The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (34 page)

Zhu
hesitates, her anger quickening at this fine, pampered lady running this bleak
mission. Muse flashes a warning in her peripheral vision, and she bites her
tongue. Of course she needs Cameron’s help. How else can she rescue Wing Sing ?
”I’m merely her bookkeeper.” At Cameron’s contemptuous glance, she adds, “Miss
Malone isn’t so bad. She’s fair.”

Cameron
takes the Bible, runs her finger down the leather binding. “That is the first
time, Miss Wong, I have ever heard anyone call a purveyor of female flesh
fair.” Dark circles underscore her large, pretty eyes. “What can I do for you?”

“I
know of a girl, an abducted girl.” And Zhu tells Cameron about Wing Sing and
her servitude at Madam Selena’s on Pacific Street.

“Oh
indeed, I know all about Selena,” Cameron says, suddenly freed of her foul
mood. Her tired eyes light up. “Selena is despicable. Miss Culbertson rescued a
five-year-old from that sink last spring. The child had been smuggled in and
sold as a
mooie-jai
, a household slave. When the child didn’t serve tea
properly, Selena poured boiling water on her hands. Let me see.” Cameron seizes
a ledger, leafs through the pages. “Selena’s house has got a trapdoor in the
roof leading up from the southeast bedroom. There’s a butcher’s shop in back, a
narrow gap between the rooftops, and a fire escape leading down from the shop.
That route of escape will have to be watched.” She slaps the ledger shut and
narrows her eyes. “Why do you want me to rescue this girl?”

“Because.
. . .” Zhu hates lying to Cameron, but she’s got to. “She’s a distant relative
of mine. A distant cousin. I truly do not want to see her live like that.” At
least that’s true enough.

“I
see. You wouldn’t by any chance intend to recruit your distant cousin for
Jessie Malone’s Morton Alley cribs?”

“No,
no! I swear it on that Bible! Nothing like that!”

“Well,
Miss Wong, your employment hardly recommends you. We’ve been deceived by the
likes of you many times before.”

“I
want Wing Sing to live
here
,” she declares with genuine passion. “She
must
live here. She’s
supposed
to live here. Please, I implore you, Miss Cameron.
Take Wing Sing into your home. Keep her safe.”

This
is
the truth. This is the object of the Gilded Age Project.

Cameron
studies her. Then the gleam returns to her eye, a slow smile to her face. She actually
rubs her hands with glee. Glee! “Very well! Let us go rescue Wing Sing.”

Cameron
sends a messenger to the callbox on Kearny Street, and the officer with the
patrol wagon there takes her message to the Chinatown station. Before Zhu has
finished her tea, five local bulls show up at the door bearing hatchets,
sledgehammers, crowbars, ropes, wedges, and determined scowls.

“Hallo
there, Mr. Cooke, Mr. Andrews, gentlemen,” Cameron greets them briskly. Zhu
thinks the policemen are rather dapper in their bowler hats, high starched
collars, cravats, and tweed jackets neatly buttoned. “This,” she says to Zhu,
“is our raiding squad.” She tells the bulls that Zhu is her informant and
mentions Madam Selena, whose name excites their chatter, the flexing of manly
muscles, and twitching of mustaches.

Off
they go, crammed in a brougham, bound for Pacific Street.

The
plug-ugly Stick Victorian has got a red light burning in the window, in spite
of the city ordinance. Cameron confers with the police, and two bulls stride
around back to stand guard at the fire escape leading down from the roof of the
butcher’s shop. The rest of their party climbs the stairs to Madam Selena’s
front door. To Zhu’s amazement, Cameron hoists up her skirts and petticoats and
bounds up the stairs, leading the way. Zhu follows.

“Even
the highbinders dare not harm my person,” Cameron declares. “Stay close to me,
Miss Wong. You will need to identify her.”

The
door—Zhu notices for the first time—comes equipped with an outer door of iron
bars. A security door that is, at the moment, securely locked. Cameron reaches
through the bars, seizes the door knocker shaped like a rooster, and knocks.
Nothing happens, but curtains stir in an upstairs window.

“Mr.
Andrews?” Cameron says. “Break it down.”

