Crooked Hearts

by Patricia Gaffney

  “Yeah,” said Reuben, “but go ahead and tell us.”

  Doc nodded. “It consists mainly of statuary taken from ancient tombs, and icons of various Chinese gods and goddesses of immortality.” He smiled, uncovering his long brown teeth. “It seems the Godfather has a fascination with death.”

  Grace was jubilant. “That’s him, Reuben, that’s our man! It has to be. Can you get a message to him?” she asked Doc.

  “Probably.” He rolled his eyes back to Reuben. “For a price.”

  “Always a price,” he grumbled, doubly irked because of the suspicion that if he weren’t here, Doc would’ve done it for Grace for nothing.

  “What message would you like me to convey?”

  Grace started to answer, but Reuben cut her off. “Tell him we have something he needs. Tell him the price will be very high, but he’ll find it worth his while because it completes a collection he recently acquired.” “Very good. And if he asks who sent the message?” Reuben thought for a second, then smiled. “Tell him the owners of the tiger.”

  “Let’s go to Chinatown.”

  “Now?”

  “Why not?” Grace slipped her arm through Reuben’s and got him moving east, toward Stockton Street. “It’s this way, isn’t it?”

  He nodded. “Haven’t you ever been there before?”

  “No, and I’ve always wanted to go. When Henri and I were here two years ago, he wouldn’t take me. He said it was too dangerous.”

  “Two years ago? You live in the Russian Valley, and you haven’t been to the city in two years?”

  “About that.”

  “Why so long, Gus?” He pulled her out of the way of a turning ice wagon, and they stepped back up on the curb at Clay Street. “Life at the vineyard’s so idyllic, you can’t bring yourself to leave?”

  Grace thought about what her life was like at Willow Pond. Despite her miserable adolescence, she’d always loved the farm. But it wasn’t the old white house or the increasingly barren fields that had kept her and Henry from visiting San Francisco for the last two years. It was hard to remember now exactly what she’d told Reuben about Henry; she had an idea she’d told him conflicting stories, which wasn’t at all like her. She gave a mental shrug and decided to tell the truth for once. “Henri’s not allowed in San Francisco anymore. Or …” Better rephrase that. “He’s been asked not to return.”

  Reuben halted in the middle of the sidewalk and stared at her. “Who asked him not to return?”

  “Some men. Respectable men. City fathers, you might say.”

  “Why?”

  “Because. He embarrassed them.”

  Understanding made him break into a grin. “You mean he swindled ’em! Right? But they can’t admit it because it was an illegal racket to begin with. Am I right?”

  The grin was so engaging it tempted her to say yes. She resisted. “He embarrassed them,” she repeated. “Anyway, now he can’t go into the city.” She pressed her lips together to make it clear that that was all he was going to get out of her.

  They started walking again. “Is that why Sister Augustine had to collect charitable donations on her own?” he asked.

  “Partly. That and Henri’s heart,” she remembered to say.

  “Oh, yeah. That bum ticker.”

  “So,” she resumed, “will you take me to Chinatown?”

  “Sure, if you really want to go.”

  “You mean—it isn’t dangerous?” If not, she wasn’t sure she wanted to go after all.

  “Not particularly. Not for Caucasians in the daytime, and probably not much at night either.”

  “No?”

  “Most Chinese are scared to death of us,” he explained, taking her hand to negotiate through the foot traffic at Joice Street. “We’re fan kwei—foreign devils. Besides, the hoodlums and hatchet men in Chinatown can rob and assault each other, kill each other in broad daylight, and the cops will almost always look the other way. But let a Chinese guy lift his pinkie finger against a white man, and the law’s all over him.”

  “But that’s not fair.”

  “No, it isn’t. Haven’t you heard the saying about a Chinaman’s chance?” He stopped walking. “Here’s Stockton Street, Gus; this is where it starts. What do you want to see?”

  “Everything,” she decided. It was raw and windy, a typical wretched San Francisco summer day. She drew her cape tighter around her shoulders and started off north on Stockton, her wrist tucked under Reuben’s arm, intrigued already by the novelty of everything around her. The streets and sidewalks were packed with pedestrians, and every shop looked full of customers; everyplace she looked was animate with moving or lounging humanity.

