S Hockensmith - H03 - The Black Dove

by Steve Hockensmith

  “A whorehouse, you mean?”

  My brother flushed. Yet for just a fleeting flash, a gone-in-a-wink instant, he didn’t look embarrassed by the lady’s language. He looked hurt.

  He snapped the expression away with a curt nod, like shaking out a tablecloth to clear it of crumbs.

  “Yup. That’s what I mean. If it is a cathouse, they’re used to fellers like us tryin’ to get inside. But you try to go in there with us . . . ? Uh-uh. Even in a town like Frisco, that’s gonna turn heads.”

  “ ‘No place for a lady,’ huh?” Diana said.

  “Now, look, miss . . .,” I began.

  “Don’t bother, Otto. This time, I’m inclined to agree.” Diana sighed. “So . . . what shall I do in the meantime? Darn your socks? Bake a cake?”

  “You could go home,” Old Red said.

  Diana smiled grimly. “Other than that.”

  “Maybe you could do a little shoppin’,” I suggested.

  The lady gave me an “I hope you’re joking” glower.

  “I got the feelin’ you’ll be needin’ a mournin’ dress pretty soon now,” I explained.

  “Ah.” She reached over and gave my arm three light little pats. “You two know how to take care of yourselves. You’ll be fine, Otto. I’m sure of it.”

  “Miss, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—you are the best liar I ever met.” I took the liberty of gently placing my hand on her arm for a moment. “And it’s much appreciated.”

  “Alright, alright,” Gustav grumbled. “Enough gum flappin’.”

  “Get yourself somewhere safe,” I told Diana as my brother and I turned to go.

  “You can count on me,” she said.

  Old Red and I were already a dozen strides away before it struck me what a cryptic response this had really been.

  “I wonder . . .”

  “Don’t try to figure her out,” Gustav said. “You’ll just sprain something.”

  “Maybe you oughta take your own advice. After all, back at Chan’s place, it was you who got all—”

  “Oh, for God’s sake, Brother,” Old Red snapped. “We got more important things to worry about just now.”

  He was looking up ahead, at two of those “more important things”: the hatchet men on either side of the door we had to get through . . . somehow.

  As we drew closer, we once again passed that hymn-blasting brass band, now solemnly oompah-ing the life out of “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.” This time, the bandleader gave me a glare that told me he had it on good authority I was going to hell. Which wasn’t news to me. Gustav and I were practically there already.

  “Let me do the talkin’,” I said as we stepped around a puddle that seemed to be blood garnished with a liberal sprinkling of teeth.

  “What kinda play you gonna make?”

  “Damned if I know.”

  The highbinders finally took notice of us as we started across the street, monitoring our approach with apathetic, slack-jawed, sidelong glances. Whatever we might prove to be, they clearly had no doubt they could handle it.

  “Don’t worry, though, Brother,” I said under my breath. “I still got a whole five or six seconds to come up with something.”

  Five or six seconds later, we were a mere five or six steps from the highbinders and I still didn’t have a plan. So my mouth just took matters into its own (figurative) hands.

  “Ooooo, yessir!” I heard myself hoot. “This must be the place!”

  I gave Gustav a boisterous slap on the back and tried to go breezing between those guards just as the geezer had a few minutes before.

  The highbinders stepped together like gates slamming shut in front of us.

  Old Red and I skidded to a stop.

  “Pardon me, gents. But this is a”—I winked and let out a loud meeoww—“ain’t it?”

  The smaller of the two highbinders—a young, round-faced fellow working so hard to look tough he should’ve been chewing nails—just said one word. It was the kind of thing that wouldn’t usually roll trippingly off a foreigner’s tongue, but he seemed to have had plenty of practice with it.

  “Exclusive.”

  “Exclusive?” I grinned. “Well, of course it is! We wanted to rub shoulders with the riffraff, we’d take our trade to the competition.”

  “Exclusive,” the highbinder said again.

  “Believe me—I don’t doubt it,” I replied. “Like I said, that’s why we’re here. You see . . . this place come recommended.”

  I gave the guards a moment to ask me by whom, but they didn’t bother. Which was fine, actually, as it gave me time to reach around and pull a name out of my ass.

