“You do not employ any women?”
He actually smiled this time. “There are almost no women in Chinatown—at least no Chinese women. The American government does not allow Chinese men to bring over their wives and daughters. And respectable Chinese women are not allowed out in public.” He leaned forward suddenly, tapping ash into the little dish. “So Miss Molly Murphy, I require your services for a good reason. I need someone who can be discreet and ask the right questions. I want this item returned to me quickly and with as little fuss as possible. So will you take my assignment or not?” He paused, holding me with that reptilian stare, then added, “I assure you I will make it worth your while if this prized possession is returned to me quickly.”
He sensed my hesitation. “Well?” he said. “What is your answer? Do you think you are up to the task?”
“I’ll do my best, Mr. Lee,” I heard myself saying.
“Splendid.” He clapped those bony hands together. “Very well then. Off you go. Good hunting, as they say in your country.”
I stood up. Frederick reappeared and came to my side to usher me out.
“You will report back to me tomorrow,” Lee Sing Tai said. “Let us hope you have good news for me by then.”
I started toward the door.
“And if you find this piece, you will get a description of the person who brought it in,” he called after me.
I turned back. “Do you have your suspicions about who this person might be?”
“No more questions,” he snapped. “Off to work now.”
As I looked back at him I saw the heavy drapes at the back of the room twitch as if suddenly dropped. Someone had been watching me.
Five
Frederick Lee insisted on escorting me back to the Bowery, then took his leave.
“I wish you success,” he said. “Until tomorrow then. Please come to my office and I will escort you as I did today. I do not want you walking through Chinatown alone.”
Since it had seemed a particularly deserted place I wondered why he felt the need to protect me. Surely not the reputed white slave trade? Or was it rather that I was an outsider, did not know how to behave, and might offend with my Western ways? We parted and I stepped into the shade of the elevated railway, trying to collect my thoughts. Why had I agreed to do this? On the surface the assignment seemed simple enough, but something wasn’t quite right. Lee Sing Tai had sought me out in order to have a female detective retrieve a piece of jade jewelry. Granted it was attractive enough, but how much could such a piece of jade be worth? Enough to pay me a generous fee for its recovery? Then I concluded it must have some kind of sentimental value—some link to his past life in China. If not, then he could certainly afford to pay a jeweler to re-create it here or even have another one shipped from his homeland. That would make more sense than sending a detective running all over the city hunting for it.
Oh, well, mine was not to reason why. No doubt all would become clear when I found the piece and delivered it safely to him. I mapped out a plan in my head. There were pawnshops aplenty along the Bowery, as is usual in a place where drinking, gambling, and prostitution abound. If someone had stolen the item for money, then he’d want to get rid of it as quickly as possible, so I should start here.
I paused again at the entrance to the first pawnshop. Why steal that particular piece of jade from a household that was full of treasures? I hadn’t asked if other items were missing. Perhaps he had set me on the trail of this one because it was so easily identifiable. I stepped from the heat of the sidewalk into the cooler darkness of the pawnshop. The shop had a musty smell as if a lot of old and forgotten things were stuffed away here. The man behind the counter was an elderly Jew with a long white beard. He listened carefully, but shook his head.
“We don’t see Chinese in here. They’ve nothing to pawn,” he said. “You know why? They only came to this country with the clothes on their backs. They left their wives and families at home and they still plan to make their money and go back where they came from. So no jewels, because there are no ladies.”
In the next pawnshop I was not treated as politely. “Don’t deal with no chinky Chinese stuff,” he said. “Who’d want it? And I don’t trust those Chinamen further than I can throw them. Slit your throat the moment you turn your back, that’s what they do.”
I got variations on these speeches from other pawnshops close to Chinatown. As I moved farther away, along Canal Street in one direction into the Lower East Side and then in the other toward Broadway, I faced a cold indifference. No, they’d never seen anything like the piece I was talking about. A Chinaman never set foot in their shops, and if he did, they’d show him the door quickly enough.
I began to see how daunting this task might be. If a robber had taken the jade piece because he needed cash, then he hadn’t used a nearby pawnshop. And if he had delivered it to a fence, then I had no way of proceeding. I knew no fences. I had come into contact with the two large gangs that ruled Lower Manhattan between them, and I had no wish to deal with either again. I knew I had been lucky to come away with my life on one occasion and I had managed to seek Monk Eastman’s help when I was truly desperate. But I also knew him to be fickle, sadistic, and ruthless. I couldn’t count on any assistance a second time.
The obvious thing would be to ask Daniel. He would know every fence in the area. But he was the one person I couldn’t go to. Most frustrating. I was rapidly coming to the conclusion that I’d have to appear before Mr. Lee Sing Tai the next morning and admit my failure. And come away with no fee for my labors. But I wasn’t about to give up yet. There were plenty of jewelers, especially along Hester and Essex and those crowded streets of the Lower East Side where the Jews had settled from Eastern Europe, bringing their craft as goldsmiths with them.
I began to work my way along Hester, up Essex, then Delancey, and Rivington. Most of the shops dealt in secondhand jewelry or bought gold to melt down, but nobody seemed interested in jade.
“It’s not worth that much,” one of the jewelers said. “It’s only semiprecious.”
“I wouldn’t find a customer for it,” another said. “My customers only want gold.”
As the afternoon wore on I was hot, tired, and growing more despondent by the minute. My overriding impression was of an extreme distrust of the Chinese. I was warned several times about getting involved with them. One man actually said, “You haven’t gone and married one of them, have you?”
I wondered what had made him say that, until an old Russian, more astute and interested than the others had been, listened carefully to my description. “Dragon and phoenix intertwined?” he said. “That sounds like a bride-
