Authors: Rhys Bowen
He took a long sip of his own tea. I noticed how he deftly pushed the wispy strands of his mustache out of the way as he drank.
“I should let you know immediately that I don’t handle divorce cases,” I said.
This elicited the ghost of a smile. “Chinese have no need for divorce cases,” he said. “Private life is kept private. Don’t your people have a saying, ‘a man’s home is his castle’? This we too believe.”
“So if it’s not a divorce case, then what is it?” I persisted.
“Such an impatient young woman,” he said. “You would not make suitable bride for Chinese man.”
“Then it’s lucky I’m marrying a fellow Irishman.”
“I know. The famous Captain Sullivan.”
I must have shown my surprise because he said, “Do you think I would not have my people do a thorough search on a person I wished to hire? So one thing I have to know before you and I proceed with this matter—do you discuss your business with your future husband?”
“Absolutely not,” I said. “My business dealings are entirely confidential. Whatever is spoken between you and me goes no further than this room.”
“Ah, so. This is what my spies tell me about you, but I wanted to hear it for myself. I had to make sure you were trustworthy. This is a matter of great delicacy.”
By now I was almost ready to grab him and yell, “Tell me what it is, for God’s sake!” but I practiced my newfound patience a little longer. I was certainly intrigued by him. Even if we had met somewhere other than in this elaborate room, I would have assumed him to be a man of power.
He leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. “I wish you to recover a precious possession that has gone missing.” I noted that he could not say the
r
in the word “precious.” It came out closer to “plecious.”
I digested what he had just said before asking him, “When you say missing, do you mean that you have mislaid it or that it has been taken from you?”
“Both,” he said.
“Stolen, you mean?”
“In a way. Taken. Carried off.”
“Mr. Lee,” I said, “if something has been stolen from your residence, then surely this is a matter for the police.”
“The police?” His lip curled in an expression of disdain. “Do you think that the New York police will help me recover a lost item? Do you think they would come to the aid of a Chinese person, even if that person is as prominent in the community as Lee Sing Tai? They stand by when we are beaten by thugs. We have to pay them protection money if we want them to patrol our streets, to prevent our shop windows from being smashed. No, I could not call upon the police in this matter. Besides, I do not think they could help me.”
“I don’t see how I could help you recover a stolen object,” I said.
“You are a lady detective, is that not correct?”
“Well, yes, that is correct,” I said.
“And should a detective not have the skill to pick up the trail of a missing possession?”
“Might I know what is this possession you speak about?”
“To begin with, I will show you this,” he said. He reached across to a side table, took a brocade envelope from it, and opened it carefully, drawing out a large medallion of carved dark green stone. “Examine it carefully,” he said.
He handed it to me. It felt cool to the touch, almost as big as my hand and carved with strange curling, intertwined beasts. It was attached to a chain of heavy gold by an ornate gold clasp.
“The missing piece is identical to this?” I asked.
“Not identical. The missing piece depicts the dragon and the phoenix—the beasts of good luck and good health,” he said. “But it is the same dark green emperor jade and the gold work is the same. You will know it if you see it. There are few pieces of such quality in this country.”
I turned the piece over in my hand. It was still remarkably cool. “Do you have any suspicion about who might have stolen it?”
“We will not discuss my suspicions at this moment, except to say that I believe that whoever has taken this jade will try to sell it. You will conduct a search for it in the obvious places first—pawnshops, jewelers—and if it can’t be found there, we will take the next step.”
He held out his hand and I passed the jade back to him. He sat calmly folding the brocade around the piece of jade again.
I frowned. Something didn’t make sense here. I plucked up the courage to break the silence. “Mr. Lee. I am given to understand that you run an empire of businesses. Do you not have employees enough to visit every pawnshop and jeweler in the city?”
He held my eyes with his cold, frank stare. It was like being observed by a snake. “Have you noticed many Chinese men in other parts of the city?”
“None at all,” I said.
