Black Dove (39 page)

I didn’t understand a word.

“Tell us what she’s sayin’, Charlie,” Old Red said.

Charlie’s eyes darted over to Scientific.

“For god’s sake, Charlie,” Diana snapped, “
speak for her
!”

“Alright, alright. I’ll try,” Charlie said. “But her Hoisanese . . . it’s pretty bad.”

“You mean she don’t even speak Chinese?” I said.

“Barely. Just look at her—she’s not from the mainland. She was probably grabbed off some little island in the South Seas. I bet she doesn’t even know its name.”

Charlie said something to the girl then, putting out both hands palms up and curling the fingers in twice. Coaxing.

Keep going
.

She did.

“She says she liked him,” Charlie said. “Gee Woo Chan. He was kind. Gentle.”

The girl looked at Madam Fong, and I knew her words had turned bitter even before Charlie turned them into English.

“The madam treats her girls like caged animals, and she knew the heartless . . . uhhh . . .”

“Bitch?” Diana suggested.

“Yeah,” Charlie said, avoiding Madam Fong’s venom-spitting glare. “She knew the heartless bitch would toss her in the gutter when she was used up. So when Gee Woo Chan bought her, she was glad. Landing a husband like him—”

Fat Choy suddenly took an angry stomp toward the girl, eyes ablaze. Whatever she’d just said, he didn’t like it. “—that was luck she hadn’t even dared hope for,” Charlie finished.

The gaunt highbinder spat something at Hok Gup, shaking his fist. I grabbed his bony, upraised wrist and jerked him back hard.

“Charlie, be so kind as to translate
this
,” I said. “ ‘Leave the girl be or I’ll snap you in two like a dried twig.’ ”

Charlie obliged, and Fat Choy backed away muttering.

Hok Gup watched the hophead shuffle away with an expression that seemed half-hateful, half-tender. Then she started talking again, and she was just plain misery through and through.

“After Gee Woo Chan brought her home, he told her the reason he’d bought her,” Charlie said. “The numbness in her hands and feet, the bumps she’d started to notice on her face. They were the first signs of
mah fung
. Leprosy. She wasn’t to be Gee Woo Chan’s wife. She was to be sent to Molokai.”

The girl stifled a sob as that last word left her lips, and even Charlie couldn’t say it without a shudder. I’d read enough about the place in magazines and newspapers to feel a little chill myself.

“Leper colony out in the Hawaiian islands,” I explained to my brother. I thought it best not to add what its nickname was: the Island of Death. I reckoned we were all feeling plenty morbid as it was.

Hok Gup choked back tears, fighting to finish her tale.

“Gee Woo Chan said he was sorry,” Charlie said. “But it was the only place she could go. She couldn’t stay in Chinatown. She couldn’t stay with people. Not
normal
people. And when she heard that, she was so heartbroken, so frightened, so angry, she went wild. She kicked him, slapped him, threw things. She . . .”

Charlie gaped at the girl a moment, speechless. Yet I knew exactly which words were stuck in his throat. I’d felt them coming for a long time now.

I looked over at Gustav and saw that he’d been bracing for them, too. His mouth was puckered shut, his jaw clenched, as if there was something he was trying to keep from crawling up out of his gut.

Then he opened his mouth, and out it came.

“She killed him.”

Or, The Black Dove Brings Her Tale of Woe to a Close

Hok Gup put her
hands together as if praying, and as she continued with her story, fresh teardrops trickled from her dark eyes. It had grown so cold out there over the water I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the tears freeze into icicles dangling from her apple cheeks.

“She wants you to know it was an accident,” Charlie said, his voice husky, strained. “A statue she threw—it hit Gee Woo Chan in the back of the head. When she realized what she’d done, she was going to just run out the door, keep going for as long as she could. She didn’t know what else to do. But then Fat Choy showed up looking for her, and she thought maybe she had a chance after all.”

The girl turned toward Fat Choy, her palms still pressed together in a plea for understanding.

