Skulduggery Read online

  Dan’s hand caught hers. “Okay, Lily, we’ll call a truce.” He squeezed her hand gently, then dropped it. “I guess Jimmy needs all of us right now.”

  Her eyes were very dark and huge and frightened. “What is it, Dan? What’s happened? Where’s Jimmy?”

  “We don’t know where Jimmy is.”

  His voice said so much more than his words.

  “I should have known something was wrong, really wrong, when he wasn’t here this morning. He always comes in before me. My mother’s bedridden. I see to her breakfast, settle her for the morning, before I come. Jimmy never minded, he said he liked to be out early. He always had the coffee made, had started on the list of things to be done that day . . .”

  “List?” Dan interrupted.

  She was impatient. “A memo, you know, so we could judge what needed to be done first. There are always so many things, so many calls, Ruth Soong’s father died and she’s found some kind of insurance policy, what does it mean; Frankie Wong’s lost his job, the new baby needs a special formula, Frankie can’t get unemployment yet; Luke Chin wants somebody to persuade his grandfather to go to the hospital, he has TB, but the old man’s papers aren’t any good and he’s afraid; Mrs. Lee’s oldest boy, Yuan, didn’t come home Wednesday night, she doesn’t know where to look, the police aren’t interested; there’s a rumor the Green Door Hotel’s been sold for a garage and, if it’s true, what will happen to the forty-three old people who live in its rabbit-warren rooms, it’s lousy but it’s home and they don’t have the money for better; Betty Wong hasn’t been paid yet and she’s been working three months in the garment factory . . .”

  She stopped then said wearily, “Yeah, a memo. We put it on paper. Like that will help, huh?”

  “You do help,” Dan said quickly. “You do.”

  “The little boy at the dike.” She shook herself then like a terrier flinging off rainwater. “Sure, Dan, we help. It’s just that sometimes, you know, you feel like you’re being buried alive. There’s never enough time or money—and so many sad people. But we do help.”

  She was looking around once again at the shambles of the narrow crowded office. “And there’s plenty to do today. I promised . . . but I have to straighten this all up first.”

  “That memo, the list of things Jimmy did yesterday, where would it be?”

  She waved her hand at the mounds of papers and files. “It’s here somewhere. Has to be. We keep the sheets for a week on a clipboard so it’s easy to look back, then we slap them into a file. We always put down every place we intend to visit and, if we do something unscheduled, we add it to the list when we get back to the office.”

  “So yesterday’s memo would show every place that Jimmy went?” Dan’s voice was deliberately uninflected but the tension was unmistakable. And Lily didn’t miss it.

  Slowly she nodded, her eyes intent on his face. “Why?”

  He ran a hand through thick black hair and hesitated.

  I didn’t hesitate. I liked Lily. Liked and trusted her.

  “Jimmy’s come across something of value. Of great value.” I didn’t say what because there was no point in loading Lily with information that might endanger her. “He has as much right to it as anyone.” I said it. But, was I sure?

  Lily’s face was an interesting mixture of curiosity and disbelief and uncertainty.

  “Of great value? In Chinatown?”

  Dan took it up. “Yes. Somewhere Jimmy’s run across a treasure. Where else but here in Chinatown? This is where he lives and works. It has to be tied up to Chinatown.” He almost smiled. “It’s a . . . Chinese treasure.”

  She thought about it for a moment, then said crisply, “The only treasures I know about in Chinatown all belong to somebody. Ming vases, Ch’ing porcelains, jade statuettes, ivory pagodas—you don’t find them lying around loose. And, I don’t care what you think, Dan Lee, Jimmy isn’t a thief.”

  “No, I don’t think he’s a thief, either,” Dan agreed. “But he’s mixing into some very uncertain business.”

  “Why don’t you ask Jimmy where he found this . . . treasure?”

  “If we knew where he was, we would,” I said quickly. “The thing about it, Lily, is that someone’s after Jimmy, trying to take it away from him. We want to find him first, help him.”

  And recover Peking Man, I thought to myself. Put him where he belonged. In a museum. Peking Man was irreplaceable, priceless, far more important than Dan or Jimmy or I. That is what I thought.