“Do you know why this is? We are hated, despised. Bullies take great delight in setting upon us with no excuse whatsoever. If we try to fight back, we find ourselves arrested for disturbing the peace, and even deported. Therefore we keep to ourselves as much as possible and do not stray far from this small area they call Chinatown. But there are other reasons I do not wish to hand this task to an employee. It requires a woman’s touch.”
“You do not employ any women?”
He actually smiled this time. “There are almost no women in Chinatown—at least no Chinese women. The American government does not allow Chinese men to bring over their wives and daughters. And respectable Chinese women are not allowed out in public.” He leaned forward suddenly, tapping ash into the little dish. “So Miss Molly Murphy, I require your services for a good reason. I need someone who can be discreet and ask the right questions. I want this item returned to me quickly and with as little fuss as possible. So will you take my assignment or not?” He paused, holding me with that reptilian stare, then added, “I assure you I will make it worth your while if this prized possession is returned to me quickly.”
He sensed my hesitation. “Well?” he said. “What is your answer? Do you think you are up to the task?”
“I’ll do my best, Mr. Lee,” I heard myself saying.
“Splendid.” He clapped those bony hands together. “Very well then. Off you go. Good hunting, as they say in your country.”
I stood up. Frederick reappeared and came to my side to usher me out.
“You will report back to me tomorrow,” Lee Sing Tai said. “Let us hope you have good news for me by then.”
I started toward the door.
“And if you find this piece, you will get a description of the person who brought it in,” he called after me.
I turned back. “Do you have your suspicions about who this person might be?”
“No more questions,” he snapped. “Off to work now.”
As I looked back at him I saw the heavy drapes at the back of the room twitch as if suddenly dropped. Someone had been watching me.
Five
Frederick Lee insisted on escorting me back to the Bowery, then took his leave.
“I wish you success,” he said. “Until tomorrow then. Please come to my office and I will escort you as I did today. I do not want you walking through Chinatown alone.”
Since it had seemed a particularly deserted place I wondered why he felt the need to protect me. Surely not the reputed white slave trade? Or was it rather that I was an outsider, did not know how to behave, and might offend with my Western ways? We parted and I stepped into the shade of the elevated railway, trying to collect my thoughts. Why had I agreed to do this? On the surface the assignment seemed simple enough, but something wasn’t quite right. Lee Sing Tai had sought me out in order to have a female detective retrieve a piece of jade jewelry. Granted it was attractive enough, but how much could such a piece of jade be worth? Enough to pay me a generous fee for its recovery? Then I concluded it must have some kind of sentimental value—some link to his past life in China. If not, then he could certainly afford to pay a jeweler to re-create it here or even have another one shipped from his homeland. That would make more sense than sending a detective running all over the city hunting for it.
Oh, well, mine was not to reason why. No doubt all would become clear when I found the piece and delivered it safely to him. I mapped out a plan in my head. There were pawnshops aplenty along the Bowery, as is usual in a place where drinking, gambling, and prostitution abound. If someone had stolen the item for money, then he’d want to get rid of it as quickly as possible, so I should start here.
I paused again at the entrance to the first pawnshop. Why steal that particular piece of jade from a household that was full of treasures? I hadn’t asked if other items were missing. Perhaps he had set me on the trail of this one because it was so easily identifiable. I stepped from the heat of the sidewalk into the cooler darkness of the pawnshop. The shop had a musty smell as if a lot of old and forgotten things were stuffed away here. The man behind the counter was an elderly Jew with a long white beard. He listened carefully, but shook his head.
“We don’t see Chinese in here. They’ve nothing to pawn,” he said. “You know why? They only came to this country with the clothes on their backs. They left their wives and families at home and they still plan to make their money and go back where they came from. So no jewels, because there are no ladies.”
In the next pawnshop I was not treated as politely. “Don’t deal with no chinky Chinese stuff,” he said. “Who’d want it? And I don’t trust those Chinamen further than I can throw them. Slit your throat the moment you turn your back, that’s what they do.”