“Fat Choy was the only person who could help her,” Charlie said. “So she told him what he wanted to hear. She loved him and she’d said as much to Gee Woo Chan and he’d flown into a rage—that’s why she’d killed him. All lies. But she had no choice.”

Fat Choy snorted scornfully, unmoved. I got the feeling he would have actually spit in her face if he hadn’t been afraid I’d put a fist to his.

Hok Gup gave up on him and told the rest of her story straight to me
and Gustav and Diana, the friends of the man she’d killed. Scientific, Madam Fong, Big Queue, even Charlie, her voice for the
fan kwei
—them she ignored.

“They faked the suicide,” Charlie said, not just translating but condensing now, too. This part of the story we already knew. “They hid in Gee Woo Chan’s basement. They tried to leave on the ferry to Oakland. They were caught.”

“Yeah,” I said under my breath. “Thanks to you.”

“No. Thanks to
him
.”

Charlie jerked his head at my brother, trying to dump all his guilt that way in the process.

“There’s just one last thing I need to know,” Old Red said, sounding weary. He’d already accepted the burden Charlie was loading him with—the
blame
—and I could see it weighing on him so clear it could have been a pack saddle strapped to his back. “Doc Chan didn’t die of a blow to the head. He died from the gas. Did she know that? Did she
know
she and Fat Choy was killin’ him when they left him up there on that bed?”

Charlie didn’t even get through the asking. The look of shock on Hok Gup’s face, the way she sobbed so hard it nearly bent her over double, that gave us our answer. If we needed any further proof, Fat Choy jumped in with panicky blabbing and finger pointing that needed no translation.

He didn’t know. Hok Gup said Gee Woo Chan was dead. It was all her fault.

Mahoney whistled. “A leper
and
a murderer . . . two for the price of one . . . .”

There was a gleam in his eye, a hunger, almost as if he was a customer ogling the girl back at Madam Fong’s. But it wasn’t what he could do to her he was thinking of. It was what he could do
with
her. She was a bludgeon he still longed to have in his own hand.

“She ain’t no murderer and she ain’t your damn toy, neither,” Gustav growled at him. “Charlie . . . tell her we’ll help her. Tell her we’ll . . . we’ll . . . do
something
.”

Charlie opened his mouth to speak.

“
Charlie
,” Scientific snapped, and what followed we couldn’t understand, though the gist was easy enough to guess. Charlie nodded, eyes down, shame-faced.

He’d been told it was time to shut up.

“You ‘help’ no one,” Scientific said to us, and he gave Mahoney’s Colt a little “Remember this?” waggle. “This is not
tot fan kwei
to decide.”

Who would decide, apparently, were the tongs: Scientific turned to Madam Fong, and the two of them got back to the angry wrangling they’d left off a few minutes before. The jury had been reduced to two, and we were all on trial this time—most likely for our lives.

“Listen,” Mahoney hissed at us, turning his back to Charlie. “I don’t like you, and you don’t like me. But we’re all in a jam now, and we need to work together.”

He slipped his right hand into his jacket pocket, and I could picture the fingers coiling around brass stained with an old man’s blood.

“Tiny,” he whispered to me, “you take Little Pete’s man. Your brother and I can rush the big one and the bitch. You . . . .” His eyes flicked over to Diana. “We need a distraction. Faint or go hysterical or something.”

“Just so I understand,” Diana replied, voice low and even and anything but hysterical, “you’ll take reinforcements to go after the clumsy oaf with the derringer, while Otto—by himself—takes on the expert fighter holding
your
revolver?”

Mahoney leaned in closer, looming over the lady. “We don’t have time to argue about this.”

“Sure we do. We got the rest of our lives.” I turned to Gustav. “What do you say?”

But he said not a word. Not then. He didn’t even look at me. He was staring at Hok Gup.

