The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (42 page)

Zhu
tries her best to calm the terror in her heart. The t-port has gone wrong. What
else she can conclude? That’s why the LISA techs shut t-porting down. Too many
mistakes. World changing mistakes. Spacetime changing mistakes. The t-port has
gone terribly wrong, and she’s on her own in the past.

That
a Chinese girl has shown up at Jessie’s Morton Alley cribs sends a shiver of
hope into her heart. On the lam from the tongs? Wing Sing? Oh, please, let it
be her! Now
this
is something she’s supposed to do something about for
the Gilded Age Project.

Zhu
takes her time fastening her button boots, slipping her mollie knife into one
boot, while Jessie gulps brandy and fumes. Then she’s ready. They clatter down
the stairs and out the door to the street. Jessie’s rockaway and pair are
stabled far away in Cow Hollow. No cabs are in sight amid the vendors’ wagons
at this early hour. They stand, irresolute, at the stoop of 263 Dupont Avenue
while the saloons, bathhouses, and gambling joints across the street eject the
last of the deadbeats and freshen things up for new customers seeking relief in
the morning.

“Hey,
it’s getting light, Jessie, let’s just walk downtown. It’s not too far, right?”

“Oh,
missy.” Jessie grimaces, holding her side. “I don’t know if I can.”

Zhu
grimaces, too, to see her. Jessie’s got some kind of serious medical problem,
that’s what Muse says. But Zhu doesn’t need Muse to tell her what’s obvious.
Kidney disease, cirrhosis of the liver, possibly cancer in an advanced stage. But
what can Zhu do for the Queen of the Underworld? Jessie Malone is no more a
part of the Gilded Age Project than Daniel J. Watkins. Jessie is just a local,
an inhabitant of this spacetime. Zhu isn’t supposed to trouble herself about
Jessie. Why should she bother?

Well.
Because she, Zhu Wong, is a Daughter of Compassion, that’s why. Because she’s a
devotee of Kuan Yin, the protector of women. Because if she ever sees Sally
Chou again, she can say she didn’t fail the Cause in her day or in Jessie’s day.
She digs through her feedbag purse, finds the little bottle marked “Montgomery
Ward Quinine Pills,” shakes out a neurobic. She breaks the capsule in front of
Jessie’s nose.

“Sniff,”
she says. Tenet Three be damned.

“Oh
no, I don’t take the cocaine,” Jessie objects. “I keep telling Mr. Watkins.”

“This
isn’t cocaine, it’s a neurobic.”

“A
neurobic. Like what you gave Mr. Watkins after I picked you two up, brawling with
them thugs in the street?”

“Exactly.
Sniff! Quickly!”

Jessie
sniffs, and her grimace of pain instantly transforms into something more
tranquil. She says suspiciously—as well she should—“What is this, missy?”

“Something
good from the future. Do you believe me?”

“Sure
and why not?”

Zhu
smiles. Daniel calls her a lunatic and loses no chance to challenge her
whenever she admits her true nature and origin. But Jessie mostly accepts her
claims with a trusting forthrightness, the way she trusts Madame De Cassin’s
spiritualism. Zhu often wishes she could show more to Jessie, using Muse’s
holoid capabilities. Of all people, Jessie would appreciate seeing visions from
a spirit. Maybe she would stop drinking champagne for breakfast. But Muse will
only issue advice and project spectacular holoids to Donaldina Cameron, not to
Jessie or to Daniel. What a shame.

“Don’t
dawdle, missy,” Jessie commands in her usual bossy way. “You said walk. Let’s
get a move on.”

They
stride down Dupont Avenue to Union Square, turn down a short, narrow alley
beginning at Stockton and ending at Kearny. The waking downtown streets are
softly lit with rosy dawn light, but Morton Alley is brightly lit with a garish
false dawn. Red lights shine over every door in flagrant disregard of the new ordinance.
Union Square and the surrounding streets are quiet and empty, save for the sleepy-eyed
tradesmen with their horses and wagons, but Morton Alley seethes with loud and
frenetic humanity.

Alphanumerics
flash in Zhu’s peripheral vision as Muse opens a file. “Beyond the time of this
Now,” Muse whispers in subaudio, “after the First Great Quake destroys most of
the city, Morton Alley will be rebuilt and renamed. There will be jewelry shops
and boutiques, art galleries and posh cafés. They’ll call it Maiden Lane and no
one will remember the ‘maidens’ you see here now.”