  “Cathal Mahoney told us to come here. That’s Sergeant Mahoney to the likes of you. He said we’d be treated right. I’d sure hate to have to tell him otherwise.”

  The highbinders’ eyes widened. I suspect my brother’s did, too, but fortunately the guards weren’t paying him any mind just then.

  “You wait,” said the talker of the two, and he turned and went inside.

  The other highbinder took a slight step to his left, the better to block us now that his compadre was gone. He made for quite an effective fence standing there, arms and legs akimbo, fearsome scowl freshly replastered over his surprise.

  “Lovely weather we’re havin’, ain’t it?” I said to him.

  He didn’t so much as blink . . . for a full minute. Really. Old Red and I couldn’t do much in the way of speaking with the hatchet man there in hearing (and hacking, stabbing, and shooting) range, so we had nothing to do but stand there timing him.

  Now, certain folks are heartbreakers, some break promises, and others are ever breaking wind. Me, I’m an incorrigible breaker of silences.

  “You know, them outfits y’all wear look mighty comfy,” I said to the highbinder, pointing at his slack black tunic. “They come in any other colors?”

  The Chinaman didn’t deign to answer.

  “Cuz I wouldn’t mind gettin’ me some duds like that,” I went on. “For lollygaggin’ around of a Sunday afternoon. You know. Like a proper English gentleman.” I waggled my eyebrows at my brother. “Know what I mean?”

  Gustav most certainly did—I’d ribbed him more than once about Holmes’s habit of lounging about in his “dressing gown.”

  “I’m sure our friend here don’t care how you dress yourself any more than I do,” he snipped at me.

  Translation: Don’t annoy the man, ya idjit.

  As you’ve no doubt noted already, there’s something else I like breaking whenever possible: my brother’s balls. It’s a compulsion I can’t always control, like the urge some fellows feel to drink or gamble or run around pretending they’re a “consulting detective.”

  So I turned back to our “friend” and said, “I like the man’s look is all I’m sayin’. Only I’d wouldn’t want my jim-jams quite so drab. No offense intended.”

  But offense finally taken, it seemed. The Chinaman reached behind his back to grab for something tucked away under his tunic.

  Old Red and I stepped backwards off the stoop, sliding away together like the tide going out. If there was to be gunplay, we’d have to sit it out—on the shooting end, anyway. Being shot we could do just fine.

  We’d lost our Peacemakers back on the Pacific Express, you see, and never got around to replacing them.

  I suddenly regretted the time and money I’d spent the night before to buy myself a new hat.

  But the hatchet man never even noticed how spooked he had us. He was too busy pulling out a small pouch—from which he produced a pile of business cards.

  As he rifled through the cards, my brother and I slid forward again, gaping at each other all the while.

  When the highbinder found the card he wanted, he held it out to me. The writing on it was mostly Chinese, but there was an address printed in English.

  “My cousin, Wing Sing. Tailor. Show this, he give good price.”

  “Thank you, friend,” I said, pocketing t
he card. “I’ll look him up once we’ve—”

  The door behind Wing Sing’s cousin swung open, and the other hatchet man rejoined us on the stoop.

  “Inside.”

  He jerked his head back at the door. Beyond it was a hallway so murky-dark it could have been the mouth of a cave.

  “Inside?” I said to my brother.

  Outside had suddenly struck me as the safer (not to mention saner) place to be.

  Gustav eyed the hallway unhappily. Yet he nodded all the same.

  “Inside,” he said.

  So in I went.

  Just as I crossed the threshold, the brass band up the street broke into a wheezing, heaving rendition of “Wretched, Helpless, and Distrest,” without a doubt the most dismal dirge ever to blacken the pages of a hymnal. Preachers like to talk about “the good news,” but there’s precious little cheer in that song. All it speaks of is doom.

  I had to wonder if the bandleader knew something we didn’t. Like maybe we’d be seeing Jesus pretty soon now, after all.

  Or St. Peter, anyway.

  15

  INSIDE

  Or, A Soiled Dove Gives Us the Bird

  There was no need for the highbinders to lead the way. There was but one way to go—straight ahead.

