The Gilded Age Part 36

Jessie yells at the sailors, "Do something, ya deadbeats! You gonna let them crimps shanghai an honest gentleman?"

Someone seizes Zhu, and she whirls and strikes. She gasps at the sharp sting of a knife cutting the skin of her arm.

"No one cross Chee Song Tong," the eyepatch says. "No woman cross me, Jade Eyes."

"I never crossed you."

"You steal from us. You steal from me."

"Then summon a policeman. Have me arrested."

"This our law, Jade Eyes." He lunges at her with the knife.

Daniel yells, seizes a shard of gla.s.s from the shattered tumbler, swings it at Harvey's thugs. They descend on him, fists flying, the awful thud of skin on skin. Daniel falls into the filthy sawdust, arms and legs flailing. Two thugs drag him by his ankles to the trapdoor. Harvey holds up a hypodermic needle, a narcotic spurting from its gleaming tip.

Jessie screams, "No, no, no, no!"

Zhu leaps at the eyepatch, infuriated, heedless of his knife, and whips the side of her hand across his throat. He staggers, and she seizes a gun-a Smith and Wesson revolver-right out of his waistband. She fires off two rounds, aiming wildly. Harvey disappears like a counterfeit coin. The thugs drop Daniel's legs and slink away in the smoke and confusion.

Jessie yanks Daniel to his feet, slings his arm over her shoulder. The trapdoor flips shut, a grave denied its corpse.

The eyepatch stares at Zhu, choking from her blow, his face a mask of malice. But, wait. An inexplicable look of betrayal pierces that mask, some connection Zhu didn't know they shared. Two Chinese struggling to survive in San Francisco, maybe? We are all strangers in Gold Mountain.

Ah, forget it. Forget it! He's a G.o.dd.a.m.n gangster.

She trains the Smith and Wesson on him, gripping the gun in both hands. He looks around, determined to satisfy Zhu's debt, and seizes Wing Sing, who screams and staggers, awkward in her Western dress and fashion boots. He wrestles her in front of him, a human shield. Zhu aims for his feet-she's an excellent shot after Changchi-and squeezes the trigger. If she wounds him, maybe he'll lose his hold on Wing Sing. Click! And nothing happens. The gun needs reloading, and she has no ammunition. She flips the barrel into her palm and leaps toward him, intent on inflicting a serious dent in his ugly skull with the grip.

The eyepatch whips the knife and cuts Wing Sing's throat, ear to ear. She shrieks, a terrible gurgling cry, and blood sprays all over the gray silk dress. The eyepatch shoves her away, and Wing Sing falls to her hands and knees, then collapses facedown on the floor.

Police whistles shriek, and the crowd stampedes for the swinging doors, pushing and shoving. The eyepatch joins the exodus, vanishing from Zhu's sight. She flings the Smith and Wesson into the sawdust, kneels over Wing Sing, gently turns the girl over, and pulls out her mollie knife.

But it's too late to heal such a mortal wound. Wing Sing's life hemorrhages away.

"I'm sorry, Wing Sing," Zhu whispers, sick to her soul, and presses the girl's gla.s.sy eyes shut with gentle fingertips. "I'm so very sorry."

Jessie and Daniel yank her to her feet, pull her out through the swinging doors to the street.

"Ain't nothin' you can do for her now, missy," Jessie says.

"You got that right," Zhu whispers.

"Let's scram outta this joint before the bulls raise holy h.e.l.l."

"Does this mean you're not leaving me for the future?" Daniel says, smiling in spite of his his split lip and black eye. He plants a bloodstained kiss on her cheek. "I'm so glad, my angel. You know how much I adore you."

Muse whispers, "Hurry."

March 17, 1896 Saint Patrick's Day

13.

