Dragonfire

Nine

Ross Alley was a narrow thoroughfare between Jackson and Pacific, west of Grant Avenue. Lined with doorways that led to bundle shops, apartments, the headquarters of a couple of family associations; two sleazy-looking bars, one of which advertised “Belly Dance on Weekends”; several little shops with signs in Chinese calligraphy and opaque windows that hid their wares and their purpose from Caucasian eyes. Overhead, some of the buildings sported gilded pagoda cornices and there were fire escapes with fluttering laundry and hanging gardens and planters of black bamboo.

Halfway along I found a narrow storefront window decorated with Chinese characters and the words Lee Chuck, Herbalist in faded black. Inside, displayed on plates, were a dozen or so varieties of exotic herbs. Each of the plates had a piece of red paper stuck to it, identifying in English and Chinese what it contained: Old Mountain ginseng, cinnamon bark, Wu Hsi lizard tea, deer’s horn, black fungus.

There were two doors set side by side in the alcove next to the window. One of them had a dusty glass pane and opened into the herb shop; the other one, hanging a little crooked in its frame, was solid except for a peephole at eye level. That one, I thought, would probably lead upstairs to the room where Lee Chuck ran his after-hours gambling parlor. I glanced up at the second story. Three windows, each with louvered green shutters drawn tight across it.

There would be blackout curtains on the inside, too, as an added precaution; and maybe a spotter stationed somewhere out here in the alley while the bigger games were in progress to warn against a possible police raid.

I opened the shop door and went inside to the accompaniment of a small tinkling bell. The interior was not much larger than the living room of my flat, fairly clean, lighted by three Chinese lamps. On the left was a counter, and behind that, across the entire wall, were blue-lacquered cabinets with hundreds of little drawers. At the rear, heavy bead curtains covered the entrance to an inner room. There was nobody in the front part of the shop, but a couple of seconds after I shut the door, the bead curtains parted and a man came through to meet me.

He was maybe sixty, average height, bald as an egg, wearing horn-rimmed glasses and Western-style clothes. If he was surprised to see a Caucasian in his shop, or if he had any idea of who I was, he didn’t show it. Nothing changed in his bland expression or in the unblinking eyes behind his glasses. This guy was the stuff of stereotypes: the inscrutable Oriental.

“Yes?” he said politely. “May I help you?”

“Are you Lee Chuck?”

“At your service, sir. Have you an ailment?”

“Pardon?”

“That brings you to my humble shop. My tonics are all genuine, imported from China. Guaranteed effective for any ailment. You are familiar with Shen Nung, sir?”

“No,” I said.

“The ancient father of plants. A thousand years ago, in old China, Emperor Shen Nung examined many plants to discover their medicinal value. His wisdom, like that of Confucius, has survived the centuries.”

I wondered if he was putting me on. His tonics might have been genuine, but his patter was straight out of Charlie Chan. He might have mistaken me for a tourist and was serving up more stereotype, tongue-in-cheek, to go with his inscrutable look. Then again, he might have recognized me and was playing games to keep me off balance.

“I’m not here to buy herbs,” I said. Then, to see if I could shake him a little, I gave him my right name and followed it by saying, “You know who I am, don’t you, Chuck?”

It didn’t buy me anything. His face remained impassive; there was not even a flicker of reaction in his eyes. He cocked his head to one side, birdlike, and said in the same polite voice, “I am afraid not, sir.”

“Sure you do. My name has been all over the news lately. I got shot by a Chinese gunman eight days ago — me and a police lieutenant named Eberhardt.”

He turned away from me, making it seem casual and unhurried, and went around behind the counter. He ran his hand over a section of the blue-lacquered cabinet, found a drawer a third of the way down. The fragrance of herbs was heavy in there, and it seemed to get even heavier when he opened the drawer.

“Some lizard tea, perhaps?” he said. “Most nourishing, a boon to the digestion.”

“I heard there was some kind of bribe involved in the shooting,” I said. “Maybe you know something about that.”

Lee Chuck opened another drawer. “Mint leaves, sir? Excellent for combating fire in the human body.”

“The man who did the shooting is known as Mau Yee. His real name is Jimmy Quon — a boo how doy for the Hui Sip tong.”

Another drawer. “Ginseng, sir? Very fine. Ginseng soup, properly brewed, provides strength and a long life.”

“You know Jimmy Quon, right? You’re a member of Hui Sip yourself.”

“Deer’s tail from Hwei Chung? Like ginseng, it is one of mankind’s greatest blessings.”

“Upstairs,” I said, “right over this shop, there’s a gambling parlor. Fan-tan, Mah-Jongg, poker — high-stakes games. You run it for Hui Sip. The police might like to know about that.”

“Sage tea? It also promotes a long life. And softens grief.”

He was getting to me. The anger boiled up near the surface, and I had to fight off an impulse to reach over the counter and grab him by the neck. Violence would not have gotten me anything; Chuck was the kind who would absorb it stoically, without breaking, and then take his revenge later on. Like charging me with assault and battery, which was something I could not afford to have happen. My threat to tell the police about his game room upstairs didn’t carry much weight. Gambling was only a misdemeanor; even if they shut him down for a while, he’d get off with a fine and be back in business inside a week.

“All right, Chuck,” I said, “don’t talk to me. But when you talk to Jimmy Quon, give him a message. Tell him I’m going to get him for what he did. Tell him if I have to I’m going to eat his pie.”

