Lair of Dreams (The Diviners #2) (2 page)

A gust of winter wind battered the colorful paper lanterns hanging from the eaves of the Tea House restaurant on Doyers Street. Only a few diners remained, lingering over plates scraped clean of food and cups of tea whose warmth they were reluctant to leave. Cooks and waiters bustled about, eager to end their shifts so that they could unwind with cigars and a few games of mah-jongg.

At the back of her father’s restaurant, Ling Chan, seventeen, glared through the carved slivers of a teak screen at the lollygagging patrons as if her stare alone could compel them to pay up and leave.

“This night will never end,” George Huang said, suddenly beside Ling with yet another pot of tea from the kitchen. He was Ling’s age and as skinny as a greyhound.

“You could always lock the door,” Ling said.

“And have your father fire me?” George shook his head and poured Ling a cup of tea.

“Thank you,” Ling said.

George gave a half smile and a shrug. “You need to keep your strength up.”

The door opened, and a trio of girls entered the restaurant, their cold breath trailing misty white tails.

“Is that Lee Fan Lin?” George said, staring at the prettiest, a girl with red lips and a Marcel Wave bob. Quickly, George put down the teapot and smoothed a hand through his hair.

“George. Don’t—” Ling started, but George was already waving Lee Fan over.

Quietly, Ling swore an oath as Lee Fan broke from the group and glided past the lacquered tables and potted ferns toward the back, the panels of her beaded dress swishing from side to side. Lee Fan ran with what Ling’s mother called “a fast crowd.” Her mother did not say it admiringly.

“Hello, Georgie. Ling!” Lee Fan said, taking a seat.

George grabbed a cup from a tray. “Would you care for tea, Lee Fan?”

Lee Fan laughed. “Oh, Georgie. Call me Lulu, won’t you?”

Lee Fan had taken to calling herself that after Louise Brooks, a crime of affectation that Ling placed on a par with people who hugged in greeting. Ling did not hug. George stole glances at Lee Fan as he poured her tea. Ling knew for a fact that Lee Fan could have her pick of beaus, and her pick would not be gangly, studious George Huang. Boys could be so stupid sometimes, and George was no exception.

Lee Fan pretended to be interested in Ling’s stack of library books. “What are you reading now?”

“Ways to poison without detection,” Ling muttered.

Lee Fan examined the books one by one:
Physics for Students. The ABC of Atoms. Atoms and Rays.
“Oooh,
Jake Marlowe, the Great American
,” she said, holding up the last one.

“Ling’s hero. She wants to work for him someday.” George tried for a laugh but snorted instead. Ling wanted to tell him that snorting was not the way to win any girl’s heart.

“What did you want, Lee Fan?” Ling asked.

Lee Fan leaned in. “I need your help. My blue dress is missing.”

Ling raised an eyebrow and waited for the words that might make her care.

“My aunt and uncle had it made for me in Shanghai. It’s my best dress,” Lee Fan said.

Ling managed a patient face. “Do you think you lost it in a dream?”

“Of course not!” Lee Fan snapped. She glanced back at the girls
standing up front, waiting for her like good little followers. “But just the other day, Gracie was over to listen to my jazz records, and you know how the old girl is, always asking to borrow my things. I saw her eyeing my dress, which was certainly too small for her, what with those big shoulders of hers. Anyway, that night, when I went to look for it, it was gone,” Lee Fan said, adjusting her scarf as if its asymmetry were her greatest concern. “Naturally, Gracie claims she doesn’t have it, but I’m sure she took it.”

Up front, big-shouldered Gracie Leung examined her fingernails, none the wiser.

“What do you want me to do about it?” Ling asked.

“I want you to speak to my grandmother in one of your little dream walks. I want to know the truth.”

“You want me to try to reach your grandmother to find your dress?” Ling said slowly.

“It’s very expensive,” Lee Fan insisted.

“Very well,” Ling said, resisting the urge to roll her eyes. “But you should know that the dead don’t always want to talk to you. I can only try. Second, they don’t know everything, and their answers can be vague at best. Do you accept the terms?”

Lee Fan waved away Ling’s admonitions. “Yes, fine, fine.”

“That will be five dollars.”

Lee Fan’s mouth rounded in shock. “That’s outrageous!”

It was, of course. But Ling always started the bargaining high—and even higher if the request was downright stupid, which Lee Fan’s was. Ling shrugged once more. “You’d spend that for a night at the Fallen Angel.”

“At least with the Fallen Angel, I know what I’m getting,” Lee Fan snarled.

Ling concentrated on creasing a napkin seam long and slow with a thumbnail. “Suit yourself.”

“The dead don’t come cheap,” George said, trying for a joke.

Lee Fan glared at Ling. “You probably make it all up just to get attention.”

“If you believe it, it will be. If you do not, it won’t,” Ling said.

Lee Fan slid a dollar across the table. Ling let it sit.

“I have to cover my expenses. Make the proper prayers. I could never forgive myself if I brought bad luck on you, Lee Fan.” Ling managed a quarter smile that she hoped passed for sincere.

Lee Fan peeled off another bill. “Two dollars. My final offer.”

Ling pocketed the money. “I’ll need something of your grandmother’s to locate her in the dream world.”

“Why?”

“It’s like a bloodhound with scent. It helps me find her spirit.”

With a drawn-out sigh, Lee Fan twisted a gold ring from her finger and scooted it toward Ling. “Don’t lose it.”

“I’m not the one who seems to be losing things,” Ling muttered.

Lee Fan rose. She glanced down at her coat, then at George, who jumped to help her with it. “Careful, Georgie,” she stage-whispered, nodding toward Ling. “She might curse you. For all you know, she’ll give you the sleeping sickness.”

George’s smile vanished. “Don’t joke about that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s bad luck.”

