Bride of the Rat God (30 page)

Auspicious time to meet the senior partner—

you will be upheld...

Omen of good to meet the hidden master...

C
HINATOWN.
A
LEC HAD
said it was the LAPD’s word for any situation unknown and incomprehensible and better left that way.

“I am looking for the Shining Crane,” Norah said, for perhaps the dozenth time, to the shopkeeper who came forward from the dark labyrinth of cheap bowls, brightly painted vases, racks of strange clothing, and bolts of fabric to which clung the unmistakable musty odor of silk. “I wish to ask him about a way to kill rats.”

The little woman bowed. Never in her gawky and long-legged life had Norah felt so inordinately tall as she had that morning. “Ah, so sorry,” she said. “I know not this name. But good poison here, killee rats all same.” She produced a red cardboard box labeled M
ARTINSON’S PATENTED RAT-BAIT
and decorated with a dramatic drawing of a very dead rodent lying on its back with its tongue lolling.

“I’m sorry.” Norah inclined her head. “But it is the Shining Crane I am looking for. Thank you all the same.”

The woman bowed and smiled again, that all-purpose, close-lipped Oriental smile that so completely concealed whatever might be going on behind it. “All same,” she replied. She teetered back behind the counter on tiny deformed feet. Most of the women Norah had seen in Chinatown that afternoon had had what Alec said were called “lily feet,” bound and crippled in childhood to increase a woman’s charms, and though under the sensible stockings and Cuban-heeled shoes her own feet smarted in their bandages, Norah felt ashamed of her complaints about the pain.

In the rutted dirt of the street outside, Christine was gazing around her with a kind of indignant surprise while Black Jasmine sniffed at the boxes of cheap cooking utensils, straw baskets, and cloth shoes lined up against the store’s adobe wall. “I must say, this doesn’t look a bit like ‘Chu Chin Chow.’”

Lines of laundry stretched overhead or aired from windowsills; men and women in faded black or blue cotton pajama suits filled the unpaved streets, though Norah very seldom caught the stench of unwashed humanity typical of, for instance, the London railway platforms where she had stood to meet Jim. At least half the men still wore queues. Everyone seemed busy, shopping or taking care of children who were themselves taking care of still smaller children, carrying bundles of laundry or trays of fish on shoulder yokes; even the young men conversing with shopkeepers under doorstep awnings about the contents of unreadable newspapers had a purposive air. From the upper stories of the buildings drifted strange smells, sweet or tart or steamy against the itch of dust in the nostrils, and strange music that twinged oddly in her memory, punctuated by the incessant rattle of mah-jongg tiles.

“I mean,” Christine went on plaintively, “aren’t there supposed to be willow trees and those round gates?”

Clothed in a very stylish suit of green wool crepe, her black hair more or less pinned up under a heron-feather hat, and a green and lavender scarf hiding the ghastly abrasions on her throat, Christine looked remarkably well. Norah reflected, not for the first time, that there was considerably more to her sister-in-law than met the eye: Emily Violet would have been prostrated if she had survived the night at all; Norah certainly couldn’t imagine that sweet-faced ingenue having the nerve to gouge out an attacker’s eye or the wits to roll at the same time Alec had kicked in order to break Fallon’s hold. Flindy McColl would already have fled the country or would be in a stupor of drugs and alcohol to “get over the shock.”

“Perhaps the people who came over from China never attended Broadway plays,” Norah theorized, and Christine sniffed.

“Well, they ought to. It’s about their country, after all.” Her voice was little more than a croak. “Did he tell you anything?”

“She. And no.”

“That doesn’t mean she doesn’t know Shang.” Alec came back from a perusal of the announcements plastered all around the door of a nearby building. Short though he was, he stood taller than most of the crowd eddying on all sides.

“If we talk to enough people,” he went on, “word will get back to him. I left word with Ah Tom—Tom Gubbins—over at the F Sui One Company. He knows everybody in Chinatown. Right now I’d say food is in order.”

Shang’s grandson located them over lunch.

“Don’t ask what’s in it,” Alec advised Norah, scooping the characteristically Chinese concoction of unknown meat, unknown vegetables, and peanuts over the rice on her plate.

