Now, there’s a certain skill you pick up when you’ve been thrown from enough horses. It’s the Not-My-Head Twist. Because when you come off the back of a bucking bronc, you want to land on your butt, your back, your feet, even your shoulder or your knees—anything but the top of your skull.
So doing a little midair curl is nothing new to me. I can wriggle like a fish on the line if need be. And need was when I felt that plank give out from under.
With the last bit of purchase I had, I sent myself twirling around toward Gustav and Diana, arms outstretched. They both leaned out to make a grab at me—and they both missed.
Cold air rushed over me. The alley below grew larger. Someone screamed. Me, most likely.
Then my palms slapped down on something solid, and my fingers instinctively curled into hooks.
I swung down and slammed face-first into the side of the building. It was like being smacked by a whale’s tail—a stunning slap to the entire front-side of my body.
I lost my grip.
Fortunately, other grips quickly came into play. Hands wrapped around my wrists, locking on tight before I could slip over the rooftop lip I’d been clawing at.
I looked up and saw Diana and my brother peering down at me, one to each arm. They were gritting their teeth, gasping and flushed from the strain of the battle: the two of them versus the earth’s gravity (and my girth).
I wanted to say, “Drop me! The highbinders’ll be on you in no time ’less you run for it now!” Truth to tell, though, I’m not that selfless. In fact, I’ve got plenty of self—enough that I desperately wanted onto that roof even if the boo how doy were just going to chuck me right off again.
I kicked at the bricks, trying to find a foothold. But there was no extra leverage to be had, and Old Red finally hissed at me, “For chrissakes, stop it! This is hard enough without you down there doin’ the goddamn Texas two-step!”
I forced myself to go limp, and a moment later Gustav and Diana hauled me up onto the roof. We ended up collapsed side by side by side, panting for breath.
“You know, I . . . ain’t never said this . . . to you before,” Old Red wheezed at me. “But I reckon . . . now’s the time.”
“Yeah?”
He put a hand on my shoulder.
“You could stand to lose a little weight.”
“A joke? At a time like this?” I said—and I laughed with what little breath I had in me. “Brother, I do believe I’m finally startin’ to have a good influence on you.”
Then I heard the creak of an opening door and the clomp of footsteps, and the laughter stopped.
A man was stepping out onto the roof—the runty, bloody-beaked highbinder with the iron fists and feet. A half dozen hatchet men spread out behind him.
“You,” he said to us, shaking his head.
He brought up one finger and waggled it back and forth.
Tsk-tsk.
“Such big trouble.”
I was inclined to agree.
27
YANG
Or, Chinatown’s Number One Crook Gives Us the Third Degree
“We’re in big trouble?”
I pushed myself to my feet and laughed my best booming nothing-scares-me laugh (which I only use, of course, when I’m scared shitless).
“There’s only seven of you up against one Big Red Amlingmeyer! Please! You’re the ones in big trouble.”
A trickle of blood was still flowing from the little hatchet man’s nose, and he flashed me a smile that was smeared dark red.
“No,” he said. “Big mistake.”
“You keep talkin’ big, mister,” I said. “But I’m gonna show you big.” Gustav and Diana had stood by now, too, and I took off my jacket and handed it to the lady.
“Get ready to run,” I whispered.
“Run where?” Old Red asked. “Case you haven’t noticed, there’s only one door offa this roof, and there’s seven Chinamen between it and us.”
“Maybe we should see what they have to say,” Diana suggested.
“ ‘Die, fan kwei!’ seems to be the gist of it,” I said. “Nope—this here’s the only way.”
I turned back to the highbinders and began rolling up my shirtsleeves. It was awful cold up there with no jacket, no pants;, and now nothing over my arms. But I was aiming to make a spectacle of myself—a distraction, to put a finer point on it—and a little showmanship was called for.
“Oh, boy . . . this is gonna be fun.” I brought up my dukes and got to pinwheeling them pugilist-style. “I haven’t whipped seven men at once in months.”
The assorted boo how doy looked about as intimidated as a cougar in a standoff with a cornered chipmunk.
