at the others. Dismissed by him, the wiry fellow and the fat man rejoin the Big Boss, who resumes his haughty promenade.
“We are all strangers in Gold Mountain. Yes. And you pretty girl, too, Jade Eyes,” he says. “You should not walk about in rags.” He touches her cheek, her lip. “I should not sell girl like you to Jessie Malone. I should keep you for myself.”
Suddenly she’s aware of his fierce masculinity. Aware of the value in gold he places on her femininity. He’s one of the bachelors, too, after all.
“Where is Wing Sing?” Zhu whispers. “Please tell me.”
“She not in Tangrenbu,” the eyepatch says. “You go to Selena’s. You go to Terrific Street.”
He turns on his heel and rejoins his entourage.
* * *
“Muse,” Zhu whispers as the hatchet men stride away, “look up ‘Terrific Street.’ Look up ‘Selena’s.’”
“I’m on it,” Muse whispers back. Alphanumerics flicker in her peripheral vision as Muse scans its Archives. Zhu watches a directory zoom by, dizzying. All kinds of file and folder names, with strange extensions. She glimpses her instructions holoid, Zhu.doc, thirty-six GB. She blinks. Wait, that can’t be right. The holoid is thirty-five GB. Muse locates and opens a file, San Francisco.1895.geography, and searches the data.
“’Terrific Street.’ He means Pacific Street,” Muse reports back. “And Selena’s? He means a ‘chop suey palace’ on the border of Tangrenbu and the Barbary Coast. The women are Chinese or Japanese, maybe some Koreans or Filipinas. But the male clientele is all white. Your disguise won’t work there, Z. Wong.”
“Hah. I won’t be a client.”
Zhu hikes north on Dupont to Pacific, turns east. Bang, bang, bang. She whirls at the muffled sound of gunfire, crouches against a shop. She sniffs for gun powder, but there’s only a faint whiff of it. Okay. There must be a shooting gallery in a basement below the cobblestone street, one of the cavernous illegal halls where white men mingle with Chinese to practice their skill with firearms. And there. Denim-clad bachelors in an uncharacteristically jovial mood stream in and out of another doorway set below the street level, jingling coins in their fists. A sentry stands watch at the door. Oh, yeah. Must be a gambling den down in that basement.
Once again Zhu approaches the invisible boundary between Tangrenbu and the rest of San Francisco. No longer does she see colorful touches of Oriental splendor. No longer can she smell that distinctive stench. From here, the Barbary Coast stretches down to the docks and the waterfront, a dense collection of dancehalls, saloons, gambling dens, opium dens, hideouts, low-end brothels, and bagnios.
Poised near the corner of Dupont Street and Columbus Avenue like a halfway house between Oriental and Occidental vice is the plug-ugly Stick Victorian with its brass plaque announcing “Miss Selena.” The sporting house boasts neither the excesses of the Parisian Mansion nor the calligraphy above the cribs on Spofford Alley. The red lamp over the door is not lit, and Miss Selena hasn’t yet stationed a red lampshade by the window. Zhu does notice lace bloomers dangling from the sill of a second-story window.
Right. She knows her way around a brothel by now. She pulls the fedora low over her forehead, pushes up the spectacles. She seizes the heavy brass door knocker cast in the shape of a rooster, squares her shoulders, and tries on a manly frown.
A middle-aged Chinese woman, her golden skin tight over her cheekbones and chin, peers suspiciously out the door, still secured inside by a chain lock. “What you want?”
“You Miss Selena?” Zhu mutters. “I need to see Wing Sing.”
“This place not for you, boy. You go to Tangrenbu. You go to Spofford Alley.”
“No, I’m her brother. Cousin. I’m her cousin from Shanghai. I have news of our family. May I speak with her, please?”
“Her time not free, brother cousin.”
“I have money.” Zhu produces the double eagle.
Selena studies her contemptuously, then slams the door. The chain lock clangs. She swings the door open and stands aside.
Zhu enters a parlor far more elegant than she would have expected from the street. There’s rosewood furniture, painted porcelains, the usual red velvet drapes mixed with unusual swathes of pink and purple silk. Chinese carpets with calligraphic and floral designs in muted pastel shades. The heady scent of plum incense makes Zhu’s head swim. A musician sits cross-legged in a corner on the floor, softly playing a moon fiddle, the strange lilting keen like mother China herself singing.
The wall hangings and painted screens are also a departure