The Girl with Ghost Eyes (12 page)

I stammered. This was going wrong, all wrong. “Mr. Wong, I—”

“Be silent,” he said.

Hong Xiaohao’s lips moved and he turned his shoulders so he faced the corner of the room. I followed his gaze.

A woman was standing in the corner, behind a table and chairs. She’d been so quiet and motionless that I hadn’t even noticed her. Facing the wall, she wore a red qipao dress with long sleeves. Leaning against the wall near her was a bamboo cane. It looked sturdy, solid. It was about five feet long.

It had been used to beat her.

So that’s how it was. In this place, where women under contract spread their legs for six bits, a woman who spoke out of turn would be punished with a caning.

Mr. Wong’s parrot cooed, and he murmured a gentle response.

I found myself angered, though I knew it was not the time for anger. I had no wish to be punished, to be reduced before these men.

I stared for a moment, uncertain. If I spoke at all, I would be violating a kind of unwritten rule here, and I might anger Mr. Wong. If I spoke I might be punished.

“Daoshi Xian Zhengying has been injured,” I blurted out.

Mr. Wong turned his face to me and I felt the weight of his gaze. Scrutinizing. Then he spoke. “You are the Daoshi’s daughter,” he said simply. I nodded.

He turned his body toward me. “I thought you wanted to be a contract girl,” he said. He shrugged. “It is no loss of face for my friend the Daoshi. Will he be all right?”

I relaxed a little, and bowed. “Yes, Mr. Wong. He is recuperating at Dr. Wei’s infirmary. Mr. Wong, Father wanted me to ask you about a man who recently came to Gold Mountain.” Father had asked no such thing of me, but the lie would hurt no one.

He raised an eyebrow. “Hundreds of immigrants come here every year.”

I bowed again. “Yes, Mr. Wong. This man has only one arm. His name is Liu Qiang.”

An expression crossed Mr. Wong’s face, like a cloud blown in front of the moon. He gave a gesture to his bodyguards. Hong Xiaohao and the older man strode out of the room, probably to wait outside. I heard the door swing shut and relaxed a little, out of the presence of the pistols.

Mr. Wong walked to the table in the far corner of the room, near where the contract girl was being disciplined. He sat down in a chair facing the wall and gestured for me to take the chair opposite. I sat, and he said, “Bring me a bottle of rice wine and a cup, whore.”

Blood rushed into my head. I gaped at him. It felt like a slap across my face. I began to tremble from emotion. It was shame and fear but anger was bubbling too, and I found my hands hardening to iron, my fingers shaping Sword Trees. But then the woman at the wall shot into motion and I realized he hadn’t been talking to me. She sped across the floor surprisingly fast for a woman with bound feet. I began to calm down, but then the other implications of his words sank in.

A bottle of rice wine and a cup. One cup. He would make the woman pour him a cup of rice wine, and he’d offer me none. Father had always been skilled at establishing his place in the social order. I was not.

If Mr. Wong had asked for two cups, and served me first, it would mean he was showing respect to a superior. If he’d served me second, he would have been addressing me as an equal who was a guest in his home. If he’d had two cups brought out and then made me serve myself, it would demonstrate that he considered me an underling.

A cup for himself and none for me meant one of two things. Either he saw me as a stranger who had come to his door begging for alms, or he saw me as an enemy. If he saw me as a beggar, he would drink the rice wine. If he saw me as an enemy, he would pour it out on the ground.

I was completely unnerved. I needed to find out more about Liu Qiang, and I needed to understand what Mr. Wong was planning to do with the corpses in the gold mines. But before he would tell me anything, he was going to insult me, and make me accept it.

I lowered my head. “Mr. Wong, sir, please will you tell me what you know about Liu Qiang?”

Mr. Wong began to speak, his voice deep and rumbling. “I will tell you in good time, girl,” he said. “Do you see this badge?”

I nodded, puzzled and frustrated. Here, in Mr. Wong’s place of business, the most powerful man in Chinatown was going to share information when he chose, if at all.

“This badge was given to me by the Governor of the State of California.” He touched it with his fingers, and pride gleamed in his eyes. The badge was silver, and the word
Sheriff
was engraved in it. “I united Chinatown. I made order. Men came to Gold Mountain, and I provided them with shelter, found them work, and offered them protection. People called me the Mayor of Chinatown back then. Back when I could walk my streets without bodyguards, without chainmail under my shirt.”

