The Wrecker

20

WONG LEE, OF JERSEY CITY, NEW JERSEY, WAS A TINY MAN WITH a lopsided face and a blinded eye. Twenty years ago, an Irish hod carrier, thick-armed from lugging bricks, knocked Wong’s hat to the sidewalk, and when Wong asked why he had insulted him, the hod carrier and two companions beat Wong so badly that his friends didn’t recognize him when they came to the hospital. He had been twenty-eight years old when he was attacked and full of hope, improving his English and working in a laundry to save enough money to bring his wife to America from their village in Kowloon.

Now he was nearly fifty. At one point, he had saved enough to buy his own laundry across the Hudson River on Manhattan Island in New York City in hopes of earning her passage faster. His good English drew customers until the Panic of 1893 had put a sudden end to that dream, and Wong Lee’s Fine Hand Wash Laundering joined the tens of thousands of businesses that were bankrupt in the nineties. When prosperity finally returned, the long hard years had left Wong too weary to start a new business. Though ever hopeful, he now was saving money by sleeping on the floor of the laundry where he worked in Jersey City. Much of that money went to get a certificate of residence, which was a new provision included in the Chinese Exclusion Act when it was renewed in 1902. It seems that he had neglected to defend himself from assault charges, the lawyer explained, filed all those years ago while he was still in the hospital. So bribes would have to be paid. Or so the lawyer claimed.

Then that past February, with winter still lingering, a stranger approached Wong when he was alone in his employer’s laundry. He was a white American, so muffled against the river wind that only his eyes showed above the collar of his inverness coat and below the brim of his fedora.

“Wong Lee,” he said. “Our mutual friend, Peter Boa, sends greetings.”

Wong Lee hadn’t see Peter Boa in twenty-five years, not since they’d worked together as immigrant dynamiters blowing cuts in the mountains for the Central Pacific Railroad. Young and daring and hopeful of returning to their villages rich men, they’d scrambled down cliff faces setting charges, competing to blast the most foot-holds for the trains.

Wong said that he was happy to hear that Boa was alive and well. When last Wong had seen him, in the Sierra Nevada, Peter had lost a hand to a sooner-than-expected explosion. Gangrene was creeping up his arm, and he had been too sick to flee California from the mobs attacking Chinese immigrants.

“Peter Boa told me to look you up in Jersey City. He said you could help me, as he was unable.”

“By your clothes,” Wong observed, “I can see that you are too rich to need help from a poor man.”

“Rich indeed,” said the stranger, sliding a wad of banknotes across the wooden counter. “An advance,” he called it, “until I return,” adding, “Rich enough to pay you whatever you need.”

“What do you need?” Wong countered.

“Peter Boa told me that you had a special gift for demolition. He said that you used one stick of dynamite when most men needed five. They called you Dragon Wong. And when you protested that only emperors could be dragons, they proclaimed you Emperor of Dynamite.”

Flattered, Wong Lee knew it was true. He had had an intuitive understanding of dynamite back when no one knew that much about the new explosive. He still had the gift. He had kept up with all the modern advances in demolition, including how electricity made explosives safer and more powerful, in the unlikely hope that one day quarries and construction contractors would deign to hire the Chinese they used to hire but now shunned.

Wong immediately used the money to buy a half interest in his boss’s business. But one month later, that past March, a Panic swept Wall Street again. Jersey City factories closed, as did factories all over the nation. The trains had less freight to carry, so the car floats had fewer boxcars to ferry across the river. Jobs grew scarce on the piers, and fewer people could afford to have their clothing laundered. All spring and summer, the Panic deepened. By autumn, Wong had little hope of ever seeing his wife again.

Now it was November, bitterly cold today, with another winter looming.

And the stranger came back to Jersey City, muffled against the Hudson wind.

He reminded Wong that accepting an advance was a promise to deliver.

Wong reminded the stranger that he had promised to pay whatever he needed.

“Five thousand dollars when the job is done. Will that do you?”

“Very good, sir.” Then, feeling unusually bold because the stranger truly needed him, Wong asked, “Are you an anarchist?”

“Why do you ask?” the stranger asked coldly.

“Anarchists like dynamite,” Wong answered.

“So do labor strikers,” the stranger answered patiently, proving that he truly needed Wong Lee and only Wong Lee. “You know the expression ‘the proletariat’s artillery’?”

“But you do not wear workman’s clothes.”

The Wrecker studied the Chinaman’s battered face for a long minute, as if memorizing every scar.

Even though the laundry counter separated them, Wong suddenly felt they were standing too close.

“I don’t care,” he tried to explain. “Just curious,” he added nervously.

“Ask me again,” said the stranger, “and I will remove your other eye.”

Wong Lee backed up a step. The stranger asked a question, watching Wong’s battered face as if testing his skills.

“What will you need to make the biggest bang possible out of twenty-five tons?”

“Twenty-five tons of dynamite? Twenty-five tons is a lot of dynamite.”

“A full boxcar load. What will you need to make the biggest explosion?”

Wong told him precisely what he needed, and the stranger said, “You will have it.”

On the ferry back to Manhattan Island, Charles Kincaid stood out on the open deck, still muffled against the cold wind that scattered the coal smoke normally hanging over the harbor. He could not help but smile.

Striker or anarchist?

In fact, he was neither, despite the fear-mongering “evidence” he had taken pains to leave behind. Radical talk, rabble-rousing posters, diabolical foreigners, the Yellow Peril that Wong Lee’s body would soon furnish, even the name Wrecker, were all smoke in his enemies’ eyes. He was no radical. He was no destroyer. He was a builder.

His smile broadened even as his eyes grew colder.

He had nothing against the “favored few.” Before he was finished, he would be first among them, the most favored of all.