  “It’s all so quaint,” she marveled, eyeing a string of whole fish, heads and all, hung out on a wash line in the alley between two narrow buildings. They were walking past a cobbler’s shop, next door to an herbalist’s, and the odors of leather and spices and musk combined in an indescribable mixture that embodied, in her impressionable mind, the essence of this alien neighborhood. “The newspapers always print lurid stories about evil characters slinking through dark alleys bent on foul deeds—but it’s just people, isn’t it? Trying to make a living.” Reuben made an ambivalent sound. “No, but what’s sinister about it? Look, a shrine.”

  “It’s a joss house,” he told her; they stopped in front of a queer-looking building, painted red and gold, and through the carved door they could see statues and images made of wood and tinsel. The odor of burning sandalwood wafted toward them; deep in the black recesses of the shrine, a dark-robed woman was lighting what looked like sparking firecrackers. “They’re everywhere, these temples,” said Reuben. , “This one’s to the goddess of walkers, actors, sailors, and whores.” Grace sent him a look. “It is,” he insisted. “Her name’s T’ien Hou, and she protects travelers.”

  “And prostitutes classify as travelers?”

  “Sure. They’re streetwalkers, aren’t they?”

  They moved on, and within half a block of the joss house she spied a woman who looked as if the goddess of streetwalkers might very well be looking out for her. “Was that a prostitute?” she whispered, turning to stare over her shoulder at the young girl they’d just passed in a doorway.

  “Probably.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “Mathematics, for one thing. The ratio of men to women in Chinatown is about thirty to one. And not many of the girls here are wives.”

  “Oh.”

  “Besides, she was wearing the cheongsam, the slit-skirted dress most of the whores wear. They call them singsong girls. Most of them are here illegally, sold into slavery by their families in Canton or Hong Kong.”

  Shocked, she glanced over her shoulder again, but the woman in the doorway had disappeared. “Why don’t the police stop it? If that girl’s a slave, why doesn’t she run away?”

  “Sometimes they do run away, but they’re usually caught, and then punished for it in ways you don’t want to know about. The Methodists run a mission here, and sometimes a girl will escape and take refuge there. But as often as not, the boo how doy send the police after her with an arrest warrant, claiming she stole her own clothes or the jewelry she’s wearing, some bauble a customer gave her. Honest Chinese people never interfere in the slave trade because they’re terrified of the tongs. Girls can bring as much as two or three thousand dollars on the block, which means the hatchet sons take a dim view of anybody who tries to crimp the trade.”

  “You mean nobody tries to stop it?” She’d read about the slave trade, but the stories were so detestable she’d shrugged them off as exaggerated and sensationalized. “The police don’t do anything? That’s appalling. Disgusting.” She looked around at the tiny flats and blank-faced alleys they were passing; no singsong girls were in sight at the moment, but she imagined them inside their squalid cribs, plying their unsavory trade. Mark Wing, she remembered, owned the brothel next door to his own house. The thought sharpened her aversion to him. Good: it was
easier to gouge somebody, she’d found, if you could work up a strong, healthy dislike for him beforehand.

  They stopped in front of a goldsmith’s shop to watch the owner making jewelry at a work table in the window. Grace kept waiting for him to look up, maybe smile at them—they were potential customers, after all—but he never did. He knew they were there, though, she could tell. They drifted on past the sweetmeats dealer and the dried-fish seller. At the corner, a huddle of men were sitting on the sidewalk in front of a hockshop, placidly playing checkers. They had on the same loose-fitting, dark blue blouses and baggy trousers that all Chinese men seemed to wear, with black felt fedoras or skullcaps, and long, skinny pigtails. One of the men looked up, and quickly away again when Grace caught his eye. She had the impression that she and Reuben were safe here, but not particularly welcome. She thought of Ah You, Henry’s houseboy, whom she’d known for as long as she’d known Henry—six years. She tried to imagine him here in Chinatown, hustling to make some kind of living on the mean, dirty streets. It was impossible; she could only think of him at Willow Pond, spouting his pseudo-Confucian sayings and puncturing Henry’s self-esteem with exaggerated obsequiousness.

