City of God (51 page)

“By whom?” Mei Lin asked.

“By all of us.”

“You are not afraid I will run away?” Mei Lin asked.

“Run to where, Miss Di? The Madams of the Sacred Heart perhaps? I have no doubt they would take you back, and that Mrs. Devrey would continue to pay the cost of your tuition—”

“How do you know about that? How do you know everything? Are you some kind of evil wizard?”

“Stop. You are needlessly exciting yourself, and you will disturb your mother’s harmony if you continue to speak to me in that tone of voice. As I was saying, I expect you could return to Manhattanville, but where would your mother go?”

Mei Lin looked around, observing the comfortable and appropriate surroundings in which Mamee and Ah Chee were now housed.

“Yes,” Mr. Chambers said softly. “Exactly. I can see you are considering the available alternatives. Very wise.”

“You mean,” she said, “that my mother and Ah Chee can stay here only if I do.”

“Entirely correct. Of course, you can go downtown and find Lee Big Belly and ask him to take your mother. I’m sure he would agree. And that he would also allow Ah Chee to come with her. She could cook for all of them. Big Belly and the others who would be using your mother.”

Mei Lin stared at the floor and made no reply.

“Nothing in this world is free, my dear,” Kurt Chambers said. “Nothing. It is a lesson you may as well learn now as later.”

“I
T IS GOOD
of you to meet me, Mr. Chambers.”

“But I am delighted to do so, Dr. Turner. I rearranged my schedule as soon as I heard from Sister Manon. A man of your distinguished reputation…No, not merely delighted, I am honored.”

Chambers turned and snapped his fingers in the direction of one of the waiters scurrying back and forth in the packed Rotunda Bar of the Astor House Hotel. They were seated at one of the bar’s few tables. Clouds of pipe and cigar smoke nearly obscured the flickering gaslight, but the waiter approached at once. Chambers pointed to their glasses. They were drinking straight rye whiskey, both having bypassed the fancy mixtures called cocktails that were so much in fashion. Despite the crowd in the place, all of whom seemed to be shouting for service in that way New Yorkers had of wanting everything done ten minutes earlier, fresh drinks appeared at their table within moments after Chambers had given the order. “Do you come here often?” Nick asked.

“No more often than I go to other venues, Dr. Turner. I am a man of business. In New York City that requires one to visit many places.”

“Including Cherry Street?”

Chambers sat back and took a cigar case from the inside pocket of his frock coat, offering it first to his guest. Nick shook his head. Chambers spent the next few moments rolling the cigar near his ear, then cutting the tip, finally lighting it with a wad of paper he held to the gas jet on the wall beside them. “Convenient sort of seat,” he said smiling. “If one wishes to light a cigar.”

Nick nodded.

“Cherry Street,” Chambers said, exhaling a long trail of smoke. “Why do you ask?”

“Perhaps, being a relative newcomer to our city, you didn’t know. Samuel Devrey was my cousin. I understand you made all the arrangements for his funeral.”

“Ah, yes, I may be a newcomer, but even I have heard stories of the once legendary family feud between the Devreys and the Turners. So perhaps you didn’t know how ill your cousin was or that his death was imminent.”

Nick knew he’d lose if he tried playing word games with Kurt Chambers; the man was slicker than he would ever be. “In fact I examined my cousin shortly before Christmas. I did know how ill Samuel was, and I was not surprised to hear of his death. My inquiry has more to do with the living than the dead, Mr. Chambers. The household my cousin maintained on Cherry Street was certainly irregular. Nonetheless, I am concerned about a Chinese lady called Mei-hua, and her daughter who is known as Miss Linda Di.”

“I understand, Dr. Turner. But I can assure you both women are quite well and in comfortable circumstances. As you say, I did make all the funeral arrangements, then I helped the ladies about whom you inquire, along with their old servant, move to a new home. Since you visited so recently, I’m sure you’ll have seen how their former neighborhood has deteriorated. Cherry Street is no longer suitable for respectable people. I’m sure you agree.”

“I do. But frankly, Mr. Chambers, it’s your involvement that puzzles me. What has any of this to do with you?”

Chambers exhaled another stream of pungent blue-gray cigar smoke
and smiled. “I should have explained earlier, Dr. Turner. I am, I think, being overly discreet. Miss Di is my fiancée. We are to be married in the spring.”