She was utterly alone. No one beside her, only the black bay behind her. We couldn’t understand the debate raging over our fates, but she surely could—and she didn’t like what she heard. Her wracking sobs had quieted, but the tears kept coming. She watched first Madam Fong, then Scientific, and from the way she shook her head and widened her eyes, it was clear
neither one was suggesting she be packed off to a cushy sanitarium to be looked after by the best and brightest. The worst and darkest . . . that’s what awaited her.

Eventually, she couldn’t take any more. She turned her back to the rest of us, facing the bay.

“Snap out of it, would you?” Mahoney murmured at my brother. “We’ve got to do something. Now. It’s our last—”

“No!” Old Red cried out.

He rushed for the girl. She was walking away from us, back straight, steps quick and steady.

The only problem was she had nowhere to walk
to
except the end of the pier. And that’s where she went . . . and beyond.

She dropped out of sight so fast it was as if God Himself reached down and plucked her right out of existence between eye blinks. We heard the splash, but by the time we reached the edge of the dock, the only sign of her in the water below was a little cloud of churned-up foam. And then even that was gone, washed under the pier by the ceaseless pushing of the tide.

My brother started to shrug off his jacket, but I grabbed him by the shirt-front with both hands.

“
No
. The current’s too strong, the water’s too cold. You’d drown for sure.”

“You couldn’t reach her anyway, Gustav,” Diana said. “Dr. Chan’s chain mail—it pulled her straight down. She’s already on the bottom by now.”

“But she’s still alive down there!” Old Red wailed, trying to worm his way out of my grip. “She’s still alive!”

“Not for long,” Diana said softly. “Then she’s free.”

Gustav stopped his squirming, yet I didn’t let him go. We were right on the edge, where one step—one second’s desperation and despair—meant death.

There was a thud somewhere behind us, then another splash. When we whirled around toward the sound, we found Scientific leaning out over the water about twenty-five feet back.

“Very brave. Very foolish,” he said gravely. “Sgt. Mahoney . . . he
jump in to save girl. Long way down.” The hatchet man shook his head and shrugged. “I think he land on his head.”

By the time we’d scrambled over to where Scientific was standing, there was no sign of the Coolietown Crusader in the roiling waters below. We didn’t hear anyone thrashing around in the water or crying out for help, either—nor did we expect to.

Needless to say, I didn’t have to worry about Old Red attempting a rescue this time. Mahoney was beyond our saving even if we’d wanted to save him.

Dark as it was out there, the body’d have to stay right where it’d landed for us to have the slightest chance of spotting it, and that wasn’t likely with the bay’s unpredictable currents. The waves had probably already pushed it underneath the pier, and from there the S.S.
Mahoney
could sail just about anywhere. Come morning, it might be spotted bobbing off the Union Street Wharf . . . or it might be halfway to Monterey. There was no way to say.

As we stood there peering over the side of the dock, Scientific, Charlie, Madam Fong, and Big Queue formed a sort of ring around us. Fat Choy lingered behind them, either too rattled or too opium-addled to slip away when he had the chance.

“So,” Scientific said, “what to do?”

I looked at Old Red.

Diana looked at Old Red.

Old Red looked at nothing. He just kept staring down into the darkness, lost in thought. And I mean truly
lost
—like he didn’t know where he was or how he’d got there.

I put a firm hand on his shoulder. Not so much to anchor him to the dock. More to anchor him to
me
.

“There’s nothing
to
do,” Diana said to Scientific. “Hok Gup is dead, and Sgt. Mahoney is . . . lost. That’s the end of it.”

“You don’t go to police?” Scientific asked, looking skeptical.

Diana shook her head. “The sergeant was no friend of ours, as I’m sure you saw. And even if we did go to the police, they wouldn’t thank us for it. Zealots aren’t good for business. The S.F.P.D. won’t be sad to see Mahoney gone. And as for what happens amongst the Chinese . . . well,
you know as well as I do, the police don’t want to be bothered with that. And it’s certainly no concern of our employers.”

The hatchet man nodded thoughtfully. “Yes. Southern Pacific?”

“That’s right,” I said, praying Scientific hadn’t made the same telephone call as Chun Ti Chu.