The Gilded Age, a Time Travel (57 page)

Is
this the way it’s supposed to be? Of course Zhu gave the gray silk dress to
Wing Sing. Of course Zhu wears a
sahm
of apple-green silk. She had the
garment custom-made at Lucky Gold Trading Company so she can be comfortable
during her pregnancy. It’s nine minutes after eleven. Zhu has less than an hour
to return downtown, catch the cable car up California Street to the
intersection at Mason. She can’t miss this rendezvous. Not this one.

“Let’s
have a drink!” Daniel declares and charges in through Kelly’s swinging doors.

Jessie
grips Zhu’s elbow, her face taut and pale. “Let’s don’t go in there, missy.”

“Why?”

“I
got a bad feeling. What do you call it? A premonition.”

“Hurry,”
Muse whispers.

“Jessie,
I can’t wait.”

Daniel
charges back out and sweeps them into Kelly’s. “Come along, ladies. It’s on
me.”

Crummy
bar, smoke and sawdust. The four bruisers sashay in through the swinging doors,
Harvey strolls in with Muldoon the crimp, and they all exchange ribaldries with
the barkeep, Mr. Kelly himself. Now three hatchet men drift through the
swinging doors. The eyepatch turns his glittering eye on the crowd.

Wing
Sing stands joking with a gang of sailors, who shout prices and what they’d
like her to do to them. Zhu takes her arm, leads her to the table where the
skinny blond sits.

Zhu
peers. “Li’l Lucy? Is that really you?”

“Yeah,
it’s me, Miss Wong. I know, I’m so ugly,” Li’l Lucy says sadly, concealing her
bony face and black-rimmed eyes behind a fluttering fan. “Hop is awful hard on
a gal’s bloom.”

But
Wing Sing is hard, contemptuous. “Just look at you, Jade Eyes. Fat with your
baby, huh?”

Zhu
studies Wing Sing’s slim belly. “You will be, too. Fat with your new daughter.”

Li’l
Lucy giggles but Wing Sing is furious, her eyes slick with tears. “No, no, I
not make baby. I lose Rusty’s baby, my monthlies stop. Hop stops monthlies,
that why singsong girls smoke hop. Maybe hop make me lose baby, too. Anyway,
good for the biz.” Wing Sing reaches over and slaps Li’l Lucy on her sallow
cheek. “Shut up, you. I sad.”

Li’l
Lucy stops giggling.

“You
so clever, Jade Eyes,” Wing Sing says. “Have fancy explanation for everything.”
She leans so close, Zhu can smell the sickly sweet reek of opium on her breath.
“You know what ‘Wing Sing’ mean in the tongue of my village?”

“It
means ‘everlasting life,’” Zhu says impulsively. Now how did she know that?

“So
clever, like I say. You think I want to live forever? Like this? Huh.” Wing
Sing’s face is a mask of sorrow. “Forget it. I go off and die.”

Daniel
strides to Zhu’s side, glancing coldly at Wing Sing and Li’l Lucy. “You’re
supposed to come and have a drink with us, miss.”

“So
what you want with me, Jade Eyes?”

This
is when Zhu is supposed to give the aurelia to Wing Sing. For the future. For
Wing Sing’s daughter. Wing Sing will get pregnant again. She
must.

“The
aurelia,” Muse whispers in her ear. The monitor isn’t helping. The monitor is
defective. She’ll have to think for herself.

Zhu
turns away from them all and bows her head.

“Why,
Muse?” she whispers. “Why should I give her the aurelia? Wing Sing never had
it. I have it. And Wing Sing isn’t pregnant, I am. If the aurelia is an enigma,
a time anomaly with no beginning and no end, what difference does it make who
gives the aurelia to Chiron in 1967? Maybe Donaldina Cameron had a premonition
when she asked if the old green-eyed Chinese woman in the holoid is me.”

“The
aurelia,” Muse repeats stupidly, as if the monitor is jammed.

“What
difference does it make under the resiliency principle? The principle Chiron is
so afraid of? If, under the resiliency principle, we can actually create
reality then I, Zhu Wong, choose. I’ll be a hundred and one years old in 1967.
With my gene-tweaking, I’ll easily live that long.
That
is my sacrifice,
Muse. I’ll stay.”

Muse
is silent, and Daniel shakes her arm. “Come along, my little lunatic. Enough of
this talking to yourself.”

“I
want you to take care of yourself, Wing Sing,” Zhu says, a deep foreboding
rising in her chest. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry
for what, Jade Eyes? I bad luck to you.”

