Black Dove (18 page)

“Hold on, now,” my brother said to Diana. “You can’t tell me you spent the last half hour just standin’ around
here”
—he waved a hand at the filthy, trash-strewn sidewalk and the leering inebriates weaving their way along it—“without gettin’ yourself noticed.”

Diana nodded. “Oh, yes. I
was
noticed. Frequently. So I did what I had to do to blend in.”

Old Red’s eyebrows shot up so high they disappeared beneath the brim of his Stetson. “Which was?”

“Haggle. Over my rates. I had my own bona fides to establish, you see.” Diana shrugged casually. “Of course, my services were priced well beyond the reach of the average passerby.”

Gustav and I glanced at each other, the wonderment upon my brother’s face no doubt mirrored on my own.

Was there anything this woman wasn’t willing to do? Any lie she wouldn’t tell?

Old Red managed to shake off his look of stupefaction first.

“Well . . . we best get ourselves gone ’fore Madam Fong’s boys can—”

Diana reached out and grabbed his arm as he turned to go.

“Gustav, wait.”

My brother turned toward the lady so stiffly one might’ve thought he’d just thrown out his back.

Diana nodded at something across the street.

“Friend of yours?” she said.

Her fingers slid away from his sleeve.

Old Red blinked, first at Diana, then over at Madam Fong’s. Then his eyes went wide.

I followed his gaze, but it took me a second to spot what had surprised him so. She was easy enough to overlook—just a slip of a thing peeking out from the alleyway beside the bawdy house.

It was the little waif we’d seen lined up with the madam’s chippies. She beckoned to us with one of her spindly arms.

“Could be a trap,” I said.

“Yup. Sure could.”

Gustav started across the street.

The girl ducked away into the alley.

“I don’t suppose it’d do any good if I was to ask you to stay here,” I said to Diana.

“None at all.”

“Fine. I won’t bother then.”

We caught up to Old Red just as he rounded the corner into the alley. Part of me expected to find the Chief standing there, his cleaver wisely swapped for a forty-five. But there were neither hatchet men nor gun men awaiting us. Just one tiny girl, all alone.

“No time! Talk fast!” she said, her words coming out high and sharp, like the yippy bark of a small dog. She scurried up so close to my brother her little slipper-covered feet practically butted against his boot-toes. “You look for Hok Gup?”

“That’s right,” Gustav said.

The girl’s jaw jutted, her eyes tightened to slits.

“
Why
?”

It was a narrow alley, with looming buildings blocking out the sun on each side. Yet still there was more light than in Madam Fong’s cavelike parlor, and I could see now that the girl was older than I’d at first reckoned. She might have been all of sixteen, even. Her slightly oversized blouse, her unpainted face, the way her dark hair had been braided into twin pigtails—it was all designed to make what was pure scrawniness look like unblossomed youth.

Scrawny or not, though, she didn’t seem to be afraid of us.

“Huh?” she grunted when Old Red didn’t answer quick enough to suit her. “
Why
you want Hok Gup?”

“She got mixed up with a pal of ours somehow—Dr. Gee Woo Chan,” my brother explained. “And now he’s dead.”

“Chan . . . dead?” the girl gasped.

Gustav nodded. “Murdered. And certain folks seem to think Hok Gup was over to his place ’round the time it happened.”

The girl shook her head, but it wasn’t meant as any kind of answer. It was a denial, a “no” to something she didn’t want to be true. Her head sank, her dark eyes glimmering though no tears flowed. She looked like she wanted to cry but had forgotten how.

“Hok Gup’s your friend?” Old Red said softly.

The girl looked up and gave him a reluctant nod.

“You’re worried about her?”

“Yes,” she said, her voice hushed.

“Darlin’ . . . you got every reason to be.”

And Old Red reached out and placed a hand on her shoulder. It was just a brush of a touch, over in a heartbeat. But for my brother, that was a bear hug.

A shattered doll in a dead man’s flat? Rather odd.

A petrified scorpion? A touch peculiar.

Gustav Amlingmeyer tenderly comforting a young prostitute?
Utterly goddamn mystifying
.

“What’s your name?” Old Red asked the girl, his voice still whisper-gentle.

“Ah Gum,” she said firmly, wiping at her eyes and unslumping her shoulders. The sound of her own name seemed to give her new strength.

Gustav straightened up, too, and when he spoke again his words came out harder and faster.