Woodward's Dancing Bears On her way back from the Snake Pharmacy with a white paper packet of powdered willow bark, Zhu hears Old Father Elphich announcing the latest hot talk as he tends to his newsstand on Market Street. He holds aloft a copy of the Examiner, displaying the headlines in a hand clawed by arthritis, and proclaims-- TONG WARS RAGE IN CHINATOWN.

HATCH MEN HACK AS COPS WATCH.

"Hey, newsboy, gimme a Call," shouts a rotund gentleman fairly bursting out of his chartreuse velvet waistcoat, emerald studs the size of dice winking on his cuffs. The gentlemen of San Francisco's Gilded Age call Old Father Elphich "newsboy" despite the fact that Old Father Elphich's chalk-white hair falls to his waist and he must be pushing seventy-five.

Zhu jostles her way to the newsstand amid gentlemen crashing together their steins of green-tinted beer, downing shots of green-tinted gin or whiskey the color of old copper infused with a liquid patina. Everyone in San Francisco is Irish on Saint Patrick's Day and, goodness knows, people need some cheer on this cold rainy spring day. Despite the morning drizzle, celebrants quaff their libations out on the sidewalk, hoping to sight a lucky rainbow in the bl.u.s.tery skies. The saloons along the c.o.c.ktail Route are serving up great steaming platters of cabbage and corned beef, pots of freshly ground mustard and horseradish, boiled potatoes and carrots, black loaves of rye bread, sweet pound cake laced with b.u.t.ter, tart San Joaquin strawberries with pale green whipped cream.

A parade careens down Market Street, the white horses, grays, and piebalds dyed various shades of green. Plenty of crepe paper shamrocks, steamers, and rosettes as bright as new gra.s.s. A tipsy bra.s.s band in kelly-green top hats pounds out "When Irish Eyes are Smilin'" surprisingly in tune, given their red-faced condition.

A gaggle of blond and red-haired Irish sporting ladies ride by in a rented phaeton with a gypsy top. Well oiled, rouged, and whiskeyed, they wave and cheer, kick up their legs revealing green garters, pull down their bodices to show the green lace along the tops of their corsets. One lady boasts a shiny emerald beauty spot on her abundant breast. Gentlemen cheer as they pa.s.s, and the proper ladies glare, scandalized. Someone will run off to have a word with the mayor's staff about such lewd public conduct, but that someone is likely to find the mayor's staff at the Irish ladies' sporting house tonight.

"Saint Patrick's Day," Muse whispers in her ear, "is generally observed in San Francisco despite the holiday's ethnic and religious origin because people intuitively want to celebrate the vernal equinox, the rebirth of life after winter, the joyful fertility of spring, the commencement of a new cycle of. . . ."

"Thank you, Muse, that will be all." Zhu cuts the monitor off. She's not feeling very joyful. And though she could call her miraculous escape on the night of Tong Yan Sun Neen a rebirth of sorts, the commencement of a new cycle, since that night she's been left with confusion, fear, a child on the way, and Daniel dying.

She buys an Examiner from Old Father Elphich, slips into the shelter of a flower stand in front of the Metropolitan Market, and scans the front-page article. There's the usual righteous rant against criminal activities in Tangrenbu, though the white community doesn't really give a d.a.m.n about the tongs and their nefarious enterprises except when bloodshed proves bad for the tourist trade. In 1896, Tangrenbu is a prime tourist attraction. The b.l.o.o.d.y skirmish-a man beheaded, another gutted-was apparently a dispute over a girl. A Chinese slave girl. Another pretty girl kidnapped, duped into a false marriage, or simply sold by her parents and smuggled into America through the coolie trade.

As usual, the press writes about the girl as if she's a criminal, too, and not the victim she most surely is.

"Wing Sing, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry," Zhu whispers. The grief, the guilt tug hard at her heart.

