Black Dove (9 page)

Which left it to me to prove that chivalry wasn’t dead—even though I had the feeling Diana would gladly drive a stake through its heart herself.

“Why is it,” I asked after we’d traveled a block in awkward silence, “that I feel like you’re just sittin’ there waitin’ for me to say, ‘This ain’t no place for a lady’?”

“Perhaps because I am,” Diana replied. We were sharing a seat, and as she swiveled around to face me fully, her thigh brushed up against mine.
Even through all her soft lady’s skirts, I could feel the firm flesh of the woman beneath. “After all, you
have
said it to me before.”

“Yup. And you sure didn’t like hearin’ it. But I reckon it was true enough when I said it. Just like it’s true now.”

“Oh?”

Diana arched an eyebrow and tilted her head, the look warning me like the clitterclatter of a rattlesnake’s tail: Watch your step. She’d been posing as a suffragette when we’d first come across her, and I wondered now how much of a pose that had really been.

“What
is
the place for a lady, then?” she asked me. “The drawing room, the kitchen, the nursery—and nowhere else?”

“I ain’t sayin’ that. But ladies, you know . . . they just belong . . . somewheres decent.”

Diana turned toward the street again just as we rolled by what was obviously a bordello, since the girls leaning out the windows to taunt passersby were already (un)dressed for work.

“Well, there’s not much decent around here, I’ll grant you. Yet I see lots of ladies.”

“You know them gals ain’t ladies.”

“They’re women. They’re here.” Diana looked at me again, a low-burning fire in her eyes that I realized now was always there, just waiting for someone or something to stoke it up white-hot. “If you don’t think a ‘lady’ has the strength to even pass through a place like this, how is it
they
have the strength to survive it?”

Old Red had been riding alone in a seat on the other side of ours, saying nothing and seemingly seeing nothing, just hanging on for dear life. I’d almost forgotten he was there at all until he swiveled around to speak to us.

“They
don’t
always survive it.”

And he quickly turned away again.

Whatever reply the lady might have made was cut off by the sound of catcalls from the sidewalk. A throng of jeering men—plainly a gang of the young street toughs the local papers had dubbed “hoodlums” for no reason anyone could adequately explain—had encircled a lone Chinaman. They’d already upended the basket of washing he’d been carrying, and
now they were pushing him this way and that, sending him flying from man to man like the pigskin in a football game.

On the Chinaman’s face was a look of hopeless terror. No one would come to his aid, he knew, and his only hope was that the “hoods” would tire of abusing him before his brains were beat out.

He and his tormentors slid past us like the scene from a diorama—a hellish vision close and real, yet untouchable, too.

“Well,” my brother muttered glumly, “we must be gettin’ close now.”

And indeed we were. Less than a minute later, we were back in Chinatown—and once the streetcar went cling-clanging away, we were almost the only whites in sight.

What few of us were around, the Anti-Coolie League’s sandwich man was trying to scare away, for he was once again out ranting about “the heathen Chinee.” When he spotted me across the street, he grinned and waved a pamphlet over his head like a little flag.

“Hey, friend! You read this yet?”

I smiled and nodded.

“
Gehen Sie sich bumsen
!” I called to him cheerfully.

Diana gave a little mock gasp. “Otto—such language!”

I blushed so fiercely it felt like someone had wrapped a hot towel around my face. “Don’t tell me you
sprechen
the
Deutsch
.”

“No. But I’m fluent in obscenity.”

Old Red turned and gave the lady the most level gaze he’d yet directed her way.

“Would you like me to demonstrate?” she said to him.

“Naw . . . that ain’t necessary,” my brother mumbled, spinning away quick.

Diana narrowed her eyes ever so slightly, and I couldn’t quite decide if she was looking upon Old Red with wry fondness or noting with satisfaction the effect she could have on him.

“This way,” Gustav said, hustling north up throng-choked Dupont toward the relatively deserted side street that was home to Chan’s shop.

