End of the Century (17 page)

“Peace, gentlemen, in the name of the Ghost Fox,” he said in fluent Cantonese. “We will accompany you to see your mistress without need for any further conflict.”

The two laundrymen stopped in their tracks and exchanged confused glances.

“Miss Bonaventure,” Blank called out, as she wheeled around to face his attackers, her own pair lying moaning on the ground. “If you would, please desist from your exertions.”

Miss Bonaventure was brought up short, and cocked her head to one side, giving Blank a quizzical look. “What's that, again?” she said, only slightly out of breath.

“These gentlemen represent the Ghost Fox Triad,” he explained casually. “I have informed them that we will come along with them without further incident.” He paused, examining the frayed cuff of his vagabond disguise with a moue of distaste, and then in Cantonese addressed the laundrymen. “We would honor your mistress in not appearing before her in these rags. May we go within and change into more appropriate dress?”

The laundrymen exchanged uneasy glances. Clearly, this abduction was not going according to plan. One of them looked to the empty wicker basket lying nearby in the street.

“Oh, and we won't be traveling in
those
, thank you very much,” Miss Bonaventure said, her Cantonese carrying a slight accent, dusting her hands on the rough fabric of her skirt. “I've been forced in a basket a time or two, and I'd much rather take a cab, if it's all the same to you.”

Blank looked at his companion with an easy smile. “Miss Bonaventure, you never cease to surprise me.”

To the laundrymen's continued dismay, the abduction persisted in failing to follow the accepted script. The four Chinese gentlemen, one rubbing an aching jaw and another a sore pate, lingered in the foyer of the York Place house while Blank repaired to his octagonal bedroom, bathed, and dressed. Miss Bonaventure, for her part, hired a cab and rode home to do the same.

Three quarters of an hour later, Miss Bonaventure returned, to find Blank in the library having a cup of coffee and a cigarette, and trying unsuccessfully to engage their would-be abductors in conversation.

“I suggested that we might all have breakfast before going on,” Blank said, brightly, “but they'd have none of it.”

Miss Bonaventure shrugged. “I'll confess I grabbed a quick bite of the meal Mrs. Pool had prepared for me, so I'll survive until lunch, I think.”

“Splendid!” Blank clapped his hands and strode to the foyer, where he retrieved his bowler hat and cane from the table. Then, carefully selecting an orchid from the vase, he affixed it to his buttonhole and turned to smile at the laundrymen. “We're ready when you are, gentlemen.”

The quartet of laundrymen, exchanging dark glances, shuffled out through the foyer, eyeing Miss Bonaventure warily.

As Miss Bonaventure had suggested, transportation within the wicker baskets, as the laundrymen originally intended, was simply out of the question. And there seemed little point in going to the expense of a carriage when the laundrymen had their van ready at hand. So it was that Blank and Miss Bonaventure sat up front with the driver, while the other three jostled in the rear of the van, and as the sun was rising over the city, they drove out in the direction of the dawn.

Turning left off Baker Street onto Oxford Street, entering the increasing flow of morning traffic, Miss Bonaventure leaned over and, with her lips brushing Blank's ears, spoke in a voice scarcely above a whisper. “And how
did you recognize the allegiance of these gentlemen, Blank? And what's your connection to the triad of the Ghost Fox?”

Blank gave her a weary smile, and with an abbreviated nod of his head indicated the black tattoo inked on the back of the driver's left hand. It was a pair of boxy Chinese ideograms.

“
Zì yóu
,” Miss Bonaventure whispered.

Blank nodded. “‘The cause of the self,'” he translated. “Or more simply, ‘Freedom.' It is the emblem of the Ghost Fox Triad, and one I have not seen for some long time.”

Miss Bonaventure opened her mouth to speak, but the driver had caught snippets of their brief exchange and fixed them with a hard look. Blank motioned her to silence, and she grudgingly obliged.

They continued on past Tottenham Court, onto High Holborn, and from there past Skinner and Newgate, along Cheapside and Cornhille, until they passed Aldgate in the east. The City of London proper behind them, they were once more in the East End. Whitechapel seemed scarcely to have gone to bed before it was up and bustling. It was a truism that the East End tended to rise earlier than the rest of the city, being the home of the working poor, and as the rising sun still pinked the eastern sky, the area had already become a great plain of smoking chimneys.

The driver turned off Whitechapel Road and onto Commercial Road, following it east towards the docks. Already, at this early hour, the first of the public houses were opening and would remain in business until half past midnight. The inhabitants of the East End provided the bulk of the manual labor which kept London running and perforce worked at all hours and spent what little leisure time allotted them, day or night, and the littler still coin left in their pockets, at the sundry lodging houses and brothels, public houses and beer-shops which dotted the narrow winding streets of the docklands.

Finally, Commercial Road ended where the East End Dock Road began, and they came in view of the Limehouse Basin, where the murky waters of the Regent's Canal met the waters of the Limehouse Cut, made urinous in appearance and smell by a match factory upon the banks of the River Lea, the two streams commingling in swirls of sickly yellow and greenish gray.

