Crooked Hearts (40 page)

“And then what? He wants you in his
house,
Gus. Even if it’s not a real marriage, how are you going to get out? And when does the charade end, before or after the honeymoon?”

“I’m working on that.”

“Oh, great.”

“Well, what do you want from me? I just thought it up five minutes ago! Don’t worry,” she repeated more calmly, “Henry will think of something.”

“Wing’s not going to hand over the drug money until
after
the ceremony,” he reminded her, “and you can’t touch your hundred thousand dollar dowry until you’re Mrs. Wing. And after that, I’m supposed to just walk away and never see you again.”

“Would you care?” she couldn’t resist asking.

“Shit,” he muttered, suddenly fascinated by the wet rings his glass made on the table.

“Well.” She eked out a grim smile. “That’s not quite the answer I was hoping for.”

“Yes, I’d care.” He kept his eyes on the glass rings. He opened his mouth and closed it. “I’d care,” he repeated.

She guessed that was all she was going to get out of him. “Good,” she said softly, and blushed, chagrined because of the words she’d secretly been longing for him to say.

Wing came back, and sat down without being asked.

Reuben said, “Okay. I’ll play hostage at your house till Friday.”

“On one condition,” Grace specified, trying to sound casual. “You have to promise not to hurt him. If he’s got black eyes or he’s bleeding from a hatchet wound when I get there for the wedding, the deal’s off. Agreed?”

Wing bowed again. “Just so. Not a hair on his head will be harmed.” Her hand was resting on the table. He snatched it up before she could react, and kissed it.

“This is so sudden,” she managed weakly.

They stood up.

“Until Friday,” Wing said lovingly. “My man will see to a conveyance for you. Where do you live?”

“I’m not telling you, and I’ll see to my own conveyance. If you send messages to me in care of the Lombard Street Western Union, I’ll get them.”

“Augustine—you don’t trust me?”

She didn’t answer. She tried hard to bury her revulsion and look at him speculatively, as she might look at any man who purported to offer wealth and security for life in exchange for her so-called favors.

It worked. He smiled his spooky smile at her before saying, “Mr. Ssmith? Shall we go?”

She couldn’t read Reuben’s expression. All at once the whole scheme struck her as insane and perverted. She lost her nerve.

Maybe he saw it, maybe not; but to cut off her inarticulate protest, Reuben abruptly grabbed her by the shoulders, jerked her to him, and kissed her on the mouth. Their teeth clashed; the kiss was painful, not pleasurable. But she got to feel his body against hers and hold onto the hard muscles in his arms, and for that too-brief moment he was solid and real, and she was immeasurably comforted.

Then he let her go, grinning his cocky grin. “So long, Gus, it’s been fun. See you in church,” he said with a wink.

Wing looked murderous. Ignoring the danger, Reuben put a loose, heavy arm around his shoulders, turning him. “So, Mark, what’s to do at your house? You don’t play poker, do you? Is your cook any good? I’m starved, by the way. Say, do you know any nice girls? I’m really …”

The rest was lost as the door to the Red Duck closed behind them.

20

In olden times, sacrifices were made at the altar—a custom which is still continued.

—Helen Rowland

T
HE
G
ODFATHER’S IDEA OF
hospitality was to keep Reuben locked in his room, feed him well, and send him a whore every night. He welcomed the whores; at least they talked to him and kept him apprised of world events (the world consisting of two connecting buildings on Jackson Street), but for the rest, he might as well have been in solitary confinement. He hated it, and complained loudly and often, for all the good it did him, to the impassive hatchet son on the other side of the door. With cold, contemptuous courtesy, the guard would listen to his complaints, bow, close the door in his face, and relock it. Reuben might’ve pressed the issue harder if not for the unsheathed bowie knife in the guard’s belt.

What he hated most about his imprisonment was all the time it gave him to contemplate how completely and spectacularly he’d botched this swindle. Manfully resisting the temptation to shuffle all the blame onto Henry, whose brainchild it had been, he had hours to own up to the truth that he’d behaved exactly like one of his own victims by letting greed cloud his judgment. “A mental thimble trick,” he’d called it. “He won’t see the one-time dodge going on right under his nose.” How embarrassing. A clearer case of wishful thinking motivated by avarice and revenge he’d never seen.