  Reuben caught her hand and swung it between them in his big one. She smiled up at him, thinking how funny it felt to be strolling through Chinatown hand in hand, like a couple of out-of-town sightseers. Honeymooners, maybe. The funny part wasn’t how odd it felt, though, but how natural.

  The street they were on narrowed to an alley and finally ended in a vile-smelling courtyard. They turned around and retraced their steps, passing countless smaller alleys and side streets, all dark and dismal-looking even though it was just past noon. How easy it would be to get lost in this labyrinth of dirty, identical-looking narrow lanes. A sign on the brick building they were passing said “St. Louis Alley” in English, under Chinese characters, and Grace pulled on Reuben’s arm to stop him. “Look,” she said, pointing, “it’s another joss house.” She started toward it, but Reuben pulled her back. She looked at him in surprise.

  “I’ve heard of this place,” he said shortly, his face grim. “St. Louis Alley. You know what’s under this temple?” She shook her head. “The barracoon. It’s a detention house—the Queen’s Room, they call it. It’s where the highbinders bring slave girls after their ships dock at the Embarcadero. They sell, them here.”

  “No.”

  “Yes. Strip them first, so the buyers can see what they’re bidding on. Sometimes they’ve been beaten, sometimes branded with hot irons. They hardly ever kill them, though, because they’re too valuable.”

  Grace pivoted and walked away, arms wrapped tightly around herself. Reuben caught up to her before she got far, steering her away from the dead end she was blindly heading for. On Dupont Street, he took her arm and slowed their pace; they walked for a time without speaking.

  “How do you know things like that?” she burst out accusingly. It was easier to turn the horror into anger than to keep it inside. “How do you hear about such awful things?”

  “I’m a man,” he said lightly. “It’s my job to know things like that.”

  She snorted with scorn, yanking her hand out of his. “It’s your job as a man to know about depravity and vice and cruelty?”

  “Those things are part of the world, Grace. I’m a man of the world.”

  She wasn’t going to get a serious answer out of him, that was clear. She felt her temper cooling anyway. Getting angry at Reuben because evil existed didn’t make very much sense.

  “I used to wish I were a man,” she said in calmer tones, slipping her hand back under his arm. “When I was little. Sometimes I still do.”

  He looked amused. “Why?”

  “Because you have it so much easier. Maybe not easier,” she amended, “but at least for you life is more interesting.”

  “Is it?”

  “I loved being Sister Augustine because I was on my own. Fooling people, having power over them. That’s close to being a man, isn’t it?” He only smiled at her. “And men left me alone and didn’t bother me. Most men,” she added pointedly. “Would you have believed I was a nun if you hadn’t seen my gun?”

  “Probably. But I’d still have asked you to have dinner with me.”

  “You would? Why?”

  He stopped, peering down at her as if she were slow in the head. “Because, Gus, you were so damn pretty.”

  She looked away and made another snorting noise. Her face felt warm, and she knew she was blushing. Blushing, for God’s sake. “Let’s go in here,” she suggested abruptly, pulling him toward a doorway. Through it she could see a short corridor that led to a room with a long gaming table in the center, surrounded by eager-looking gamblers. Even from here she could hear the click of dice and dominoes.

  “Hold it, Grace—you can’t go in there.”

  “Why not?”

  “They won’t let you.”

  “Why won’t they?”

  “Well, for one thing, gambling’s illegal in Chinatown, and for all they know we might be cops. And even if we aren’t, we’re white devils, so we’ll bring them bad luck.”

  “Don’t be silly, they’ll let us in. Everybody gambles in Chinatown.”

  He shrugged. “Okay, you go ahead, then.” She looked at him doubtfully. “Go ahead, go on in.”

  “Aren’t you coming with me?” She glanced back at the door. A Chinese man sat on a stool beside it, guarding the entrance. He looked harmless enough, gray-bearded and stoop-shouldered, blinking dreamily and gumming an unlit cigar.

