by Mark Frost
"All from the same shipping agent, I trust."
"That would be customary."
"I shall in short order wish to examine the bill of lading lor them," said Doyle, accepting the hammer and crowbar from the engineer. "There was only one insurmountable dif-ficulty in the resolution of my theory; as we saw while boarding the ship, security was airtight—which is more than I can say for this casket." Doyle shimmed the crowbar with the hammer into a gap beneath the mahogany lid of the first coffin.
"Mein Gott, sir, think what you are doing...." Hoffner moved to stop Doyle from proceeding with the exhumation: Innes clamped a strong hand on his arm, holding him back, as Doyle continued.
"If a band of professional assassins have found their way onto the Elbe—and I assure you, Captain, that is exactly what we are dealing with here—they had to have managed it by some less conventional means than strolling up the gangplank in plain view—"
"I must order you to stop this at once...."
"You'll recall one of your passengers heard the cries of a 'ghost' from somewhere in the hold our first day out of port...." Doyle heaved at the crowbar; with a piercing shriek of protest from its nails, the coffin lid separated and lifted an inch from the sides. The shriek echoed hauntingly down the steel passageways around them. Doyle took a strong grip on the exposed edge of a coffin lid and pulled it open the rest of the way.
"This is a desecration...." Captain Hoffner broke free of Innes and rushed forward to discover that the plush pink satin-lined interior of the coffin was completely empty. Hoffner stared at Doyle, mouth agape.
"The 'ghost's' cries were followed shortly thereafter by a loud, rhythmic knocking."
Doyle dropped the lid shut and hammered the nails back in.
"Look closely and you can see the indentations made when they hammered the nails back in," said Doyle, beckoning Hoffner closer to the box. "Your cargo hands have assured me that each coffin carried the full, shifting complement of a body weight when they were carried aboard. If you examine them closely down here as well, Captain, you can see that minute holes were drilled in the corners for the circulation of air."
Hoffner ran a finger over the perforations. "I do not know what to say."
"An apology to Mr. Stern might be a prudent beginning. And the next time one of your passengers approaches you with concerns for their personal security, regardless of their religious or cultural persuasion, one hopes you will respond with a generosity more befitting your position."
Hoffner's face turned crimson; he grabbed the hammer and crowbar from Doyle; three minutes and four more open empty coffins later, a winded, chastened Hoffner laid down the tools.
"Mr. Stern," he said, standing tall. "Please accept my deepest and most sincere apologies."
Stern nodded, avoiding the Captain's eyes.
"You have five stowaways on board. Captain. There are dozens of places to hide on a ship this size. I don't need to suggest that you take all appropriate actions."
"No. Yes, of course. We shall conduct a search of the entire ship at once," said Hoffner, wiping his brow, mind racing. He considered himself a man of reason, above all, and second-most, a man of action.
"A concerted effort to find the Irish priest Father Devine would also be in order," said Doyle.
"Why is that?"
"Because this man is not a priest. He is their leader."
That's when the lights went out.
SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA
To call this place the Devil's Kitchen does not do it justice, thought Kanazuchi, watching a rat chase a cockroach. He lay on a lice-infested blanket covering a wooden pallet he had secured the use of for the princely sum of two pennies a night. The beds of twenty other vagrants crowded the fifteen-square-foot room, one of four equally congested flops on the third floor of a five-story tenement in the middle of Tangrenbu, the twelve-square-block area of downtown San Francisco that the whites called Chinatown.
An opium den occupied the basement, and rumors circulated among these poor and illiterate peasants, many of them migrant farm workers who flooded the city each autumn when the central valley's harvest ended, that a demon roamed the hallways at night, tracking down souls to devour. The bodies of three men had been discovered recently in the alley behind the tenement; throats slashed, hearts ripped from their bodies.
Offerings left in shrines outside their doorways, what little money these Chinese could scrape together collectively, appeared to placate the monster. Each night they heard it prowling outside their doors and each morning the offerings were gone. But no one else had been killed in the week since the offerings began.