Muse
whispers urgently, “The aurelia.”

The
aurelia.
Zhu conceals the brooch with her hand. This is Kelly’s,
after all. The place is crawling with thieves, cutpurses, desperados, and
crimps. A small, tightly corseted woman conspicuously faints near the cooch
booths. Fanny Spiggot is working the crowd.

Zhu
lurches to her feet. She’s got to get out of this place fast!

But
Harvey, Muldoon, Kelly, and the four bruisers surround her and Daniel. Smiling,
Harvey brandishes two tall tumblers brimming with drink. “So you’re takin’ me
to court, are ya, Mr. Watkins? Well, have a drink with me first.”

“Thank
you, sir, don’t mind if I do. You’ll get due your justice.” Daniel, smiling
back, takes a tumbler. Kelly guffaws. Daniel raises the tumbler to his lips.

Now
suddenly the eyepatch glimpses Zhu. He and his hatchet men stride across
Kelly’s, heading toward her.

Zhu kicks,
moving easily in the
sahm
, and plants a hard heel in the gut of one of
the Harvey’s thugs. She whips her fist like a snake striking and knocks the
doped drink from Daniel’s hand. The tumbler falls to the floor and shatters.
Now the trapdoor flips up, waiting like an open grave, Kelly’s confederates
waiting in a boat below the pier, ready to kidnap the next drugged man and take
him out to a clipper ship bound for Shanghai.

Jessie
yells at the sailors, “Do something, ya deadbeats! You gonna let them crimps
shanghai an honest gentleman?”

Someone
seizes Zhu, and she whirls and strikes. She gasps at the sharp sting of a knife
cutting the skin of her arm.

“No
one cross Chee Song Tong,” the eyepatch says. “No woman cross me, Jade Eyes.”

“I
never crossed you.”

“You
steal from us. You steal from
me.
”

“Then
summon a policeman. Have me arrested.”

“This
our law, Jade Eyes.” He lunges at her with the knife.

Daniel
yells, seizes a shard of glass from the shattered tumbler, swings it at
Harvey’s thugs. They descend on him, fists flying, the awful thud of skin on
skin. Daniel falls into the filthy sawdust, arms and legs flailing. Two thugs
drag him by his ankles to the trapdoor. Harvey holds up a hypodermic needle, a
narcotic spurting from its gleaming tip.

Jessie
screams, “No, no, no, no!”

Zhu
leaps at the eyepatch, infuriated, heedless of his knife, and whips the side of
her hand across his throat. He staggers, and she seizes a gun—a Smith and
Wesson revolver—right out of his waistband. She fires off two rounds, aiming
wildly. Harvey disappears like a counterfeit coin. The thugs drop Daniel’s legs
and slink away in the smoke and confusion.

Jessie
yanks Daniel to his feet, slings his arm over her shoulder. The trapdoor flips
shut, a grave denied its corpse.

The
eyepatch stares at Zhu, choking from her blow, his face a mask of malice. But,
wait. An inexplicable look of betrayal pierces that mask, some connection Zhu
didn’t know they shared. Two Chinese struggling to survive in San Francisco,
maybe?
We are all strangers in Gold Mountain.

Ah,
forget it. Forget it! He’s a goddamn gangster.

She
trains the Smith and Wesson on him, gripping the gun in both hands. He looks
around, determined to satisfy Zhu’s debt, and seizes Wing Sing, who screams and
staggers, awkward in her Western dress and fashion boots. He wrestles her in
front of him, a human shield. Zhu aims for his feet—she’s an excellent shot
after Changchi—and squeezes the trigger. If she wounds him, maybe he’ll lose
his hold on Wing Sing.
Click!
And nothing happens. The gun needs reloading,
and she has no ammunition. She flips the barrel into her palm and leaps toward
him, intent on inflicting a serious dent in his ugly skull with the grip.

The
eyepatch whips the knife and cuts Wing Sing’s throat, ear to ear. She shrieks,
a terrible gurgling cry, and blood sprays all over the gray silk dress. The
eyepatch shoves her away, and Wing Sing falls to her hands and knees, then
collapses facedown on the floor.

Police
whistles shriek, and the crowd stampedes for the swinging doors, pushing and
shoving. The eyepatch joins the exodus, vanishing from Zhu’s sight. She flings
the Smith and Wesson into the sawdust, kneels over Wing Sing, gently turns the
girl over, and pulls out her mollie knife.

But
it’s too late to heal such a mortal wound. Wing Sing’s life hemorrhages away.