Kurt Chambers became who he was because in 1810 a man named Cheng Yu walked out of Kwangchow, the bustling city the foreign traders called Canton, taking with him the clothes on his back and a pack containing seven taels of silver, the red silk robe that had belonged to his grandfather, and a few other things only slightly less precious.

He walked for five years.

Northwards the length of China. Across Mongolia into Russia. Through central Europe into the German-speaking lands along the Rhine, eventually into France, and finally, on the only leg of the journey he could not make on foot, into England. He was helped on his way by courage and cleverness and the fact that he had picked up a smattering of many foreign tongues from the traders of Kwangchow.

The most important events of his odyssey occurred at the beginning and towards the end.

Before he crossed the border of his home province of Kuangtung, Cheng Yu acquired a strong young peasant girl. She cost only a few coins because her feet had never been bound. For him that was her appeal; the swaying walk of a women with golden lilies would be of no use to him. This one could keep up and carry his pack, as well as provide him relief during the night. Her name was Kai-kai and she was fourteen when she became Woman Cheng.

Fifty-six months later, while they were waiting for a man with whom Cheng Yu had arranged a rendezvous in the Black Forest of Bavaria, they encountered a blizzard that forced them to take shelter in an empty woodsman’s hut.

The blizzard got worse, and the man Cheng Yu expected did not arrive. Kai-kai, pregnant for the third time, went into labor and gave birth to a dead girl-child, also for the third time. They had food for only one more day.

Cheng Yu considered these disasters and did not know whether to go on, perhaps leaving Kai-kai behind, or remain where he was. Such a dilemma could be solved in only one way. Among the treasures in his pack was a leather-bound book wrapped in flowered silk and three hexagonal coins. He would find his answer in the system of divining known as
I-ching
. He had long since run out of joss sticks, but he kowtowed profoundly and fixed his mind on higher things, ignoring the quiet tears of Kai-kai huddled in a corner.

Cheng Yu threw the coins in the approved manner and was led to two trigrams. Together they formed the message the gods were sending him on this occasion.
Waiting on the outskirts you should be patient. Strangers arrive. If you treat them with respect, all will be well
.

It seemed a particularly clear message. Cheng Yu went outside to look again for the man who had promised to come. He found a woman who had obviously been a long time wandering in the storm and had staggered off the path and collapsed in exhaustion. When Yu stumbled over her she was near death. He knelt beside her and disarranged her many layers of woolen shawls to see if he could feel her heartbeat. There was an infant nestled in her clothing, a newborn. “
Er heisst
Kurt,” the woman whispered before she died.

“The child’s name is Kurt,” Yu told his wife when he returned to the hut carrying the baby. “He is starving. Give him suck.” Past experience had taught him that by now her breasts would be full, though her child had been born dead some hours before.

Kai-kai’s broad, flat face expressed both fear and wonder. Her arms ached for a child, but this was a thing of which she had never heard. “Can a barbarian infant drink the milk of a civilized woman?”

“We shall see. In any case, we must try.” Yu did not care much about the child. He was thinking of the
I-ching. Strangers arrive. If you treat them with respect all will be well
. The most respect they could show this small stranger was to keep him alive.

Kai-kai put Kurt to her breast. He drank her milk and he thrived.

A few hours later, while Kai-kai and Kurt slept, the man for whom Yu waited arrived. He was a Turk and he led a mule loaded with a chest. Here
at last was the quarry Yu had so long pursued, the end of the quest that had driven him across Asia and much of Europe. The Turk was bringing him the first of a promised steady supply of sticky black balls of
ya-p’ien.
It came direct from the source and had not passed through the hands of the British or the Americans. As such it would cost considerably less than any
ya-p’ien
available in the Middle Kingdom. A cheap and steady source of such a treasure would make him a very rich man. He would found a dynasty and be an ancestor.

Things did not work out exactly as Cheng Yu had intended. While he lived he never did return to China, though he maintained his connections to the supply of opium from Turkey, selling it first in the ports of Genoa and Marseille and eventually in London, where he established himself and Kai-kai and the then four-year-old Kurt in a set of rooms in Soho in the heart of the West End.

There were many customers for
ya-p’ien
in London, and Cheng Yu cultivated the better sort, white men who had picked up the habit while in the various colonies of the Empire. It was such a one who in return for a reduced price for his opium helped get Kurt into an admittedly third-class school, but one good enough to give the boy the superficial polish of an English gentleman along with other skills useful for making his way in the West. No lessons the boy learned, however, were more important than those taught by Yu and Kai-kai. Together they made the only child they had, the one miraculously sent to them by the gods, truly a man of the ancient kingdom midway between heaven and earth which looked down on the lesser lands below.

