Bitter Spirits (14 page)

She glared at Winter, defiant and bitter. “I'll take the yellow.”

AS SOON AS AIDA SLID INTO THE BACKSEAT OF WINTER'S CAR, HE
rolled up the privacy window and lowered the shade.

“What's wrong?”

“Oh, gee, nothing at all. What would be wrong?”

Winter shifted, stretching his legs. He removed his hat, scratched his head. Put his hat back on. Took it off again.

Oh, he knew. Of
course
he knew.

“I mean, what could Sook-Yin and I have possibly talked about?” Aida said, crossing her legs. “The weather? Poetry? Politics? Oh, wait. I know. How about the fact that she's a prostitute, and you're her favorite customer?”

“Shit.”

“Yes, shit. That's what I thought, too, especially when she was going on about how she could make you smile—”

“Aida—”

“So there are others? This is routine for you?”

He groaned in angry frustration. “This is
not
routine. Sook-Yin was the only one.”

Was that worse or better? Aida honestly didn't know. “She did brag about how special she was and seemed to know you quite well. She even asked me if I was the ‘new wife,' because apparently there's an old wife that
nobody told me about
.”

Winter said nothing. Just stared ahead at the canvas shade as the car began rolling out of Ju's garage.

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

“She's dead,” he said without looking at her. “There's nothing to tell.”

Aida rocked her foot and opened the side shade to stare outside. “I asked you about the house and you growled at me,” she said in a much calmer voice than she thought she was capable of at that moment. “You could've told me. I told you things about me. I've told you secrets about my job—about the lancet. About my plans for the future. How many lovers I've had. I told you all these things, and you couldn't be bothered—”

“This is a business relationship. I am paying you to do a job.”

Her mouth fell open. “Then why was your hand up my skirt yesterday?”

“You attacked
me
!”

“I did not!”

He narrowed his eyes.

“Okay, maybe I did attack you a little bit,” she said in frustration. “But I'll tell you what. It's one or the other. Either you pay me and I advise you about spiritual matters, or you don't. Because if you think I'm going to take money from you when you're kissing me and holding me, you can think again. I'm not a whore.”

“I've
never
thought of you that way,” he said in a low, angry voice. “Never.”

“You don't have to think of me in any way at all. Why would you? I'm just a low-class spirit medium you picked up in a speakeasy.”

“My father was an immigrant fisherman. I make my living by breaking the law. If you're low-class, so am I, and—Jesus, Aida.”

She swiped below her eyes. “These are angry tears, not sad tears. I'm not crying over you. How could I cry over someone I don't even know?”

The question hung in the air for a moment before he spoke again. “Just because I haven't told you my life's story doesn't mean you don't know me.”

“I don't know you as well as Sook-Yin, apparently. You could have at least warned me before you took me there.”

“I haven't seen her for months. I told Ju I didn't want her there today—I told him.”

She stared out the window. “It was humiliating.”

“I don't know what to say.”

“Me, either.” She tugged the tassel of the privacy shade and lifted it. Wide-eyed, Bo stared back at her in the rearview mirror. She looked away.

Winter pulled the shade down. “I was lonely. Is that what you want to hear? I'm not proud of it. But in case you haven't noticed, I'm not exactly prime husband material.”

“Boo-hoo, you have a scar. You're easily the most handsome man I've ever met in my life,
and
you're rich and influential. If you'd stop scowling and quit being so damn defensive—”

He stuck a finger in front of her face. “You can't begin to imagine what I've been through. I lost everything in one day. Everything.”

A wave of pity crashed over her, subduing her indignant anger. She couldn't bear to look at him. “I'm not judging you about Sook-Yin. I'm just hurt that you didn't tell me about any of it. About your wife.”

“I don't like to talk about her.”

“It's fine. You don't owe me anything. I made assumptions I shouldn't have.”

She raised the shade.

They sat in silence for several seconds. He lowered the shade again.

“All right. I'll tell you everything. What do you want to know?”

“I . . . I want to know about your wife.”

He hesitated. “Her name was Paulina. Her family was from Nob Hill. Lost their fortune after the earthquake. My mother encouraged the marriage to distract me from getting caught up in the bootlegging with my father. She thought it would bring us a certain status that the money alone didn't. We were married for a year.”

Aida waited for more. It was slow to come.

“The summer of 1925, when one of Paulina's relatives invited us to a charity dinner at the Elks Club, my parents accompanied us. My father's mental health was not stable. He was having manic episodes when he wasn't himself.”

Oh
 . . . Ju's comment about Winter having all his marbles. Aida didn't know what to say.

“He'd been seeing a doctor for several months. During the charity dinner, he went through one of his fits and caused a scene. Embarrassed Paulina. We left the dinner in a rush, to get him home and call the doctor. He was screaming in the backseat. Paulina was arguing with my mother, telling her that my father's fits were caused by the devil, or some such nonsense. And I was trying to calm everyone down. I accidently jerked the wheel as a streetcar was turning a corner.”

Aida made a small noise.

“One second of distraction. That's all it took. One second, and I killed three people. It was my fault.”

“You can't believe that,” she whispered.

“People have told me that again and again, so why do I still feel guilty?”

“Oh, Winter.”

“I'm not looking for pity. Just don't tell me that my life is all champagne and caviar, because it damn well isn't.”

He tugged on the shade to lift it once more, and they spent the remainder of the ride in silence. As they pulled up to her building, she said, “Maybe it's not a good idea that I work for you anymore.” When he didn't answer, she exited the car.