Of the four hundred men living in this building, only one had seen the demon and lived to tell about it: the building's trustee—a pockmarked, thick-necked bully in charge of gathering each day's rent and, more recently, the money for the offerings. This demon had the head of a dragon, a thousand eyes, and ten ravenous mouths, he testified, a first-rank demon, one of the ten thousand that figured in their complex belief system. He had watched it use its hideous talons to rip open the chests of the men found in the alley, as easily, he said, as if it were peeling an orange.
Each room was now locked by the trustee at night, but even if they had been able to, none of these men would dare venture into the halls after dark, which left personal sanitation a concern to be attended to locally. There were times when Kanazuchi wished his senses were not honed as sharply as the Grass Cutter that lay beside him in his bundle; the ripe stink of these unwashed provincials occasioned one of those moments.
Amid such fear, squalor, and destitution, Kanazuchi knew that since his arrival the day before no one had taken notice of him, but not being able to move freely at night was unacceptable. Sighs, guttural snoring, the whimper of a troubled dreamer, underscored the darkness around him. He did not want to leave the room until its occupants were sound asleep, and the thin man with the fever two beds down was still tossing and turning.
Kanazuchi had been visited by his dream again last night; one image leaped out with the solid clarity of a lead worth pursuing.
Chinese faces working in a tunnel.
His first two days in Dai Fow, the Big City, New Golden Mountain—what these Chinese called San Francisco—had failed to shed light on this mysterious image. Menials like these ignorant slum dwellers were of no use. He had considered cultivating the local merchants, but they spoke a more cultured dialect than the guttural Mandarin of the peasants he'd made the crossing with; it would take another week to master its nuances and they were notoriously tight-lipped to anyone outside their social tongs. His other option was to move beyond the ghetto into the white sections of the city, but every person he had spoken to in Tangrenbu had warned him not to. A wave of anti-Asian rage had swept through America in recent years; in Chinatowns up and down the western coasts, crimes of violence against Asian immigrants had grown steadily worse—murders, riots, lynchings. Whenever the whites needed someone to scapegoat for their economic misfortunes, the "yellow peril" was emphasized in public sentiment and these acts of racial barbarity inevitably followed. What more could you expect from such uncivilized people? Kanazuchi was hesitant to go into white areas, not for fear of being attacked, but only because killing any white men in public would trigger unnecessary complications.
First things first: A more direct path to the information he sought might lie right in front of him.
The man two beds down had settled, breathing strained but slow and regular. Kanazuchi shouldered his bundle and stepped between the sleepers, careful to avoid the four creaking floorboards. He stopped at the bed of the trustee next to the door. Using the tip of his wakizashi—his long knife—he delicately slipped the room key undetected from under the trustee's pallet. A length of rawhide secured it to a slat; he slit it with a flick of the wrist.
One minute later, he stood in the hallway, eyes already conditioned to the darkness. The air pungent with the smoke of the joss sticks burning on the shrines; each one still pa
cked with fruit and coins. Kanazuchi examined the dust on the floor; no one had moved through the hall since their doors were locked at midnight, two hours before. He drifted to the center of the hall near the stairs, blended into the shadows, stood still, and listened.
Sleepers breathing in the four rooms on his floor. In the rooms above and below. Cockroaches scuttling behind the walls. He pushed the reach of his extraordinary senses further out; an old, familiar exercise, slipping into it as easily as a well-worn garment.
An alley cat tipped a trash can outside. Rats foraging. A carriage clipping by. Drunks laughing. The shrill negotiations of a prostitute. Horses shifting, stamping their feet, snorting in the stables next door.
Footsteps; nearer.
He reeled the net of his senses back in and cast it down to the tenement's first floor.
One man entered. Heavy. Tall, by the length of the stride. Western leather boots. A sack dragging on the ground behind. Rattling, hissing like a snake. A soft scoop, then the clink of coins falling together. Banging sounds; a clash of tinny cymbals.
