Crooked Hearts (17 page)

Grace pivoted and walked away, arms wrapped tightly around herself. Reuben caught up to her before she got far, steering her away from the dead end she was blindly heading for. On Dupont Street, he took her arm and slowed their pace; they walked for a time without speaking.

“How do you know things like that?” she burst out accusingly. It was easier to turn the horror into anger than to keep it inside. “How do you hear about such awful things?”

“I’m a man,” he said lightly. “It’s my job to know things like that.”

She snorted with scorn, yanking her hand out of his. “It’s your job as a man to know about depravity and vice and cruelty?”

“Those things are part of the world, Grace. I’m a man of the world.”

She wasn’t going to get a serious answer out of him, that was clear. She felt her temper cooling anyway. Getting angry at Reuben because evil existed didn’t make very much sense.

“I used to wish I were a man,” she said in calmer tones, slipping her hand back under his arm. “When I was little. Sometimes I still do.”

He looked amused. “Why?”

“Because you have it so much easier. Maybe not easier,” she amended, “but at least for you life is more interesting.”

“Is it?”

“I loved being Sister Augustine because I was on my own. Fooling people, having power over them. That’s close to being a man, isn’t it?” He only smiled at her. “And men left me alone and didn’t bother me.
Most
men,” she added pointedly. “Would you have believed I was a nun if you hadn’t seen my gun?”

“Probably. But I’d still have asked you to have dinner with me.”

“You would? Why?”

He stopped, peering down at her as if she were slow in the head. “Because, Gus, you were so
damn pretty.”

She looked away and made another snorting noise. Her face felt warm, and she knew she was blushing.
Blushing,
for God’s sake. “Let’s go in here,” she suggested abruptly, pulling him toward a doorway. Through it she could see a short corridor that led to a room with a long gaming table in the center, surrounded by eager-looking gamblers. Even from here she could hear the click of dice and dominoes.

“Hold it, Grace—you can’t go in there.”

“Why not?”

“They won’t let you.”

“Why won’t they?”

“Well, for one thing, gambling’s illegal in Chinatown, and for all they know we might be cops. And even if we aren’t, we’re white devils, so we’ll bring them bad luck.”

“Don’t be silly, they’ll let us in. Everybody gambles in Chinatown.”

He shrugged. “Okay, you go ahead, then.” She looked at him doubtfully. “Go ahead, go on in.”

“Aren’t you coming with me?” She glanced back at the door. A Chinese man sat on a stool beside it, guarding the entrance. He looked harmless enough, gray-bearded and stoop-shouldered, blinking dreamily and gumming an unlit cigar.

“No, you go ahead. It’s all right, you’ll be fine.”

She knew he was daring her. Fleetingly she wondered how he could know that a dare was the one thing she could never resist. “All right, I will.” She wheeled around and strode toward the door.

Quick as a snake, the elderly man reached up and grabbed a rope she hadn’t noticed before, suspended from a hook above his head. She heard a loud bang, and jumped in fright when the inner door, the one at the far end of the dark corridor, slammed shut on a fast spring lock. A muffled roar went up from the room beyond the door. Spinning around, she raced back to Reuben, hauled on his arm, and dragged him away from the gambling den at a fast trot. Her heart was pounding, but when she threw a panicky glance over her shoulder, she saw that no one was coming after them. She felt like an idiot. And she had to listen to Reuben’s infuriating chuckling for half a block.

“Wait, I can’t go any farther,” he panted, pulling her up short, pretending he was winded.

She glared at him. “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

“This was more fun. Wait!” He grabbed her before she could flounce away again. “If you really want to go gambling in Chinatown, Grace, I can think of one place where they might let us in.”

“Where?” she asked suspiciously.

“Come on and I’ll show you.”

The place where he took her had no sign, no window. It was literally a hole in the wall; the door looked like a fissure in the side of a stone cave. From the entrance no lights were visible. “Wait here and don’t move,” he cautioned her—needlessly; where did he think she would go? Leaving her at the entrance, which was unguarded as far as she could tell, he disappeared inside the fissure.