  Inside, we found no foyer, no stairs, no adjoining rooms. Just a narrow, shadowy corridor leading to another door a short distance away. Crimson-tinged light bled through into the darkness from the door’s every edge, giving the end of the passageway an eerie reddish glow.

  The hatchet men let me and Gustav start toward it, then pulled the door to the stoop closed, and rode drag on us, tight. Their presence at our heels seemed to cut us off from our each previous step and cancel out everything that lay behind us, so that the steps ahead were all that remained of our world.

  That world was shrinking fast. When there were but a few steps left to it, the door at the end of the hall swung open, and light flooded into the corridor.

  For a moment, I could see only the outline of a woman before us. It was quite the outline, too: short in stature but long on curves. The woman’s hair was done up in a big bun, adding one more bulge to her already shapely form—an onion atop the hourglass.

  “Welcome, gentlemen. I am Madam Fong.”

  My vision unblurred, and I found myself face to lovely face with a Chinese woman dressed in a flowery blouse and silky-black pantaloons. To call her beautiful would do her a disservice. She was a goddess, albeit one who was enough the mortal to age. There was the slightest sagging to her smooth crescent chin; the beginnings of a droop to her puckered, painted lips; lines around her almond eyes even the most skillfully applied talcum couldn’t quite hide.

  You could see her years in her eyes, too. Not that they were cloudy or crossed or bloodshot. They just seemed dulled somehow, as if from overuse. They were eyes that had seen too much.

  She stepped back and swept out an arm, ushering us into a perfumed parlor room that was one-third Xanadu, one-third Sears & Roebuck, and one-third dirty postcard. There were low-slung divans piled high with embroidered pillows, wicker armchairs with cushions that looked so soft a man might sink into them like quicksand, and everywhere—everywhere—ashtrays, picture frames, figurines, and other assorted trifles crafted from teakwood, bamboo, or porcelain. (No obsidian-black birds, though, I noted.)

  Plush red carpet covered the floor, pink paisleyed paper was plastered to the walls, and nailed up willy-nilly was “art” that . . . well, suffice it to say, the pictures alternated between nature scenes and scenes of a nature that would make a sailor blush.

  But perhaps the room’s most notable—and fortuitous—feature was what wasn’t there: the old-timer.

  “Please. Make yourselves comfortable,” the madam said as Gustav and I shuffled into the room. Her accent wasn’t as thick as some we’d heard that day, yet her words came out clipped and curt, as if she had to spit them out one letter at a time.

  “I can’t imagine anybody bein’ uncomfortable in here if they tried,” I said, stretching myself out on a settee.

  Madam Fong chuckled, the sound of her amusement light and musical—and no doubt well practiced, given her line of work. She nodded at her black-clad doormen, who disappeared the way we’d just come, closing the door behind them.

  There was only one other door, on the opposite side of the room, and no windows at all. Despite what I’d said about the coziness of the place, it was starting to feel like a velvet-lined cage.

  “You want a drink?” Madam Fong asked, moving toward a cart upon which sat several sparkling cut-glass decanters.

  Old Red perched himself stiffly on the edge of an easy chair, looking anything but easy. “No, thanks, ma’am. We ain’t thirsty.”

  He shot me a glare that warned me not to contradict him.

  “Leastways, not for liquor,” I said, and I gave our host a lewd wink.

  “Here we can quench any thirst,” Madam Fong replied dryly. “Yours can be taken care of. Any friend of Sergeant Mahoney is a friend of ours . . . if they are a friend of ours. Because Sergeant Mahoney is no friend to us.”

  “Exactly,” I said with a nod and a smile—though I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.

  “So . . . what is it you offer?”

  “Plenty, ma’am. Plen-ty.” My mind raced to come up with anything beyond cocky grins and blarney. “OF Cathal, he can be a tough nut. But we know how to handle him.”

  The madam went gliding away from the liquor cart, looking thoughtful. And when I say “went gliding,” that’s not just a fancy way of saying “walked.” The woman’s steps were small but her gait amazingly smooth, and she moved as if she was floating on the wind like a wing-spread bird.