Zhu
gapes at a hellish scene. Naked maidens lean out from the casement windows, shouting
prices, trilling like creatures in heat, describing in detail certain acts they
can be hired to perform, and belittling the anatomy, wealth, and intelligence
of the mob of men below their windows. The alley is thronged with drunken men
who shout back at the maidens, at the door maids, at the bouncers, at each
other. Men stagger from crib to crib, peer in the barred windows at the
occupants as though viewing animals in a zoo, shout approval or disapproval,
pinch flesh when they can reach it. Two fellows reel by locked in a violent
embrace, their faces bloodied by several rounds of fisticuffs.

“Don’t
worry,” Jessie shouts in Zhu’s ear, “the bulls won’t bother no one here unless
there’s a shooting.”

Unlike
the Parisian Mansion, where Jessie’s girls are blond or red-haired and
well-endowed, these women are of all different shapes, sizes, and races. Zhu
spies every color of humanity here—ivory white, golden yellow, fawn brown,
ebony black. She’s oddly reminded of pirates of the high nineteeth-century seas,
their captains equal opportunity employers welcoming Oriental, Hispanic, white,
and black as long as the crewman is sufficiently qualified with seamanship,
swordsmanship, avarice, and bloodthirstiness.

But
as she and Jessie press through the crowd and draw nearer to the windows, Zhu
sees their faces. Despite their variegated skin colors, hair colors, and eye colors,
their features fine or bold, their bodies robust or frail, these women share
one thing in common—a look of deep despair behind the bawdy façade. A look born
of the cruel grip of degradation. Cast over all of them is the patina of
poverty, makeup plastered over the taint of disease.

A
bouncer shouts like a carnival barker at the door leading up to a row of cribs
called, according to the sign overhead, The Cow Yard. “Ten cents touch a titty,
fifteen cents two titties, twenty-five cents plow a Mexican, fifty cents a Chink,
Jap, or darkie, seventy-five cents a Frenchie, a dollar for an American beauty,
all white meat.”

Jessie
seizes Zhu’s elbow, drags her onward. “My cribs is down the block.”

“Damn
it, Jessie, how can you keep an establishment in this hellhole?”

“The
biz is the biz, why can’t you ever get that straight?”

“But,
Jessie.” Zhu calculates. The girls at the Parisian Mansion earn five dollars a
gentleman, sometimes more. “How can you clear a profit with a fee structure
like that?”

Jessie
grins. “Now you’re thinking like a madam. Each of my Morton Alley gals clears
eighty, maybe a hundred a night.”

“Eighty,
maybe a hundred dollars?”

“Johns.
Johns, missy. The Red Rooster has a reputation for the prettiest girls on this
alley. A port of call all its own. This way.”

And Zhu
thought she’d seen the worst the Gilded Age had in store for women. She hadn’t.
Her heart clenches with rage and pity, and her mind immediately turns to
liberation, to assistance for these imprisoned ‘maidens’ forced to have sex eighty,
maybe a hundred times a day just to earn their keep. Tenet Three be damned, she
thinks for the thousandth time. But what can she do, even if she had
authorization from the project directors? What can she do?

Jessie
leads her to the Red Rooster, also known among the denizens of Morton Alley by
the bird’s more common name. The Rooster is housed in a ramshackle commercial
building so old and so weathered, Zhu is hard put to call it Stick Victorian.
Jessie slaps, shoves, and punches rowdies out of her way, pulling Zhu through
the door of her nefarious lair.

“Ber-THA!”
Jessie summons the door maid, a black woman of tremendous height and girth. Not
only is she brawny from years of hard physical labor, Bertha in her position as
the door maid has eaten and drunk heartily. She surveys Zhu with eyes of black
ice, a dour mouth.

“She
the chit aksin’ where that hunnert went?” Bertha means an unaccountable monthly
shortfall Zhu discovered in the Rooster’s books. The door maid takes a cover
charge of twenty-five cents from each john before he makes his choice; she
takes the balance when he leaves. The bouncer also tabulates the number of
johns for every twelve-hour period by logging in each visit to each maiden. The
system is meant to keep tabs on the maiden, how much traffic she attracts. Zhu
pointed out to Jessie that the system also serves as a cross-check on the door
maid and other staffers. Bertha was Zhu’s number one suspect. But door maids as
big and mean as Bertha are not that easy to find.