Immediately she remembered every story she’d ever read about kidnapped Caucasian women, sold into slavery and forced into lives of harlotry and degradation. What was Reuben thinking of, to leave her out here on the street by herself? Everybody on the sidewalk looked sinister all of a sudden. A man in a long wool overcoat and Western shoes walked straight toward her, bare white ankles showing. His forehead was shaved, and his long black queue hung down over one shoulder. He had mild brown eyes. Deceptively mild? They caught hers and held them. The closer he came, the harder Grace pressed back against the rough wall. At the moment the man drew level with her, someone clamped a hand on her shoulder from behind. She let out a squawk and jumped half a foot in the air. Whirling, fists clenched, she confronted Reuben.

“Damn it, Grace, you scared the hell out of me!”

Her racing heart wouldn’t let her speak for a few seconds. When she got her breath, she said deliberately, “Don’t—ever—do that to me—again.”

“Do what? Come on, let’s go, you shouldn’t be standing out here by yourself.” She mumbled inarticulate curses, which he ignored. “The look-see man says we can come in, but we can’t play. I had to give him some cumshaw. Don’t forget, you owe me two bucks.”

He was pulling on her hand, leading her through the crack in the wall. “What’s cumshaw?” she asked shakily.

“A tip, a bribe. The specials earn a pretty good living that way, in payoffs to look the other way. A special is an auxiliary cop,” he said before she could ask.

Except for the low ceiling, the roomy, well-lit gambling den bore no resemblance to a cave whatsoever. It was fairly clean, not too crowded, and it even had a band—two men playing strange music on odd-shaped instruments in the corner. Along the sides of the room were tables for cards, dice, dominoes, and white-pigeon ticket—a form of lottery, Reuben explained. But the primary game here was the one going on around a square table covered with matting in the middle of the room.

“It’s fan-tan, isn’t it?” she asked in a whisper, standing as close to Reuben as she could without stepping on his feet. She was acutely aware that they were the center of suspicious attention and that every gambler in the room was sneaking dark, baleful glances at them when their heads were turned.

Reuben nodded. “Do you know how it’s played?”

“Not really.” It looked simple, but she couldn’t figure out the object. A man with a long wand, like a conductor’s baton, was sliding small porcelain buttons in groups of four out of a larger pile of buttons. The gamblers standing around the table stared intently at this operation, mesmerized. When the man with the stick—the banker, she assumed—stopped counting because the pile of buttons was depleted, several of the watchers were paid off in bank notes from a purse the banker wore around his waist. They’d won, obviously, but how or why, Grace couldn’t fathom.

“How does it work?” she asked out of the side of her mouth.

“The guy with the purse is called the
tan kun,
which means the ‘ruler of the spreading out.’ Watch what he does now. See? He takes a bunch of buttons out of that bowl, and now he hides them.”

“Why?” He’d put a lid over the pile of buttons immediately after placing them on the table.

“So the players can’t try to count them until after they bet. Now they’re betting.”

The gamblers were putting money down on the four numbered sides of a square painted in the middle of the table—she hadn’t noticed it until now. “What are they betting on?”

“They’re guessing how many buttons will be left after the last spreading out—one, two, three, or none.”

“That’s it?”

“That’s all there is to it.”

The banker began the “spreading out” with his wand, sorting the buttons in fours with lightning quickness, never faltering or making a clumsy pass. Within seconds he was paying off new winners—this time, the men who had put their money on the number three—and reaching into the bowl for another handful of buttons. “I like it,” decided Grace. “How much do you get if you win?”

“Four times your bet, minus a small cut for the house.”

She had another question. She should wait, ask it outside, but she was dying to know. Under her breath she murmured, “How do you cheat?”

“You can’t.”

She looked at him in disbelief. “Nobody can?”

Now he was whispering too. “Sometimes the dealer uses a wider stick and hides a button in it to foil the heaviest bettors. But a player can’t cheat, not unless he’s connected to the house.”

“Amazing.” She’d never heard of a game you couldn’t rig somehow. She was impressed.

“We should go,” Reuben said.

“Oh, no—so soon? Are you sure we can’t play? I’d love to try it.”

“No, and the sooner we get out of here, the better they’ll like it.” He made a gesture with his chin toward the players.

“Why? We’re not bothering anybody.”

