Gold Mountain (33 page)

I can reconstruct what happened with fair accuracy, however. Someone came up behind me and pushed a cloth over my nose and mouth and something on the cloth—chloroform, most likely—caused me to lose consciousness almost immediately. I was quickly and inelegantly pushed into the waiting hands of an inhabitant of that not-so-innocent cab, which entered the alley with just the right amount of speed—not so fast as to appear suspicious and not so slowly that a pedestrian on the street would have had time to run up to see what had just occurred. Not that anyone did, as far as I know. If there were pedestrians they must have been busy with their own thoughts because I was abducted off a San Francisco street without anyone calling an alarm. Just like that I disappeared!

I remember nothing of the cab trip that followed, but I must have been manhandled and jostled and slung about like a sack of grain. That rough treatment certainly contributed to the pain I felt when I regained consciousness. I stirred slightly and turned my head, an action which caused me to be immediately and violently ill. I had felt wretched upon awakening but after that terrible bout of sickness, I felt far worse, still nauseated, my head pounding, and the slightest movement sending waves of dizziness crashing over me. I had never felt so completely and helplessly miserable as I did lying on that small, dirty bed in a dim room that reeked of human sweat and my own sickness. For the life of me, I couldn’t recall what had happened or where I was, and I just barely knew who I was. Anything more complicated than that lay beyond my capabilities. Through the one small barred window halfway up the wall opposite me I could see the passing shadows of walking figures. Get up, Dinah, I told myself, get up and call for help, but if I moved any part of my body, I knew I would be sick again, and I couldn’t bear that thought. All I could do was lie very still and stare at the window, what I needed just on the other side of those bars but unable to do anything about it.

I must have slept again and to my relief awoke to a clearer head. The light through the window had the look of early evening to it, and it seemed to me that the racket of street noises had increased. I moved my legs tentatively and slowly shifted them off the bed so that I lay in an awkward position: one foot on the floor, one foot close to the floor, and the rest of me still lying in a crooked and ungainly posture on the low bed. I took a deep breath, ignored the stomach-turning pain, and used an elbow to push myself to a sitting position, holding onto the side of the bed until the room stopped swirling. I was mesmerized by the small window and thought if I could just get to it, could thrust out my arms and cry for help, someone would be sure to come to my aid. At the time I had no way of knowing that the thoroughfare right outside was the infamous Morton Street—the street that came alive with saloons and sailors and brothels and brawls as soon as the sun set—and that cries for help for one reason or another were not all together uncommon but were generally ignored.

I pushed myself upright, teetered unsteadily, and took one step forward, and as I did so, a door on the wall behind me crashed open and a man called in Chinese, “Get back! Get back!” He hurried into the room, grasped me by one arm, and pulled me backwards. His tug made me fall inelegantly onto the bed again and moan with pain.

Unmoved, he stood over me and scolded, “You must not move. Not move at all. You must stay quiet or I will tie you to the bed.”

I croaked out a few words from a throat and mouth that felt sticky and swollen. “I want some water. I am very thirsty. Please bring me some water.” The man frowned at my request.

“I don’t know. I’ll see. But you may not move. You must stay still.” By then he and I were in perfect agreement because all I truly wanted was to stay still, stop the throbbing in my head and the churning in my stomach, and drink something.

“Bring me water and I will be very still. But bring me something to drink.”

The water he finally delivered was tepid with an odor about it that didn’t bear scrutiny, but it was wonderful, nevertheless. I gulped down one glass, held it out to my captor with a mute demand for a refill, and drank the second glass he brought.

When I handed back the empty glass, I asked, “Why are you keeping me here? Who brought me here? Do you understand that you can hang for being involved in the abduction of a white woman?”

The man, who never stopped glaring at me, snatched the empty glass out of my hand and backed away from me. “Be still. Be quiet. You are to stay here until I have word otherwise.”

“Please let me go. I can pay you a great deal of money.”

He shook his head vigorously at that and repeated the same message, “You are to stay here until they send me word.”

