characters in black ink. They meant nothing to me, of course, and no one bothered to elucidate. The pocket bulged with papers. When I looked at him in question, he put out his hand as if to say, Go ahead.
I reached for the corner of one of the papers shoved within it and pulled it loose. It was the size of a check, a bit smaller, and written in English. I, Goldie Sullivan, do promise to pay China Joe twenty dollars. It was dated and signed by both her and, I assumed, Joe. It was not the only one. There were dozens, all for different amounts. Some higher, some lower. I did not need to look at all of them to know that it was a great amount of money.
It was more debt than I could possibly have imagined. “This is for opium?”
“So many secrets,” he said softly. “Not just opium, little hen. Gambling. She loves to gamble, your Goldilocks.”
The story of Goldie’s engagement returned to me. Stephen Oelrichs, taking her to Ingleside, teaching her to gamble. His words to me at the Anderson soiree. “Stay away from China Joe.”
The paper between my fingers smelled of sandalwood and tobacco smoke. It was crisp and thin. A blocky, inked red stamp took up one corner—again, Chinese symbols.
I took a deep breath and pushed it back into its pocket. I closed the book, nauseated. “And my uncle?”
Again, Joe flipped through the book. This time when he set it before me, the papers inside were not IOUs, but invoices bearing my uncle’s signature, as well as a ledger showing dollar amounts, names, and accounts. “I don’t understand. What are these?”
“Evidence of graft, bribes.”
“Corruption,” Dante LaRosa had said.
“Sullivan Building wrote many false invoices to build city hall,” China Joe went on. “They exchanged cheap materials for those the city paid for, and bribed those in charge to look the other way. Where did the money go, little hen, hmmm? Now, people see that walls promised to be solid brick were filled with sand and trash. The great pillars were only shells. Now they ask questions. They want to know who to blame.”
I’d seen how the elegant facade had slid from its metal structure like melting chocolate. The walls had been pulverized. Years to build and the pride of San Francisco, and it was a sandcastle of a structure that had trapped several in its collapse—there had been a hospital and an asylum in its basement. It was the building the newspapers and everyone else pointed to when they spoke of needing new codes and updated standards for rebuilding. City hall was a disaster. My uncle’s fault, and China Joe had the proof of it.
Joe watched me with an expression I could not read. Amusement, perhaps, or perhaps he was only watching to see the moment when I put it all together. This time, when he turned the pages of the book and handed it back to me, I was afraid to take it.
I feared the name on the pocket was my own.
I was right to be afraid. The pocket was full of newspaper clippings. The society page, every time I’d been mentioned. The notice of my arrival in San Francisco. The drunken frivolity at the Cliff House. The picture of me in the bathing suit. Then, after that, the articles of my madness, the accusations of murder, my commitment to Blessington.
He reached for one of the papers in the pocket and pulled it out, holding it until I took it between numb fingers. His gaze ordered me to read it.
I glanced down. It was the Classifieds section of the San Francisco Call.
Found: Italian boy, 3 years old, from Union St.
To ANYONE at the ST. FRANCIS HOTEL, SF, who knows anything about my son, Robert Fletcher. Please notify Mrs. Francis Fletcher, Valencia Hotel, Los Angeles.
Just like every other day. Advertisements like this had been running since the earthquake. Lost children, missing relatives, requests for information. I had no idea what it had to do with me, but when I looked up at him in question, he nodded for me to keep reading.
Found: Green parrot. Says “Hurry sailor” constantly. Please claim.
Seeking information about BLESSINGTON HOME FOR THE INCURABLY INSANE, regarding certain patients from the facility. Please contact David Emerson, Private Detective, temporarily at West 1922.
I stopped, hoping I’d misread, but I knew I had not. I understood what Joe meant by showing me this. The Sullivans had hired a private detective to look for me. China Joe would make certain the man found me unless I did what he wanted—whatever it was. Had Shin known this? Had she brought me here only to cross me?
Joe’s gaze was slow, sweeping; his little smile made me think of rosy light, a heavy sweet smoke, and the languorous drawl in Goldie’s voice. His had not been a benign smile then, and it was less so now. Beside me, Shin shifted from one foot to the other. She said something quickly, but he did not answer. To me, he said, “It is simply informatio
n, Miss Kimble. Information I believe you should know.”
My instincts told me otherwise. I could barely get out the words as I asked him, “What do you want from me?”
He sighed. “I have worked very hard to make my kingdom, Miss Kimble. It has taken years of planning and special . . . shall we say, negotiations? And now, I find—we find, my friends and I—that after all the favors we have done, all the allies we have made, we are betrayed by those who owe us the most.”
“I see.” Actually, I had no idea what he was talking about, but I understood secrets, and I listened.
“They wish to take Chinatown from us. They wish to move it to Hunters Point. Do you know of these plans?”
“I’m not surprised.”
“Then I think you will not be surprised to know who is at the center of these plans.”
“My uncle.”
Again, that slow, considering look. Again, a frisson of unease down my spine. “You help me stop them, Miss Kimble, and I will help you with your . . . difficult . . . relatives. Perhaps also I can help you—or not—with this Mr. Emerson.”
Again, I understood. China Joe had me neatly trapped.
He went on. “And I give Shin what she asks for.”
I was confused. “What she asks for? I’m confused.”
“She is my eyes and ears on the Sullivans,” he said. “If we keep Chinatown, Chen Shin’s debt to me will be paid. She will have her liberty. You will do this for me. Agreed?”
“You still haven’t told me what I need to do.”
Joe reached for a wooden box on the wagon. It was small and inlaid with leaves of a lighter wood. He opened it and took out a cigarette, which he lit. Joe drew heavily, held it, and opened his mouth, releasing the smoke in a ring. He looked so pleased at its perfection that for a moment he seemed a child, or would have, if child’s play had held such threat. “I need a reporter to remind the city what they owe us and what they would lose if they choose to go against us. You know one, I think. At the Bulletin. He is a good friend of yours.”
How easily it came together. So much so that I was suspicious. Shin had said he knew everything. Even my own intentions, it seemed. “He’s hardly a good friend.”
