“In case he’s wonderin’,” I said, “no, the scorpion tea ain’t for me.”
“He’s saying he’s heard about you,” Charlie said, beginning his translation before Lee Kan was even through talking. “That’s the only reason he let us in so cheap. He’s got information he thinks you’ll pay big money for. He knows—”
Charlie broke back into Chinese, his voice rising, excited.
As Lee Kan answered, his grin stretched so wide I could see every tooth in his head.
“What? What?” my brother said.
“He knows where Fat Choy is.”
So at last, at least one mystery was solved: I now knew what Lee Kan had to be so chipper about.
“I don’t think four bucks quite qualifies as ‘big money,’ ” I said. “And that’s all we got left, remember? How we gonna get Lee here to spill the beans?”
“I’ll get him to talk,” Charlie said, his tone turning tough. He brought himself up to his full height and clenched his long, bony fingers into fists.
It was funny seeing scrawny Chinatown Charlie trying to act hard. To me, he looked about as menacing as an understuffed scarecrow.
Yet little Lee Kan picked up on the change in Charlie, and his big grin changed, too. The lips lost some of their rubbery stretch, and the eyes widened, turning wary.
“Actually, we’ve still got plenty of cash,” Diana said. “Charlie—what about the fifty dollars I gave you this morning?”
“What about it?” Charlie growled back, clearly not caring for the direction the conversation was taking.
“Why not loan it back to us?” she suggested. “At, say . . . one-hundred percent interest? Compounded daily?”
Charlie snorted. “I’m not a bank.”
“Oh, come on, Charlie,” my brother snapped. “We ain’t got time for this. Offer the man twenty bucks outta your stash. You know the lady’s good for it.”
Charlie glared at him a moment, then slowly unclenched his fists and pulled out his folding money. Lie peeled off a ten note, held it up in front of Lee Kan and spoke in Chinese.
The healer nodded and snatched the bill away, looking relieved. Then he started talking.
Fat Choy had been standing right there in his store not half an hour before, he told us (via Charlie). The hatchet man had been dressed in an American-style suit that seemed a touch tight on him, and his queue was tucked under the collar of his jacket. He bought opium—a lot of it—and asked about herbal remedies for seasickness. While Lee Kan mixed up a batch of his own secret recipe, he’d slyly (or so he said) inquired as to Fat Choy’s need for the stuff. Fat Choy had laughed.
“You know why I can’t stay here,” he’d (supposedly) replied. “I have an uncle in Honolulu. I’ll go live with him until everyone’s forgotten about Gee Woo Chan.”
“He really came right out and mentioned Doc Chan by name?” I asked when Lee Kan was through.
Charlie passed the question along, and Lee Kan nodded.
“Well, I reckon there ain’t no question about it now,” I said to Old Red. “Fat Choy done in the doc for sure.”
My brother didn’t even look at me.
“Fat Choy said ‘I can’t stay here’? ‘I’ll go live in Honolulu’?” he was saying to Charlie. “No ‘we’? No mention of the gal at all?”
Once again, Charlie Chineseified the question. This time, Lee Kan answered with a burst of words and a shake of the head.
“No,” Charlie told Gustav a moment later. “Fat Choy didn’t say anything about Hok Gup, and Lee Kan sure wasn’t going to bring the subject up.” He rolled his hands in the air like the paddlewheel of a steamboat pulling away from the dock. “So are we through here? Because it seems to me we’ve heard everything we need to know.”
“I gotta agree with Charlie,” I said. “We finally got a real bead on where Fat Choy’s gonna be. All we gotta do now is grab us a paper and check the shippin’ listings. Can’t be more than one boat bound for Hawaii tonight. We hightail it over to the right pier, maybe we can catch Fat Choy ’fore his ship sets sail.”
“If it hasn’t already,” Diana said.
Charlie wasn’t waiting for more debate. He spun away from Lee Kan and pushed past us toward the door.
“Not yet, Charlie!” Old Red barked.
Charlie stopped and whirled around. “More questions?” he asked through gritted teeth.
