Black Dove (28 page)

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.

The first thing Pete made from it, of course, was a cringe, a gasp, and a (Chinese) curse. The Dodger, meanwhile, made a beeline for my brother.

I pushed myself off my saddle warmer and stumbled to Gustav’s side. But by the time I got my feet planted (and my head to stop swimming), he didn’t need me there. The hatchet man’s charge was called off by a fresh peel of laughter from his master.

“Oh, I like this cowboy! He is crazy!” Little Pete giggled, playfully wagging a finger at Old Red. “I just wonder”—his tone suddenly sharpened, and he turned a look on his henchman that could’ve made a gelding out of a stallion—“how he is allowed so close to me without his pockets searched?”

The Dodger went skulking back to his place beside Pete’s throne, while I hobbled to the divan and slumped next to Diana again.

“So?” my brother said. “That mean anything to you?”

“Mean? It is a scorpion.” Little Pete pitched the dried husk back to my brother. “What does it mean to
you?
”

“Not all I’d like it to . . . yet.” Gustav stuffed the brittle little critter back in his pocket. “But this much I do know now: Doc Chan wasn’t done in cuz some hophead hatchet man was jealous. This whole thing with the gal—the Black Dove, Hok Gup, whatever you wanna call her. It runs a lot deeper than her and Chan and Fat Choy. Which is the real reason I’m here talkin’ to you, ain’t it? A feller like you don’t bother with the likes of me just to amuse himself, no matter how you might play-act it. You got some kinda stake in this, and I’m wonderin’ what it is.”

Little Pete nodded, still looking plenty amused, play-acting or not.

“In Chinatown, I have a stake in everything.”

“Including Hok Gup?” Diana asked.

“Of course. What the stake is, though . . . ?” Little Pete gave the lady a head-shaking shrug. “I don’t even know. But Madam Fong and Kwong Ducks want the girl.
Chun Ti Chu
want the girl. So
I
must have the girl. If Six Companies say she is worth one thousand dollar, then maybe she is worth two thousand, or five thousand, or ten thousand.”

He looked away for a moment, his gaze moving to the empty show-cases that once housed ancient treasures of the Orient.

“Maybe she is priceless,” he said, his tone turning strangely melancholy.

Then he brought his eyes back to my brother, and there was no emotion in his voice whatsoever—just the cold sound of a businessman talking trade.

“But two thousand dollar is what I offer
you
, cowboy. You are crazy, but you are clever, too. Maybe you find Hok Gup. You do, you bring here. I give you two . . . thousand . . . dollar.”

Now, two thousand dollars wasn’t just twice what the Six Companies was offering. It was twice the money my brother and I had earned in five years of drovering—and about two thousand times what we had left of it.

So did I think about what that kind of cash could do for us? I’m proud to say I did not.

Which isn’t to say I thought Gustav shouldn’t accept the man’s offer. A yes would get us out of there. A no, though—that would get us nothing but trouble.

You might assume a wily fellow like my brother would know that—and he probably did, down deep. Up top, though, he was pissed, and it was his up top that did the talking.

“You go to hell.”

“Probably,” Little Pete said, looking unperturbed—perhaps even pleased—by Old Red’s answer. “Only you go first, you are not careful.”

He turned then, saying something to the Dodger in Chinese, and the highbinder moved toward us.

“My friend Scientific will show you the way out,” Little Pete said, nodding at the Dodger.

“ ‘Scientific’?” I asked.

“ ‘The way out’?” asked Gustav.

“You’re letting us go?” asked Diana.

“Yes,” Little Pete said, answering all our questions at once. “Go. And good luck. Or perhaps I should say . . .
fat choy
.”

He started to smile at his own little funny, but his lips never made it to full curl. They froze halfway up, then drooped downward into a frown.

Then I heard it, too. A muffled thumping coming through the door. It had a rhythmic quality to it—
one-two, one-two, one-two
—like men driving railroad spikes or chopping together at a big tree.

Little Pete muttered something under his breath, and the Dodger (a.k.a. Scientific) nodded brusquely and slipped a hand under his tunic. It was my fervent hope that he was just scratching at a sudden itch.

Here was a man who could bust through doors with a fist and snuff out my lights with a foot. What he could do with an actual
weapon
I did not want to see.

And I didn’t. The thumping gave way to a splintering sound, then shouts, then screams, then pounding feet.

A moment later, the men with axes rushed in.