The Gilded Age Part 33

"I'm leaving for the future," she says, impatient. "For my Day in the future."

"Jar me, missy," Jessie says. "Enough is enough."

"I thought you believed me."

"Sure I do. Like I believe in Santa Claus and the tooth fairy."

"What about everything I've told you?"

Jessie shrugs. "Tall tales like Mr. Wells."

"What about my mollie knife?"

"I was sippin' evil absinthe that night. So were you and Mr. Watkins."

Zhu is silent. Of course she'd never touched the absinthe. What if Jessie is insisting on a reality that's different from what she remembers? What if she's entered a different timeline and she doesn't know it?

"Come, my little lunatic," Daniel says, laughing. "Let's have a toast to the future. Miss Malone? Come along. It's on me."

"On you, indeed. What about my rent, buster?"

"Let's discuss the rent over a shot of rye."

"Get in there, Z. Wong," Muse whispers. "Find Wing Sing now."

"Yeah, okay, let's toast the future," Zhu says, her heart pounding in her throat. She takes Daniel's and Jessie's hands and sweeps them into Kelly's.

The bar stinks of cheap beer and rotgut. The air is hazy with tobacco smoke, the clotted sawdust ankle deep. Games of faro are conducted here and there and a sizable crowd crouches around games of dice. There's no ballroom dancing Zhu can see, despite the sign, but plenty of lap dancing transacted in little plywood booths set across the back. The place is mobbed with sailors.

And there. There! Posing before a table, her crippled foot propped up on the seat of a chair, arms akimbo, giggling, bantering stands Wing Sing. She negotiates with sailors who wear the grizzled, famished look of men months at sea with no female company. An anomalous sight she is, too, a young Chinese woman in apple-green silk, walking the Barbary Coast, imprisoned by neither crib nor parlor. And although she is degraded by her trade, robbed of her future, denied the simple comforts of an ordinary life other women either savor or endure, certain to meet a violent unsavory end, for a moment, just for a moment, Wing Sing stands triumphantly before Zhu, a woman on her own in the Gilded Age.

Zhu seizes her arm, but Wing Sing shrugs her off. The sailors guffaw.

The four bruisers who've been shadowing them all night stride in through the swinging doors. A small man accompanies them. Black hair, black beard, black pools for eyes. Harvey walks arm in arm with Muldoon the crimp. Harvey and his entourage saunter up to the bar, exchange ribald greetings with the barkeep, Mr. Kelly himself. Harvey spots Daniel, tips his top hat. Jessie tugs on Daniel's sleeve, worry st.i.tching her face, but Daniel ignores both her and his debtor's greeting.

"Please," Zhu says to Wing Sing. "I have something to give you."

Now three Chinese men in black slouch hats drift into Kelly's. The eyepatch and his hatchet men step up to the bar.

"You give me something?" Wing Sing arches her eyebrows and arranges her face in a caricature of surprise. She says to the sailors, "Excuse please, gentlemen."

She marches indignantly to the table where the skinny blond sits nursing a shot of whiskey. No, she's not Li'l Lucy. Dark blotches rim both women's eyes, and their skin has that sallow cast Zhu has seen on the faces of opium addicts in Tangrenbu. "Jade Eyes, I not take nothing from you."

"It's something nice."

"You bad luck to me, Jade Eyes."

"Please take it." Zhu unpins the aurelia from her collar. The gold and diamonds linger in her fingers. The tiny golden woman is impa.s.sive, lifeless, a sacrifice on the cross of destiny.

Wing Sing's mouth drops open. She gapes, wide-eyed. "What this?'

"This is real gold. Real diamonds." Zhu pins the brooch on Wing Sing's collar. "You take. You keep. To make up for your dowry. For you and your daughter. Rusty's baby."

Wing Sing shrugs. "If my baby is girl, I sell her to Chee Song Tong. Clear my debt."

Protest swells on Zhu's tongue, but she bites back anger. There is nothing she can say, nothing she can do. She will step across six centuries tonight, never to return. She only smiles and says, "Ah, but you won't. You'll love her. You'll keep her."

Wing Sing vigorously shakes her head. "I not keep girl."

"She'll look just like you," Zhu says. "You can name her Wing Sing, too."

"I not name girl for me," Wing Sing says contemptuously. "You so smart, Jade Eyes, know reason for everything. But I bet you not know what 'Wing Sing' mean in the tongue of my village."

"What does 'Wing Sing' mean?"

"It mean 'everlasting life.' You think I want to live forever? Like this? You think I want my daughter to live forever? Huh. Forget it, Jade Eyes."