I got variations on these speeches from other pawnshops close to Chinatown. As I moved farther away, along Canal Street in one direction into the Lower East Side and then in the other toward Broadway, I faced a cold indifference. No, they’d never seen anything like the piece I was talking about. A Chinaman never set foot in their shops, and if he did, they’d show him the door quickly enough.
I began to see how daunting this task might be. If a robber had taken the jade piece because he needed cash, then he hadn’t used a nearby pawnshop. And if he had delivered it to a fence, then I had no way of proceeding. I knew no fences. I had come into contact with the two large gangs that ruled Lower Manhattan between them, and I had no wish to deal with either again. I knew I had been lucky to come away with my life on one occasion and I had managed to seek Monk Eastman’s help when I was truly desperate. But I also knew him to be fickle, sadistic, and ruthless. I couldn’t count on any assistance a second time.
The obvious thing would be to ask Daniel. He would know every fence in the area. But he was the one person I couldn’t go to. Most frustrating. I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that I’d have to appear before Mr. Lee Sing Tai the next morning and admit my failure. And come away with no fee for my labors. But I wasn’t about to give up yet. There were plenty of jewelers, especially along Hester and Essex and those crowded streets of the Lower East Side where the Jews had settled from Eastern Europe, bringing their craft as goldsmiths with them.
I began to work my way along Hester, up Essex, then Delancey, and Rivington. Most of the shops dealt in secondhand jewelry or bought gold to melt down, but nobody seemed interested in jade.
“It’s not worth that much,” one of the jewelers said. “It’s only semiprecious.”
“I wouldn’t find a customer for it,” another said. “My customers only want gold.”
As the afternoon wore on I was hot, tired, and growing more despondent by the minute. My overriding impression was of an extreme distrust of the Chinese. I was warned several times about getting involved with them. One man actually said, “You haven’t gone and married one of them, have you?”
I wondered what had made him say that, until an old Russian, more astute and interested than the others had been, listened carefully to my description. “Dragon and phoenix intertwined?” he said. “That sounds like a bride-piece to me. Dragon for virility and power, and phoenix for fertility and health. I saw that kind of thing when I was in Shanghai, waiting for a ship.”
When I looked puzzled by this he added, “We fled from Vladivostok, you know. Our home was destroyed in the war with Japan, and Russia is no place to be right now.”
I had had enough for one day. The soles of my feet were throbbing from those burning sidewalks. The thin muslin of my dress was sticking to my back with sweat. I decided to call it a day and make an early start in the morning, although I was already telling myself that I was not likely to be any more successful than I had been today.
Workers were leaving sweatshops, indicating how late it had become. Those girls worked a twelve-hour day at least. I watched them walking three or four abreast, arm in arm, chatting and laughing with the relief of being in the fresh air and free after the long day of toil. The pushcarts had come out too in abundance and I had to thread my way between stalls selling roasted chickpeas, live chickens, pickles, buttons, and lace—in fact anything that could be sold to earn a few coins. Usually I savored this lively scene, but at this moment all I wanted to do was escape from it to the peace of Patchin Place, where a bath and a cool drink would await me.
I was on my way back to the Bowery and the El station when I heard the most improbable sound: someone was yelling my name. I turned around, unsure that I was actually the one being called, and saw two figures running toward me, fighting their way through the crowd. It was my long-lost Irish children, Bridie and Shamey, followed by their father.
“Molly. Look, Pa, it’s Molly!” Bridie was shrieking, not caring whom she pushed aside to reach me.
Shamey made it first with his big, almost man-sized strides. He went to hug me, then thought better of it, wiping his hands down his shirtfront instead, but smiling at me delightedly. “We thought you’d gone away,” he said.
“I thought you must have gone away,” I replied, putting my arms around both of them. “I sent you an invitation to my wedding but I got no reply.”
“We came back to the city,” Shamey said. “We’re living with Auntie Nuala for a while.”
“Goodness gracious. What on earth made you do that?” I demanded, as that lady’s abode did not hold pleasant memories for me.