“No, no,” their little leader said, shaking his head. “Mistake. You not in big trouble. You are big trouble. Someone wanna talk to you, that all. No need for run. No need for fight.”
“Otto,” my brother said.
“Oh, yeah?” I snarled at the hatchet man, moving toward him fists a-spinning. “Breakin’ that board out from under me—that the kinda innocent little chat you’re talkin’ about?”
The highbinder grinned again, but his eyes were bored, sleepy, scornful.
“I know you make it,” he said.
There was something about his smirky smile that seemed familiar, but I shook the feeling off. How many Chinamen had I seen wearing black hats and baggy black clothes the past day? Of course he’d seem familiar.
“Otto,” Old Red said again.
But I was already lunging forward, right arm whipping out to throw my best punch—into empty air.
The hatchet man stepped under the swing, popping up just to my right. He could’ve driven a fist into my belly, broken my jaw, tripped me, knocked off my cap, pulled down my underpants, whatever he wanted. The same with his buddies.
They didn’t touch me, though, which I found damned irritating.
I’d hoped the gang would try rushing me in a bunch, open up a hole Diana and Gustav could dash through to the door. But the other highbinders didn’t budge.
“Last chance,” their boss said. “You come on feet or you come on back. But you come.”
I threw another jab, but I may as well have been the tortoise trying to cold-clock the hare. The hatchet man pivoted, putting his side to me, and my fist whizzed right past his face.
Then he did something strange, or so it seemed to me for the next quarter-second. He leaned back so far on one foot I thought his head might actually touch the roof.
But it wasn’t his head I should’ve been watching. It was his free foot—the one that came flying up into the side of my skull.
Nothingness came on me as quick as the snuffing of a candle.
Somethingness returned a lot more slowly. First as a dull awareness of light and sound. Then as a much sharper awareness of pain.
I put my hands to my head and was surprised to find it didn’t have the consistency of oatmeal.
“Easy, Otto,” Diana said gently.
I pried my eyelids apart and found her and my brother peering down at me anxiously. The lady placed a reassuring hand on my shoulder.
“You took quite a nasty blow to the head.”
“Good thing, too,” Gustav grumbled. “At least he took that kick where he has the most fat to pad it.”
“That must mean I’m gonna live,” I croaked at Diana. “If it looked like I was gonna die, he wouldn’t be givin’ me guff.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Old Red said. “You deserve guff and plenty of it.”
“Why?”
“Why don’t you sit up and see?”
I struggled to push myself up, noticing for the first time that it was soft cushions beneath me, not hard roof. I was properly attired again, too—or I had something over my underwear, at least. Whether the pants I was wearing could be called “proper” would be a matter for debate. They were black trousers of the type the highbinders wear, only this pair fit me so snug it looked like I’d been stuffed into a little boy�
��s knickerbockers.
“Don’t belly-ache,” Old Red said when he saw my look of vexation. “The feller who had to donate them drawers to you, now he had reason to complain.”
“What are you talkin’ about?”
“One of the boo how doy had to give you his pants,” Diana explained. “So the others could bring you here.”
“ ‘Flere’ bein’ where?” I said, and I finally got myself propped up enough to get my bearings.
I was stretched out on a divan in a room that was equal parts hotel lobby and museum. The floor was plushly carpeted, the ceiling high, and comfy-cozy settees and armchairs were bunched together in little knots here and there. Windows lined one wall, a large bookcase another, while an array of glass cases formed an L around the rest of the room. The dark mahogany shelves behind the glass were empty but for one item: an age-browned folding fan propped up on a little stand. The fan was spread out to full flower, and painted upon the brittle-looking paper was the faded image of a snarling dragon.
You couldn’t ask for a jail with more class. Yet a jail it was, for the burly highbinder loitering by the only door was clearly there to keep us from going through it.
Upon noticing me noticing him, he opened the door and walked out, speaking in Chinese as he went. He shut the door behind him, but it didn’t stay closed long. Two other Chinamen joined us in the room a moment later. The second I saw them, I knew where I was—and why the Artful Dodger, the nimble hatchet man with the feet of steel, had seemed familiar. The day before, I’d spotted him out for a bite with his boss.