  I didn’t know what Dan thought. But I don’t think he cared a hang what happened to a bundle of bones.

  “Jimmy’s . . . disappeared,” he said gruffly. It was the first time he had put it like that.

  Silence then among the three of us. Bleak silence.

  “When?” Lily asked finally.

  “Last night.” Dan told her about the thugs and Jimmy’s flight and how we hadn’t been able to find any trace of him, not at his room or at friends’ or among the family.

  “The hospitals?” she asked.

  “We checked them,” Dan answered. “There’s no trace of him. Anywhere.”

  “All right,” she said quickly. “I’ll give you the names of the people he’s visited lately. At least, I will if we can find the memo in all this mess.”

  “We’ll help,” I offered again.

  With three of us working, even though Dan and I had to be told where to put everything, it took us no more than half-an-hour to clear up the worst of the mess.

  The clipboard turned up toward the end of our straightening, lying upside down beneath an overturned filing cabinet.

  “Here,” Lily cried, picking it up.

  Dan took it, ran his finger down the sheet, nodding to himself.

  “There are the visits he made Wednesday,” she explained. “Let’s see, first he went by Self-Help for the Elderly.” She turned to me, explaining, “That’s one of the best social agencies in Chinatown. They kind of draw all the strings together, they know where to go to get help for all kinds of problems.” She paused. “Jimmy and I are more of a shoestring operation—we try to help when it’s something that local, state and federal funds won’t cover. We aren’t funded by any government program. We have our hand out to take money from people and private groups.” She turned back to Dan. “That couldn’t be where he found . . . whatever it is. He was going to Self-Help to talk about Eddie Leong. Eddie ruptured a disc in his back, unloading crates of vegetables, and he doesn’t know how to file for workman’s comp. So, anyway, after Self-Help, Jimmy was going to Ping Yuen to see the Chan family and from there to a tenement on Stockton to talk to the Lees and try to find out more about Yuan.”

  She studied the sheet a moment longer, then said decisively, “That takes care of Wednesday. On Thursday, he put down the East Wind Restaurant, the Green Door Hotel and the Middle Kingdom Gallery.” She squinted at the sheet. “By the hotel, he has the name E. Chow in parentheses.”

  Dan was writing down the names. “What’s this Middle Kingdom Gallery? That doesn’t ring any bells.”

  “It’s fairly new, a high-class antique shop. The owner’s Wilkie Lee.”

  I looked at Dan but his face didn’t change at all. He saw my question and shook his head. “No relation. Lee’s the most common name in Chinatown. There are lots of Lees, Wongs, Moys, Chans, etc. There are only about a hundred surnames in all of China and, since most American Chinese came from only a few districts around Canton, there are only about twelve or fourteen common last names here.” He turned back to Lily. “I still don’t place it. Where . . .”

  “It’s next door to Ted Moy’s curio shop.”

  “Oh, sure,” Dan said. “There used to be a bakery there.”

  Lily nodded. “But I’m sure Jimmy just went there to ask Wilkie for a donation.”

  Dan grinned. “Relax, Lily. Jimmy didn’t rip anything off of the Gallery. It isn’t that particular kind of treasure.” He scrawled another note on his sheet. “Okay, so far as we know, on Wednesda
y and Thursday this is where Jimmy went—Self-Help for the Elderly, Ping Yuen, the Lees’, the East Wind Restaurant the Green Door Hotel and the Middle Kingdom Gallery.”

  Six places where Jimmy Lee had walked on Wednesday and Thursday, knocking on doors, smiling, entering. In one of them had he come across the most famous fossils in the world?

  I was too old to believe in pots of gold or rainbows or maps with X marking the spot. But I had seen and held that skull, that distinctive unmistakable skull. Jimmy could have found it anywhere in San Francisco. There was no guarantee that we had traced all of Jimmy’s activities on Wednesday and Thursday.

  But, we did know six places he had gone. Perhaps, at one of them . . .