“Just two.” Gustav looked up at Lee Kan. “Does that seasickness cure of yours cost a lot? And how much of it did Fat Choy buy?”
Charlie did his translating from behind us, near the door. Though he surely knew Old Red couldn’t understand a word, Lee Kan gave his answer directly to my brother, looking him in the eye the whole time.
“Yeah, the seasickness powder’s expensive,” Charlie said. “Twenty bucks a bag. Hard-to-find ingredients, Lee Kan says—which just means he had a customer who didn’t have time to haggle. Fat Choy only bought enough for a couple nights.”
“Well, then . . . .” Gustav turned to face the rest of us. “He ain’t goin’ to Hawaii.”
I held up a finger. “Uhhh, if I may interject.” I cleared my throat. “Huh?”
“Fat . . . Choy . . . is . . . not . . . going . . . to—”
“Oh, would you stop it? I ain’t goin’ deaf. I just don’t get it. You’re sayin’ Fat Choy blew forty bucks on a remedy for seasickness so he could turn around and go to Idaho?”
“Could be.”
“You think it’s too simple,” Diana said to Old Red. “Too obvious.”
“But simple is good!” I protested. “Obvious is good! We ain’t had enough of neither today.”
Old Red chided me with a quote from Holmes: “There is nothing more deceptive than an obvious fact.”
“You know, that one makes about as much sense as that claptrap about the truth bein’ whatever ain’t impossible.”
Gustav rolled his eyes. “Just think about it, would you? Fat Choy’s spooked enough to spend the whole day down in that hidey-hole, but when he finally climbs out he comes here, to him—”
He waggled his thumb back at Lee Kan, who stood stiffly behind his counter watching us with an even stiffer smile.
“—a man Charlie tells us is three miles to the left of respectable. And he up and lays out exactly where he’s goin’ next?”
Old Red shook his head.
“That don’t sit right. Not unless he wanted to spread around that fairy tale about an uncle in Hawaii. And use your noodle on this: Fat Choy buys him a big mess of opium but goes stingy on the stomach soother? When it takes a ship . . . what? Two, three weeks to get out to them islands? Naw.”
“If he was lying, why buy the seasickness remedy at all?” Charlie asked from his spot by the door. He looked so anxious to get going he may as well have been tapping his foot. “Fat Choy’s a hoppie. He’s not going to throw away forty dollars he could spend chasing the dragon.”
“Welllllllll . . . ,” Gustav said, stretching the word out like taffy while he did some quick figuring. “Maybe he really did need some of that potion. Only not for a long trip. For a short one.”
“Los Angeles and Portland ain’t but a few days away by boat,” I suggested.
“Or,” Diana said.
Just that. “Or.” And she cocked an eyebrow at my brother.
“Oh, yes . . . oh, yes, yes, yes,” Old Red said, giving her a nod that started small but kept growing until his head was doing such a bobble he could’ve been bobbing for apples.
I nodded, too. “Of course! Why, it ain’t just elementary, it’s kindergarten!”
“What is?” Charlie demanded.
I shrugged. “You got me.”
Diana took mercy on the two of us and provided an actual answer.
“If you want to get as far away from San Francisco as quickly as possible, a train’s the best choice. But you can’t catch any of the major lines from the city itself. For that, you have to go to Oakland.”
“Of course,” I said. And I meant it this ti
me. “On the ferry.”
“Last one leaves at nine o’clock—right, Brother?” Old Red said. “So that means we probably got no more than . . . hey, hold on, Charlie!”
I turned toward our guide only to find him blowing out the door. He threw a glance back at us as he stepped outside, the expression on his face a strange gumbo of opposing emotion. I saw contempt there, and fear, and regret.
Then he bolted.
I ran after him, but by the time I reached the sidewalk, his long, lean legs had already carried him across the street to yet another alleyway. He disappeared into the shadows without another look back.
“He’s gone.” I stumbled back inside, stunned. “He just . . . run off.”
“Of course, he has,” Diana said, less like it was something she’d been expecting than something she’d been dreading. “He’s gone to tell his boss what we know. We’re in a race for sure now, gentlemen.”