Now, they were in the Limehouse and might well have stepped into some
other world. While Victoria ruled the rest of London, the rest of the Empire, here the Ghost Fox held dominion.

The last census had showed only a few hundred Chinese in London, of which fewer than a hundred were resident within the Limehouse. Far fewer than the hundred thousand Jewish immigrants who crowded in Whitechapel and Spitalfields, much nearer the scattered number of Malay sailors who drifted in and out of port. But the recorded numbers of the Chinese population were far from accurate. The queen's census takers had been baffled by the warren of narrow, winding streets which had grown up like kudzu around the Limehouse Dock, and had walked away with little clear understanding of how many Chinese really dwelt within and even less understanding of what sort of society these immigrants from the East had fashioned for themselves.

Blank knew too well. He had been in the east during the Opium Wars and seen firsthand the dark underbelly of Western imperialism. He had seen up close the toll demanded by empire.

The driver brought the van to a halt out front of a humble-seeming laundry and ordered Blank and Miss Bonaventure to step down. By the time the pair had climbed down to the cobblestones, the other three laundrymen had come around from the rear of the van and taken up positions behind and to either side of them.

“Come along, then,” Blank said amiably in Cantonese. “I'm sure your mistress awaits.”

The three laundrymen, now joined by the fourth, glowered at him but stayed their hands. With a sharp motion of his hand, one impatiently signaled for the rest to follow and strode through the laundry's front door. Blank bowed slightly to Miss Bonaventure and said, “After you.” She inclined her head with a smile, rested her parasol on her shoulder, and sauntered after the laundryman.

In through the cramped confines of the laundry, thick with the alkaline smell of lye, they came to a narrow door behind a counter. The lead laundryman pushed his way through a thick curtain and the other three urged Blank and Miss Bonaventure on from behind. With a shrug, the pair elbowed their way past the curtain and found themselves in a labyrinth-like winding corridor from which innumerable chambers opened. These were heavy hung
with a floral scent, sickly sweet like rotting fruit. Miss Bonaventure arched an eyebrow at Blank, and he nodded in ascent to her unspoken observation. It was a secret opium den, the rooms littered with the insensate bodies of the patrons stretched on couches and divans, or else sprawled unceremoniously on the floor. Blank noted that the vast majority of the patrons were Occidentals, the few sons of the Orient in evidence those employees of the establishment who tended to the needs of the lolling patrons.

At the rear of the opium den, they came to a sturdy, barred door. This the laundryman swung open, after first beating a staccato rhythm on the wood, and on the other side appeared a burly figure, his forehead shaven in the Manchurian fashion, his hair hanging in a heavy plait down his back. He wore loose-fitting black silk garments, shirt and trousers, with a golden circle stitched to the front, upon which were embroidered the ideograms for Freedom.

The black-clad gatekeeper did not exchange more than a glance and a nod with the laundryman, but without speaking to Blank and Miss Bonaventure, escorted them deeper into the labyrinthine bowels of the building. Beyond the heavy door was a steep stairway leading down, which jogged at a landing, then again, zigzagging back and forth every few dozen feet. The walls of the stair were close on either side, unadorned wood paneling which seemed black as pitch in the dim lighting.

Finally, they reached the bottom of the stair and another door, but while the door above had been rough-hewn oak, this was more elaborate, lacquered red with a gold fox rampant in bas relief on its surface. In the place of a knob was a heavy brass ring, large enough to be worked around the neck as a torque, and this the gatekeeper turned. The red-lacquered door swung open easily, noiselessly on well-oiled hinges, and Blank and Miss Bonaventure stepped out of the darkened stair into the bright light of a throne room.

It was a massive chamber, substantially underground it would seem, lit by rows of massive lanterns that depended from iron stanchions on the walls, with polished marble underfoot. The chamber was dominated by an immense golden statue of a fox which was raised on a dais at the far side of the floor. The fox held two jade disks, one in either paw, one engraved with the symbol “
zì
,” the other with “
yóu
,” which together comprised the ideogram for “freedom.” Standing in ordered rows along the walls to either side of the door
were guards dressed in traditional Chinese armor, swords at their belts and long halberds in their hands, staring forward dispassionately.

Seated before the dais, on a simple and unadorned wooden chair, sat an ancient Chinese woman in a simple dress of green and black silk embroidered with gold thread. She seemed almost like a child's doll, given her diminutive size. Her eyes, staring out from a face like a nest of wrinkles, were the color of violets, her fingers thick jointed and gnarled, while her skin and hair were a uniform shade of alabaster, the color of bleached bone.

In one sense it had been only days since Blank had seen her, but in every other way that mattered it had been a lifetime.

“Miss Bonaventure,” Blank said, taking his companion's hand and leading her forward into the chamber. “Allow me to introduce Madame Quexi, better known as the Ghost Fox.”