“It’s superstition. We’re Americans now.” Lee Fan marched through the restaurant, slowing to allow everyone to watch her. Through the holes in the screen, Ling watched Lee Fan and her acolytes walking easily into the winter’s night. She wished she could tell them the truth: The dead were easy to talk to; it was the living she didn’t like.

The cold wind whistling around the curve of Doyers Street made Ling’s teeth chatter as she and George walked home toward Mulberry Street. The laundries, jewelers, groceries, and import shops were closed, but the various social clubs were open, their cigarette smoke–drenched
back rooms filled with businessmen, old-timers, newcomers, and restless young bachelors all playing dominoes and Fan-Tan, trading stories and jokes, money and ambition. Across the rooftops, the Church of the Transfiguration’s steeple loomed at the edge of the neighborhood, a silent judge. A trio of slightly drunk tourists stumbled out of a restaurant talking loudly of heading over to the Bowery and the illicit delights to be found there in the deep shadows beneath the Third Avenue El.

Beside Ling, George jogged up and back, up and back, in little bursts like the track star he was. For a slight boy, he was surprisingly strong. Ling had seen him carry heavy trays without much trouble at all, and he could run for miles. She envied him that.

“You charge too much money. That’s your trouble. Other Diviners charge less,” George said, panting.

“Then let Lee Fan go to one of them. Let her go to that idiot on the radio, the Sweetheart Seer,” Ling said. Lee Fan might live it up in nightclubs uptown, but Ling knew she wouldn’t go outside the neighborhood for fortune-telling.

“What are you saving money for, anyway?” George asked.

“College.”

“Why do you need college?”

“Why do you let Lee Fan run you like a dog?” Ling shot back, her patience at an end.

“She doesn’t run me,” George said, sulking.

Ling rebuked him with a guttural “ack” of disappointment. Once upon a time, Ling and George had been close. She’d been his protector of sorts. When the Italian boys from Mulberry Street harassed George on the way to school, it was Ling who had told them she was a
strega
who would curse them if they didn’t leave George alone, and whether they believed her or not, they didn’t bother him after that. George had thanked Ling with a prune hamantasch from Gertie’s Bakery on Ludlow, the two of them laughing as they picked the tiny seeds from their teeth. But over the past year, Ling had watched George grow moody
and restless, chasing after things he couldn’t have—tagging along with Lee Fan’s set as they went to the pictures at the Strand, sitting in on picnics arranged by a local church, or squeezed in the backseat during Sunday drives in Tom Kee’s car, one foot in Chinatown and the other outside, angling for a spot they thought was better, a spot that didn’t include Ling.

“She’s changed you,” Ling said.

“She has not! You’re the one who’s changed. You used to be fun, before—”

George cut himself off abruptly, but Ling could fill in the rest of his sentence for him. She looked away.

“I’m sorry,” he said, chagrined. “I didn’t mean it.”

“I know.”

“I’m just tired. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

Ling drew in a sharp breath.

“I don’t have the sleeping sickness!” George said quickly. He held out his hands. “Look: No burns. No blisters.”

“So what’s the trouble, then?”

“I had the oddest dream.”

“Probably because you’re odd.”

“Do you want to hear this?”

“Go on.”

“It was incredible!” George said, his voice hinting at wonder. “I was at one of those mansions like the millionaires have out on Long Island, only it was my house and my party. I was rich and important. People looked at me with respect, Ling. Not like here. And Lee Fan was there, too,” George said shyly.

“I didn’t realize it was a nightmare,” Ling muttered.

George ignored her. “It all seemed so real. Like it was right there for the taking.”

Ling kept her eyes on the uneven edges of the bricks. “Lots of things seem real in dreams. And then you wake up.”

“Not like this. Maybe it has something to do with the New Year? Maybe it’s good luck?”

“How should I know?”

“Because you know about dreams!” George said, jogging in front of her. “You can walk around inside them. Come on—it has to mean something, doesn’t it?”

He was practically begging her to say it was so, and in that moment, she hated George a little bit for being so naive, for thinking that a good dream could mean anything other than a night’s escape from reality until the morning came. For thinking that wanting something so badly was enough to make it come true.

“I’ll tell you what it means: It means that you’re a fool if you believe Lee Fan will give you the time of day once Tom Kee comes back from Chicago. You can keep throwing yourself at her, but she’s never going to choose you, George. Never.”

George stood perfectly still. His wounded expression told her that the words had hurt. She hadn’t meant to be cruel, only truthful.

George’s eyes went mean. “I pity the poor soul who takes you for a wife, Ling. No man wants to have the dead in his bed every night,” he said, and then he marched away, leaving Ling just short of her building.

Ling tried not to take the words inside, but they’d already settled there. Why couldn’t she have just left George alone? For a moment, she had half a mind to call him back, tell him she was sorry. But she knew George was too angry to hear it now. Tomorrow she’d apologize. For now, she had Lee Fan’s money in her pocket and a job to do. Ling moved slowly toward her building, feeling each bump and brick up her spine. Above her, yellow-warmed windows dotted the building facades, forming urban constellations. Other windows were dark. People were asleep. Asleep and dreaming, hopeful that they’d wake in the morning.

For all you know, she’ll give you the sleeping sickness.

It had started with a group of diggers who shared a room on Mott Street. For several days, the three men lay in their beds, sleeping. Doctors had tried slapping the men, dousing them with cold water, striking the soles of their feet. Nothing worked. The men would not
wake. Blisters and weeping red patches appeared all over their bodies, as if they were being consumed from the inside. And then they were dead. The doctors were baffled—and worried. Already the “sleeping sickness” had claimed five more people in Chinatown. And just that morning, they’d heard there were new cases in the Italian section of Mulberry Street and in the Jewish quarter between Orchard and Ludlow.