McBride automatically tried to figure their angle. He knew that there had to be one, and he put all of his cunning to work in an attempt to determine what it was. And then it occurred to him that there just possibly might not be an angle. That made him experience the almost totally foreign emotion of gratitude, which he wasn’t at all sure that he liked because it made him swallow a lot.
“Look,” he said, and this time his voice did squeak a little. He forced it down into its normal register. “Look, if you guys ever need anything — I mean anything — well, shit, you know where to find me.”
“That’s right, Eddie,” Artie Wu said. “We know.”
Chapter 6
It was exactly 5:32 that evening when Hart Ebsworth, carrying a small stack of three-by-five cards, entered Randall Piers’s study and took his usual seat in one of the brown leather chairs that faced the carved oak desk. Piers watched as Ebsworth carefully rearranged the cards, getting them into the exact order that he wanted.
For a few moments Ebsworth said nothing as he concentrated on the cards, shuffling and rearranging them, frowning a bit as he worked. The cards were filled with the lawyer’s cramped scribblings that were virtually indecipherable to anyone but him. Ebsworth liked to work from cards because he found them neat, concise, and logical.
Finally, Piers grew tired of waiting and said, “Well?”
Ebsworth looked up. “A couple of real hot-doggers,” he said. “Hardball players. They’ve done it all. Or almost all.”
“Oh?” Piers sounded pleased. “What haven’t they done?”
“Well, they’ve apparently never killed anybody and they’ve never been caught stealing and they’ve only been in jail twice, once in Mexico and once in Djakarta. And the Chinese gentleman, if you’re still with me, is the pretender to the throne of China. The last of the Manchus. Or so he says.”
Piers nodded and grinned. He looked pleased. “Tell me,” he said.
“About Artie Wu?”
“Yeah. Pretender to the throne of China. Damn, I like that. By God, I do.”
“Well. According to Wu — and he has some pretty fancy documentation to back him up, although I guess it could be faked — he’s the illegitimate son of the illegitimate daughter of the Boy Emperor who was called P’u Yi. by most Westerners. You want more?”
“Absolutely.”
“The Boy Emperor — and he was the last one they ever had — ascended to the throne in 1908 when he was not quite three, I think. In 1912 he was forced to abdicate by Sun Yat-sen, but they let him hang around the palace in Peking until about 1924. Well, in 1922, just before he got married, there was this fourteen-year-old girl in the palace who had an illegitimate daughter. P’u Yi, it seems, had knocked her up. The fourteen-year-old, I mean, not the one he married. So all the high pooh-bahs in the court wanted to get rid of the baby — strangle her or throw her out with the garbage or whatever. But P’u Yi — you’ll like this next part — got one of his faithful eunuchs—”
“You’re making it up,” Piers said happily.
“I’m not.”
“A faithful eunuch, by God!”
“Well, the faithful eunuch smuggled the kid out of the palace and turned her over to Mr. And Mrs. C. Howard Hempstead, a couple of Methodist missionaries who were both about forty and childless.”
“And they took the kid in.”
“Right. They adopted her and took her to San Francisco with them when they went back in 1926.”
“Whatever happened to the Boy Emperor?”
“He got married and finally they chased him out of Peking and he wound up in Tientsin and then, about 1931, after the Japanese took over Manchuria, they made him emperor of that, which really wasn’t much of a job, but he stayed with it until the Russians dragged him off the throne in 1945. Then when Mao came along in 1949 or ’50, P’u Yi got thrown into jail — actually, it was a labor reform camp — but finally they let him out and he wound up as a tourist guide in Peking — at the Heavenly Palace, in fact. He died in ’66.”
“And the girl?”
“She grew up in San Francisco with the Hempsteads. Then in early 1939 this old friend from China visited them on some kind of a fundraising trip. He was a Chinese Methodist bishop, and if I’ve got it right, his name was Bertrand Sooming Liu. It seems that the bishop had an eye for the ladies.”
“The girl was how old by then?”
“In ’39? Seventeen, I guess. Sixteen, maybe.”
“And the bishop snuck into her bedroom, huh?”
“Somebody did. Anyway, she got pregnant and died giving birth to Artie Wu. By then the Hempsteads were in their late fifties, but being good Christians they adopted the new baby and gave him the name Arthur Case Wu — which was his mother’s surname. I don’t know where they got the Arthur Case.”
“Then what?”
“Well, on August 9, 1945, the Hempsteads got killed in a car wreck in Oakland. They had no relatives, close or otherwise, so Artie Wu was dumped into the John Wesley Memorial Methodist Orphanage in San Francisco. Guess what six-year-old was there to show him the ropes?”
“Durant,” Piers said.
“Right. Quincy Durant — and that’s all anybody knows about him. He got left on the orphanage steps in the usual bassinet or basket when he was about six weeks old. He had a tag around his neck that read Quincy. Nobody knew whether Quincy was his first name or his last, but the guy who ran the orphanage had once had a Durant car — was there a Durant car?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Piers said.
“So he named him after this car that he’d once had.”
“Jesus,” Piers said. “Then what?”
“Well, they stuck it out at the orphanage until they were both fourteen, which would be around 1953. August of ’53, in fact. And then they simply took off and never went back. They’ve been partners ever since.”
“And afterwards?” Piers said. “I mean after the orphanage.”
“There’s a blank between 1953 and 1956, but by late ’56 they’re down in New Orleans shucking oysters in some place just off Canal Street. So one night they’re going home. It’s late, maybe two in the morning. They re going up Chartres, and they decide to cross Jackson Square because they live in a flophouse on Decatur — 1021 Decatur.”
Ebsworth looked down at his notes to make sure of the address. Piers tried to remember whether Ebsworth had looked at them before and decided that he had, but only once.
Ebsworth glanced up from his notes and frowned — a small, disapproving frown. “Now it gets a bit like Dickens or maybe Horatio Alger.” From his tone it was apparent that he didn’t think much of either one.
“More,” Piers said.
“Comes now Henderson Hodd Belyeu, doctor of philosophy — Princeton ’16 it seems — Southern scion, minor poet, onetime associate professor of Greek at the University of Mississippi, and elderly fag. He was sixty-five then and the first time Durant and Wu saw him he was getting himself beaten up by a couple of deepwater sailors that he’d tried to cruise.”
Piers grinned, clasped his hands behind his head, and leaned back in his chair. “Well, now.”
“So Durant and Wu waded in and took out the two sailors. They got Dr. Belyeu back up on his feet and brushed him off, and he was so grateful that he invited them up to his apartment. He lives in one of those big old red brick buildings that are on either side of Jackson Square.”
“Lives?”
“Lives. I talked to him this afternoon. He’s eighty-four and a militant activist in the Vieux Carré chapter of the New Orleans Gay Liberation movement. But it apparently wasn’t like that between him and our two heroes, although I suppose he tried. He didn’t say. What he did say was that the first thing he noticed about both Wu and Durant was that they were bright — very, very bright. Well, they talked almost the entire night — the old man’s fascinating, by the way, he really is — and finally he asked them if they wanted to be oyster shuckers for the rest of their lives. They said no, and he offered to tutor them. Which he did.”