Sleepers waking on the lower floors. Fearful whispers. Cowering. No one moving from his pallet.
Footsteps climbed the stairs. Second floor. Drumbeats, cymbals louder: hissing and rattling. More coins collected: moving closer.
Terror spread through the building. Prayers mumbled, worry beads clacking frantically. Kanazuchi turned his mind away from the chattering peasants and toward the leaden footsteps coming up the stairs.
The demon turned at the landing. A bulky, intimidating figure; dragon's head, feathered limbs, avian claws clutching a tambourine that banged against its hip. Large burlap sack behind, bumping up the risers.
As the demon reached the third floor, a coin dropped at its feet; it stopped, looked down. Gold; the demon reached for it. A shadow moved; the demon's mind registered confusion and a flash of something silver moving toward him in the instant before consciousness ceased. The sword cut so quickly the demon's eyes were still sending information to its brain—the room spinning out of control—as its head tumbled backward down the stairs away from the still-stationary body.
Kanazuchi cut up at an angle so the demon's body would shoot no blood onto his clothes. He sheathed Grass Cutter, reached out in time to lower the body silently as the arteries began to pump onto the floor. He jumped lightly to the landing, and pulled the demon's head out of the cheap paper dragon costume—eyes and mouth caught wide open in surprise; the flat, stupid face of a common thug.
Kanazuchi pulled the flute from his belt and headed back toward his room.
When the trustee heard the demon stop outside, he reached for his key, then for his knife when he found the key was missing. The knife was gone, too. Just then the door swung open and he heard the hollow, reedy whistling of an evil wind. The rest of the men in the room huddled under their blankets.
The bright paper dragon head peeked around the corner of the open doorway. A clawed finger pointed at the trustee and beckoned him forward.
What the hell was Charlie doing? thought the trustee. This is not how things are supposed to work.
Annoyed, the trustee walked out into the hall. The wind stopped suddenly; the door closed behind him. A sulfurous white cloud of smoke billowed before him in the hall, and in a flash of light he saw the head and body of his cohort, Charlie Lee, laid out on the blood-soaked floor. Before his legs could run, an iron vise grabbed him around the throat and lifted him straight off the floor. His captured breath swelled in his chest like a balloon.
"The gods are unhappy with you," said a harsh whisper in the trustee's ear.
What a horrible voice! He kicked his legs futilely and struggled for air: Nothing moved inside him. Surely he was about to die....
"They have sent me to punish you with the death of a thousand torments."
Heaven protect him: a real demon!
"Maybe you don't deserve such mercy. Maybe I should just eat you one piece at a time."
The demon shook him like a helpless kitten.
"Lucky for you I am in a good mood. Return the money you've stolen from these men and maybe I will let you live."
The trustee tried to nod his head: anything! A trickle of breath slipped through the demon's grip, keeping him on a thin edge of consciousness.
"Tell me: Do you steal this money for yourself?"
The trustee frantically shook his head no.
"Really? Then who told you to steal this money?"
The grip relaxed enough for him to croak out an answer. "Little Pete."
"Little Pete? What sort of name is that for a civilized person?"
"Real name is ... Fung Jing Toy. Chinatown boss."
"Which tong does he lead?"
"Sue Yop Tong."
"Where will I find Little Pete?"
"On Leong Society Building," croaked the trustee.
"The Chamber of Tranquil Conscientiousness?"
The trustee nodded again. For a Chinese demon, this one spoke pretty good English, he thought, just before its grip tightened on his neck like a band of iron; another blinding flash in the air. The trustee blacked out.
When he came to, a crowd of men from all the building's rooms milled around the decapitated remains of well-known neighborhood tough Charlie Lee. The trustee scrambled to his feet, sharing their happiness that the reign of terror had come to such a satisfying end: It wasn't a demon after all! Picking up the extortionist's grab bag, the trustee began to distribute its coins to the residents: What a stroke of fortune! He took none for himself; a change of heart had come over the trustee, a spurt of generosity that might last as long as another two days: The demon had let him live!