“Aida!” he called after her. As he stepped onto the sidewalk, a woman with an unruly toddler passed. The child, attempting to escape her mother's grip, twirled around and looked up at Winter. The tiny girl wasn't even the height of his knees, and Aida could only imagine what he looked like in her eyes: an angry giant towering above her. But it wasn't just his size. The girl saw something Aida didn't notice anymore: his mismatched eyes and scar. She screamed bloody murder and ran to the shelter of her mother's legs, sobbing in terror.

Winter's face fell.

Ever loyal, Bo lurched from the car, shouting in Cantonese at the woman, motioning for her to take her crying daughter away. Protecting the monster from the child.

Aida's throat tightened as her own eyes welled with tears. She took one last look at Winter and walked away in the opposite direction from the crying girl, more depressed than she'd been in years.

 • • • 

With one hand on the open car door, Winter stared out over the black roof of the Pierce-Arrow, watching Aida retreat inside Golden Lotus. He slammed his fist against the car frame. Pain shot up his wrist. He angrily threw his hat into the street.

“I take it she found out about Sook-Yin,” Bo said as his gaze tracked the hat.

“And Sook-Yin told her about Paulina.”

Bo whistled. “You probably should've told her that yourself.”

“Not another word.”

Bo managed to stay quiet for all of five seconds. “Is she never-want-to-see-you-again angry, or just temporarily angry?”

“How the hell should I know?” Winter felt as if Aida had just pulled on a loose thread of a sweater, and he was left watching it unravel before his eyes, powerless to do anything to stop it. When he picked her up that morning, he'd felt happier than he had in years.

And now he wanted to pummel every stranger on the sidewalk.

The crying girl didn't help, though he couldn't say he blamed her—or that it was the first time, either. A face that makes children cry. What a perfect ending to a perfectly pissy afternoon. “She doesn't want to work for me anymore,” he said miserably.

“Maybe that's for the best,” Bo said. “Now you can ask her out to dinner and not feel conflicted.”

“Doubt she'd agree to that at this point.”

“She did say you were the most handsome man she'd ever met.”

Winter looked askance at his assistant.

“Hey, I tried not to listen,” Bo argued, “but you were both shouting and . . .”

Winter stomped off into the street to retrieve his hat, then rammed himself into the backseat of the car and slammed the door.

Bo climbed into the driver's seat. “Home? Pier?” he asked. “Or do you need to hit something?”

Hitting something sounded beautiful. And after Bo dropped him off at the boxing club, he spent the rest of the afternoon doing just that.

And the next afternoon.

And the next.

But it didn't help. His hellfire mood only worsened.

He busied himself with work, visiting his warehouses and overseeing deliveries. He spent an entire morning taking apart a small boat engine and putting it back together. His employees began looking at him as if they wanted to toss him in the bay. He didn't give a damn.

He'd nearly convinced himself that he never wanted to see Aida Palmer again—that he'd be just fine if he didn't, because a woman like her would only drive him to violence, what with her insisting that he tell her every godforsaken thing about his life, screwing up his orderly routine, making him feel guilty.

Making him hope.

On the fifth afternoon, Bo breezed into his study carrying a box under his arm. “I just had an interesting conversation with a butcher in Chinatown.”

Winter lay on his leather sofa, one arm and leg dangling off the side, staring at the ticking grandfather clock his father had shipped over from Sweden. “If it's not about Black Star or those symbols, I don't want to hear about it.”

“It's not directly about Black Star, but it might be.”

The pendulum on the clock swung several times while Winter waited for Bo to elaborate. “You going to tell me, or make me guess?”

“This butcher says that his cousin joined a secret tong two years ago. He said that no one knew the name of the leader, where it was based, what it controlled. But his cousin underwent a strange initiation that involved enduring insect bites.”

Now Winter was interested. “Insects? Like the
Gu
poison?”

“Maybe, and remember the tong leader killed by bees? I've heard of blood initiations, but this . . .”

“It does sound strange,” Winter admitted.

“There's more. The cousin said that the leader of the tong claimed to be a descendant of a mystical group of Chinese rebels from the Han Dynasty. A military group. Their leader was a necromancer.”

“What is that? Black magic?”

“Calls up the dead. Could be nothing but legend, but it's the first connection I've heard between sorcery and a tong, and it's awfully strange.”

“Damn right it is. We need to talk to the butcher's cousin who joined this tong.”

Bo shook his head. “The night after he spoke to the butcher, he turned up dead in a gutter. The butcher thinks the tong killed him for blabbing about the initiation ceremony. The butcher also said after his cousin's death, he was so worried the secret tong would come after him and his wife that he moved his business to the opposite end of Chinatown.”

“Christ. A secret tong with mystical roots . . . This has to be it, Bo.”

“I'll keep my ear to the ground and let you know what else I can dig up.”

Unease wormed its way into Winter's gut. Bo was savvy and sharp; he knew what he was doing. But Winter had already lost too many people in his life. If anything happened to Bo while he was slinking around Chinatown's alleys, Winter would never forgive himself. “Tread carefully,” he told him. “If any of that is remotely true, and if they're connected to this Black Star, God only knows what they'd do if they thought someone was poking into their business.”

Bo flicked the cap on his hat and winked. “I'm always careful.”

“I mean it, Bo.”

“Your concern for my well-being is touching. I will agree to be careful if you agree not to bite my head off for giving you this.” He handed over the box. “A courier dropped it off.”