Only when we got there this day, Chan’s street wasn’t deserted at all. A milling, murmuring crowd was clustered in a clump about halfway down the block.

“Awww, hell,” Old Red groaned.

“Is that—?” Diana began.

I didn’t hear the rest. I was already sprinting ahead, making a beeline for something I hadn’t once
seen
in Chinatown till just then: a policeman. I pushed through the mob to get up close.

“Hey! What’s goin’ on here?”

The copper gave me a long, sleepy-eyed sizing up before deigning to reply.

“Some Chink killed himself, that’s all,” he said in a voice that sounded like a yawn. “The quack who ran this place.”

And he jerked his blue-helmeted head at the shop behind him—Dr. Chan’s pharmacy.

Or, We Nose Around for Answers and Don’t Like What We Sniff Out

I took a step
toward the door.

The policeman sidestepped to block me.

“Where do you think you’re going?”

“Inside,” I said.

I started to move around him.

The copper moved, too.

“No, you’re not.”

“Yeah, I am.”

I tried to get around him again. He was a big fellow, tall as me and almost as broad, but he could move fast. We bumped together this time, the big brass buttons of his frock coat gouging into my chest.

“Look, I know Dr. Chan,” I said. “He’s a—”

I almost made the mistake of saying “friend of mine,” which would’ve
guaranteed we d
never get through that door. Fortunately, Diana closed my mouth before I could put my foot in it.

“Officer,” she said, snaking through the crowd with Gustav behind her, “we need to speak with whoever’s in charge here.”

She plunged a hand into her drawstring purse, fished out a smallish, golden-brown doodad, and pushed it up under the copper’s bulbous nose.

His eyes bulged.

Old Red’s eyes bulged.

My
eyes bulged.

The doohickey was a Southern Pacific Railroad Police badge.

“We’re here to consult with Dr. Chan on important S.P. business,” Diana said. “If something’s wrong, we need to know what. Our superiors will expect a full explanation.”

The big copper’s eyelids went droopy with disdain. “Oh, they will, will they? And they’d be expecting it
horn you
, little missy?”

“Indeed, they would.”

The policeman shook his head and snorted out a grunt of a laugh.

His condescension was all for show, though. In California, the Southern Pacific gets what the Southern Pacific wants, from the governor’s mansion all the way down to the harness bull in Chinatown.

“Hey, Sarge!” the cop shouted over his shoulder. When he didn’t get a response, he took a step backward into Chan’s shop and tried again at twice the volume. “
Sarge
!”

Toward the back of the store was a narrow, doorless pass-through, and the sound of footsteps thumped out from somewhere beyond it.

“What?”

A head poked out—bald, blocky, sharp-edged. Paint it red and it could’ve passed for a stack of bricks.

“Got some S.P. pussyfooters out here, Sarge. Say they had business with the Chink. Now they wanna
see you
.”

“Sarge” craned his thick neck to peer at us around the bull’s bulk. The sight of Diana, so fetching in her white summer dress, and Old Red, so outlandish in his white Boss of the Plains, slapped surprise across the man’s slab of a face. He recovered quick, though.

“Let ’em through.”

And he disappeared with another
clomp-clomp-clomp
.

The big copper stepped from our path and waved us past.

“S.P. or not, hayseed,” he hissed as I followed Diana and Gustav inside, “next time, you
ask
.”

“
Hayseed?
” I thought.
But I’m wearing a boater
.

As we hurried up the center aisle of the store past bins and baskets of
roots, pods, and mysterious blobs, Old Red glanced back at me. He gave his head a little jerk forward, toward Diana, his eyebrows up high.

See?
he was saying.

I replied with a coy shrug.

See what?

My brother shook his head and looked away.

I knew exactly what he was “talking” about, though. If the Southern Pacific had canned Diana, why was she still running around with an S.P. badge?

It was a question I preferred to put off . . . partially because I wasn’t sure I’d like the answer.

