The Body Snatchers Affair

14

The streets of Chinatown were even less populated today. The small number of black-clad, pigtailed men and work-stooped women abroad hurried on their errands, wariness in their movements, their usual singsong chatter muted. There was an almost palpable tension in the air. The danger of widespread tong violence, police raids, and vigilante retaliation from the Chinese-hating inhabitants of the poor white neighborhoods had spread fear throughout the Quarter.

Mock Don Yuen’s herb shop was closed, shuttered, and apparently empty. Several sharp raps on the door and two more on the window glass brought no response. Well, this was no surprise. Whether or not the Hip Sing Company’s new president was mixed up in the intrigue, he would be sensitive to the ominous rumblings and likely have sought refuge in the tong’s headquarters.

Quincannon briefly considered another visit there and discarded the idea. Mock Don Yuen would surely refuse to see him, as would Mock Quan; chances were he wouldn’t even be permitted to enter the building this time. There was nothing to be gained in making the effort. For that matter, he shouldn’t have bothered coming here to the herb shop. Neither Mock Don Yuen nor anyone else in a position of power in Chinatown would have anything to say at this point to an Occidental detective with no official standing.

The Chinese woman, Dongmei, on the other hand …

The building in which she resided was on the steep section of Clay Street that rose above Portsmouth Square. Two stories, built of brick with a slatted wooden front, it stood between a pagoda-corniced temple and a larger structure that Quincannon guessed, by dint of its shuttered windows and profusion of Chinese characters, belonged to one of the small benevolent associations that dotted the Quarter. A balcony festooned with colored lanterns stretched across the upper floor; the windows behind it were likewise shuttered.

The entrance was narrow, recessed from the wooden sidewalk by two steps. The door there had no lock; it opened into a dark vestibule no larger than a cell. Stairs rose at its end, with another door behind them that would give access to the ground-floor apartment. Dongmei’s would be the one upstairs, he judged, as befitted a woman of status in the community.

He climbed the stairs, quietly. The strong odor of incense came from behind the door on the landing above. He paused to listen, heard only silence, and rapped smartly on the panel, the sound echoing hollowly in the stillness. There was no response here, either.

Not that her apparent absence was necessarily disappointing. It might, in fact, be a blessing in disguise.

The door to her rooms was fitted with a locking plate, and when he tried the latch he found it secure. No locked door had ever deterred him for long, however, and this one was no exception. It took him less than thirty seconds of keyhole manipulation with the lock picks he carried, formerly the property of an East Bay scruff, to release the bolt.

Dongmei’s abode, unquestionably. The unprepossessing building masked an apartment befitting the daughter of a highborn Chinese, a place as opulently furnished as any of the parlor houses. The furniture was of teakwood and bamboo, dominated by couches with soft cushions of embroidered silk; the walls were hung with exotic paintings, some of such an erotic nature that Quincannon couldn’t help admiring them. Atop a wooden cabinet was a large bronze statue of Buddha. Elaborately painted screens and beaded curtains separated the parlor from another rooms, one containing an agreeably large canopied bed in a frame decorated with carved dragons. Brass and porcelain incense pots were the source of the heavy, still fresh scent that choked the air. Dongmei had not been gone for long.

He set about a rapid search of the premises. If Dongmei and Mock Quan were conjoined in the opium seduction of James Scarlett, it was highly doubtful that he would find the lawyer’s private papers here. Anything of a sensitive nature that he might have left in her care would have been turned over to Mock Quan; might in fact have been the motive behind the assassination. What he did hope to find was evidence directly linking the pair to each other, if not to the late attorney.

There was nothing in the parlor that might have belonged to Scarlett or any other Occidental, or for that matter to a Chinese of Mock Quan’s Westernized tastes. None of the few handwritten documents tucked into a black-lacquered parlor cabinet were written in English.

Quincannon turned his attention to the bedroom. At the foot of the bed was a broad, intricately carved camphorwood chest. He unfastened the brass catch on the side of the chest, lifted the lid to look inside. Blankets. Silk sheets. An extra pillow. One of two bottom drawers contained several pieces of jade and ivory jewelry, valuable from the look of them, and little else. It was in the second that he found the first items of interest: a curved opium pipe, cooking bowl, needle, and a small supply of ah pin vin. Dongmei was either a hop smoker herself, or she kept the materials on hand for male callers such as James Scarlett and Mock Quan. Or perhaps both.

A dragon-decorated, red-and-black wardrobe contained several silk robes, two of them much larger than the others. Dongmei was obviously of a diminutive stature; the large robes were masculine attire, though their pockets contained nothing to indicate who had worn them. But as he was about to close the wardrobe doors, he spied the second item of interest on a corner shelf: a man’s black slouch hat with a red topknot.

He was studying the hat, turning it in his hands, when the sound alerted him — that of a key scratching in the front door lock.

Caught, blast it! No sense in attempting to hide, even if the apartment had had a place large enough to conceal him. If the windows facing Clay Street had been unshuttered, he might have managed to slip out onto the balcony and then to climb or drop down to the sidewalk. As it was, the only course of action open to him was to brazenly stonewall.