  EIGHT

  Even living on Russian Hill for six months hadn’t trained me for the steep climb up Washington Street. The sidewalk angled sharply up and pedestrians bent like alpine hikers. We passed noodle cafes, apothecaries and tiny grocery stores. Orange crates balanced on boxes on the sidewalk and fresh produce beckoned shoppers. Dan pointed out twisted and brown arrowroot, taro, huge white radishes, winter squash and bok choy, Chinese cabbage. Squeezing past the crates, I smelled the cellar-like scent of earth and dampness.

  Self-Help for the Elderly filled to bursting a string of tiny rooms that fronted onto Old Chinatown Lane, a narrow dead-end alley not far from Stockton. Every inch of space was utilized, workers squeezed behind desks stacked high with papers and folders. Phones rang, people came in and out and there was a constant hum of voices, speaking English and, Dan told me, Cantonese, its musical intonations rippling like water slipping over rocks.

  It took a few minutes to find out who Jimmy had seen on Wednesday. We ended up in a narrow cubicle formed by a partition on one side and file cabinets on the other. Annie Jiu was on the telephone. She smiled and pointed to a couple of chairs. We slid sideways into them.

  It came to me abruptly that she would be finished in a moment and would turn to us. What in the world were we going to say? We couldn’t ask if she was the one who had Peking Man. If she did, she surely wouldn’t admit it. If she didn’t, we would almost be committed to long and difficult explanations. Worse than that, we didn’t want to start the swirl of rumors that Peking Man was somewhere in Chinatown. That, at all costs, must be avoided.

  I left it to Dan. When he spoke, I decided there were no flies on him.

  “Annie, this is Ellen Christie.” We smiled at each other. “Dr. Christie’s visiting here from Arkansas, doing a special study on the role of social agencies in an urban society as opposed to a rural situation. She has a letter of introduction to Jimmy but he’s out of town so I’m trying to shepherd her around. She’s particularly interested in whether your problems in Chinatown are different or similar to those in her home area.”

  Annie didn’t answer for a long moment. For that, I didn’t blame her.

  She looked at me curiously but answered very pleasantly. “Research for publication?”

  I nodded and wished I could kick Dan. I cleared my throat. It was certainly time for me, the dauntless researcher, to offer something.

  “It’s a bit narrower than that,” I improvised. “Of course, we do deal in different situations. Boone County is primarily agricultural so we have a good deal of seasonal labor. Strawberries and peanuts. You know the problems there.” I nodded sagely and she nodded in return. “I’m attempting,” and I was amused at the suddenly pontifical depth to my voice, “to determine whether different qualities are needed by social workers in such disparate conditions. If you don’t mind, I’d be interested in knowing something about you personally and what qualities, in your view, are particularly helpful to work in Chinatown.”

  “Good Grief,” Annie replied simply. She smiled a little. “I don’t think it much matters whether you work in Chinatown or in the Bronx. It all comes down to people. People in trouble. People who need help.” She stared thoughtfully at a bright red poster thumbtacked to a bulletin board. A full-jowled dragon tossed his head and thick black letters proclaimed the Chinese New Year celebration which would end with a huge parade on Saturday night. “Of course, Chinatown is a world all its own. There’s no other like it. It’s the largest Chinese community outside of Asia, almost fifty thousand Chinese in a twenty-four block area. But there’s a lot more to make it unique than numbers. Historically, and that’s still true today, it was the landing place for new immigrants. But, it’s changed a lot. Do you know anything about what happened to the Chinese who came to America in the early days?”

  I shook my head.

  She said a little helplessly, “I scarcely know where to start, but you have to know the past to understand the present.” She frowned, then began, “They came originally because there was no living to be had in China, no way, no hope for the future, nothing. Then came the gold strike in California and they immigrated by the thousands, coming to Gum Sahn, the Land of the Golden Mountains, as they called America. They worked in the mines, they cleared the swamps, laid the railroad tracks to the East, they did all the rough nasty jobs you couldn’t hire anyone else to do and they did them without complaint because it was a living and a little over, enough to send money home to China to save their families. It was exciting then to come to America, a time of hope and promise. America liked the new immigrants, the sober, industrious, peaceable Chinese; liked them until times got bad and jobs were hard to find and, suddenly, the Chinese were an alien people, mentally and morally inferior, loathsome, dangerous. That was the start of almost seventy-five years of persecution by the government, Chinese immigration forbidden, the Chinese driven from jobs in all industries, relegated only to cooking and washing clothes and migrant labor, hounded out of towns up and down the West Coast; beaten, murdered, forbidden to become citizens, to marry whites, to own property. That’s why Chinatown grew and prospered. There was no other safe place for most Chinese.