“Oh, no, darling, that would be
fatal.”
Christine delicately unwrapped a triangle of oiled paper and with expert chopsticks picked at the few bits of steamed chicken within. “That’s the
first
thing I learned.”

“Ah,” Norah said wisely. “More Chinatown.”

“Exactly.” Alec added a dollop of brown liquid from a delicately flowered porcelain pitcher on the table. “I’m told the Chinatown division of the Los Angeles police force is a world unto itself. They’re supposed to make about $400,000 a year off bribes. They don’t bother the owners of the gambling clubs and fan-tan houses, and the tongs settle any little problems they have among themselves. There was a Flash of tong murders a few years ago. Nobody knew why they started, nobody knew why they stopped, but the heads of the Bing Kong and the Hop Sing called on the Chinatown beat and told them the problem had resolved itself.”

He shrugged. “So the police dropped it. They didn’t know what was going on, but they knew it had to be about either prostitution—which is everywhere in Chinatown—or gambling. Most of the big gambling in Los Angeles is done in places like this.”

He gestured with his chopsticks at the small, low-raftered room on the second floor of a building on Marchessault Street that smacked more of half-ruined Spanish missions than of the Celestial Empire. An attempt had evidently been made to display Christmas spirit, for incongruous garlands festooned the black rafters among the paper lanterns and a framed magazine illustration of Ebenezer Scrooge and Marley’s ghost hung above the mantel of the tiled fireplace. “Don’t eat that,” he added hastily as Norah picked up a short, hard-shelled red-black pepper from the aromatic gumbo on her plate.

“What is it?”

“Kung pao death pepper—mysterious poisons of the East. The Chinese like their food even hotter than the Mexicans do. Mostly, in the rest of Los Angeles and Hollywood, you get Americanized Chinese. I’m told at the Forbidden Palace you can get chow mein noodles fried Chicago-style. This is Chinese from China.”

“Pick them all out, darling,” advised Christine, doing so with the chopstick adeptness of a native. “And if you get a seed in your teeth, whatever you do,
don’t
bite it.”

Under her rouge and powder she looked exhausted, eyelids smudgy with fatigue and shock, lines of strain still faintly visible in the hollowed cheeks. She had looked far worse that morning when she and Norah had made their appearance, early, at Frank Brown’s office at Colossus Studios to talk to the police. But that, Norah knew, had been deliberate. She’d seen Christine darkening the hollows of her cheeks and the sockets of her eyes with judiciously applied Colura even as she doctored away the lines of strain around her pale unrouged mouth. “I want to look frail, darling, not hagged,” she’d explained.

She hadn’t had to do anything to the vicious bruises on her neck. Pulling off the scarf to show the police detectives the white flesh blackened, the virulent red patterns where Blake’s grip had driven the necklace’s links into the skin, had been a stunning piece of theater and one calculated to divert anyone’s mind from any question about gouged eyes, smashed skulls, appropriated vehicles, or two of the Gilmore Oil Company’s wells still in flames. The smoke from them had been visible through Frank’s office window.

“He was insane,” Christine told Brown, drawing quietly on a cigarette before the police came, her dark eyes haunted-looking in their bruised rings. Norah, sitting on the blue velvet couch with Black Jasmine on the far side of the office, had to admire the underplaying. Christine had tried it on her, both hysterical and quiet, before leaving the house that morning. “I think he was going insane all the time at Red Bluff, when he was following me around like a demented wolf. Poor Monty had nothing to do with it.”

The young stuntman was in a coma at the Methodist Hospital. Christine had telephoned while putting her makeup on.

“Nothing I did—nothing Alec did—would stop him. God knows where he went or what he did after he wrecked Miss Bow’s car.” When Alec heard who the owner was of the car in which they’d made their escape, his sole comment had been, “No wonder the thing went like a bat out of hell.” They had agreed not to mention the fact that Fallon was already dead during the chase down Wilshire or talk about the explosions of subterranean gas. There were things, Norah said, that people would believe and things they would not. She was still having trouble believing them herself.

The early morning papers made no mention of anyone finding Blake Fallon’s body.

“Damn.” Brown rubbed his stubbled chins. In the outer office the typewriter clacked busily, and through the window Norah could see the comedians Larry and Jerry out in the studio quadrangle under the pepper trees, working out what appeared to be a new routine with the hot dogs they’d originally intended for their breakfast.