“Well, Miss Gum, it’s like you said before. There ain’t much time—for us nor your friend nor you. So you’d best answer me quick as you can: Why was Hok Gup at Chan’s place?”

“Because he buy her,” Ah Gum said.

“ ’scuse me?
Bought
her? Like, you mean . . .” I started counting out invisible greenbacks. “. . . with money?”

“No. With catfish.” Ah Gum rolled her eyes exactly as my brother so often does. She sure had snapped back fast. “Yes, with money! What you think ‘buy’ is?”

“Now, just hold on a second,” I said. “This ain’t Dixie and it ain’t 1860. Folks don’t get put on auction blocks no more. Not in America, they don’t.”

“Every day girls on auction block in Chinatown!” the girl spat at me. “Why you think I here? Like this?” She grabbed a fistful of her silk shirt and yanked hard at it, as if she meant to tear it right off her back. “Madam Fong—she buy me!”

“Offa
who
?” Old Red asked sharply, indignant.

“My family send me here,” Ah Gum told him. “Woman come to village. She say she look for
mui tsai
—servant girls—for Gold Mountain men. Wives, too.”

“Gold Mountain?” I asked.

“Here,” Diana said. “That’s what the Chinese call California.”

The girl nodded. “Everyone rich here, we think. Coming to Gold Mountain—this is luck! I can send back money, later maybe family come. So I go with the woman. Other girls, too. Then we get here and—”

She spread her thin arms wide.

As you see . . . .

“And Hok Gup?” Gustav said. “She was one of the other gals from your village?”

“No. She special. She—”

Ah Gum curled her fingers into claws and grabbed at the air.

“Was take,” she said. “Steal.”

“Kidnapped?” Diana suggested.

The girl repeated the word, saying it slowly, as if for someone writing it down. “Yes. A year ago, from south islands. Some girls there worth lots money. Long, black hair. Dark eyes. Special pretty.”

“The Black Dove,” Old Red mused, gaze going glassy.

“When is it Dr. Chan bought your friend?” Diana asked Ah Gum.

“This morning. But he first come see her yesterday. With Yee Lock. Old man who check our—”

She fluttered her fingers down around the region where, unfortunately, she was forced to conduct most of her business.

“Feller with a white beard?” Gustav bent over and put his hand to his back. “Walks with a stoop? Froggy voice?”

“Yes. That Yee Lock.”

“That broke-down ol’ goat’s some kinda
doctor
?” I said.

Ah Gum nodded, though she threw in another eye-roll while she was at it. “Kwong Ducks pay him look after sing-song girls. Keep them not sick, to work . . . long as they pretty. Once they old—” She shrugged. “No one care.”

“I’m awfully sorry, miss. I must’ve misheard you,” I said. “The geezer. He works for some . . . ducks?”

The girl gave me a half-lidded glare that told me my intelligence had dropped even lower in her estimation. Whereas before I’d been a half-wit, now I was closer to a quarter-or even eighth-wit.

“Kwong Duck
Tong
. Own Madam Fong’s.”

“Oh ho.” I turned to Gustav. “There’s that we’ you and the madam talked about.”

My brother grunted and stroked his mustache absentmindedly for a moment.

“
So
,” he said,
eyes
refocusing on Ah Gum, “Doc Chan and Yee Lock come here yesterday. Then what?”

“They go in with Hok Gup. Later, Chan come out and talk to Madam Fong. He want Hok Gup. He say two hundred dollar—and Madam Fong just laugh. So he come back today with two
thousand
.”

“Whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa!” Old Red said, throwing up his hands. “Chan gave Madam Fong two thousand dollars
cash?
”

“Yes. After that, Hok Gup gather her things, and we all cry, we so happy.” On cue, the girl’s eyes began watering again. “We think she go be
gamsaanpo
—wife of Gold Mountain man. We think she be free.”

“She may be yet, Miss Gum,” Gustav said, and it didn’t sound like mere rote reassurance. It almost seemed like a promise. “Tell me: Is there anybody who
wouldn’t
be happy to see your friend stop . . . you know . . . ?” My brother blushed and cleared his throat, the bashful old Gustav Amlingmeyer finally peeking out from behind this charlatan’s shining armor. “. . . offerin’ her services on the open market? Maybe a steady customer who—?”

“
Ah Gum”
someone said behind us.