“No herbs, sir? No fine tonics? There are more than one thousand prescriptions in the book of Li Shih-chen, the great physician of the Ming dynasty. Many would be of benefit, to assure you health and longevity.”

“Don’t give me any more of that crap. You want to threaten me, do it out in the open. Like I just threatened Jimmy Quon. Like I’m threatening you. If you’re mixed up in what happened, I’ll nail your ass too. That clear enough for you?”

Behind his glasses, his eyes were steady on my face. Snake’s eyes: it seemed they hadn’t blinked once the whole time I’d been there and they didn’t blink now. “Are you familiar with Chinese folklore, sir?” he said. “Most interesting. We have sayings appropriate to all occasions. I am fondest of the one which states, ‘Loud bark, no good dogs; loud talk, no wise man.’ ”

“There are a lot of Western sayings too,” I said. “How about ‘You’re a long time dead?’ Or maybe ‘Shit or get off the pot?’ ”

“If you do not wish to buy my tonics, sir, I must humbly request that you leave my shop. I have prescriptions to fill for others more concerned with their well-being.”

He didn’t wait to see if I had anything else to say to him. He came out from behind the counter, in the same unhurried movements as before, and disappeared through the bead curtains. I had to curb another impulse to go after him. The fragrance of the herbs seemed overpowering now, like some sort of opiate affecting my sense of reason and control. Either I got out of there pretty quick or I was going to start busting the place up. And Lee Chuck along with it.

I backed to the door, yanked it open. The little bell tinkled musically, and that was more irritation; I had a mental image of myself ripping it off the wall. I went out and hurled the door shut behind me, hard enough to rattle the pane of glass and set the bell tinkling all over again.

A motorized ricksha, driven by a Chinatown tour guide and with a couple of tourists in the rear seat, was coming down the alley. I didn’t see it right away and the damned thing almost ran me down. The driver yelled something at me; I yelled something back at him, a biological suggestion that brought shocked looks to the faces of the tourists. The three of them gaped at me as if they thought I might be a lunatic.

Well, maybe I was turning into one, at that. Maybe I was becoming unhinged. I had not handled Lee Chuck worth a damn; telling him what I knew, threatening him and Jimmy Quon, had been a stupid blunder. I admitted that as soon as I got myself calmed down. Now I was vulnerable, a walking target. Chuck would talk to Mau Yee, all right, and Mau Yee would come after me. He had tried to kill a cop; I had told Chuck I was looking for him and made it clear that I hadn’t shared my knowledge with the police. Yeah, he’d come after me. He had no choice.

A damned fool, that was what I was. Running around like a pulp detective, getting in over my head. Jimmy Quon was half my age, he had two good arms, he was a professional thug. How the hell was I supposed to challenge him? He could make a move against me any time, anywhere. Crippled up the way I was, I would not stand half a chance of defending myself.

It’s not too late to get out of it, I thought. Go talk to Marcus and Klein, tell them—

Tell them what?

I had no proof that Quon had shot Eberhardt and me. And he had a manufactured alibi, according to Richard Loo, that the police hadn’t been able to shake. Tell them I had been withholding information? Tell them I had been chasing around the city, investigating an attempted homicide? They could throw me in jail for obstructing justice, for practicing without a license, while Quon and whoever had hired him got off scot-free. Tell them about the bribe thing, the stock-transfer form in Eberhardt’s safe? If I did that, the media might get hold of it — and suppose Eb was innocent? A public flap would mark him for life, just as the one a few weeks ago had marked me.

No, damn it. Right or wrong, Jimmy Quon was my baby; I’d get him one way or another and I’d get the bastard who hired him, too. The hell with the risk. And the hell with the consequences.

I went up Washington, taking it slow because the hill there was steep, and cut through Spofford Alley and across Clay. Hang Ah Street was another narrow alley that opened off Clay and jogged through the block past the Chinese Playground. I seemed to recall that Hang Ah meant “old fragrance” and that the alley had been named after a long-vanished perfume factory founded by a German chemist. The fragrance it had these days was a lot less sweet: garbage, animal feces, cooking odors that came from the brick tenements surrounding the playground, that were piped through ventilators from the Hang Ah Tea Room at the opposite end.

I passed the offices of the Young China Daily, a couple of social clubs, and several doorways that led to tenement apartments. The door to Number Sixteen was painted green; the mailbox attached to it had no name on it. Public anonymity was a big thing among Chinatown residents. Even somebody as notorious as Mau Yee observed the custom of unmarked mailboxes.

Across from Sixteen were a row of benches and some spindly trees and a fenced-in section of tennis and volleyball courts. I sat sideways on one of the benches, looking up at the fire escape and the windows in Jimmy Quon’s building. There was not much to see. The fire escape had a potted tree on it; some of the windows were shaded and some had curtains and one was open partway. A young woman moved around behind the open one, doing something I couldn’t see. Quon’s woman? I wondered if he was in there somewhere. I wondered if Lee Chuck had got in touch with him yet.

But I wasn’t here to confront Mau Yee; that would have been another blunder. I just wanted to see where he lived, familiarize myself with the surroundings in the event I had to come looking for him here. So I did not stay long, just a couple of minutes. Then I got up and went back the way I’d come.

I would need to familiarize myself with Jimmy Quon, too, I thought as I headed down toward Portsmouth Square. As it was, I knew little enough about him; I didn’t even know what he looked like. Kam Fong could supply a description and some information about his habits, but that could wait. There was something else I needed to do first, outside Chinatown. Something more important.

I needed to get myself a gun.