On the third night of his captivity, a Thursday night, he sat up in bed and stubbed out his second-to-last cheroot. His room was large and lush, with a peculiar mix of Oriental and Occidental furnishings—Venetian blinds on the windows and a dragon frieze below the plaster cornice; a homey hooked rug on the floor and painted storks and water lilies on the ceiling. Books and magazines were plentiful, but he was sick of reading. The clock on the mantel struck midnight. The house was finally quiet.

Out of the debacle, he could discern only one good thing, that Grace was out of it and at least temporarily free of Wing’s clutches. But she was coming back, because she had some half-baked plan that would save the day if it worked and get them all killed if it didn’t. But what the hell
was
the plan? The wedding was definitely on; he knew that much because Wing had paid a visit to his opulent prison cell this evening to tell him the opium transfer had gone off without a hitch this afternoon, and the blessed nuptials would commence tomorrow in the courtyard, weather permitting, at eleven
A.M.

For two days, from his third-floor window, Reuben had had a good view of the preparations going on below, the cleaning, sweeping, and whitewashing, the extravagant decorating with potted trees, banks of flowers, hanging lanterns, tinsel, streamers, wreaths, and on and on. The colorful spectacle depressed the hell out of him. Henry was going to be the priest, and Wing had relented enough to allow one wedding guest: Doc Slaughter. What Reuben couldn’t figure out was the mechanics of the getaway, the “outlet,” in bunco lingo, after the ceremony was over. How were they going to escape with their skins still on, much less a hundred thousand dollars in their pockets? Granted he’d done a lousy amateur’s job of helping to plot the first scheme; it still drove him crazy that he had to cool his heels while Grace and Henry and Doc plotted the second one.

Lying in his arms that last night at the Claymore, Grace had made a shame-faced confession. The other thing she had against the scheme was that even if it succeeded, all Wing would lose was money, which he could easily afford. It wasn’t very Christian of her, but she couldn’t help it: she wanted something bad to happen to him.

At the time, he’d sympathized with the sentiment, but not enough to consider altering the plan they’d set in motion to accommodate it. But something had happened since then to change his mind.

The prostitute Wing had sent him tonight and last night was Toy Gun, the plain-faced little girl Reuben had terrorized with the derringer in the House of Celestial Peace and Fulfillment. Tonight, over a peculiar card game she’d taught him called foo-foo, she’d told him about her life in the brothel—not much, since she was still shy and distrustful, but enough to chill him. Her poor but reasonably happy childhood had been cut off abruptly at the age of fourteen when her parents had sold her to slavers in Hong Kong for two hundred dollars. But she’d sold on the barracoon for two thousand, she bragged with pathetic pride, and she’d been one of Kai Yee’s singsong girls ever since. How did she like her new life? he’d asked, and she’d shrugged her small shoulders. Was she ever mistreated? Oh, no. No one beat her? Oh, no. No? Well, sometimes, but only when she was bad. When was that? Oh, when she was lazy, when she didn’t please a customer, when she wasn’t respectful enough to her masters. Did Kai Yee ever beat her? She wouldn’t answer that; she’d paled and hidden her face, but not before he’d seen the stark fear in her eyes. She was tiny, demure, hardly bigger than a child; the thought of someone raising a hand against her—or a belt, or a whip—made him feel sick.

Would she leave if she could? he’d asked her. The adult stoicism in her little-girl face was heartbreaking. “Never go.” But if she
could!
“Never get away. Never.” She told him the story of Quee Ho, a sixteen-year-old singsong girl who had tried to run away from the house last year. Wing’s highbinders found her and beat her to death—accidentally, thereby bringing down the Godfather’s wrath on their own heads for destroying valuable property. Toy Gun knew other stories, of girls in other brothels who’d had their feet cut off for trying to escape, or their tongues cut out for telling lies. She’d never heard of anyone who’d successfully gotten away. “Never leave,” she repeated stolidly. “Never.”

Tonight, when it was time for her to go—Wing’s generosity didn’t extend to letting a working girl stay with a non-paying customer for longer than a few hours—she’d begged Reuben not to tell anyone that she hadn’t “pleased” him, that all they’d done was play cards. Why, he asked, because she’d be punished for it? She wouldn’t answer. “Don’t tell, okay?” she repeated, anxious. He gave her all the money he had, which wasn’t much, and said okay.