  A hawk, maybe. Or a vulture.

  “Other men ‘handle’ Mahoney already,” she said.

  “But not to suit you, am I right?” I shrugged. “So why not let us take a crack at it?”

  Madam Fong smiled again, and I could tell this time she really meant it—because her grin was just the sort of grim, sneering thing she could never show a paying customer. I’d pegged her as thirtyish before, but now I saw a whole other bitter decade etched into the carefully concealed lines of her powdered face.

  “I look at you, I do not see rich men. Why would Mahoney listen to you?”

  “Cuz money ain’t everything,” I replied with a breeziness that was all hot air. I looked over at my brother. “You wanna spell it out, or shall I?”

  “Oh . . . well . . . you go ahead,” Old Red said. “You’re the talker.”

  “Alrighty.”

  I turned back toward Madam Fong as slow as I thought I could get away with, stretching the moment to the snapping point while I scoured my brain for inspiration. I wasn’t even sure I’d found any even as my mouth opened up and an answer popped out.

  “You see . . . he’s our cousin.”

  I swept my boater off my head and let my carrot-top do the talking for a second. (Thanks to our flaming red hair, Gustav and I have been taken for Irish so many times I once proposed that we change our names to O’Amlingmeyer.)

  “Paddy and Seamus Mahoney, at your service. Our cousin—‘Cal,’ we’ve always called him—he sent word to us down in Texas a while back. Said he could slip us onto the po-lease payroll now that he was runnin’ the show with the Chinatown Squad. And Paddy and me, we’re gonna take Cal up on it. Only we ain’t sure we can get by up here in Frisco on a lawman’s pay. So we’re lookin’ to supplement our income a mite.”

  “I see,” the madam said in that cool, reserved way of a person sniffing for a whiff of bullshit. “So you and your brother could help us by . . . ?”

  “Just stayin’ friendly is all. Droppin’ by to chat from time to time. You know, like whenever Cal’s plannin’ on gettin’ his face in the papers with a big raid.”

  Madam Fong gave me a brooding nod. I seemed to be making sense to her . . . so far.

  “But why come to us? Here?” she asked. “Why not Litt
le Pete? Or even Chun Ti Chu? They would like Mahoney ‘handled,’ too.”

  “Well, first off, Paddy and me don’t know who the hell ‘Little Pete’ or ‘Chunky Chew’ is. We’re new in town. Don’t know the lay of the land yet. Second off, we thought we oughta start small. Take our time, work our way up to the big boys. And third off, Cal just happened to mention that this was where they kept the purtiest whores in Chinatown . . . so of course we had to come here first! Right, Brother?”

  I yelped out a yeee-haaa of the sort people seem to expect from Texans. Old Red tried to join in, for appearance’s sake, but he couldn’t put much oomph into it. He never has been one for huzzahs, unless it’s to get a herd moving.

  The madam endured our howlings with the sort of pained/amused look I assume one sees on missionaries attending tribal dances in the deepest Congo. On the surface, there’s a smile. Underneath, they’re thinking, “Savages.”

  “What about your cousin’s friends?” she asked. “Won’t they expect you to work for them, too?”

  “Well, that’s the beautiful part of it. They probably will . . . which’ll give us the perfect perch for keeping an eye on everybody.”

  I tried my best to look smug—and my best is pretty damned good, to hear Gustav tell it.

  “Now, we don’t deny we’re still in the dark on a lot of things,” I went on. “The longer we’re around, though, the brighter the sun shall shine. You take care of us, we’ll throw whatever light we can your way.”

  The madam was on the move again as I spoke, doing her glide-walk toward the door on the far side of the room. “We will need time to think about it. But for now I can offer—”

  “ ’Scuse me, ma’am,” Old Red broke in.

  The woman stopped and turned to look at him. “Yes?”

  “I can’t help noticin’ how you keep sayin’ ‘we’ and ‘us.’ We come to you to talk one-on-one. If we’re dealin’ with another party here, I’d like to know it.”

  Madam Fong tilted her head ever so slightly to one side, like a crow eyeing something shiny.

  “This is Chinatown, Mr. Mahoney. There is always a ‘we.’ ”