  “During World War II, when Chinese Americans were recognized as citizens with the rights of citizens, Chinatown began to shrink and people talked of how it might dwindle to nothing because most American-born Chinese were growing up and leaving Chinatown. Their parents had been willing to make every sacrifice for their educations so they went to college and moved to the suburbs. They are artists, teachers, doctors, lawyers, restaurant owners, you name it. The homegrown Chinese are like any other second- and third-generation Americans. Their kids play Little League baseball, the girls are in ballet. I’d estimate there are about three hundred thousand Chinese in the United States today and most of them are like you and Dan, as American as popcorn and Coke.

  “But that’s not true in Chinatown for two distinct reasons that explain why there still is a Chinatown and why it is so different from your Boone County. Since the immigration reforms in 1965, more than 40,000 immigrant Chinese have settled in Chinatown. They arrive broke, bewildered and most of them not speaking a word of English. That’s one unique fact. The other is the great number of old people in Chinatown. Out of a population of about fifty thousand, some ten thousand are old people. And nine out of ten of those old people are poor. Many of them are immigrants who squeaked into the U.S. in the 1920s and 30s with false papers. They came to work and send money back to China. The war and the Communist takeover stranded them here and now they are old and all alone.

  “So, here in Chinatown today, you have people trying to make it in a foreign country and you have the old and lonely poor.” She paused and spread her hands. “We don’t run out of things to do,” she said simply.

  I felt suddenly ashamed of the role I was playing, pretending to be a social worker to someone who was spending her life helping others. It took a sharp nudge of Dan’s foot to push me ahead.

  “Are you a native of Chinatown? Is that how you became interested in social work?”

  Annie smiled. “No. I’m from Peking and I . . .”

  An electric shock couldn’t have startled me more. I forgot all feelings of shame.

  “. . . never intended to stay in the United States
. I came here in 1946 to study. I was sponsored by my mission school. I planned to go back to China and teach but I was stranded here by the Revolution.” She paused and her gentle civilized face was thoughtful. “I don’t know, perhaps I should have gone back, but you know the climate in China then, there wasn’t any place for people like me. The churches were suspect and the church schools and that was my background. Sometimes I wonder . . .” She broke off, shook her head again. “You can’t second-guess life. I’ve been happy here and especially since last year when my mother was able to come, oh, that’s been so wonderful, to see her again, to hear of my brothers and their families . . .”

  She came from Peking. Could she have brought Peking Man with her, years before? But why should she have hidden the fossils if she had them? Because of family still in China? But now, her mother here, could she have decided it might be safe to try and dispose of them through someone like Jimmy? Or, perhaps, had her mother brought them when she came to the United States?

  Annie was still tracing her background. “Of course, I was lost for awhile when I decided it would be dangerous to try and go home to China. I taught for a year or so in Chicago, I waited tables in a restaurant in Albuquerque and finally ended up as a secretary in an import-export house in Los Angeles. But I was never satisfied, you know? Then I came up to San Francisco one weekend with friends and we visited in Chinatown and I saw all those old people, little old women in their shiny black slacks and narrow black slippers and shabby short coats—and I wondered how my mother was in Peking. You see, that was in 1972 and I had not heard from her, not a word, since 1947. So I came here and . . .”

  The telephone rang. With a murmured apology, she broke off and picked up the receiver. We couldn’t help overhearing.

  “Yes, this is Annie . . . Oh, no . . . oh, Bobby, that’s awful, awful . . . I meant to visit her yesterday, oh, I wish I had . . . yes, I’ll come . . . no, there’s no one to notify, she had no one . . . all right, Bobby.”