The woman in the red dress returned, carrying a tray with a bottle and a cup. I sat tense on the chair, waiting to learn whether he saw me as a stranger or an enemy. The woman filled his cup and placed it on the table, then stepped away, waiting for further instruction.

She was good at this, I realized. She had a skill for disappearing from men’s eyes. Subservience had taught her a kind of invisibility. In a different context, such vanishings could be deadly. It was a skill worth learning, I decided.

“Five years ago, a man came here. To this very room.” Mr. Wong sneered, recollecting. “He stood here in this room and asked for half.”

He paused. Mr. Wong was telling a story, I realized. He was waiting for me to ask the obvious. “Half?” I obliged.

“Half,” he repeated. “Half of Chinatown. And who was he? He was nobody. He was piss. I laughed in his face, and then some of my little brothers beat him.”

He picked up his cup and lifted it toward his mouth. It looked like he was about to drink from it, but he hesitated. “That man,” he said, and placed the cup back on the table, while a look of total abhorrence crossed his face. “That filth. Prancing around in his American clothes. What kind of man names himself after a
vegetable
?”

I tapped my feet under the table anxiously.

Mr. Wong held his cup in both hands, running a finger over the rim as he spoke. “Bok Choy,” he muttered darkly, and the name set Mr. Wong’s parrot into a commotion.

“Bok Choy! Bok Choy!” the bird mimicked. “Fuck his ancestors to the eighteenth generation!”

I gaped at the parrot. The bird had shown me the depth of Mr. Wong’s hatred, more than anything he could say. How many hours he must have spent in this room, discussing business with his 438s, cursing Bok Choy’s name so often that the parrot had learned his expressions. I turned back to face Mr. Wong.

“Within a year, my profits were down. It had taken me so many years to build the Ansheng tong, and so quickly it began to fail. My fantan tables were empty. Bok Choy and the Xie Liang tong took over gambling first. And he wanted the rest, he wanted it all now. A ship from China was robbed before we could unload our goods. Bok Choy stole our cargo, girls and opium, and I still had to pay for it.”

Hands shaking with rage, he put the cup back on the table. “He found a Christian minister—a minister!—and started him on a crusade against vice in Chinatown. Bok Choy tells him where to find my gambling halls and opium dens, and then the minister shows up with constables and they shut me down.”

“Why don’t you have his businesses shut down too?”

His gaze fell on me like a weight. “Because he only tells the minister about my smaller businesses. If I were to retaliate in any way, Bok Choy would have my bigger ones shut down.” He put his head in his hands, a helpless gesture. “And then one of his men and one of mine got into a fight, over something meaningless, like a woman. And the tongs went to war for five days.”

“I remember,” I said. For five days, hatchetmen ran through the streets, livid with vengeance. The tong war left a dozen men dead.

“Those were good men, my men. Do you know what I call the young men who work for me?”

“Little brothers,” I said, allowing him to tell his story as he saw fit. I still couldn’t tell what this had to do with Liu Qiang, but I had spent the years of my life among older men. They like to talk in stories.

“Little brothers,” he repeated.

Mr. Wong let out a heavy sigh.

“I have sent assassins, of course. Bok Choy can’t even shoot straight. Do you know what he does in a gunfight? He takes a .45-caliber pistol in each hand, and then he closes his eyes. With his eyes closed, he squats down and spins around, shooting at random. He could shoot his friends or his bodyguards by accident. He’s no warrior. My assassins should have killed him.” He looked down at the floor and fidgeted with his silver badge.

“He has their corpses brought here in the night. Here, to my restaurant. He leaves the corpses of my little brothers on my front step. My Daoshi makes sure their corpses are well treated, their names revered in the Hall of Ancestors.”

He clasped his hands together. “I have the best Daoshi in America working for me,” he said. “Fifteen years ago I brought him here from China. He was fleeing something, and he had his daughter.”

I sat alert, suddenly interested. I hadn’t come here today expecting to learn about my past. What did he mean, Father was fleeing something? This was something Father had never told me.

“The American officials wouldn’t let him in. Not with a daughter. It was the Chinese Exclusion Act. I sent him letters. Leave the girl behind, I said. Sell her, there’s always someone willing to buy a girl. But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t come here without her.”