“Three-fourths of the hottest biblical in town in the can, and hands down the best acting I’ve ever seen out of Fallon...” The producer’s intolerant green eyes shifted to Norah. “This is hell, coming on top of the Pelletier murder and with
Midnight Cavalier
just out. Jesperson’s fighting me every step of the way on the Enterprise buyout.” He picked up his cigar from the silver ash-tray and drew thickly on it, but mercifully it had gone out. “You think Blake set those guncotton charges in the desert last week?”

“He certainly had access to the guncotton.” Norah looked back at him, while Black Jasmine chewed plaintively on her finger. “More access than the extra he accused of doing it.”

“Damn.” He glanced up as a secretary tapped discreetly on the door to announce the arrival of the police.

“We’ll keep this as quiet as we can until we find out what they know,” he said, his cold glance going from Christine to Norah as he stubbed the cigar in the tray. “And nothing to the press, you understand? None of this calling them up to tell them some senile idiot’s filled your dressing room with flowers, all right? Let’s fade back and see what they know. If Fallon went as crazy as you think, he may have turned up.”

“He may,” Norah said quietly. “But I sincerely doubt he’s turned up alive.”

“Miss Blackstone?”

Norah looked up in surprise, broken from her reverie. A young Chinese man stood next to the table, bowing respectfully. He wore what she thought of as traditional Chinese garb: the black cotton pajamas sold in any of a dozen stores she had been in that day. His hair hung down in a traditional queue, and he had traces of a thin mustache. She thought he might be the young man who had led Shang out of the lobby of the Million Dollar Theater but could not be sure.

“I am Shang Feng, great-grandson to the Shining Crane,” he said. “He has asked that you come with me.”

As they rose, the proprietor of the restaurant hurried over, also bowing. Black Jasmine trotted out from under Norah’s chair to meet him in a ludicrous parody of his self-importance. Christine gestured grandly with her chopsticks and said, “If you’d box this all for us, we’ll pick it up on our way back.”

Shang Feng led them down age-blackened oak stairs barely wider than Alec’s shoulders to the market on the ground floor. In the gloom of the thick-walled adobe room, jars, tins, and wooden boxes, their lids pried off to reveal strange wares, sat on the uneven tile of the floor and fish stared mournfully at passersby from crates of ice. Instead of leading them through to the outer door and thence to the street, Shang Feng nodded to the grocer, turned, and opened the door to a small back room, where, amid more boxes labeled in scribbled ideograms, a trapdoor gaped in the floor. Christine gathered Black Jasmine into her arms.

In a cellar below that smelled of earth and cabbage, their guide opened a second trapdoor. Heat rolled up to meet them from darkness mitigated by the ocher smudge of a kerosene lamp: dirt, unwashed clothing, a musky whiff of incense. They descended a ladder to a subcellar containing three narrow, unoccupied bunks, where bright red half-pound tins labeled in yellow were stacked floor to ceiling on the opposite wall. A door was set in a third wall—all the walls were built of aged brick almost completely black with smoke—and Shang Feng took up the kerosene lantern that burned beside it and led them through. Alec’s hand slipped into his pocket for the brass knuckles he’d borrowed from Captain Oleson when they’d stopped at Enyart’s for breakfast on their way to the studio. By the way he moved, Norah guessed he was wishing he’d borrowed a gun as well.

The tunnel through which they passed was very narrow, though its earth walls and floor, shored up with timbers, were not damp and the air was relatively fresh. Now and then they passed roughly curtained doorways through which voices could be heard, along with the rattle of
pai-gow
tiles or dice. Once Norah heard music, thin and nerve-racking and whiny, the sound of it touching something in her memory, a dream, perhaps.

She had dreamed, just before morning, something about Alec. Something about taking the dogs and locking them in the bathroom. Something about putting on her robe and walking down the stairs, across the parlor where he slept in a tangle of spare blankets on the divan, to open the front door. The dream had been so vivid that when she’d woken, she’d had to look at her feet to make sure they weren’t wet from the dew on the rough California grass that grew along the edge of the pavement. Yes, she thought, she had dreamed of going down the porch steps and along the edge of the street to the eucalyptus that overhung the steep dip of the drive. Remembered how bright the full moon had been, riding in midheaven by then, ringed with halos of ice.