Andrews
wields his ax and, in a moment, he’s smashed the wood all around the door of
iron bars. Cooke applies his crowbar, plucking the bolts right out, and pries
the door from its frame. Andrews smashes his ax against the inner front door,
splintering the wood. A third bull kicks the door in.

Cameron
storms inside, her black skirts a thunderhead of fury, and Zhu steps into the
parlor she entered before in her coolie’s disguise. Andrews whirls, smashing
rosewood chairs, tables, statuary, the lewd paintings on the walls. Cooke kicks
at the spittoons, the vases, sending porcelain shattering against the
baseboards. The third bull heaves the lamp with its red light through the front
window, shattering the glass. Selena’s girls fly out of their rooms, shrieking,
scrambling here and there, to the back of the house, upstairs.

Zhu
and Cameron charge up the stairs, Zhu leading the way now, recalling the
bedroom where she last saw Wing Sing. Madam Selena, in a black silk nightgown
and robe, steps out of Wing Sing’s bedroom. She slams and locks the door, and
stands defiantly in their way, barricading the room with her body.

“That’s
her room, at the end of the hall!” Zhu cries.

And
then she stares—is that a figure darting behind Selena into the room? No, no,
no. It can’t be. Selena just closed and locked the door. Zhu’s breath rasps in
her throat. Suddenly she’s dizzy, disoriented. Reality is shifting and tilting
all around her again.

What
on earth is happening?

Selena
heaves herself at Zhu, cursing and punching. “You go now! No one here!” One of
the cops pulls her off and slams her against the wall.

Andrews
swings his ax at the door, and Cooke wedges his crowbar. They pop the bedroom
door right open, and Zhu and Cameron rush inside.

“No
one here!” Selena shouts and spits. “
Fahn quai!
”

There
is
no one here. The bedroom is empty. Cameron throws open the closet,
throws back the bedclothes, kicks at the flimsy wire frame of the bed.

“She
not here,
fahn quai!
” Madame Selena shouts. “You go now, white devils!”

“Wait,”
Cameron says, cocking her head. She presses her forefinger to her lips.

Zhu
strains to listen. And there! A tiny, scratching sound.

“You
turn into turtle!” Selena yells. “All your children, they turn into toads!”

Cameron
seizes the bed, struggles to push it away from the room’s corner. Andrews and
Cooke join in, shoving the bed frame across the room. Andrews breaks the
washstand with one stroke of his ax, sending water and basin flying. Cameron
hugs the walls, tapping, listening. “Listen for a hollow sound,” she tells Zhu.
“There’s a secret compartment in here, I can smell it.”

Zhu
starts tapping on the walls, too, but she hears nothing unusual.

Cameron
wipes her noble forehead with her hand, flushed and sweating.

Again
that tiny scratching.

Cameron
drops to her knees with a cry of triumph, scratches at the floor with her fingernails.
Zhu pushes her aside, takes out and runs the mollie knife down the crack
between the floorboards. Cooke applies his crowbar, a loose nail flies out, and
two floorboards pop up.

And
there, in a narrow space beneath the floor, lies Wing Sing, wide-eyed and
trembling.

“Ai!”
screams Madam Selena. “All go to hell!”

A
tong enforcer stands watching at the door, but he makes no move to interfere.
He smiles a little, staring boldly at Zhu.

“Wing
Sing,” Zhu says, taking her hand, and helps her sit up. The girl is
glassy-eyed, her makeup smeared. Drugged? Her mouth hangs open, her limbs are limp,
her hair disheveled. She wears the same apple-green silk pajamas, now soiled
and wrinkled. Foreboding rises in Zhu’s throat as she glances at the girl’s
feet. She wears the same straw sandals threaded with green silk. But now her
feet are concealed by thick white cotton stockings. Bound or unbound? Zhu can’t
tell.

“We’re
going to go now, just like I promised you. Okay?”

“Jade
Eyes?”

“Yes,
it’s me. We’re going to take you home.” But that’s not strictly true. How she
hates lying to this girl! “We’re going to take you to the home,” she amends.

“My
jade, my gold,” Wing Sing says. “My dowry. I take my dowry!”

“Where’s
the jewelry she brought with her?” Zhu says to Selena.

The
madam shrugs. Zhu exchanges a look with Cameron, and Cameron tears around the
bedroom again, tapping, prying. She finds another secret compartment in the
floor of the clothes closet. Officer Andrews breaks the planks open with his ax.