Alphanumerics scroll across her peripheral vision. "Listen well, Z. Wong. An anonymous Chinese woman in a Western-style gray silk dress got her throat cut in a Barbary Coast saloon on the night of Tong Yan Sun Neen." Muse recites these facts dispa.s.sionately and opens the file that Zhu has studied over and over. A collection of newspaper clippings and articles much like the inky paper she holds now in her hands. Muse highlights the relevant text. "She dies. She always dies. No one knows who or what she was. No one has ever known a thing about her except that she did not have bound feet. There was nothing you could do."

"My throat still aches, Muse."

Muse is silent.

"That sacrifice was supposed to have been mine."

"You've made other sacrifices. You'll make more."

She doesn't like the sound of that. "I survived the Closed Time Loop."

"Not quite. You survived that particular CTL, the Prime Probability that collapsed on the Chinese New Year." Muse is glum. "Permit me to remind you, we're still here. Still in this Now." Muse's tone is accusatory and, for the first time, Zhu considers the monitor's point of view. What will happen to the sentient Artificial Intelligence when she dies and is buried in an anonymous grave six hundred years before the monitor was manufactured? The steelyn ultrawire and nanochips won't disintegrate the way her physical brain and nerve cells will. Does Muse face everlasting imprisonment in a coffin buried under centuries of soil? Does Muse have any way of contacting its makers in the future? Any way of escape? Is Muse afraid? "You never made it to the rendezvous."

"No kidding."

A man whose blond muttonchops have been dyed a variegated green pours his green beer over the head of a swarthy, dark-eyed fellow. The men proceed to punch and wrestle, knocking over buckets of dyed green carnations. Green water pools on the macadam. A rowdy crowd gathers around, cheering them on, the mood turning tense with more violence.

Zhu backs away from the altercation. "No," she whispers, "I never made it to the rendezvous." What could she have done? A squad of the local bulls rounded up Zhu, Daniel, and Jessie on the street outside of Kelly's and hustled them down to the precinct station to file a statement while Harvey and his thugs, the eyepatch and his hatchet men faded like shadows into the night. The morgue's mournful wagon clattered by and collected Wing Sing's corpse, listing the girl as a Jane Doe. No identification, no immigration doc.u.ments, no next of kin. Well, that's the Barbary Coast. The n.o.b Hill swells clucked their tongues, mothers pleaded with their sons to stay away from that wicked place, and life in San Francisco went on.

When the precinct station finally released them at four in the morning, Jessie herded them into a cab and spirited Zhu and Daniel away to south o' the slot. There Jessie prevailed upon a distant cousin of hers working as the concierge in a seedy Tehama Street boardinghouse to put the couple up.

"Jar me, you two cannot come back to my house," Jessie declared as they fled in the dawn. "I run a cla.s.s joint."

"But we've done nothing wrong!" Zhu was furious, exhausted, and very scared.

"Harvey's thugs will come a-lookin' for the both of you at my place."

Of course Jessie was right, and Zhu hasn't seen her bedroom at 263 Dupont Street ever since. That night I knew I'd never return to my room. But is this the way things are supposed to be? She doesn't know.

Two beat cops confront the grappling men and separate them, escorting each in the opposite direction down Market Street. The baby in Zhu's belly flutters. She ducks out of the flower stand, finds a corner in the Metropolitan Market where she can rest on a wrought-iron bench.

"What will happen now, Muse? Has all of s.p.a.cetime become polluted? Have I unleashed another reality?"

"I don't know." Muse, honest for once. What a surprise.

"The aurelia is still an enigma, is it not?"

"That it is."

"And I'm a more reliable courier than the LISA techs bargained for because I know exactly what to do."

Muse pauses. "I beg to differ, Z. Wong. You haven't been listening to me. You are not the anonymous Chinese woman who gives the aurelia to Chiron in 1967."

Zhu fusses with the cuff of her sleeve, hoping the shock of the monitor's statement will pa.s.s quickly. "Of course I am. I must be. Who else could it be?" When Muse doesn't answer, she says the obvious. "I've got green eyes."