Daniel comes to Zhu's side, glancing at Wing Sing, the aurelia pinned to her collar. "You're supposed to come and have a drink with us, miss."

"No, I've done what I came here to do. It's time, Daniel. Goodbye and good luck to you. I tried to love you. I hope you fulfill your dream of making moving pictures."

There's really nothing more to say, and she turns to go. But suddenly alphanumerics skitter and swirl in her peripheral vision, and a wind whistles in her ear.

"The aurelia," Muse whispers. Voices scramble into nonsense, laughter clatters.

The eyepatch scans the crowd, his eye piercing the haze of smoke, lighting on Zhu and Wing Sing. His hand whips out like a snake striking, tugging on the shoulders of the wiry fellow, the fat man.

Jessie hurries to Zhu's side. "What's going on, missy? Something's strange! Like one of Madame De Ca.s.sin's seances."

Muse whispers, "The aurelia," and an odd gleam shoots from the curve of the aurelia's golden wing on Wing Sing's collar.

Zhu looks around, confused. Suddenly Harvey, Muldoon, Kelly, and the four bruisers surround Daniel. Harvey smiles in a friendly sort of way, though the expression doesn't fit on his face. He holds two drinks in tall tumblers. "So you're takin' me to court, are ya, Mr. Watkins?"

"That I am, Mr. Harvey." Daniel smiles back. "You'll get your due justice."

Fear wells in Zhu's chest, and her heart skips.

"The aurelia," Muse buzzes in her ear like a mosquito. Is the monitor jammed?

"Have a drink with me first, then. For due justice, sir."

"Don't mind if I do, sir." Daniel takes the tumbler Harvey offers. Zhu watches him lift his arm, reach out his hand, curl his long fingers around the tumbler. He knocks the rim against Harvey's in a toast. The gla.s.s s.h.i.+mmers as he raises it to his lips, and he swallows half, takes a breath, and swallows the rest.

Harvey watches, not smiling, not drinking.

"Oh, Daniel," Zhu whispers.

Kelly flings back his head and guffaws.

Daniel drops the tumbler to the floor, where it shatters. Sawdust m.u.f.fles the cracking sound, but the damage is done.

Harvey spills coins into Muldoon's open palm.

Daniel's eyes roll back, and he collapses. Harvey's thugs seize him, dragging his crumpled body through the sawdust. Jessie whips the thugs with her handbag and screams, "Knockout drops in his drink, you b.a.s.t.a.r.ds!" but she's useless. Kelly finds a handle in the floor, tugs open a trapdoor. Zhu smells the reek of the harbor, of things rotting in the water. Someone reaches up from a boat bobbing beneath the trapdoor.

"He'll be halfway to Shanghai before he wakes up," Muldoon says to Harvey. "If he wakes up."

"Kelly's Shanghai Special," the barkeep says. "Works like a charm."

Harvey laughs. "Teach that boy to sue me."

"The aurelia," Muse whispers, "the aurelia."

"No!" Zhu rushes to the trapdoor, seizes Daniel's coattails. "No, you can't shanghai him!"

Harvey's thugs laugh and shove her away.

"Do something, ya deadbeats!" Jessie screams at the sailors. "You gonna let that lousy crimp shanghai an honest gentleman?"

Now, in the confusion, the eyepatch and his hatchet men stride across the bar to Zhu. The eyepatch seizes her, shakes her. "No one cross Chee Song Tong."

"I never crossed you."

"You cross us. You steal from us."

"Then summon a policeman. Have me arrested." Never supposed to happen this way.

"This our law, Jade Eyes."

Zhu glimpses a flash of silver. The eyepatch whips out a knife and slits her throat.

Harvey's thugs throw Daniel into the boat below the trapdoor.

Jessie screams, "No, no, no, no!"

The sting is excruciating, but the sudden blood loss from her severed jugular sends Zhu into shock so sudden and intense, dying almost feels like pleasure.

Muse says forlornly, "The aurelia, the aurelia, the aurelia."

Then silence.

Blackness.

Nothing.

Jessie seizes Wing Sing and together they back away from the terrible scene. Harvey's thugs secure the trapdoor, kick sawdust over it. A couple of beat cops wander in to investigate the cries of murder. But this is the Barbary Coast and the fresh corpse is only a woman. Only an anonymous Chinese woman in a gray silk dress without any station in life. The black wagon of the county morgue pulls up to the saloon and the coroner hauls the body away.

Sure and where is Mr. Watkins' body? Knocked out and on a rowboat to h.e.l.l.

"She's dead, Mother of G.o.d," Jessie says, crossing herself. "Rachael, my sweet innocent angel, you look out for that girl in the Summerland, you hear me? I loved her, too."