And
there, the rosewood box!

“I
know that my cousin brought a dowry given to her by her mother in China,” Zhu
says carefully. “I want to see if Selena has stolen anything, the way she’s
stolen Wing Sing’s innocence.”

“Indeed,
yes, take a look,” says Cameron.

Zhu
eagerly flings back the lid.

The
aurelia. She will have it.

Glitter
of gold, bracelets of jade, earrings and rings. Zhu peers breathlessly. Several
new pieces she doesn’t recognize—amber beads, a necklace of lapis lazuli, a
brooch of freshwater pearls.
Please.
Zhu doesn’t care how or where or
when the girl got the aurelia. If a john gave it to her, if she bought it
herself at Colonel Andrews’s Diamond Palace, if it materialized out of thin
air. It doesn’t matter.
Please make this right.
Wing Sing has got to
have the aurelia. Wing Sing has got to be the girl Zhu is supposed to rescue so
that all of spacetime in the future survives.

But
the aurelia isn’t there. It isn’t there.

Cameron
beams. “Praise Jesus Christ!”

Officer
Andrews hands his ax to Officer Cooke. With a gentleness Zhu didn’t think
possible, the policeman lifts Wing Sing in his arms.

*  
*   *

At
Nine Twenty Sacramento Street, Zhu and Cameron escort the trembling girl into a
tiny dormitory with twelve cots and on into the bathroom. Miss Olney is waiting
with a basin of steaming hot water, a bar of soap stinking of lye, a burlap
wash cloth, and rough cotton towels.

“Let
us get you clean in the name of the Lord, my dear,” Miss Olney says. Her tone
implies more than physical dirt.

Wing
Sing looks at the homely walls, the sticks of furniture, the bare floors. Her
drug-addled eyes widen. The other girls peek at her with their scrubbed faces,
disciplined hair, homely cotton clothes. Wing Sing backs away from Miss Olney,
hugging her silk around her. Her apple-green silk, the intricate black and
yellow embroidery, and gold frogs stand out in this plain place like some
glorious pennant of sin.

Olney
advances on her, gripping the dripping bar of soap. “Tut, tut, dear. Take off
those rags and let me wash you.”

“You
not touch me,
fahn quai.
” Wing Sing spits at her.

“The
girl may have some trouble adjusting,” Cameron says calmly to Zhu. “They often
do.”

Olney
seizes a green silk sleeve. “I cannot get you clean, dear, if you won’t take
off your clothes.”

‘”Oh
ho!” Wing Sing cries. “You not pay, I not take off clothes.”

“Really!”
Olney says and glares at Zhu.

“Hey,
you know where she’s been,” Zhu says, glaring back.

Wing
Sing darts to Zhu, seizes her sleeve. “Please, Jade Eyes, I go home now, okay?’

“You
are home, dear,” Cameron says, seizing her hand. Wing Sing flings her hand
away. “We’ll get her busy soon enough, Eleanor. Sewing, do you think? She seems
to like clothes.” To Zhu, “Do you know if your cousin can sew?”

Zhu
shakes her head, worried now. The girl is supposed to live here, stay here, according
to the Gilded Age Project. She says harshly, “Wing Sing, take off those dirty
clothes and wash that crap off your face. You won’t need any of that here.”

The
two Presbyterian women throw startled glances her way. Zhu doesn’t care. Maybe
brusqueness will work when kindness fails. The madams and the johns push these
young women around as a matter of course. The girl isn’t accustomed to
kindness.

“I
not sew! I not sew!” Wing Sing wails. “I have maid.
She
sew!”

“Get
the jewelry box,” Cameron says to Olney, and Olney makes a motion to take the
box. Wing Sing clutches the box to her chest and backs away, rolling her eyes.

“I
don’t think you should take her jewelry,” Zhu says evenly. “This is her dowry.
All the wealth she has from her family.”

“Miss
Wong, you do not really suppose it is hers?” Cameron snaps.

Zhu
turns to Cameron, troubled by her attitude toward her new charge. “This girl
and her mother were tricked by a would-be husband, Miss Cameron. I know that
for a fact. She’s not a thief. Her mother gave her this dowry to facilitate her
marriage. Isn’t that right, Wing Sing?”