I stared at him. My mouth was open in a perfect circle. What he was saying couldn’t be true. If it was true, it meant I had misunderstood my father for a lifetime. If it was true, it meant he valued me more than he’d ever led me to believe. I had spent my life wishing I could make him proud of me, and Mr. Wong was telling me that my father valued me all along.

“He wouldn’t leave me behind?” I asked in a tiny voice.

“He wouldn’t leave you,” Mr. Wong repeated. “So I had to bribe the officials to classify him as a merchant. It cost me a fortune. A fortune! It cost a fortune to bring the great Daoshi Xian Zhengying and his daughter to Chinatown.”

I sat there, stunned. Father always seemed so severe, so distant. And yet Mr. Wong was telling me that Father risked staying in China rather than leave me behind. It didn’t make sense at all. He had given his eye for me, but he had only done it to save face. What had he hoped to gain by refusing to leave me behind?

Mr. Wong picked up his cup of rice wine and took a sip. But it seemed casual, unthinking; did it mean he considered me no enemy? Or had he simply forgotten? I had no way to tell. I was full of hope and confusion, a mess of childish emotion, and utterly bewildered.

“All this I did for your father, and he would not do the one thing the Ansheng tong needed most. He would not summon evil spirits to kill Bok Choy.”

I felt suddenly cold. Horror washed over me as the words sank in. I pushed back my chair, ready to run, ready to fight. My pulses were racing. “You asked him to unleash monsters in Chinatown?” Outrage was plain in my voice.

Mr. Wong raised a hand to silence me. “For three years I asked this thing of him. For three years he refused. ‘It would go against the ideals of my lineage,’ he said. It took me a long time to accept his position. Daoshi Xian Zhengying honors his lineage, his ancestors. He is a man who does not compromise. I hope to honor my ancestors as he honors his.” Mr. Wong looked down and away. I felt my pulses begin to calm down.

“Some of my 438s did not feel the same way. They watched our businesses go under, they saw their glory extinguished, and they saw Bok Choy and his American ways gain in power. They have been saying I am too old. My ways are too Chinese, too old-fashioned, they say. There is one man in particular,” he said, and I saw pain in his eyes, “one in particular who disagrees with me.”

The pain made it clear to me. “Tom,” I said. Mr. Wong gave a slow, heavy nod.

“Tom said I should not tolerate your father’s insubordination. He said if your father refuses to summon monsters to kill Bok Choy, we should hire someone who will do as he’s asked.”

“Liu Qiang,” I said. My hand involuntarily went to touch the cuts on my stomach.

Mr. Wong gave a barely affirmative gesture, and continued. “My son and a number of his friends are acting outside my authority now. They issue commands in my name but I have not asked them to do as they’re doing. There is disharmony among the Ansheng tong. There are sworn brothers who follow my son and not me. I do not know how many. Others follow Tom’s commands, believing they came from me.”

I watched his face, weary and heavy. I could hardly imagine all the years he had spent building the Ansheng tong into what it was, both a surrogate family and a criminal empire. First he watched it lose power and status to the upstart Bok Choy, and now he was watching his organization fracture. How it must have broken his heart, and how much more it must have hurt him to know the man trying to overthrow him was his own son.

I looked at Mr. Wong, the great man of Chinatown, who had done so much for so many, including Father and me. He was lost in thought, and seemed alone. If I showed sympathy, I would cause him to lose face. I needed to take advantage of the moment.

“Will you tell me about the miners?” I asked.

“Miners?” he said, turning to me. He looked baffled.

“The corpses in the gold mine. I was told you had them exhumed to send their bones to China.”

“No,” he said, “I have ordered no such thing. It must be Tom’s doing. But what would Tom want with corpses?”

“I don’t know, Mr. Wong,” I said.

“Whore!” he said. The contract girl and I both jumped. He turned to her. “Why did you bring only one cup for rice wine?”

“I … it was my mistake, Mr. Wong,” she said. She fled to bring me a cup.

He waited for her to leave. Once the door was closed behind her, we were alone, and he looked at me with a gaze of centuries. “I will not help you fight my son, Xian Li-lin. If you need allies, go seek out the Xie Liang tong, and tell them Bok Choy is in danger,” he told me.