The first man to enter was the Dodger himself, his face wiped clean but his nose still bulbous and red. Following him was his employer—a lean, stiff-necked fellow attired in silken robes so blinding bright they’d make a bouquet of posies look like a bucket of coal. The flashy man had a regal bearing (or you could call it just plain haughty) and a long-striding yet slow-stepping gait that carried him through the doorway with all the painstaking pageantry of a bride coming down the aisle.
It was Little Pete, Chinatown’s crime king, and he’d brought us a gift: my brother’s Boss of the Plains.
“A-ha! The cowboy!” he exclaimed upon laying eyes on my brother. His stern expression gave way to a beaming, boyish grin. “I hear so much about you! Here, here!” He rushed over to Old Red with the Stetson held out before him. “Every cowboy must have his big hat!”
Gustav accepted the hat back gingerly, as if taking a vial of nitroglycerine from a baby.
“Yes, yes?” Little Pete said, his smile wavering as his gaze moved from Gustav’s head to the Stetson and back again.
Old Red got the idea—and put on the hat.
“Ah! Perfect!” Little Pete proclaimed, giving his hands three quick claps. “I never meet a cowboy before. Howdy, partner! Yeeeha! Giddyup!”
The tong boss looked back at the Dodger, who laughed on cue, but I didn’t get the feeling Little Pete was trying to humiliate my brother (though he most assuredly had). He seemed genuinely excited to be in the presence of a bona fide cowpoke, and he was still chuckling as he bowed deeply to Diana and acknowledged me with a little nod.
Maybe that’s why folks call him “Little Pete,” I thought—his childlike enthusiasm. He was actually rather tall for a Chinaman, and there was certainly nothing undersized about his personality.
“Please, sit,” he said, lowering himself into a throne-ishly overstuffed chair that I had a hunch only his underpadded rump ever rested upon.
Head swimming, I pulled myself up from a sprawl to a slump so Diana could join me on the divan. The Dodger stayed on his feet, drifting over to stand behind Little Pete.
And Old Red—he didn’t move an inch.
“Where’s Chinatown Charlie?” he said.
“Chinatown Charlie?”
Little Pete turned his head to one side, and the Dodger bent down and whispered in his ear.
“Oh. The guide.” Little Pete gave a little wave of the hand, and the Dodger stepped back, dismissed. “Don’t worry. He is fine.”
“And why should we believe you?” Diana asked.
Little Pete looked at the lady approvingly, as if admiring a particularly well-crafted piece of art.
“Because I give you a reason,” he said. “He owe me.”
“And dead men don’t pay off their debts, is that it?” Gustav said.
“Lots living men don’t!” Little Pete laughed. “But yes. You are right. Dead never do. And I am a businessman. Debts to me I want paid.”
He glanced away, turning a wistful gaze on the empty cases along the walls. When he looked back at my brother again, a sly smile was curling up the corners of his thin lips.
“Like I must pay debts I owe.”
Old Red nodded. “I understand . . . Mr. Toy.”
“Mr. Fung,” the Dodger barked.
Little Pete said a few quiet words to him in Chinese—something along the lines of, “Now, now . . . the poor, ignorant heathens don’t know any better,” I’m guessing.
“Family name come first,” Little Pete explained to Gustav. “Family always first.”
“Toy . . . Fung?” I said. The sounds seemed like something I’d heard before—not long ago, neither—yet I still couldn’t place them as a name.
“Fung Jing Toy,” Diana corrected me. She looked at Old Red and offered him the kind of congratulatory nod you give someone who’s just beaten you at checkers. “The collector who loaned Dr. Chan all the Chinese art for the Exposition.”
“Not all . . . just best,” said Little Pete, a.k.a. Fung Jing Toy. “Vases, jars, cups, bowls, all Tang Dynasty. One thousand years old. Gee Woo Chan want to show Americans beautiful things Chinese make so long ago. He think, ‘Now maybe they see. Now maybe they respect.’ ”
The Chinaman sighed.