“A race with who?” I asked.
“His boss?” asked Old Red.
The lady was able to answer us both with the same two words.
“Little Pete.”
35
SHIPPING NEWS
Or, We Race the Clock to Make the Ferry, but the Clock Up and Cheats
It took a few seconds for Diana’s pronouncement to sink in. By the time it had, my hopes were sinking, too.
“So Charlie was a spy?”
“More than a spy,” Diana said. “He’s been guiding us, using us all along.” She looked over at Gustav, her expression turning sorrowful. “We ended up working for Little Pete, after all.”
My brother gave her the slow, somber nod of a man accepting the fact of his own failure. “How’d you deducify it?”
Diana gestured back at the ever-smiling Lee Kan, who’d gone so still he could’ve been a grinning gargoyle propped up on the shop counter.
“Charlie still had money to pay him, for one thing. If he’d really been captured by Little Pete’s hatchet men this afternoon, like he said, would they have let him keep the fifty dollars I paid him to help us?”
She answered her own question with a shake of the head.
“I already had my suspicions before then, though. The men we spoke to in the opium dens this afternoon didn’t help us much, but they didn’t throw us out, either. That’s more than I would’ve expected, given that we were just some nosy fan kwei and a lowly ki di. It makes a lot more sense if they knew Charlie was working for Little Pete. That way, any questions they were answering for us, they were really answering for him.”
“Explains why Little Pete wasn’t pissed when I said no to him, too. That bounty he offered us for the gal—that was just some kinda test.” Old Red drove a fist into an open palm. “Dammit, I should’ve seen it all along.”
“You’re a natural-born detective, Gustav, but you’re not naturally devious.” Diana offered him a small, sympathetic smile. “We’ll have to work on that.”
“Why didn’t you say something about Charlie sooner?” I said to her.
“Until a minute ago, it was no more than a vague inkling. And anyway, where were we going to find another interpreter? We needed him.”
As she spoke, I noticed movement in the dim candlelight behind her. Lee Kan was edging toward a bead-draped doorway at the back of the shop.
“You goin’ somewhere?” I asked him.
He stopped, still grinning, and gave me a confused shrug.
I had an inkling of my own.
“No sabe Englee, huh?” I said.
Lee Kan nodded.
“Uh-huh. Right.” I turned to my brother and dropped my voice. “You know, just to be safe, I think we oughta wrap a rope around this little feller like we did—”
Lee Kan darted through the doorway.
I started after him, but Gustav hooked me by the arm before I’d taken two steps.
“Lemme go! We can’t have him tattlin’ to who knows who!”
“We ain’t got time to chase after him now,” my brother said. “Fat Choy gets on that ferry without us—or gets hisself bagged by Little Pete—and we’ll never find Hok Gup or know what really happened to Doc Chan.”
He steered me toward the door, and Diana fell into step behind us.
“Folks,” my brother said, “we got us a boat to catch.”
Once outside, we proceeded east at a canter. A full-on gallop wouldn’t do—not with nearly a mile between us and the Ferry House. We’d over-bake ourselves before we were halfway there.
It’s at times like these a cowboy truly misses his horse.
We could’ve headed down to Market, eight or nine blocks south, and probably hopped a trolley or hack from there. But Old Red pointed out that we likely had a war party of boo how doy on our trail, and the best place to shake them would be the Barbary Coast. So into the breach—and the debauchery—we headed yet again.
On our way out of Chinatown, we passed the Anti-Coolie League sandwich man, who was busy abusing any Chinese within earshot. I “accidentally” knocked him into the gutter as we whipped by.
“Entschuldigung, Arschloch!” I called back apologetically as we hustled away.
“You mean ‘Pardon me, sir’!” the stupid “Arschloch” bellowed. “You’re in America now, dammit!”
Mere seconds later, we were weaving through hoodlums, harlots, sailors, and toffs—many of whom were weaving themselves. Or staggering, anyway. In the hour or so that had passed since we’d last left the Coast, the number of drunken revelers had doubled, and the sidewalks were overflowing with people (not to mention—and perhaps I shouldn’t—puke and piss).