  “No, you go ahead. It’s all right, you’ll be fine.”

  She knew he was daring her. Fleetingly she wondered how he could know that a dare was the one thing she could never resist. “All right, I will.” She wheeled around and strode toward the door.

  Quick as a snake, the elderly man reached up and grabbed a rope she hadn’t noticed before, suspended from a hook above his head. She heard a loud bang, and jumped in fright when the inner door, the one at the far end of the dark corridor, slammed shut on a fast spring lock. A muffled roar went up from the room beyond the door. Spinning around, she raced back to Reuben, hauled on his arm, and dragged him away from the gambling den at a fast trot. Her heart was pounding, but when she threw a panicky glance over her shoulder, she saw that no one was coming after them. She felt like an idiot. And she had to listen to Reuben’s infuriating chuckling for half a block.

  “Wait, I can’t go any farther,” he panted, pulling her up short, pretending he was winded.

  She glared at him. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  “This was more fun. Wait!” He grabbed her before she could flounce away again. “If you really want to go gambling in Chinatown, Grace, I can think of one place where they might let us in.”

  “Where?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Come on and I’ll show you.”

  The place where he took her had no sign, no window. It was literally a hole in the wall; the door looked like a fissure in the side of a stone cave. From the entrance no lights were visible. “Wait here and don’t move,” he cautioned her—needlessly; where did he think she would go? Leaving her at the entrance, which was unguarded as far as she could tell, he disappeared inside the fissure.

  Immediately she remembered every story she’d ever read about kidnapped Caucasian women, sold into slavery and forced into lives of harlotry and degradation. What was Reuben thinking of, to leave her out here on the street by herself? Everybody on the sidewalk looked sinister all of a sudden. A man in a long wool overcoat and Western shoes walked straight toward her, bare white ankles showing. His forehead was shaved, and his long black queue hung down over one shoulder. He had mild brown eyes. Deceptively mild? They caught hers and held them. The closer he came, the harder Grace pressed back against the rough wall. At the moment the man drew level with her, someone clamped a hand on her shoulder from behind. She let out a squawk and jumped half a foot in the air. Whirling, fists clenched, she confronted R
euben.

  “Damn it, Grace, you scared the hell out of me!”

  Her racing heart wouldn’t let her speak for a few seconds. When she got her breath, she said deliberately, “Don’t—ever—do that to me—again.”

  “Do what? Come on, let’s go, you shouldn’t be standing out here by yourself.” She mumbled inarticulate curses, which he ignored. “The look-see man says we can come in, but we can’t play. I had to give him some cumshaw. Don’t forget, you owe me two bucks.”

  He was pulling on her hand, leading her through the crack in the wall. “What’s cumshaw?” she asked shakily.

  “A tip, a bribe. The specials earn a pretty good living that way, in payoffs to look the other way. A special is an auxiliary cop,” he said before she could ask.

  Except for the low ceiling, the roomy, well-lit gambling den bore no resemblance to a cave whatsoever. It was fairly clean, not too crowded, and it even had a band—two men playing strange music on odd-shaped instruments in the corner. Along the sides of the room were tables for cards, dice, dominoes, and white-pigeon ticket—a form of lottery, Reuben explained. But the primary game here was the one going on around a square table covered with matting in the middle of the room.

  “It’s fan-tan, isn’t it?” she asked in a whisper, standing as close to Reuben as she could without stepping on his feet. She was acutely aware that they were the center of suspicious attention and that every gambler in the room was sneaking dark, baleful glances at them when their heads were turned.

  Reuben nodded. “Do you know how it’s played?”

  “Not really.” It looked simple, but she couldn’t figure out the object. A man with a long wand, like a conductor’s baton, was sliding small porcelain buttons in groups of four out of a larger pile of buttons. The gamblers standing around the table stared intently at this operation, mesmerized. When the man with the stick—the banker, she assumed—stopped counting because the pile of buttons was depleted, several of the watchers were paid off in bank notes from a purse the banker wore around his waist. They’d won, obviously, but how or why, Grace couldn’t fathom.