When I had a good chance I slipped on back and began to explore. I had a pretty good mental map of the place, but there were a couple of things I didn’t know for sure, and wanted to find out about. I’d managed to keep in pretty close touch with Chinatown and quite a few of the Chinks knew the old man that showed up once in a while and shuffled around on mysterious errands. The room that I’d been in when old icy-eyes gave me my instructions looked like the old office of the Fa Kee lottery company. They’d gone out of business a while back, and there had never been very much said about what happened to the place.
I hit the rabbit-warren and began to shuffle around.
“Hoh shai mah,” intoned a guard doubtfully.
I get a kick out of the Chinese salutation. “Hoh,” that means good, “shai kai,” that means the whole blamed world, and “mah,” that’s the sign of a question. What the Chink really inquires in his salutation is whether everything in the world is good. It amuses me to see a Chink who is steeped to the very slant of his eyes in intrigue, foxier than any fox, smooth as a pane of window glass, bow and inquire of his visitors if the whole world and everything in it is good.
Gravely, I returned his salutation.
“Hoh shai kai,” I asserted, answering his question with an assertion.
“Where goes the father?” asked the Chink.
I fixed him with a stem gaze.
“The rooms of the Fa Kee Company,” I said.
He smiled.
“The Fa Kee Company has suffered losses, and has gone out of business for three moons to let the luck change. Too many ten-spot tickets caused a break of the bank.”
I nodded, but shuffled forward.
“The venerable one should be careful not to intrude upon their rooms,” went on the guard. “What is it you wish?”
I flickered my eyes in a gesture of aged impatience.
“Is it then given to a babbling brook to question the placid surface of the lake?”
He shrugged his shoulders and went on about his business.
By devious wanderings and workings I got into the lease of the Fa Kee Company, and that was all the good it did me. The place had been cleaned out. The teakwood desk, the expensive tapestries, the Oriental rugs, had all gone. The place where I had been received was barren, empty, devoid of occupancy. The place had served its purpose and had then been abandoned.
I was puzzled, but not for long. In a little room to the rear there were three Chinamen playing at their everlasting domino games. They were furtive, swift-moving Chinks, men who were not of the usual type. To one side, in a darkened corner, sat a fourth Chink, silent, watchful, his beady eyes darting about. I watched the game for an interval, and watched the players more than the game.
At length one of them made a signal, and they changed around. The watcher in the corner came over and took a hand in the game, and one of the players went back to the corner. Apparently they were on guard, Chinese gunmen, watching and waiting. In China the art of murder is one of the professions. Each tong has its paid murderers. In time of need one does not commit his own murders any more than he fills his own teeth or does his own doctoring. He hires his professional murderer to do the job for him.
These four men were hired murderers, imported gunmen who knew their onions.
“The aged one will find the air better elsewhere,” remarked one of the players, significantly.
“When one has attained age he requires but little air,” I retorted. “Youth takes much air, for it must breathe and speak needlessly. Age needs but to breathe.”
They exchanged glances.
“Father,” advised one, rising courteously, “we wait with a mission. At any day, at any hour, there may be fumes which will choke the air, the fumes of powder. The venerable one will find it difficult to vanish quickly before the police come to investigate.”
I bowed my head slightly.
“I thank you. Youth has power of quick motion and trusts to flight. Age has learned the lesson of poise and trusts to wisdom. Have no fear.”
With that I turned slowly, dignifiedly, and shuffled off, on my tour about the place. So they waited, did they? Waited the coming of one who was to be shot? Was it possible that icy-eyes had left a reception committee for me? That Ed Jenkins, the crook, was expected to enter that room, and that when he entered he was not to leave? The finding of a crook, dead in Chinatown, would hardly be expected to bother the police. If that crook were Ed Jenkins, the police could rather be expected to heave a sigh of relief.
I shuffled out into an all-night tea-room. I wanted to sit and think. At a small teakwood table I had a cup of tea and sat, stroking my beard, running over things in my mind. The good actor becomes a part of the character he is impersonating. To carry Occidental habits of thought into Chinatown while disguised as an old Chinaman would be to court discovery. Knowing the psychology of the Chinks as I did, I always managed to think the part as well as to speak it and look it. As I sat there I was really tempering my thoughts with the philosophy of the Chinese, a philosophy which sees time in a cycle of ages, rather than in the span of a lifetime.
Calmly, philosophically, I went over the events of the past few days, thinking, planning. From curtained booths to the right there came the occasional sound of spooning couples who had picked the half-light of a Chinese restaurant as the place to finish up their wild night. Also there was another sound, the steady sound of sobs, the sound of a woman crying softly.
Moved more by curiosity than otherwise, I went to the booth from which the sounds came and threw aside the curtain, slipping within.
A girl sat on the cushioned bench, her head thrown forward on the table, the tea dishes pushed to one side. Her arms were twined about her face, and she was sobbing her heart out. There was a mole on the skin of the left hand.
Quietly I sat down across the table, assumed a dignified position and began to stroke my beard.
“Suffering follows wrong as the wheel follows the path of the ox,” I said, making my voice thin and reedy, speaking English with an accent.
Startled, she straightened at the sound of my voice. It was the girl I had known as Maude, the girl against whom I had been warned.
“Who are you?”
I stroked my beard. “It is the function of age to counsel youth.”
She looked me over with her red-rimmed eyes. There in the soft light of the curtained booth she stood no chance of recognizing me. My disguises are good. I fancied I could tell what was on her mind, but I wasn’t sure.
“I did not kill him,” she said abruptly, “but I could have saved him. He went to his death, and there is the death of another, a friend, a man who should mean nothing to me and yet who fascinates me.”
I stroked my beard again, keeping my eyes on her face.
“Death is but a sleep,” I said; “the sooner we sleep, the sooner we wake.”
Her head fell forward on her arms.
“I must warn him,” she said, “and if I warn him I will hang. They have me in their power. What will I do, oh, God, what will I do?”
I placed my hand on her shoulder.
“Do nothing,” I said. “I will warn him.”
“You?” she asked, half rising… “Who are you, anyway? There is a soothing strength to your touch. Your hand on my shoulder thrills me. How do you know what I am talking about?”
I had gone too far. That touch might have told her much. She was sensitive, this woman with the mole on her hand. I slipped through the curtains, shuffled along the passageway and into the kitchen in the back. White girls would not be allowed in here. I went down the back stairs, through some more passageways and out into the night. Putting two and two together, I began to see a great light.