As we neared the back of the store, I noticed a pungent odor—a reek that, at first, I assumed was the product of the foulest flatulence my brother had ever unleashed when not on the cattle trail. (Feed a fellow nothing but beans for a few weeks, and eventually he gets to out-odoring the cows.) Yet as the smell grew stronger, I realized that even with a bellyful of beans, beer, and jalapeno peppers, no mere man could produce such a smell.

Not alive, anyway.

Beyond the pass-through was a box-packed storage room and, to the right, a narrow, steep stairwell leading to the second floor.

“Come on up . . . if you really want,” Sarge said, leaning out around the corner at the top of the stairs. “I’m warning you, though. It stinks even worse up here.”

Then he was gone.

Of course, this warning didn’t slow Diana and Gustav. And it didn’t slow me, either. It was the
stench
that did that.

With each step I took up the stairs, the putrid aroma grew more potent. It was one of those scents you can taste as much as smell . . . which was mighty unfortunate, since it smelled like a bucketful of buttermilk and hard-boiled eggs left out all day under an August sun.

“What
is
that, anyway?” I coughed out.

“Ain’t quite right for a bloated-up body,” Gustav said. “But it’s close.”

“It’s gas from the pipes, actually,” Diana said without looking back at
us. “It has no smell in its natural state, so the gas company adds chemicals to give it an easily detectable odor.”

“Oh, that’s easy to detect, alright.” I swiped off my straw hat and gave it a wave under my nose. “Any easier and I’d pass out.”

My brother’s only response was a vexed grunt—and I figured I knew why. The buildings he knows best are lit with oil lamps, candles, or the simple glow of a fire, not gas. If Diana hadn’t been there to set us straight, he might have “deduced” that somebody upstairs had been breeding skunks. The stink of that gas was just the kind of thing I’d been riding him about the day before: a city clue . . . the kind he couldn’t catch.

Old Red stomped to the top of the stairs with such booming clops I almost feared he’d splinter the steps.

Up on the second floor was a small, dimly lit flat through which the noxious vapors swirled so heavy I could practically feel them flowing around me like water. That wasn’t what stopped me dead in my tracks, though. The bed in the corner did that. Or the man stretched out atop it, anyway.

It was Dr. Chan, alright—though not the same Dr. Chan we’d talked to just the day before. His clothes, normally so neat and sleek, were rumpled, and his round-rimmed spectacles were gone. He was lying on his back, eyes half-lidded, mouth half-open.
All
dead. And all grayish-blue, too, to judge by the darkened tinge to his hands and face.

I’d seen skin that color before—when I’d buried the last of my family, aside from Gustav. Like my kin back in Kansas, Chan had died for the simplest reason there is: He couldn’t breathe anymore. The only difference being their lungs had filled with floodwater and his had filled with gas.

I grabbed a sheet bunched up at the foot of the bed and pulled it over the body.

“There’s a lady present, case you hadn’t noticed.”

“Sorry,” Sarge said with all the sincerity of a cat apologizing to the mouse it was about to stuff in its mouth. “I hope the
ladys
not upset.”

I turned and got my first good look at the man in his entirety. He was stocky, thick-necked, and clad not in a bull’s blue frock but a businessman’s brown tweed.

And he wasn’t alone. Behind him was a tubby Chinaman sporting such a jutting gut he could make even a bulky fellow like myself feel like Jack Sprat. A neatly trimmed mustache and chin whiskers adorned his jowly face, and he dressed himself American fashion, though not in the starchy formal attire Chan had favored. Instead, he was wearing a white seersucker suit with matching hat. If not for the man’s Oriental features, he could’ve passed for a Southern gentlemen on his way to the veranda for a sip of mint julep.

“You needn’t worry about me,” Diana said to Sarge, her voice hushed but remarkably calm. “I probably saw more dead men before I was four than you’ve seen in your entire life, Sergeant . . . ?”