In his elation, the trustee took no notice of the slender, quiet man who had come in the day before, the last to leave his pallet and step into the hallway with the others. The man stood near the back of the crowd, apart from them, his bundle over his shoulder. Ready to go.
Fung Jing Toy noisily sucked out the marrow between the webbing of the pickled duck's foot. A delicacy his lower-caste family could never afford, duck's feet served every afternoon was one of the more genteel ways in which Little Pete reminded himself of the good fortune that twenty years of back-breaking work and self-sacrifice had given him. Although of modest stature befitting his nickname and an outwardly mild disposition, Little Pete was in his basic nature a man of ravenous appetites, and he rarely obeyed any impulse to hold them in check.
He was the only tong leader with whom "Blind Chris" Buckley and the corrupt white political establishment of San Francisco could negotiate comfortably; the rest of these top-dog Chinamen acted too high and mighty by half for their taste. Little Pete was the only one of them who laughed at the insults they casually tossed in his face, a clown who bowed and scraped in a manner reflecting his inferior racial status.
But Chris Buckley and his cronies recognized in Little Pete a man fiercely dedicated to an objective dear to their own hearts: the perpetual containment, subjugation, and enslavement of the city's Chinese population. The residents of Tangrenbu lived in mortal fear of Pete and the vicious henchmen of his Sue Yop Tong. Although five other criminal tongs owned significant holdings in Tangrenbu, Little Pete's On Leong Society controlled the flow of opium into the quarter. He owned many of the sweatshops where addicts slaved away for the pennies they spent to fill their bowls every night and most of the verminous flophouses where they slept it off.
In trade for their cooperation with the political machine, the six tongs had been granted sole responsibility for the importation and regulation of all workers from mainland China. And through Buckley's cozy association with the powerful railroad barons of San Francisco—Hopkins, Huntington, Crocker, and Stanford—Little Pete had become chief supplier of "coolie" labor for the expansion of the western lines. In Mandarin dialect, kuli signified "bitter strength."
So for the privilege of resettling in this land of opportunity, once a lower-caste worker passed through the sheds at the embarcadero he was chattel
, owned and exploited to the grave by Little Pete and the Six Companies. At which point one of Pete's funeral parlors would perform the cremation and turn a tidy profit on shipping the ashes—by no means necessarily those of the worker—back to the departed's family in China.
Bitter strength, indeed.
Little Pete was a creature of habit. One of his established routines: hearing requests from his constituents during the business day lunch hour on the second-floor balcony of his Kearney Street town house. Little Pete liked to stuff himself heartily while his workers and shopkeepers humbled themselves before him. On occasion, if a request was sufficiently innocuous or inexpensive enough, he would demonstrate his rare and therefore legendary magnanimity.
But here it was half past noon; already on his third helping of duck's feet and no one had yet arrived to petition him with their stupid problems. He yelled out to his houseboy, Yee Chin: Why is no one here? If they have been left waiting downstairs, someone will be punished!
No answer. He threw down the bones on his plate and demanded more food. No one appeared. Now he was angry: His kitchen boys had orders to stand by inside the balcony with extra helpings to bring out the moment he called; they had all felt his crop on their back when a dish landed on his table cold. Little Pete rang the little porcelain bell he kept by his plate and shouted again.
Nothing. Yee Chin would catch unholy hell for this incompetence.
Little Pete wedged his bulbous stomach from behind the table, lifted his generous behind off the silk pillows on his hand-carved Tang dynasty chair, picked up his riding crop, and waddled into the sitting room, thinking of creative new ways he was going to punish these useless domestics.
A silver dome covered the serving that waited for him on the cart inside the door. If his next course had gone cold, heaven help Yee Chin. He lifted the dome off the tray....
Little Pete fell to his knees and violently retched up his lunch, mind blanked, senses obliterated; blind, deaf, and dumb.
There were feet on the tray.
Human feet.