"No!" Muse is adamant. "The holoid was shot with modern equipment, not a remastering of ancient television footage shot in 1967. The Archivists would have certainly identified you at any age."

"Oh, wise up, Muse. Do you really think Chiron and the Inst.i.tute would have told me they were sending me into the past to die? That if Wing Sing didn't survive, I would have to take her place? Wasn't that their secret plan?"

"No, I would have been informed, Z. Wong. And I a.s.sure you, I was not."

She sure as h.e.l.l has no reason to trust the monitor, but allows that to pa.s.s for now. "Okay. But answer me this. What difference does it make under the resiliency principle?"

Muse is silent.

"Without Block or mouth swathe or neurobics, I'll look like an old woman at a hundred and one years old." She sighs. In her Now, she'd be in youthful middle age-and look it. "But I'll make it. Without a new contraceptive patch, who knows? Birth control pills haven't been invented. I may even have more children."

"No, no, no. You'd creating a new reality, Z. Wong. You would."

"Then I'm the only one, Muse, who can decide what to do."

Zhu cups her hand on her belly. Five months pregnant, that's what Jessie Malone says. She's always hungry but whenever she eats, her stomach squeezes against the baby, and then she can't eat. Of course, there's no way to tell her baby's gender. That technology won't be available for nearly another century.

She tunes out the costermongers and fishmongers and butchers and bakers and cheesemakers bellowing out their specials of the day to the pa.s.sing shoppers, opens her Examiner, and reads- A notorious hatchet man who wore a black eyepatch like a pirate on the high seas, was employed by the notorious Chee Song Tong, and was well known for his nefarious and vicious acts of murder, mayhem, and violence contracted for by substantial sums of gold, was among the casualties in the Bartlett Alley ma.s.sacre yesterday afternoon.

"The eyepatch," Zhu whispers. She grips her forehead, expels a breath. We are all strangers in Gold Mountain.

A shop clerk bends over her. "Are you all right, madame? May I get you something? Do you need a doctor?"

She looks up, sees the startle in his eyes at the sight of her features. She doesn't need to tell him to leave her alone. He's gone in a flash. She abandons her newspaper on the bench, heaves herself to her feet, and braces herself for the crowd on Market Street. Time to go home. Time to go to Daniel.

"Heads up, Z. Wong," Muse whispers as she heads down Fifth Street. "You need to worry about Harvey and his thugs."

Two bruisers circulate through the Saint Patrick's Day crowd, not partic.i.p.ating in the drunken revelry or gratuitous violence but watching, searching, checking out faces. Checking out the few Chinese slipping anonymously through the crowd. Checking out women.

Harvey's thugs? Maybe, maybe not, but every tough bird merits Zhu's attention. Since that terrible night, Harvey has circulated the word through the underworld that he's put a price on Daniel's head. Jessie heard the rumor from a john at Morton Alley, and Jessie's distant cousin has turned out to be a terrible gossip.

"You kids better move on," Jessie told Zhu. That was three weeks ago.

Zhu found a room at another boardinghouse south o' the slot while Daniel's lawyers pursued the foreclosure action against Harvey's poolroom. Dressed in her denim sahm, posing as Daniel's manservant wielding Daniel's power of attorney, Zhu has appeared and signed several pet.i.tions on Daniel's behalf, keeping both the foreclosure action and Harvey's vendetta alive. By now Harvey's spies know that she may dress as a Western lady, as a Chinese wh.o.r.e, or as a coolie. Harvey's spies have found out that she is Jade Eyes.

Harvey means to kill Daniel, all right, Zhu thinks, but Daniel may oblige Harvey by dying all on his own. He's going to die.

No!

Zhu can't abandon Daniel. She won't. And she won't let him die. If there's anything right she can do for the Gilded Age Project, it's got to be saving Daniel. And to h.e.l.l with the Tenets, trying to tell her she can't help an innocent man whom the project directors haven't given the nod to. She's here in this Now. She's got her own responsibilities. Ah, and what did Muse say? She creates this reality. However it turns out.

