behind them. Nothing happened. Hammett kept on. Finally a voice inside called something in Chinese. Hammett persisted. The voice repeated its high-pitched exhortation. Hammett continued.
‘Go ’way,’ the voice finally called in English.
Hammett didn’t. There were sounds of a whole series of bolts being drawn. The door opened a bare two inches on a stout length of chain.
‘Go ’way.’
‘Chin Kim Guy,’ said Hammett.
The door was slammed shut and bolted.
Hammett sat down on the steps and lit a cigarette. He finished it and started a second. Mist wet his face. The bolt ritual began again. He ground the butt against the pale brick wall, dropped the shredded remains at his feet, and was waiting in moody patience, hands in overcoat pockets, when the door opened again.
‘You come,’ said a different voice from the darkness.
A dim unshaded lightbulb at the far end of the twenty-foot hallway showed that his grossly heavy Chinese guide was as tall as he, and wore Occidental clothing. He stopped at a door halfway down the hall and called out in Cantonese. The door was unlocked. They went through into a passage like the one they had just left, only at right angles to it.
Near the far end of this hall they paused before another door, different from the others. Its seasoned oak panels were thickly studded with the square heads of iron carriage bolts.
This door had a buzzer, which the binder pushed in a quick uneven rhythm; no voice could have carried through the two-inch hardwood thickness. Noise and lights and tobacco smoke came out at them — underlaid with incense and the faint sweetish reek of opium. The voices, high-pitched and singsong and excited, all male, mingled with the clack of buttons. Which meant fan-tan, not a pai gow parlor or a do far lottery.
Blocking Hammett’s way was another Oriental, dressed in loose baggy trousers of a coarse material, wearing slippers and a wide-sleeved buttonless jacket cinched at the waist with a two-inch sewn cloth belt. Between the parted edges of the jacket were the shifting planes of his immense hairless chest. He was six-six and two hundred and fifty pounds, none of them fat. His head too was hairless. His features were more Mongol than Chinese.
He stepped back a pace, crossed his arms into the wide sleeves, and bowed deeply from the waist. ‘We are honored, Prince of Men.’
‘You been demoted, Qwong?’ asked Hammett cheerfully.
‘Demoted, oh King of Pursuers?’
‘Chin has you on the door.’
He bowed again. ‘Merely awaiting your August Self.’ He made a graceful gesture. ‘My Master is impatient for the unutterable joy of your presence.’
Hammett bowed himself. ‘Lead on, O Giant of China.’
‘That’s terrible,’ said Qwong Lin Get.
Hammett’s earlier guide manipulated the heavy swiveled bar on the door back into the cleats that held it in a locked position. The lean detective followed Qwong down the square low-ceilinged basement room. It was crowded with a couple of hundred male Chinese, massed around a dozen four-by-ten fan-tan tables. The din of voices flowed and ebbed as the buttons were drawn down.
Qwong indicated the tables with an almost contemptuous sweep of one steel-muscled arm.
‘What your friend Mau Yee would give to know of this!’
‘You think he doesn’t?’
The enormous homosexual bodyguard caressed Hammett with his eyes. ‘I know that you would not tell him.’
Hammett nodded wordlessly. He wouldn’t have to. It was from Manion that he had gotten the current location of Chin Kim Guy’s fan-tan parlor.
He stayed a moment to watch the play.
The table was covered with a mat, in the exact center of which was diagrammed a twelve-inch square divided into quarters. Each corner bore the Chinese character for a number from one to four.
Across from Hammett was the dealer, an Oriental ancient in skullcap and silk jacket. Fastened to the table in front of him was a leather bag filled with small black and white buttons.
‘My Master awaits his Peerless Friend.’
‘Sure,’ said Hammett.
The venerable dealer dipped into the sack with a colorful lacquer bowl, brought it out full of buttons, and turned it upside down on the table under the avid eyes of the players. As Hammett moved off, he had begun drawing buttons, four at a time, out from under the bowl with a hooked bamboo stick. By placing money on a numbered quarter of the diagram, the players were betting whether one, two, three, or four buttons would be left under the bowl for the final drawdown.
At the rear of the room was a partition of antique Japanese screens, which had been among Guy Kim’s most valued possessions. They had partitioned the players from the dealers in one of his do far parlors. Now they were his son’s.
Inside the carefully guarded little chamber was a hardwood table bearing piles of crumpled bills, a black- beaded abacus, and nothing else.
Chin Kim Guy bounced to his feet behind the table, hand extended. ‘Hammett!’ he exclaimed. ‘Long time no see. Hear the one about the minister and the little boy he caught swearing? He says, “Little boy, when you talk like that the chills run up and down my spine.” And the boy says, “If you’d heard my ma when she caught her tit in the wringer, you’d of froze to death.”’ He burst into high-pitched laughter and waved Hammett to a chair across the table. ‘Rest the dogs.’
Hammett sat.
The dapper Chinese was dressed in a gray Glenurquhart plaid and a knitted silk tie with a fancy crocheted weave. He looked like a Chinese pimp, not the king of an illegal gambling empire stretching from San Francisco to the Chinese colonies in Stockton and Sacramento. As long as Hammett had known him he’d been telling terrible jokes and laughing uncontrollably at them.
Now he uttered a short burst of Cantonese at another of the giant bodyguards, who was leaning against the back wall. The man quickly disappeared through an unframed door at his elbow.
‘Did your father get the magazine I sent him a few years ago?’
Chin laughed. He had very white buckteeth and wore his black hair parted in the middle and combed tightly to his skull. His utterly black eyes glittered with amusement under delicate brows.
‘I read the story to him, he got a hell of a wallop out of Chang Li Ching. He didn’t know he impressed you as such a bloodthirsty character. You knew he’s Kam Sam Hock now?’
‘I’d heard he’d gone home from the Golden Mountain,’ Hammett admitted.
The Golden Mountain was what the old-generation Chinese still called San Francisco. One who had been to the Golden Mountain and had returned home to China, wealthy and respected, for his declining years, was known as a Kam Sam Hock. Only Chin Kim Guy’s generation had begun to consider America as home.
The bodyguard returned with a delicate china pot and two small handleless bowls set on doughnutlike saucers. The tea was pale amber, clear as spring water, and steaming hot. With it was a dish of four small round sesame seed cakes baked to a pale brown. Hammett nibbled at one and sipped tea.
Chin’s laughter bubbled up again; it was said he laughed the same way when his binders hacked an enemy to pieces.
‘You hear the one about old Nate? Rebecca is downstairs in the front room with Abie, see, and Nate hears some strange sound coming from down there, so he goes to the head of the stairs and he calls, “Becky, are you and Abie fighting?” And Rebecca says, “No, daddy, we’re screwing.” And old Nate says, “That’s nice, children, don’t fight.”’
His gales of laughter trailed away in chuckles.
‘Anyway, Hammett, you want to see the Honorable Pater you’re out of luck-’
‘Came to see you,’ said Hammett.
He jerked a thumb over his shoulder without looking around; he knew the massive bald-headed Qwong would be directly behind his chair with a snickersnee, the swordlike Chinese knife that could take out a man’s throat with a single slash, strapped hilt-downward to his left forearm beneath the flowing jacket sleeve.
