Black Dove (16 page)

“I can’t imagine anybody bein’
uncomfortable
in here if they tried,” I said, stretching myself out on a settee.

Madam Fong chuckled, the sound of her amusement light and musical—and no doubt well practiced, given her line of work. She nodded at her black-clad doormen, who disappeared the way we’d just come, closing the door behind them.

There was only one other door, on the opposite side of the room, and no windows at all. Despite what I’d said about the coziness of the place, it was starting to feel like a velvet-lined cage.

“You want a drink?” Madam Fong asked, moving toward a cart upon which sat several sparkling cut-glass decanters.

Old Red perched himself stiffly on the edge of an easy chair, looking anything but easy. “No, thanks, ma’am. We ain’t thirsty.”

He shot me a glare that warned me not to contradict him.

“Leastways, not for liquor,” I said, and I gave our host a lewd wink.

“Here we can quench any thirst,” Madam Fong replied dryly. “Yours can be taken care of. Any friend of Sergeant Mahoney is a friend of ours . . . if they
are
a friend of ours. Because Sergeant Mahoney is no friend to us.”

“Exactly,” I said with a nod and a smile—though I didn’t know what the hell she was talking about.

“So . . . what is it you offer?”

“Plenty, ma’am. Plen-
ty
.” My mind raced to come up with
anything
beyond cocky grins and blarney. “OF Cathal, he can be a tough nut. But we know how to handle him.”

The madam went gliding away from the liquor cart, looking thoughtful. And when I say “went gliding,” that’s not just a fancy way of saying “walked.” The woman’s steps were small but her gait amazingly smooth, and she moved as if she was floating on the wind like a wing-spread bird.

A hawk, maybe. Or a vulture.

“Other men ‘handle’ Mahoney already,” she said.

“But not to suit you, am I right?” I shrugged. “So why not let us take a crack at it?”

Madam Fong smiled again, and I could tell this time she really meant it—because her grin was just the sort of grim, sneering thing she could never show a paying customer. I’d pegged her as thirtyish before, but now I saw a whole other bitter decade etched into the carefully concealed lines of her powdered face.

“I look at you, I do not see rich men. Why would Mahoney listen to you?”

“Cuz money ain’t everything,” I replied with a breeziness that was all hot air. I looked over at my brother. “You wanna spell it out, or shall I?”

“Oh . . . well . . . you go ahead,” Old Red said. “You’re the talker.”

“Alrighty.”

I turned back toward Madam Fong as slow as I thought I could get away with, stretching the moment to the snapping point while I scoured my brain for inspiration. I wasn’t even sure I’d found any even as my mouth opened up and an answer popped out.

“You see . . . he’s our cousin.”

I swept my boater off my head and let my carrot-top do the talking for a second. (Thanks to our flaming red hair, Gustav and I have been taken for Irish so many times I once proposed that we change our names to O’Amlingmeyer.)

“Paddy and Seamus Mahoney, at your service. Our cousin—‘Cal,’ we’ve always called him—he sent word to us down in Texas a while back. Said he could slip us onto the po-lease payroll now that he was runnin’ the show with the Chinatown Squad. And Paddy and me, we’re gonna take Cal up on it. Only we ain’t sure we can get by up here in Frisco on a lawman’s pay. So we’re lookin’ to supplement our income a mite.”

“I see,” the madam said in that cool, reserved way of a person sniffing for a whiff of bullshit. “So you and your brother could help us by . . . ?”

“Just stayin’ friendly is all. Droppin’ by to chat from time to time. You know, like whenever Cal’s plannin’ on gettin’ his face in the papers with a big
raid
.”

Madam Fong gave me a brooding nod. I seemed to be making sense to her . . . so far.

“But why come to us? Here?” she asked. “Why not Little Pete? Or even Chun Ti Chu? They would like Mahoney ‘handled,’ too.”

“Well, first off, Paddy and me don’t know who the hell ‘Little Pete’ or ‘Chunky Chew’ is. We’re new in town. Don’t know the lay of the land yet. Second off, we thought we oughta start small. Take our time, work our way up to the big boys. And third off, Cal just happened to mention that this was where they kept the purtiest whores in Chinatown . . . so of course we had to come here first! Right, Brother?”