“I’m
sorry, Wing Sing,” Zhu whispers, sick to her soul, and presses the girl’s
glassy eyes shut with gentle fingertips. “I’m so very sorry.”

Jessie
and Daniel yank her to her feet, pull her out through the swinging doors to the
street.

“Ain’t
nothin’ you can do for her now, missy,” Jessie says.

“You
got that right,” Zhu whispers.

“Let’s
scram outta this joint before the bulls raise holy hell.”

“Does
this mean you’re not leaving me for the future?” Daniel says, smiling in spite
of his his split lip and black eye. He plants a bloodstained kiss on her cheek.
“I’m so glad, my angel. You know how much I adore you.”

Muse
whispers, “Hurry.”

March
17, 1896

Saint Patrick’s Day

13

Woodward’s
Dancing Bears

On
her way back from the Snake Pharmacy with a white paper packet of powdered willow
bark, Zhu hears Old Father Elphich announcing the latest hot talk as he tends to
his newsstand on Market Street. He holds aloft a copy of the
Examiner
,
displaying the headlines in a hand clawed by arthritis, and proclaims--

TONG WARS RAGE IN
CHINATOWN

HATCH
MEN HACK AS COPS WATCH

“Hey,
newsboy, gimme a
Call
,” shouts a rotund gentleman fairly bursting out of
his chartreuse velvet waistcoat, emerald studs the size of dice winking on his
cuffs. The gentlemen of San Francisco’s Gilded Age call Old Father Elphich
“newsboy” despite the fact that Old Father Elphich’s chalk-white hair falls to
his waist and he must be pushing seventy-five.

Zhu
jostles her way to the newsstand amid gentlemen crashing together their steins
of green-tinted beer, downing shots of green-tinted gin or whiskey the color of
old copper infused with a liquid patina. Everyone in San Francisco is Irish on
Saint Patrick’s Day and, goodness knows, people need some cheer on this cold rainy
spring day. Despite the morning drizzle, celebrants quaff their libations out
on the sidewalk, hoping to sight a lucky rainbow in the blustery skies. The
saloons along the Cocktail Route are serving up great steaming platters of cabbage
and corned beef, pots of freshly ground mustard and horseradish, boiled potatoes
and carrots, black loaves of rye bread, sweet pound cake laced with butter,
tart San Joaquin strawberries with pale green whipped cream.

A
parade careens down Market Street, the white horses, grays, and piebalds dyed
various shades of green. Plenty of crepe paper shamrocks, steamers, and
rosettes as bright as new grass. A tipsy brass band in kelly-green top hats
pounds out “When Irish Eyes are Smilin’” surprisingly in tune, given their red-faced
condition.

A
gaggle of blond and red-haired Irish sporting ladies ride by in a rented
phaeton with a gypsy top. Well oiled, rouged, and whiskeyed, they wave and
cheer, kick up their legs revealing green garters, pull down their bodices to
show the green lace along the tops of their corsets. One lady boasts a shiny
emerald beauty spot on her abundant breast. Gentlemen cheer as they pass, and the
proper ladies glare, scandalized. Someone will run off to have a word with the
mayor’s staff about such lewd public conduct, but that someone is likely to
find the mayor’s staff at the Irish ladies’ sporting house tonight.

“Saint
Patrick’s Day,” Muse whispers in her ear, “is generally observed in San
Francisco despite the holiday’s ethnic and religious origin because people
intuitively want to celebrate the vernal equinox, the rebirth of life after
winter, the joyful fertility of spring, the commencement of a new cycle of. . .
.”

“Thank
you, Muse, that will be all.” Zhu cuts the monitor off. She’s not feeling very joyful.
And though she could call her miraculous escape on the night of Tong Yan Sun
Neen a rebirth of sorts, the commencement of a new cycle, since that night she’s
been left with confusion, fear, a child on the way, and Daniel dying.

She
buys an
Examiner
from Old Father Elphich, slips into the shelter of a
flower stand in front of the Metropolitan Market, and scans the front-page
article. There’s the usual righteous rant against criminal activities in
Tangrenbu, though the white community doesn’t really give a damn about the
tongs and their nefarious enterprises except when bloodshed proves bad for the
tourist trade. In 1896, Tangrenbu is a prime tourist attraction. The bloody
skirmish—a man beheaded, another gutted—was apparently a dispute over a girl. A
Chinese slave girl. Another pretty girl kidnapped, duped into a false marriage,
or simply sold by her parents and smuggled into America through the coolie
trade.