Our jog slowed to a walk, then a shuffle.
It was hard to gauge whether our slowed progress should have us worried, panicked, or downright suicidal without knowing the hour. Maybe we had half an hour to catch the ferry . . . or maybe it was already cruising past Alcatraz Island. So we tried asking folks the time. We were told, “Not late enough,” “Who cares?” and “Ask that bastard in the slouch hat—he just stole my watch,” before someone graced us with a straight answer.
It was eight-fifty. We had ten minutes to travel ten blocks.
“We ain’t gonna make it.”
“Thank you for statin’ the obvious,” my brother grumbled.
“Oh, I do what I can.”
“Which ain’t much.”
“You want me to do more? How ’bout if I was to pick you up and throw you to the—?”
“Look,” Diana cut in, pointing up at one of the wooden poles running along Pacific Avenue. “Some of these buildings have been wired for telephone service. Maybe we could get inside somewhere and find a phone. Ring up the Ferry House and have them hold the boat.”
“That’s a mighty big ‘maybe,’ ” I said.
“Too big,” said Old Red.
“Well, squabbling’s certainly not going to get us to the Ferry House any faster.”
“Don’t underestimate the power of squabblin’,” I said. “It’s served me and my brother well enough so far.”
Gustav stepped sideways into the throng, headed for the street. “What we need to find is a . . . hel-lo.”
I heard what he was hel-loing before I saw it. It was loud enough to cut through even the din of dance-hall bands, crib girl come-ons, and cackled laughter.
The clattering whir of wheels. The heavy clop-clop of hooves on a city street.
A wagon was coming.
Diana and I wormed our way out to the gutter with my brother. He was looking west down Pacific, back the way we’d just come. There were no cable cars or carriages in sight—none would risk a trip through the Coast after nightfall. But the Coast being the Coast, there was money to be made if a man was willing to brave the chaos. And men being men, there were takers.
The buckboard rolling toward us was toting a dozen kegs. Some concert saloon or melodeon had raised the alarm, so here they came like the fire brigade: the beer men, making an emergency run.
Appropriately enough for beer men, they were barrel-chested.
And loaded, too—as in with bullets. The fellow holding the reins was wearing a gunbelt, and his shotgun rider lived up to the name.
They were a block away, moving at a pace just shy of brisk. We had all of thirty seconds to come up with a plan.
Gustav took a stab first.
“We’ll stop ’em, then—”
“Ho! Hold on there, Brother!” I said. “You can’t move on to ‘then’ that easy. Stop ’em how? Them fellers probably got drunks flaggin’ ’em down all night. They ain’t gonna . . . Miss?”
Diana was walking out into the street.
“Stay back,” she said without turning to look at us. “Don’t let them know we’re together.”
She planted herself in the wagon’s path and waved her arms over her head.
I started toward her, but Old Red held me back.
“They won’t run down a lady . . . I hope.”
“You’d better hope,” I said. “Cuz if she gets hurt, I’m gonna—”
“Don’t worry. She gets hurt, I’ll do it myself.”
The driver had spotted Diana by now, and he jerked his reins to the right, trying to steer around her.
Diana put herself in front of his horses again. If he didn’t rein up, and hard, she’d be rolled out like a pie crust in five seconds flat.
The driver called out “Whoa!” and jerked back on the reins with such force I could hear the leather creaking over the rumble of the wheels. The horses whinnied and skidded over the cobblestones, and the whole kit and caboodle—ponies, harness gear, the wagon—seemed to squeeze up like a concertina.
When it all came to a stop, Diana was practically nose to muzzle with the lead horse.
“Gentlemen,” she said coolly, “thank you for stopping.”
The driver immediately launched into a tirade so larded with profanity I’m sure even the passing sailors picked up a phrase or two. The gist: The lady had just done a darned foolish thing. Why?
“I’m sorry, but it was an emergency.” Diana walked around to the left side of the buckboard—pulling the beer men’s eyes with her, away from us. “I’m in desperate need of transportation. Would it be possible to hire out your wagon? Just for a little while?”
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