“Until who sends you word? Who brought me here?” I asked again, but I couldn’t get any more information from him. From the look on his face my questions frightened him, and he quickly left the room. After his departure, I heard the noticeable click of a latch on the other side of the door fall into place.

I’m locked in this awful place, I thought hazily but without alarm, realized how weak and tired I still felt, and fell asleep again.

When I awoke next, I felt immeasurably better, achy but clear-headed and alert and ravenous. The light that filtered through the bars of the window was the light of early morning and the raucous street noises I recalled hearing intermittently through the night were gone. I swung into a sitting position on the bed and when my head and stomach did not respond to the motion, I stood upright. My arms and legs hurt in a way that indicated they’d been bumped and bruised, which they probably had been, but otherwise I felt whole. After taking two steps toward the window, I looked back over my shoulder at the door, expecting to see it thrown open by my jailer, who would then rush in and fling me unceremoniously back onto the bed. But nothing happened. Perhaps the fact that Morton Street was empty of both people and activity made my jailer think he had nothing to fear for the time being. Whatever the reason, I intended to take advantage of the unimpeded moment, however long it might last. At the window, I stood on tiptoe to peer out at what appeared to be an uninhabited street in an uninhabited city. No pedestrians and no danger lurked on Morton Street as the sun rose, wickedness and vice relegated to the dark anonymity of night. As I watched, a woman came into view on the other side of the street. She stepped off the walk onto the street, hurrying directly toward the window where I stood.

With another hasty look over my shoulder at the door, I dragged the small bed under the window, climbed on it, and thrust out both hands, all that would fit through the small opening. “Help me!” I cried. “I’m held here against my will!”

I could tell from the posture of the woman’s shoulders that she didn’t want to stop, that she regretted hearing my voice and was prepared to ignore my pale, waving hands. But if I let her pass without acknowledging me, I would lose the chance to get word to someone of my predicament and location.

“Please,” I said again. “Please help me.” At those words she looked over at the window opening and I knew I had won some kind of battle. “I’ve been kidnapped. I’m being held here against my will,” I repeated hurriedly.

Though I could see her only partially, I thought the woman’s face held the detritus of great beauty that had been ravaged by time and the abuse of life on the streets. Her fair hair was disheveled and her green eyes, which at one time must have shone brilliantly with the flash of emeralds, now looked only terribly, terribly weary, with no warmth to prove that this woman possessed any inner spark of life at all. A walking dead woman was my first thought at the gaze of those vacant green eyes sunk into a face that looked as old as time, and I felt a moment of despair. She will not help me, I told myself, but I had to try anyway because I feared she could be my only hope for rescue.

“There’s nothing I can do for you. If I’m not back with the money from the night, he’ll hurt me. Nothing I can do.” Her voice, like her eyes, was expressionless. She may have been afraid, but it was only the words that told me so. The woman had passed beyond fear.

“Yes, you can do something. He doesn’t have to know.” I had no idea who the
he
was, but I had to say something. “Just tell someone you saw me here. Tell the authorities.” But that was the wrong thing to say because she backed away, the idea of authorities possessing an intrinsic threat. I rushed on, not thinking, just talking to keep her attention and enlist her aid before my jailer spied me. “Or if not the authorities, tell my friend, Jake Pandora. He’s at the Pandora Transport Company in the alley behind the Broadway Dock. Tell him you saw Dinah and tell him where. That’s all I’m asking. He’ll give you money, a lot of money, for the information.” At her continuing indecision, I pleaded, “Please. They’re going to kill me, I think. I don’t know what else to do.” My voice cracked on the last word and I believe it was that single syllable broken by desperate fear and panic that made her decision.

She spoke in a low voice. “All right. I’ll do what I can. Dying isn’t such a bad thing the way I live. Why would I care if he takes a knife to me?”

“Pandora will pay you. I’m sure he will. He’ll give you whatever you ask. Just tell him I’m here.”

