the Far East. Jessie recognizes the movements, despite the shadows cast over the fracas. The coolie whirls and dives, yelling.
Yelling in a high, womanly voice. Say. Hasn’t Jessie heard that voice before?
Jessie cracks her horsewhip as Daniel rises, stumbling, the back of his head bleeding, swings at a thug, and misses. The other thugs tear at his fine clothes. His face is flushed, his collar askew, his bowler pushed up on his sweaty forehead. He throws another punch and staggers. Blood trickles down his face, too.
“Mr. Watkins!” she cries.
Jessie clucks to the geldings, cuts through traffic. A gift from an attaché to the ambassador, the geldings were. And last autumn it was, a party for some poxy barons who’d invested in certain municipal bonds and dropped load at the opera. It was a swell party, too, plenty of champagne and whiskey. She made a bundle that night. And though she had the girls douche with mercuric cyanide afterwards, Rosa and Dolores came down with the pox only too soon. Jessie had to turn them out to her Morton Alley cribs. A shame, but the biz is the biz. And now the geldings are all hers.
Jessie pulls up to the curb, reaches in the glove box. She finds the silver flask of Jamaican brandy, bites off a nip to steady her nerves. Then she seizes her horsewhip, stands unsteadily, and cracks the whip but good over the thugs’ noggins. The geldings rear. “Whoa!” she cries, pulling them up and falling on her bustle onto the driver’s seat. She lands another lashing, this time across the thugs’ backs.
“That’s from Mr. Harvey!” cries the thug in the slouch hat, landing one last punch across Daniel’s kidneys. Jessie winces. She can practically feel the blow in her liver. “Keep yer friggin’ mitts off his joint!” Dodging the scrawny coolie, the thugs turn and flee.
The coolie hoists Daniel to his feet, slings his arm across one shoulder, and staggers to the rockaway. “Help me, Miss Malone,” he says in a ragged voice, his fedora knocked askew, his queue unraveling.
“What in tarnation?” Jessie leaps down, seizes Daniel’s other shoulder. Together she and the coolie boost him into the back seat of the rockaway where he collapses with a curse and a groan. The coolie takes off his fedora, wipes sweat from his smooth, pale forehead.
“Jar me,” Jessie whispers, staring. “Missy? Zhu? Is that you?” For a moment, the person standing before her, heaving for breath, is a puzzle. A riddle that don’t make sense. Well, tan her hide, it is Zhu! “What in the blue blazes do you think you’re doing, gadding about dressed like that? You could get arrested.”
“For impersonating a man, I know.” Zhu shrugs and smooths back her hair, yanking the fedora over her head. “Sorry, Miss Malone, but I had some business to attend to.” She laughs softly at Jessie’s astonishment.
“Don’t you dare laugh at me.” Jessie shakes her finger at her. “How dare you gad about in peasant’s rags? You, my servant, my bookkeeper, my trusted. . . .oh, I don’t know what to call you! What will people think to see you?”
“It’s no reflection on you or the business,” the chit says, climbing into the backseat with Daniel.
“Like hell it ain’t!”
“No one saw me, Miss Malone. Can we get out of here? Please?”
Jessie clucks to the geldings who canter off, magnificently terrified.
She’s so rattled, it’s all she can do to drive and the nighttime traffic is a fiddler’s bitch. She pulls up at a traffic jam on Montgomery. Looks like an accident, the tangle of a beer wagon and the beery driver of a cab. The horse screaming in pain, how Jessie hates that. The passenger in the cab is climbing out, pushing up his sleeves, spoiling for fisticuffs.
As she steadies the geldings, waiting to pass by, Jessie glances back.
It isn’t just that Zhu is skinny. The girl is muscular and angular, built like some creature other than a woman. She doesn’t slouch her shoulders, doesn’t bat her eyes. She has no hips to speak of in those denim trousers. She’s so slim, Jessie often frets about her health. She is bold and forthright, almost intimidating in her directness, and nothing much intimidates the Queen of the Underworld. She holds her head up, doesn’t simper or defer. She moves and acts unlike any girl or woman—rich or poor, lady or whore--Jessie has ever met before.
“I’m still a-waitin’ your explanation, missy.”
“I bought some clothes.”
“Those ain’t clothes. You got perfectly fine clothes.