He was in sympathy with Grace now. He very much wanted something bad to happen to the Godfather.

He started again on his familiar pacing route—bed to window, window to door, door to bed. It reminded him of Grace pacing in the hotel room the day before the meeting at the Red Duck, glaring at him and Henry, saying, “Well,
somebody’s
got to worry about all the things that might go wrong!” The shoe was on the other foot tonight. She had a plan by now—she’d better have a plan—but what if Wing saw through it as easily as he had the last one? What if he didn’t believe Henry was a priest? What if he called the wedding off, forcibly evicted everybody but Grace, and had his way with her? He was already more than a little deranged; what if he went completely around the bend, killed everybody but Grace, and had his way with her?

Reuben stopped at the window in mid-circuit. No fog tonight. The courtyard below was dark and quiet, and empty except for the hatchet man on duty at the street door; from here it looked like his old pal, In Re. Only a few windows in the brothel were still lit, and whatever was going on behind them was going on silently. In the dark stillness, Reuben accidentally let his guard down. Just for a second he saw clearly the lurid picture his mind had been battling for two days—the picture of the Godfather bending over Grace on a bed. He saw his silk robes and white, slithery hair; smelled the sweet reek of opium; heard the soft slide of sallow skin over white. If Wing got his hands on her again, she’d be scared, no matter how many drugs the bastard gave her, how much dope he made her smoke.

Snarling, Reuben picked up a ceramic vase—priceless, he hoped—and flung it at the door, where it smashed to bits with a loud, satisfying crash. Immediately the key turned in the lock and the door swung open. Reuben charged the shocked guard, who took one look at his face, jumped back, slammed the door, and locked it as fast as he could. Reuben kicked at the door until his toes ached, then limped back to the bed and set a match to his last cigar.

Wing was a fiend, and he would put his hands on Grace over Reuben’s dead body. His
dead body.
It was terrifying to realize that finally, at last, there was someone in the world he cared about more than himself. It seemed impossible; he’d have denied it, laughed at it, if the circumstances hadn’t gotten so dire that the truth was staring him in the face. But there it was. And even though it was terrifying, it was also exhilarating; wonderful, really, in a horrible kind of way. He lay on his back and blew two perfect smoke rings, wishing Grace was lying beside him so he could tell her the news. Painful, intense longing gripped him; he needed her now, right now, not just to touch her but to tell her what he was thinking.

But would he? If he did, it would be for the first time ever. Why was it so hard to say out loud the things he was feeling? Why couldn’t he even imagine himself saying to her, “Grace, I’m in love with you”? To say to her straight out, “I love your toughness, and how smart you are, the way you make me laugh. I never knew a woman with so much courage and guts. You’re so damn beautiful, sometimes it hurts to look at you, and when we make love I feel like I’ve got a soul. A
soul,
Gus”—How could he say those words to her? Even thinking them, lying here
thinking
them, was making his face turn red, he could feel it.

The last night at Willow Pond, before they’d all packed up and come to San Francisco, Ah You had given him a piece of advice. They’d met under somewhat awkward circumstances—in the dark hallway at dawn, as Reuben was sneaking back to his room from Grace’s. Ah You had looked like a convict in a black and white striped nightshirt.

“You know story about two stars, Mira and Hamel?” he’d asked without preamble. Used to his roundabout-parable style by now, Reuben had simply said no and waited. “They live in sky, Mira a fisherwoman, Hamel a cowboy. Fall in love, all happy, till Hamel quit doing cowboy duties and make God of Sky mad. God of Sky make Hamel mute for punishment.” Reuben yawned without covering his mouth, hoping to speed things along. “Now along come handsome fisherman name Didra, fall in love with Mira. All day, Didra say love words to Mira while poor Hamel watch, can’t talk. Mira give Didra big carp for present, go off together, love-love. Too late, Hamel make big scratch in sky with horseshoe, write, I LOVE MIRA. Too late—Mira already go. Too late. Sad, sad.”

The main thing that had bothered Reuben about Ah You’s tale was its lack of subtlety. He’d never known the pesky Chinaman to be so damn literal with his unsolicited hogwash. The other thing that had bothered him was how the hell Ah You could know so much about his private business, stuff he didn’t even know himself, or not for certain.