“We’re bad luck, I told you. White is the color of mourning and death, and we’re white. They associate us with losing.”

“The house ought to pay us to stay, then,” she muttered, letting Reuben guide her toward the door. Hostile stares followed them all the way; she felt them on the back of her neck. When they reached the street, she couldn’t help feeling relieved.

A man in a bamboo basket hat was selling spiced pork on the corner, and the enticing smell reminded her she was hungry. They found an eating house on China Street. Grace balked at first, put off by the pigs’ heads hanging from the rafters and the chicken gizzards and livers proudly displayed in bloody wooden bins at the entrance. But Reuben insisted, and when the meal came she had to admit it was delicious. She didn’t ask what was in the bowl of rice they were sharing, though, and she noticed he didn’t, either.

It was getting dark by the time they finished dinner. Grace said they should go north and see if they could find Mark Wing’s house, but Reuben said Jackson Street was too far away. She argued with him, more from habit than conviction, but gave in when he pointed out that they wouldn’t know Wing’s house if they saw it, and it wasn’t likely he’d have his name on the door.

They were walking through a particularly unsavory neighborhood near St. Mary’s Square; in the gathering twilight, the character of the streets and narrow houses changed, seemed to grow subtly more menacing. In a dark doorway, a woman’s form materialized; Grace caught a quick glimpse of her young, pretty face before she faded back into the shadows and disappeared. A lady of the evening, no doubt. Reuben had told her St. Mary’s Alley was one of the places where whores congregated after dark. Just then they passed a ramshackle building, with one brightly lit window on the ground floor. Behind the window—Grace blinked hard and looked again, to make sure—a woman sat, naked to the waist, smiling woodenly at passersby. Reuben was looking the other way; he went three steps by himself before noticing Grace wasn’t beside him. She’d stopped in her tracks to gape.

“Did you see that? Did you see it?” she sputtered, letting him take her arm and drag her away. “That girl—did you see her?”

“I saw her.”

“She was just
sitting
there—naked as a jaybird!”

“Come on, Gus.”

She craned her neck for one last glimpse. “What did the sign say? Did you see the sign Under the window?”

“I saw it.”

“What did it say?”

“How would I know? It was in Chinese.”

Something in his voice convinced her he knew exactly what the sign said. “But the money was in English,” she insisted. “Three amounts—one dollar, two dollars, and ten dollars. What was it?” He kept shaking his head until she pulled on his arm. “Come on, Reuben, tell me. You know, I can tell. What were the amounts for?”

“Why do you want to know so much?”

“I just do. I’m curious. Come on, tell me.”

He looked up at the sky and heaved a put-upon sigh. “I
think
—and I’m only guessing, of course—that for a dollar, the customer gets to fondle one of the lady’s … charms.”

“In the
window!”

He nodded; his face was grim because he was trying not to smile. “And for—”

“Never mind, I can work the rest out for myself.” For two dollars, the customer could fondle both “charms,” no doubt, and for ten, he got the most intimate favor of all. She wondered how exactly the sign expressed the latter, but at the same time she was glad Reuben couldn’t tell her. Or could he? Maybe he knew everything about it because he visited girls like that all the time. A little fire, hot and unpleasant, flared up in her at the thought. It almost felt like jealousy—but, of course, it couldn’t be.

Besides, she couldn’t imagine Reuben having to pay a woman to have sex with him—even though some men, she’d heard, liked it better that way. But Reuben … well, he was too good-looking, for one thing; and for another, he was such an accomplished confidence man, she wouldn’t put it past him to figure out some way to make women pay to sleep with
him.

“Let’s go home, Grace.”

“I’m not ready to go yet,” she said perversely. “I want to go to an opium den.”

“You
what?”

“I want to see one.”

“What the hell for?”

“Because I never have before. I’ve read about them, and now I want to see one, and this is probably my only chance. Have you ever seen one?” He gave a reluctant nod. “Why did you go?”

He shrugged. “Curiosity.”

“There you are. Take me to one, Reuben.”

“Out of the question.”

“Why? You said it wasn’t dangerous, not even at night.” She argued with him until he gave in. Jubilant, she clutched his arm and started walking. “I wish we had a gun, just in case. You don’t have one with you, do you?”