I yelped out a
yeee-haaa
of the sort people seem to expect from Texans. Old Red tried to join in, for appearance’s sake, but he couldn’t put
much oomph into it. He never has been one for huzzahs, unless it’s to get a herd moving.

The madam endured our howlings with the sort of pained/amused look I assume one
sees
on missionaries attending tribal dances in the deepest Congo. On the surface, there’s a smile. Underneath, they’re thinking, “Savages.”

“What about your cousin’s friends?” she asked. “Won’t they expect you to work for them, too?”

“Well, that’s the beautiful part of it. They probably will . . . which’ll give us the perfect perch for keeping an eye on
everybody
.”

I tried my best to look smug—and my best is pretty damned good, to hear Gustav tell it.

“Now, we don’t deny we’re still in the dark on a lot of things,” I went on. “The longer we’re around, though, the brighter the sun shall shine. You take care of us, we’ll throw whatever light we can your way.”

The madam was on the move again as I spoke, doing her glide-walk toward the door on the far side of the room. “We will need time to think about it. But for now I can offer—”

“ ’Scuse me, ma’am,” Old Red broke in.

The woman stopped and turned to look at him. “Yes?”

“I can’t help noticin’ how you keep sayin’ ‘we’ and ‘us.’ We come to you to talk one-on-one. If we’re dealin’ with another party here, I’d like to know it.”

Madam Fong tilted her head ever so slightly to one side, like a crow eyeing something shiny.

“This is Chinatown, Mr. Mahoney. There is always a ‘we.’ ”

She picked up a little mallet on a table by the door and struck a brass gong the size of a dinner plate. It didn’t make much of a sound—more of a
clink
than a
bong
—but it did the job.

The door opened, and a dozen girls scurried into the room with small, quick steps. Their eyes were downcast, their slender bodies wrapped in colorful silks or sheer chemises.

The madam had summoned her harem.

The girls took up positions against the far wall, arranging themselves at slight angles to us so as to maximize our view of the merchandise. Some
stood, some knelt. Nary a one looked us in the eye. When they were all in place, they went motionless, almost lifeless—we could’ve been looking at the “Slave Girls of the Orient” exhibit in one of the tawdrier wax museums.

“A gift—or a down payment, maybe,” Madam Fong said. “From ‘us’ to you. Choose what suits you and . . . enjoy.”

I turned to my brother wondering just how far we’d take this charade. The answer made itself plain pretty quick, at least to my eyes: not very.

Old Red looked worse than he had coming over on the ferry that morning. And the thing that was seasicking his stomach now, I saw when I followed his hollow gaze, was one of the fallen women before us.

Or “fallen girl,” I should say. She was a ghostly pale, wispy-thin thing with no womanly curve to her anywhere. And for good reason. She couldn’t have been any older than twelve.

Gustav wiped the revulsion off his face fast—but not fast enough to fool a sharp-eyed man-reader like the madam.

“Something wrong?” she asked.

Old Red shrugged and looked down at his boots and put on an
awwshucks
shit-eating grin, the very picture of the unpolished bumpkin flummoxed by big-city sin. My brother’s no William Gillette, but he’s not a half-bad actor when he cares to make the effort.

“It’s just that I . . . well . . . I had my heart set on a certain gal, and I don’t see her here. Not if my cousin described her right, anyhow.”

“Oh? You know her name?”

Gustav nodded eagerly. “Oh, yeah. It ain’t exactly what we white folks’d think of as purty, but I hear the little lady’s enough the looker to make up for it a hundred times over.”

He leaned so far forward in his chair it barely seemed he could have enough cheek on cushion to keep himself from falling off.

“ ‘Hok Gup.’ That’s what Cal called her.”

It took all the acting skill
I
have to hide my surprise. It hadn’t even occurred to me that “Hok Gup” might be somebody’s name. Yet when I thought back on how that old coot kept repeating the words over and over while creeping around Chan’s place, it seemed obvious he’d been searching for a who not a what. If someone steals your boots, you don’t wander around calling for them.

