EMPTY STREETS
1902—New York
After his failure to find Cela at the theater, Jianyu had reached an impasse. He had no idea where to look for her next, but if the woman at the theater had her—or if someone else did—he would require help. He had to find Viola, which meant that he had to return to the Bowery.
The Bowery, he knew, was in chaos. And with Nibsy Lorcan in control of the Devil’s Own, the streets around the Strega would no longer be safe for him, as they once had been.
There was one place in the city where Jianyu’s countrymen were welcomed without hesitation—the blocks close to Mott Street known as the Chinese quarter. He might go there, but Jianyu had worn out his welcome more than two years before, when he’d broken his oath of loyalty to Tom Lee and the On Leong Tong by defecting to the Devil’s Own.
If Jianyu was caught by the On Leongs now, he would be made to pay for his transgressions. The question was what the price would be. Tom Lee might use simple violence, or he might do more. Jianyu was Lee’s nephew only on paper, after all. While Dolph was alive, the secrets he had collected had assured Jianyu’s safety from Tom Lee, but the power of those secrets had died with Dolph. If Lee chose, he could alert the authorities to Jianyu’s precarious position in the city—and to the falseness of his documents. If Jianyu were deported, it would be tantamount to a death sentence, because being removed from the city would mean passing through the Brink.
It did not seem worth the risk to attempt navigating those dangers in the dead of night, when it would be harder to pull on his affinity for concealment. Instead, he ventured east to Twenty-Fourth Street, just a few blocks from where the newest skyscraper was nearly complete. There, a friend from Jianyu’s first days in the city had a small laundry he ran with his wife, a sturdy Irish girl with kind eyes and ruddy cheeks. Since it had been years, Ho Lai Ying was surprised to see him, but understood the reach of the tongs. Though he did not wake his wife or family, Lai Ying gave Jianyu a bowl of the family’s leftover meal and a warm place to rest for the night. But Jianyu barely slept, and he was gone before daybreak, so as not to put his old friend in any danger.
As the morning began to warm, Jianyu’s path finally brought him to the Bowery. He needed to speak with Viola, but he also needed to find Cela without rousing the interest of anyone else who might be hunting for her or the stone. He was so deep in thought considering his options that he failed to notice the pair of men who had started following him not long after he had crossed Houston. By the time he felt their presence, it was too late to open the light around himself—not without revealing what he was.
Picking up his pace, Jianyu headed down one of the busier thoroughfares. Perhaps they would be less likely to do anything to him if there were enough witnesses. It was a feeble, naive hope. The streets were nearly empty at that early hour, and even if they had been filled, witnesses were more likely to become part of an attack than to prevent one.
In an instant, the men were flanking him, and Jianyu knew that he had little choice. He turned, his hands up, ready for a fight, but the two men only looked at each other and laughed. They were dressed in the familiar uniform of Bowery toughs—brightly colored shirts and waistcoats in stripes or plaids, trim pants, and the ubiquitous bowler hats that they wore cocked over one eye. Their pale, pasty skin looked wan and sickly contrasted against their garish clothes.
“Whaddaya think you’re gonna do?” the one said, laughing to the other. “I’ve seen how they fight . . . like chickens flapping their wings after you chop off their heads.” He stepped forward, his narrow-set eyes so heavily hooded, they made him appear half-asleep. “Come on. Gimme the best you got. . . . Go ahead. Your first flap is free.”
Jianyu kept his attention split evenly between the two of them as they circled him.
“Come on, you dirty bastard,” the other taunted, laughing darkly all the while.
They were expecting something else from him, perhaps. Or maybe their mouths were smarter than they were, but Jianyu took their offer and launched himself at them. The larger of the two was too slow to ward off Jianyu’s first blow. He went down easily, splayed in the dirt of the street and groaning with the damage Jianyu’s fist had done to his face.
The other goggled for a moment, looking at his friend with a kind of horrified shock that gratified Jianyu to the very marrow of his bones. But Jianyu had spent too much time at The Devil’s Own training with the rest of Dolph’s crew to miss taking further advantage of the pair’s surprise. He whipped around and drove his fist into the other boy’s stomach, knocking the air from him, before the boy realized what was happening.
The first was climbing to his feet, his nose dripping with blood and his eyes filled with rage, but a strange calm had settled over Jianyu. With a slow, mocking smile, he raised his hand and motioned for the boy to come closer. He and the boy circled each other, dodging and ducking each other’s fists as the second boy came to his feet. Without warning, the second boy ran at Jianyu, tackling him to the ground.
Jianyu’s head cracked against the edge of the sidewalk, and for a moment his vision went white. That moment was enough for the two to take advantage. One was on him in an instant, and before Jianyu could protect himself, he felt a fist plow into his side. He lashed out, landing a glancing blow or two, but the other had already made it to his feet again and had joined in.
A vicious kick landed in Jianyu’s back, sending a near-blinding pain through his body.
“That’ll teach you,” one of the boys growled as his fists plowed into Jianyu’s stomach again. “Damn dirty—”
Jianyu did not need to hear the rest to know what the boy said. That word—or words like it—had followed him ever since he had stepped off the boat in Mexico. He had heard them as he had ridden the train in silence for days, first crossing the border and then a country that he knew could never be his. Those slurs had been his companion in the dead of night as their ferryman smuggled him into Manhattan. And once he had arrived, he had heard the slur—or some version of the same—every day in the city’s streets, tossed about by filthy beggars who were not man enough to look him in the eye when they said it.
He struggled to his knees, but another vicious kick landed in his stomach, and he went over hard again, tasting the coppery blood in his mouth. His ears were ringing. He had to get up, had to get to his feet somehow if he wanted any chance to survive this.
“. . . damned dirty . . .”
They had him by the hair. One of them was holding on to the long queue he wore braided down his back. There was a roaring in his ears, but he could not tell whether it was from their punches or from the fact that he knew what they were about to do even before he heard the snick of the switchblade opening. His head was pounding, and the sound of a thousand winds howled in his ears. He wanted to scream at them, but his mouth was filled with his own blood.
When it went off, Jianyu felt the gunshot as much as he heard it. It was so close that the echo of it rang through his head and rattled his bones, even though the bullet never touched him.
It took him a moment to realize he was still alive—to realize that he had not been struck by the bullet. He lay with his face pressed to the grime of the street, the sourness of his blood thick in his mouth, but he was still breathing. There was pain in his head, yes, but he was still breathing.
Footsteps came closer until he was looking at the scuffed toes of two brown boots.
“You are lucky I came along when I did,” the voice said in the familiar tones of his own language. “They would have killed you once they were done scalping you.”
Scalping . . . He knew without reaching for his hair that it was gone, and without it, returning to his own country would be impossible. Without it, the one feeble dream he had carried secretly in his heart for so long crumbled to ash.
“You should have let them kill me,” he answered, the words a comfort on his tongue even though his lips were bloodied and swollen so much that they sounded garbled even to him.
“Now, why would I do a thing like that?” the voice said. “I’ve been waiting so long to talk to you.”