At those words, the woman straightened her posture and stepped forward to look through the bars of the little window and stare straight into my face. “It’s not about money. I got a girl of my own, a smart, good girl, and I don’t know why, but there’s something about you that reminds me of her. If she was in trouble, I’d want someone to do for her, and maybe my helping you means someone will help her some day. Maybe it does. Maybe that’s how it works. God knows I’m no good to her as it is.” She repeated Jake’s name and his location. “I’ll do what I can.” Then, intending kindness, she advised in words that chilled me to the core, “Don’t fight them. That’s what I’ve learned. Don’t talk back and don’t fight them. Maybe then they won’t kill you right away. Do whatever they tell you and act like you like it so I have time to get the word to this Pandora fella. I’ve got to go back to my loafer first and give him the night’s earnings. I’m already late, and he’ll beat me. He doesn’t tolerate any of his girls coming back late with the money.”

She pulled her shawl more tightly around her shoulders and started to walk away as I called after her, “Bless you! What’s your name so I’ll know who to thank when I’m free?” She stopped.

“All I’ve got to show for my life is a daughter and a name. That’s all that belongs to me. My name is Bea.” She spelled it for me, leaving the impression that spelling was something she did not do easily or well but proud of the little she could do. “B-E-A. That’s my name.”

After she moved out of view, I quickly stepped down and just managed to seat myself on the edge of the bed before the door opened with such force it smacked back against the wall. The same Chinese man from the night before stormed in shouting at me to get back, get back! He pushed me to the side and shoved the bed away from the window.

I said in Chinese and with as much dignity as I could muster, “I only wanted more air. I won’t fit through that window, you know. Now I need to use the facility. Will you take me there?”

Without answering, he hurried out, carefully closing and locking the door behind him, and returned in a matter of minutes with a bucket that he placed in the corner behind the door. “Here facility,” was his comment before exiting again.

I took a deep breath and sat back on the edge of the bed. I didn’t really have to use the facility just then, I’d made it up as a distraction, but I supposed I would have to do so eventually and the bucket would have to do. I never thought I’d be grateful for my experiences during the Siege of Pekin, but at that particular moment I was. The stink of the room and a bucket in the corner were nothing new. I had endured them once before, and I would endure them again. Until Jake Pandora came for me, I would do what Bea advised—endure whatever it took to survive. I’d survived against the odds before and had lived to tell about it; I intended to repeat the experience.

For the rest of the morning I roamed that disgusting little room thinking and praying. I was very frightened, but my mind, recognizing the familiar sensation, adjusted to it and calmed. I didn’t think the same could be said of my poor Ruthie, who would be worried to distraction. At first she wouldn’t have been very concerned, but once Martin arrived home and I still wasn’t there, she would have begun to feel a nagging worry. Perhaps she sent Martin to 920 to look for me; perhaps she went next door to use the neighbors’ new telephone. Whatever action she took, she would eventually have discovered that I left the mission hours earlier, and then her vague anxiety would have blossomed into fear. My poor sister—and in her present condition, too. My job was to make her life easier, not add to her burdens.

I went over my conversation with Bea, too, and knew that I had instinctively asked for Jake Pandora because I trusted him. I thought first to send her to Colin, who with the full arm of the law behind him would have stormed wherever I was held and easily rescued me, but Bea’s recoil at the mention of the authorities made me fear that regardless of what she agreed to do, once she was no longer confronted by my urgent pleading she would not willingly approach a policeman. I doubted she would enter the well-to-do, upstanding borders of Grove Street, either. Her profession showed too obviously in her dress and her face, and I thought she might hesitate before climbing the front steps of an affluent house in a prosperous and proper neighborhood. Bea would know the dock area for a number of reasons, however, and feel quite comfortable with the likes of Jake Pandora. Not that I didn’t understand why that should be so. I felt quite comfortable with Jake Pandora myself, comfortable on several levels and at that particular time especially comfortable that he would move heaven and earth to find me. I didn’t dwell very long on why I believed—more than believed, felt absolutely confident—that Jake would find me. Nothing spoken between us, no promises, no protestations of devotion or fidelity, nothing concrete at all. I just knew, despite the lack of anything tangible in word or deed, that he would come.