“So foolish of me to listen.”
“But you would’ve lost it all, anyway, right?” Old Red pointed at the rows of empty shelves lining one side of the room. “You didn’t send all that to Chicago. You sold the rest off cuz you got skinned in the Panic.”
Little Pete nodded. “Advice to you. Gambling, drinking . . .” He paused, eyeing Diana as he searched for the right words. “. . . entertainment for lonely men. These are all good investments. But a bank?” He gave his head a rueful shake. “Big risk.”
“So you had to pay your creditors, and Doc Chan had to pay you,” Gustav said. “And Chan still owed you.”
“Oh, yes. Owed lots. And it is like you say. Dead men cannot pay.”
“Is this why you had us chased down and dragged here?” Diana said sharply. “So you could tell us that Chan’s debt to you is the very reason you wouldn’t have had him killed?”
Little Pete showed no sign that the lady’s razor tongue had sliced him in the slightest.
“I want you to know that, yes,” he said pleasantly. “It was important that Gee Woo Chan think I am displeased, that he might be . . . made uncomfortable by my boo how doy. Otherwise, maybe he forget what he owe me. But I would never have really harmed him.”
Little Pete dismissed the subject with a limp, regal wave of his right hand.
“That is past. More important to me now is to meet you. I hear about you ail day. Cowboy, lady, and . . .”—he groped for the words that’d sum me up—“. . . big man looking for Hok Gup and Fat Choy. Going to opium dens. Fighting Big Queue. Meeting Chun Ti Chu.” He paused again, though this time it was merely a buildup to the punchline. “Taking brass band into Madam Fong’s!”
He burst into hysterical cackles, clapping his hands like a delighted child. The Dodger joined in with some halfhearted chortles of his own, glowering at us all the while. I got the distinct impression we weren’t kowtowing enough for his tastes.
“Oh, such a day,” Little Pete sighed, wiping laughter-tears from his almond eyes. “I could not let anything happen to you until I see you for myself.”
“Uhhh . . . and now that you have seen us?” I was about to ask, but Old Red jumped in first.
“You sure know a lot about what we been up to.”
“This is Chinatown,” Little Pete said. “I know more about what you know than you know.”
While I was still puzzling over that, Gustav dug a hand into his pocket and took a step toward Little Pete’s throne.
“Stop,” the Dodger barked, practically hurling himself in front of my brother.
“No need to fret,” Old Red said. “I just wanted to put what your boss said to the test.”
He stretched out his right hand. In it was the little china face we’d found in Chan’s flat.
The Dodger snatched it away. “What is this?”
My brother looked around him at Little Pete. “I was hopin’ you could tell me.”
Pete held out a hand and snapped his fingers, and the Dodger turned and gave him the shard of porcelain.
“Oh. This is nothing,” Little Pete said after giving the small, white face a quick once-over. He sounded sincerely disappointed. “From statue of Kuan Yin. Chinese goddess. Very cheap. Hundreds like it all over Chinatown.”
He handed the face to the Dodger, who threw it to my brother with a contemptuous flick of the wrist.
“I figured it ain’t valuable, but it is important,” Old Red said, pocketing the china chip again. “The statue it came off was used to kill Doc Chan . . . or knock him cold so he could be gassed, anyway.”
“The statue from Gee Woo Chan’s own altar?” Little Pete asked.
Gustav nodded.
“Ha! And this is how she repay him!” Little Pete crowed. He turned to the Dodger. “His offerings must been very stingy!”
The Dodger laughed for real this time.
“Kuan Yin is goddess of mercy,” Little Pete explained to us between chuckles. “Fat Choy must appreciate . . . .”
He spun his hands in the air again, his eyes rolling back in his head.
“Ah, yes. Irony.”
“Seein’ as you know so much,” Gustav snapped, looking like he wanted to stomp over and wipe the man’s grin away with a greasy rag, “surely you know what this is.”
He pulled out the scorpion and tossed it into Little Pete’s lap.
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