Quickly he replaced the hat, then hurried to the bead curtains and stepped through them into the parlor just as the door opened. The woman saw him immediately as she came inside; she stopped with the door still open, stood stock-still. Tiny she was, no more than five feet tall; shiny ebony hair hung in a long queue down her back, and what Quincannon imagined would be an enticing body was concealed inside a loose-fitting garment that covered her from head to foot. She was strikingly attractive, or would have been if her elfin features hadn’t twisted into expressions of surprise and then cold fury.

“Fan kwei!” She spat the phrase at him.

Quincannon knew what it meant. Fan kwei — foreign devil. He assumed a sternly officious expression as he came forward, as if he had every right to be in her apartment.

Dongmei chattered at him briefly in Mandarin, with such vitriol that he had no doubt he was being roundly cursed. Then, abruptly, she switched to lightly accented English. “Why you break in here?” she demanded.

“Break in? The door was unlocked.”

“You lie! Door locked like always. You steal something?”

“I’m not a thief.”

“What you come here for?”

“Police business.”

“Hai! You not police dog.”

“No? Then who am I?”

“Quin-cannon.” As if his name were two words instead of one, both of them obscene. “I know you.”

“From Mock Quan, eh?”

She made the same kind of angry hissing sound Mock Quan had the day before. Then, “You go away now.”

“Not until you tell me about Mock Quan and James Scarlett.”

“I tell you nothing. Nothing!”

“Why was Scarlett killed?”

“Get out!”

“Talk to me or talk to the American Terror, Dongmei.”

She made a spitting mouth, staring at him lynx-eyed, her hands hooked in front of her. The fingernails were an inch long and as sharp as claws. For a moment Quincannon thought that she might launch a furious attack, but when she moved it was away from him toward the windows.

She threw open the shutters, then the glass doors to the balcony. He knew what she was about to do then, even before she stepped out onto the balcony, but it was too late to stop her. She emitted an ear-piercing shriek, followed by a shrill string of Chinese words dripping with simulated terror and then more shrieks. Anyone on Clay Street below would think she was being raped or murdered and there would soon be a stampede, if not a riot.

Quincannon was no fool; he did the prudent if not the manly thing.

He fled.

A messenger service envelope was waiting for him when he returned to the agency — on the floor with the morning mail, having been pushed through the slot in the locked door. Sabina seemed not to have come in yet today. It must be that she was off investigating the Blanchford matter or perhaps another of her cases. The alternative, that she had spent a long, amorous, and exhausting night with the Montgomery swell, was too depressing to consider.

At his desk he sifted quickly through the mail, separating out the only piece which might contain a check for services rendered, but leaving it unopened for the moment. Then he gave his attention to the messenger service envelope.

As he’d anticipated, it was from Father O’Halloran’s scholarly acquaintance, a man named Fosbury, and contained both the original two-page document from James Scarlett’s office file and an English translation. He read and digested only a few sentences before putting it down. For the document was nothing more than a contract between Mock Don Yuen and the owner of the building in which he maintained his herbalist shop, extending a five-year lease for the shop and the rooms upstairs at no monthly increase.

The document made no mention of the fact that the upstairs rooms were being used for an illicit gambling operation, although the amount of money Mock Don Yuen was paying the owner indicated a percentage payoff. Even if the gambling had been mentioned, it had no direct bearing on Quincannon’s investigation. The attorney, who had both spoken and read Chinese, must have acted as an intermediary in the financial negotiations between the two men and then vetted the agreement.

A waste of time and money, having the document translated? No. While it didn’t absolve Mock Don Yuen of complicity in James Scarlett’s murder, it strengthened Quincannon’s growing belief that the old man was not the one plotting a criminal takeover of Chinatown. He was not cold-blooded enough, nor recklessly ambitious enough at his age, to have masterminded such a scheme. His son was. And so was Little Pete.

Which one, then? Or was it possible that the two of them were in cahoots, Mock Quan’s vicious invective against Fong Ching nothing but a smokescreen? Possible, but highly unlikely. Pete had long been a ruling force in Chinatown crime, a man who relished his position of power; while he might want to gain command of the Hip Sing’s gambling network, he would never agree to share with a rival to get it. If he was behind the Bing Ah Kee snatch, it was in an effort to gain control by devious means. Yet he had had plenty of opportunity to start war between the Kwong Dock and the Hip Sing before this, and hadn’t done so. The death of Bing Ah Kee might have acted as a trigger; he could have other, hidden reasons as well. But it still seemed out of character for him to have risked the wrath of Blind Chris Buckley and the Chinatown flying squad by ordering the murder of a white man. Or, for that matter, to have made an ally of James Scarlett in the first place.

Which left Mock Quan. More and more, he seemed the most likely candidate. How to prove it, though? And how to do so before more blood was shed on the streets of Chinatown?

Quincannon sat staring into space, pondering the dilemma. He was still pondering, and beginning to make out the shape of things, when the sound of the door opening and Sabina’s voice snapped him out of his reverie.