“Don’t
worry your pretty little head about it, Bertha,” Jessie says now and barges in.

“Why
doncha mind yer own business?” Bertha snaps at Zhu, the unmistakable smarm of
guilt in her icy eyes.

Before
Zhu can protest that she was just doing her job, Jessie ushers her into a hallway
awash in red light. From a plain wood plank that functions as a bar, a wiry old
man sells shots of whiskey and gin. Zhu notices a stove, a bubbling cauldron of
water. Two maids scoop hot water into basins and hurry down the hall, doling
out water as each john finishes his business. More men, more barred windows,
more cribs, more women leaning out, haranguing whoever stands there gawking at
them. A bouncer oversees the mob inside, announcing the fee scale in a loud
monotone.

A
drunken girl slumps over the ledge of her window. Slovenly blond hair, floppy
breasts and arms, bruises dappling her plump neck.

“Li’l
Lucy!” Zhu cries and hurries over. Columns of figures in a ledger, that’s all
the Red Rooster had been to Zhu. Not anymore. She peers in at the crib, a
cubicle not much larger than a clothes closet. Against the back wall is a cot
covered with a slick red cloth, a washbasin for the hot water, and a bottle of
carbolic acid for douching. A framed placard on the wall over the cot reads
“Li’l Lucy” romantically rendered in daisies.

“’Lo,
Miss Zhu.” Li’l Lucy grips the window with both hands, holding herself up. The
ledge is padded with more of the slick red cloth. “Like my workshop?”

Zhu
runs a finger over the cloth. “Oilcloth?”

“Yeah,
on the cot, too. The johns don’t never take their clothes off or their boots.
Them’s the rules. So the mud an’ all? I can wipe it right off. See?” Li’l Lucy
demonstrates with a stained rag she pulls out from under the cot.

Jessie
looms behind Zhu and shoulders past her. “You’re jagged again, Li’l Lucy.” She
seizes Li’l Lucy’s face, turns her chin back and forth. “You’re smokin’ hop,
too, ain’t ya?”

“No,
Miss Malone, I would never. . . .”

“Yeah,
you are, I can see it in your eyes.”

Li’l
Lucy’s blue eyes are all dark pupil, the flesh around them dark, too, and
mottled as if she has two black eyes. Zhu swallows hard, then glimpses blood
dappled down Li’l Lucy’s arm. “Jessie, what’s this? She’s got blood on her
arm.”

Jessie
waves a maid over. To Li’l Lucy, “The creep come in here again?”

Li’l
Lucy nods. Jessie lets the maid into the crib with a key from the outside, and
the maid wipes Li’l Lucy down with hot water and a rag.

“’s
okay, Miss Zhu,” Li’l Lucy says, smiling at Zhu’s look of horror. “Some
gentleman always come here with a chicken, a live chicken. He likes to cut its
head off after he spouts hisself off and spray the blood all around. He’s what
we call a creep.”

“Let’s
go, missy.” Jessie takes Zhu’s arm and drags her down the hall.

“You
take care of yourself, Li’l Lucy,” Zhu calls to her, feeling helpless and
outraged.

Li’l
Lucy has two years left on her contract. “Oh, I ain’t long for this world, Miss
Zhu. Don’t you worry about me, ‘s okay.”

“How
can you do this to her?” Zhu shouts at Jessie. “She was your girl at the Mansion.”

“The
biz is the biz. She got the pox, you know that.” Jessie swipes a shot of gin
from a maid’s tray, knocks it back. “Where’s the new girl?”

“Number
forty-two,” the maid says, scurrying away, fear of the Queen of the Underworld
plain on her face. “She got her boyfriend with her.”

“Does
she, now.” Jessie storms to the crib, Zhu following reluctantly. She doesn’t
want to stay in this hellish place one minute longer. Jessie unlocks the door
and strides inside, Zhu dogging her heels.

The
new girl turns. Round face, golden skin, her cheekbones deeper. Her dark eyes
rimmed in red, her black hair unraveling from its queue. The apple-green silk
is crinkled, the embroidery unraveling, too, the fabric ruined by a scrubbing
in hot water and soap. Her hands are raw, the knuckles red, perhaps skinned by
a washboard or a brush. She wears the same straw sandals over big knobby toes,
her feet bare.

“Wing
Sing!” Zhu cries. The girl’s feet are as big and broad as paddles. But is it
really her? “Wing Sing, what are you doing here?”