The shop clerk calls out at the corner of Market and Fifth. "Say, miss! I say, miss? You forgot your newspaper."

The two bruisers turn and crane their necks at her.

Zhu flees.

To south o' the slot where immigrants the world over newly arrived in San Francisco come to live, the people who sweep the streets and st.i.tch boots and scrub floors. Jessie's neighborhood is a glossier place, in spite of the saloons on every corner, a place rich with gold and silver coins tumbling carelessly in and out of every pocket. South o' the slot-south of Mission Street, that is, a stone's throw from Market Street and the fabulous Palace Hotel-reflects its own dingy economy. It's not Tangrenbu which, despite its colorful filth and occasional outbreak of the plague, attracts tourists' coins. Not North Beach or the Latin Quarter, which with their handsome swarthy people, thick red wines, odoriferous cheeses and fish, and bay views also attract the moneyed and the curious.

No, south o' the slot is just plain poor with no extra zest or exotic quality to attract anything other than penniless immigrants from Britain, Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Germany, France, Belgium, and people of those nationalities from everywhere else in America. Stick saloons, laundries, tiny grocery stores with wilting produce and day-old bread stand side by side with boardinghouses, warehouses, whiskey distilleries, and sugar refineries. The stink of tanneries and butcher's shops mingles with the bitter clean smell of hops and bleach. Saloons are as plentiful as in the tenderloin and along the c.o.c.ktail Route, but these are cheap beer halls or wine dumps where the "wine" is raw alcohol colored and flavored with cherry extract.

Zhu circles the boardinghouse twice, watching for signs of anyone following her. She finally darts in, climbs the stairs, and examines the three deadbolts she installed top, middle, and bottom. An old trick from the Daughters of Compa.s.sion compound. Thugs can't crowbar a door with deadbolts top to bottom without making a racket. You'll hear them first, get your gun, and step out onto the fire escape.

On the night of Tong Yan Sun Neen, Harvey's thugs beat Daniel badly. In that freezing dawn after Jessie helped them book the room at the Tehama Street boardinghouse, he slipped in and out of consciousness and cried out for morphine. Could Zhu refuse him? She herself had once lain like this, leaking blood, bruises aching, ready to die if it hadn't been for the black patch. She found his works in his jacket pocket-a smart bra.s.s Parke-Davis emergency kit custom-fitted with a hypodermic needle and vials of cocaine, morphine, atropine, and strychnine.

What every gentleman of the Gilded Age needs.

The atropine and strychnine she could use to keep his ticker pumping. The narcotics she hid in her feedbag purse. No matter much how he cried, she refused to give him morphine.

She refused him.

He went into fullblown withdrawal that morning. Nothing prepared her for the violence of his reaction. He went into shock and a condition resembling a severe case of dysentery, along with cardiac arrhythmia, infection of his needle tracks, and hemorrhaging in his nose. She was terrified he would have a stroke.

"Oh, Kuan Yin," Zhu prayed. "I'm not a doctor. This isn't a hospital. Please help me!"

She sent a messenger boy to Dupont Street, and Jessie came to the boardinghouse at four the next morning, bringing hot water in a steaming pot, clean sheets, blankets, and food. Mariah helped haul everything up the stairs and stood guard at the door, her expression stony.

"Sure and I once saw a bird as bad off as him," Jessie said. "At the Mansion, so do not be too ashamed of him. Fine gentlemen get themselves in a fix from time to time. They usually go take the water cure for the summer season up at San Rafael, bringin' their fancy doctors with 'em. Jar me," she sniffed indignantly, "if there ain't more dope fiends on Sn.o.b Hill than in all of Tangrenbu."

Muse searched the Archives. "Poor water quality, ma.s.sive problems with dysentery in the nineteenth century. Must be why morphine therapy is so popular in this Day."