"Poor Jade Eyes," Wing Sing says, clasping her hand to her throat. She covers the gold thing, what Zhu called the aurelia, with her other hand.

The beat cops saunter up to the bar and order drinks, which the barkeep dispenses, free of charge. Jessie would dearly love a drink, too--she feels faint with shock and her stays are killing her-but she don't dare order one in this accursed saloon. d.a.m.n Kelly to h.e.l.l! The boat bearing Daniel J. Watkins is likely to be halfway across the bay to a clipper s.h.i.+p bound for the Far East. When he wakes from the laudanum Kelly dosed him with, the s.h.i.+p will be well out to sea. If kickin' the dope don't kill him, the hard labor will.

Should she write a letter to his father in Saint Louis? Maybe the old man can send for help. Then she decides against it, after everything Daniel has said. The eminent Jonathan D. Watkins would never take the word of a fallen woman like her.

Jessie drags Wing Sing out of Kelly's, rips the aurelia off her collar.

"That mine!" Wing Sing cries.

"You're just gonna sell it for dope."

"No, Jade Eyes say it for me. For me and my daughter."

Jessie slaps the girl's belly. "Liar. You're not really pregnant."

"But I am, Miss Malone. I not get monthlies."

"That's just the opium, you fool."

"No, I make little girl. Jade Eyes say."

Jessie's fingers curl around the gold, the diamonds. The bauble feels hot, but she refuses to drop it or hand over such a valuable thing to a tramp like Wing Sing. Anyway, it's too beautiful for the likes of her.

"Tell you what. I'll keep it safe for you."

In July of 1896, Wing Sing gives birth to an underweight female infant and dies three days later of internal hemorrhaging. Jessie takes the infant to Donaldina Cameron at the Presbyterian mission. It's the least she can do in memory of Zhu Wong, who had cared so much for the baby's pathetic mother. Not that Jessie likes the Bible thumper, but who else will raise a Chinese girl with nothing but the clothes on her back in anything like decency?

That summer, Chee Song Tong escalates the war with Hop Sing Tong. On Bastille Day, an a.s.sa.s.sin hacks the eyepatch to death with a b.u.t.terfly knife in Bartlett Alley. On that same day, Mr. Heald suffers a heart attack and dies alone in Sutter Hospital. Jessie's new connection to the mayor's office quadruples her civic contributions.

In September of 1896, Mariah invites Jessie to go with her to the National American Woman Suffrage a.s.sociation meeting. It turns out that Mariah has been stealing away from the boardinghouse over the years to attend meetings of the local chapter. Jessie declines the invitation, pleading exhaustion, though secretly she believes Mariah's friends won't take kindly to her. During the rest of that autumn, Mariah works every spare moment she has on the committee supporting the state referendum for woman suffrage in California but, to her bitter disappointment, the measure is defeated.

In the spring of 1897, Mariah leaves San Francisco for good, having h.o.a.rded her salary in a savings account at Wells Fargo Bank. She returns to her family in Boston-Jessie never knew Mariah was from Boston-opens up her own boardinghouse, and begins to write for The Woman's Era. She is appointed by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin to be the treasurer of the National Federation of Afro-American Women, which in the summer of 1897 renames itself the National a.s.sociation of Colored Women.

Short on cash in July of 1897, Jessie takes the aurelia down to Colonel Andrews' Diamond Palace, intending to p.a.w.n the thing. The good colonel, supercilious as ever in his immaculate tuxedo and top hat, tells her the piece is old-fas.h.i.+oned and tenders a ridiculously low offer. Jessie tosses the aurelia into her handbag and stalks out, mightily displeased.

On Columbus Day of 1897, the police call Jessie down to the morgue to identify a blond prost.i.tute who has been found beaten to death outside of Kelly's. Jessie cannot positively tell if the thin poxy corpse is that of Li'l Lucy. The face is too disfigured, the arms riddled with needle tracks. If it is, Li'l Lucy didn't live to see her twenty-first birthday.

Eight years after the turn of the century and endless trouble with the police, the clientele, the girls, and her unflagging appet.i.tes, Jessie learns that she is ill with liver cancer. It's bad. Her doctor tells her she has a month, maybe two months, left to live.

And that is when Miss Jessie Malone, her face and bosom fallen, her waist excruciating beneath the corset that is still fas.h.i.+onably in style, deeply in debt, deeply in drink, and unable to rest by night or by day, goes up to Nine Twenty Sacramento Street.

The forbidding red brick edifice looks exactly as it always has.

Donaldina Cameron, much grayer and much more gaunt, answers the door.