And I wasn’t the only one to get a jolt from my brother’s words. A few of the chippies peeked up at him wide-eyed. The little urchiny girl dared the longest stare—though she looked down quick when she noticed
I’d
noticed.

As for the madam herself, she just nodded slowly and said, “You want the Black Dove. I should have known. So many men do.”

She gave the gong another clang, and her girls scampered from the room. Most of them seemed relieved to be going. But the waif dragged her feet, one ear so obviously cocked to catch whatever should be said next her head practically spun on her neck like a lazy Susan. She was the last one out, by her own design, and as she left she began to shut the door.

The madam slid over quick and caught it before it closed.

“Wait here,” she said to us.

And then she slipped away, pulling the door of the velvet cage closed behind her.

Or, Our Hosts Decide to Bury the Hatchet—in Us

“So,” I said after
giving Madam Fong a few seconds to float off into the shadows on the other side of the door, “Hok Gup is a gal.”

“Looks thataway.”

Gustav stood and started making a slow circuit of the room, inspecting the madam’s bric-a-brac like a judge sizing up the pies at a county fair.

“Well, hurrah for us—we’ve actually learned something,” I said. “Only I don’t see how it gets us any closer to whoever killed Doc Chan.”

“The old man was huntin’ for the girl over at Chan’s place.” Old Red turned around just long enough to offer me a shrug. “She must tie in somehow.”

“Yeah, maybe. Only why was Grandpa lookin’ for her over there if she was here all along? I mean, he didn’t have no trouble gettin’ in here—unlike us. Oh, and thanks for the thanks for that, by the by.”

“Thanks,” Gustav mumbled, distant and dreamy, as if talking in his sleep.

“Don’t mention it,” I said. “So anyway, if ol’ Methuselah was tryin’ to find the girl, why didn’t he check with Madam Fong first? And where’d he go after he did finally come in here?”

“Well,” Old Red said, his tone turning sour, “could be he’s with the Black Dove this very moment.”

“Oooooo,” I groaned, my mind conjuring up a picture too frightful to describe. “That is one deduction I could’ve lived without.”

Gustav stopped before a small, platformlike structure sticking out of the far wall. “Well, don’t dwell on it too much. It ain’t very likely the old man would . . . hel-lo.”

“Hel-lo what?”

“Didja notice this thing here?”

My brother stepped aside to give me a clear view of the wall-mounted whatever-it-was he’d been eyeing. It reminded me of a crèche, except with one big figurine—a stern-looking Chinaman with a long black beard—instead of a bunch of small ones.

“No, I hadn’t noticed it,” I said. “In case
you
hadn’t noticed, there’s a lot
to
notice ’round here. Any particular reason I should have set my sights on that thing?”

“There’s a whole bundle of reasons right there.”

Old Red pointed at the little scowling Chinaman’s besandaled feet. Around it were several small, brass bowls filled with “joss sticks”—just like the ones on the altar in Chan’s bedroom.

“Yeah, alright. I see what you’re gettin’ at,” I said. “So now I guess we’ve learned
two
things: ‘Hok Gup’ is a Chinese floozy, and Doc Chan and Madam Fong have the same taste in home decoratin’.”

Gustav went into such a smolder it’s a wonder he didn’t set those incense sticks to smoking.

“Feh,” he spat. “You can lead a horse’s ass to water, but you can’t make him
think
.”

I sat up straight and gave him a round of applause. “Bra-vo, Brother. Nicely turned. Almost witty, even. Keep practicin’, and one of these days maybe you’ll actually be funny.”

“I ain’t tryin’ to be funny.”

“That works out well for you, then.”

“Feh,” Old Red said again, and he turned away and sank to his hands and knees.

He spent the next few minutes crawling around taking in a dog’s-eye-view of the room while I watched (and carped) from the comfort of my settee. We’d found a new trail to follow, my brother tried to assure me,
but I wasn’t so sure it was headed toward
Chan’s
killer. It seemed more likely to lead to our own.