By the time he was grown, Kurt Chambers—the surname he used in the white world—was truly, and without any chinks in what he thought of as his armor, a yellow man in a white man’s skin.

Kurt was twenty-four when Kai-kai died. Cheng Yu, recognizing the now pressing need for a female in their household, arranged for a young girl to be sent from Kwangchow. Since he was old and his jade stalk no longer worked as once it had, he decided that the girl should be of tender years and that she would belong to his son.

The one who arrived was indeed young, just fourteen, and a virgin,
and quite pretty, with acceptable golden lilies. Unfortunately she was apparently barren, since she never bore Kurt any children. A few years later, when he discovered she had become addicted to opium, he had her killed. For a time he decided to put the idea of a wife out of his mind. There were plenty of whores available to meet his needs, and it was more important that he concentrate on expanding his father’s business. He did this so well that
ya-p’ien
became only one part of a vast trade in the things men wanted but society told them they could not or should not have. Yu, who was by then a very old man, watched all this with satisfaction until in 1846 he also died.

Kurt arranged for a temporary burial and two years later had the corpse disinterred and sent his father’s now dry and free-of-flesh bones back to Kwangchow. He had no more profound duty, and there was no greater honor he could pay to the man who had, in the most real sense, given him life.

News of the California gold strike reached London soon after that obligation had been fulfilled. It occurred to Kurt that the discovery and resulting chaos might provide him with many opportunities for profit. He entertained the idea of moving at once to San Francisco (there were rumblings of legal difficulties with some of his London enterprises) but the
I-ching
counseled him to wait and he obeyed. Then, a short time later, concentrating on the question of whether he should go instead to New York, he again threw the coins that determined the trigrams.
Favorable result. The two worlds meet and all is well.

Within a year of arriving in New York, having used the substantial wealth he brought with him as seed money for earning more and to establish himself as a highly respected gentleman of means, he heard from one of the Chinese sailors who had been drawn into his circle of the extraordinary Mei-hua and her half-white daughter.
The two worlds meet and all is well.

Chambers kept close tabs on the Cherry Street household for the next eighteen months, making it his business to learn everything about it that could be known. By the autumn of 1851 he had decided that the time was right and that he would make himself known to the women
after the Christmas holidays. Perhaps in First month, February, during the festival celebrating the arrival of the year of the Wood Rooster. But before that, in Good month, November, he happened on Mei Lin in the lobby of St. Vincent’s Hospital and impulsively spoke to her.

That night when he consulted the
I-ching
he was told that precipitate action brings trouble. He resolved to do nothing until the signs were more auspicious. But once more, in front of Tiffany’s jewelry store of all places, the gods put the girl and her mother and the old servant in his path. He could only think that he had misinterpreted the trigrams, because it was impossible for him to follow the counsel of prudence and turn away. The
tai-tai
and her daughter required protection from an increasingly hostile crowd, and he had no choice but to act. After all, it was purely fortuitous that he was on the scene. He was there to meet Lilac Langton, alias Countess Romanov (whose use of chloroform was swiftly making her the most successful abortionist in the city) and offer her full immunity from prosecution by either the scourge of abortion, George W. Dixon, or the police. In return she would give him thirty percent of her profits. It was a scheme which she had found acceptable and which benefited them both. That Lilac Langton had turned out to know something about the
tai-tai
’s past he’d discovered nowhere else was a bonus, something he could see only as validation of the choices he had made. Which prompted him to speak as he had to Mei Lin that night in Delmonico’s.

Soon after that event Samuel Devrey died, and despite the fact that the
I-ching
continued to counsel delay, Kurt decided he must bring Mei Lin and her mother entirely under his influence. If he did not, he might lose the girl to the care of Carolina Devrey and her lover. He had by then learned that the pair felt a certain sense of responsibility for the
tai-tai
’s daughter. He even knew why and that Mrs. Devrey was very rich. Sufficient money made things possible that were otherwise unthinkable. His two-worlds-meeting woman, the perfect solution to his now pressing need to create a dynasty of his own so that his bones too would some day be honored by a son, preferably many sons, would be his only if he acted decisively and with boldness.