We turned to find Wong Woon waddling up the alley fast, his tub gut practically bouncing down to the cobblestones and back with each wobbling trot. As he approached, he kept up a stream of chatter in Chinese, all of it aimed past us at the girl. The only bit I could make out was her name—and interesting that he should know it, I noted.

Ah Gum sassed the big detective back a bit, but it was obvious her heart wasn’t in it.

“What are you sayin’ to her?” Old Red snapped at Woon.

“I tell her she foolish. Talk to you instead of run to Jesus men at Mission House. Maybe they hide her, help her. But now—”

He jutted his quivering chins at something further up the alley.

The back door of the nearest building had opened up, and Madam Fong was stepping outside. Her powdered face appeared all the more pallid and masklike in the sunlight, contrasting grotesquely with her bright silken clothes. She looked like fresh flowers on an old grave.

When she spotted us, she barked something back into the house, and
a moment later the Chief and his fellow hatchet man were marching out the door and toward us. Neither of them was carrying anything more dangerous than a grudge—in plain sight, anyway. Yet by force of habit I started scanning the garbage thereabouts for something heavy to throw.

As the highbinders drew closer, the madam snarled something at Ah Gum, and the chippy went into a broken droop that took half a foot off her height. Suddenly, she was a little girl again, a chastised child.

“Miss Gum, you don’t have to—,” Gustav whispered to her, his voice strangled.

“Like I say, cow-boy. You come back, I make you forget all about Hok Gup,” the girl cut in. Her tone was both lewd and loud, and her
eyes
darted back and forth between my brother and the person she was really speaking to—Madam Fong. “You don’t find better than Ah Gum anywhere.”

And she went up on her tiptoes and planted a peck on Old Red’s left cheek.

Predictably, Gustav was red-faced as she whirled away and hurried back toward the brothel. But it wasn’t Ah Gum’s kiss that had brought on the new blush. It was rage. Never mind “if looks could kill.” The glare Gustav was giving Madam Fong should’ve skinned her, skewered her, and roasted her over a barbecue pit.

The Chief had come to a stop perhaps twenty yards away, the other highbinder just behind him. As Ah Gum scurried past them, the Chief spat a few words our way in a gruff, husky voice. I only recognized one phrase:
fan kwei
, which had been thrown our way enough the past day to give me some idea as to its meaning. (My money was on “white assholes.”)

“He tell you to leave,” Woon said.

“Gee, thanks for the translation,” I told him. “I thought he was invitin’ us in for tea.”

Ah Gum had reached the back door by now, and she tried to scoot past Madam Fong, eyes on her toes.

The older woman caught her by the arm and gave her face a slap loud as a thunderclap. Then she spun the girl around, shoved her into the house, and followed her inside.

“Goddamn pimpin’
bitch
,” Gustav muttered.

He took a step toward the door.

The Chief took a step toward
him
.

With surprising speed, Woon maneuvered his bulky body between Old Red and the highbinders.

“You just make it worse for her,” he said to Gustav. “Plus, you die.” He shook his head gravely. “Very awkward for everybody.”

“You need to tell them that,” Diana said, nodding at the tong men.

“Yeah,” I threw in. “Them sons of bitches was choppin’ at us like we was cordwood not ten minutes ago.”

Woon shrugged. “You still in Chinatown ten minutes from now, they try again. Better you leave.”

“Better for who?” Old Red growled.

For a moment, Woon just gave him a baffled squint, as if my brother had asked him a riddle he couldn’t even understand, let alone solve.

“A thousand Chinamen die building railroad, no one notice,” he said. “Then one Chinaman die after riding train . . . and the Southern Pacific must know why?”

“We’re trying to change our image,” Diana said.

“That’s right.” I held up my hands and spread them wide as if reading something off a banner. “ ‘The Southern Pacific: The Railroad That Cares.’ ”

Gustav just stared back at Woon, offering no explanations—his stony silence saying Woon didn’t deserve any.

The Chinaman gave his head a jowl-shimmering shake that seemed both bewildered and truly rueful. Then he turned away and headed toward the Chief.

“Better you leave,” he said again, not bothering to look back. “You have no business here.”

He said something in Chinese to the hatchet men, and the three of them ambled off together.

“What’s
your
business here, Mr. Woon?” Diana called out as they reached the bordello’s back door.

Woon glanced back at us now—glanced at
me
, actually. And for the first time, I saw what looked like a smile tightening the saggy skin of the man’s fat face.