butterfly knife. “We teach the people of Tan not to steal from Chee Song Tong.”
The fat man and the wiry fellow grin, as if killing Zhu would be more gratifying than turning her out. Go figure nineteenth century men.
“Blood payment?” Selena shouts. “Fools! Not enough pretty Chinese tail in this town. I pay much gold for her myself, girl for girl. I get one on Jessie Malone.”
Zhu finds herself silently thanking the despicable madam as the hatchet men circle around her, considering their possibilities. The eyepatch is as cold as ice. Any trace of a friendly connection between them has long since vanished.
But they’re drunk, Zhu sober, and she seizes a spittoon, dashes the foul contents on the eyepatch, his fellow gangsters, and Selena. People start screaming, and the house maids and the bartender block the front door, the cook blocks the kitchen door. Zhu dashes up the stairs. Think! What did Cameron say before the raid and rescue of Wing Sing?
“Muse,” she whispers, “didn’t Cameron say there’s a trapdoor?”
“Southeast bedroom,” Muse whispers. “Goes to the roof. Narrow gap between the rooftops. Fire escape goes down from the next roof over. A butcher shop. Go, go, go!”
She dashes up the second flight of stairs, clatters down the hall. Dead end! She races down the other way, finds a third flight of stairs to a half story tucked around the corner. She finds the southeast bedroom, the door unlocked, dashes in, and locks the door behind her.
There, in the ceiling, a pull and a trapdoor like the entrance to an attic. That’s it! Zhu slides a chair over, climbs up on the rickety seat. The chair wobbles with her frantic action, sending her skirts swaying. Damn these skirts! Careful, don’t break your neck! She gives the pull a good yank and the trapdoor flips open, revealing blue skies above. A cast-iron stepladder gracefully telescopes out and down. Bootheels pound down the hall outside the bedroom. She scrambles up the stepladder onto the roof, pulls the ladder up behind her, slams the trapdoor shut. In a corner of the rooftop, she spies a barrel half-filled and no doubt heavy with dried-up tar. She half-scoots, half-rolls the barrel over the trapdoor, tearing a seam in her armhole.
Then, her heels sinking into the warm tar, she ventures to the roof’s edge. There’s a gap, all right, maybe two feet, between the house and the butcher’s shop. That’s supposed to be narrow? Oh, man! Her head swirls with vertigo to look down. She pulls off her button boots, tosses them over, lifts and gathers her skirts, and works up a good run, pure fear propelling her. Help me, Kuan Yin. She leaps, her skirts billowing, and tumbles onto the next roof, blunting the impact of her landing with a practiced roll of her hips.
She leaps to her feet, untangling the skirts from her knees. The stink of offal and blood from the butcher’s shop nearly makes her retch. She pulls on her button boots, finds the fire escape. Breath ragged in her throat, heartbeat pounding in her chest, she climbs down as quickly and quietly as she can. A butcher leans out of a window as she passes by, his hands smeared with blood and gobbets of flesh, his knife dripping.
She drops down into an alley half a block from Broadway, which bustles with traffic. The cries of the ragpickers rise over the clatter of fine carriages.
“Take Broadway to Stockton,” Muse whispers in subaudio, “go through Tangrenbu. Hurry.”
Tangrenbu is the last place she wants to go, but she follows Muse’s instructions, slowing to a walk as the invisible barrier of Chinatown rises before her like a tangible thing. She’s reasonably safe in her Western dress, her lungs heaving against the corset’s constriction. Anonymous slim men in denim sahms crowd the street, their fedoras pulled low, their faces averted.
Zhu presses herself against a shop wall, glances down the block. The hatchet men are milling around on the sidewalk outside Selena’s. The eyepatch spots her the moment she ventures across Pacific Avenue and hurries down Stockton. Well, of course. Who else in Tangrenbu would be dressed in cerulean silk? What she’d give right now for her denim sahm and fedora! She pushes men aside as the hatchet men pound down the block, scattering a basket of bok choy, kicking over a cage of clucking chickens.
“Turn left,” Muse whispers, alphanumerics flickering in her peripheral vision. “Down that alley, turn right. Go in there.”
Elaborate gingerbread, a curving roof, gilt