“Don’t be silly,” I said. But the truth was much harder to admit. “Bobby, I didn’t trust me.”
The next morning, first thing, I went to see Rose. She was propped on pillows, snoring. Lifang was asleep beside her, looking like a child of no more than eight or ten.
I was about to leave when Rose grumbled, “What’s on your mind?” She’d lost none of her bearings. She was ever the vigilant madam in whatever room she was in.
“Money,” I said. “Money is on my mind.”
Rose grunted as she struggled to lift herself higher on the pillows. “What about the girls? No gentlemen callers? I thought you were working on that. They are looking to you, you know.”
“They’re looking to you,” I declared. “We all are. And I’m asking, what about the safe? It’s plenty cool by now.”
“The safe is none of your concern.”
“You mean you’re not going to open it?”
“I mean, what’s in there is not for general use.”
“Rosie?” Lifang yawned and, raising herself to sitting, wiped the crust from her eyes with her dainty fists. “Rosie,” she repeated, in that awful little-girl voice she used around Rose. “Madam Johanna started a house not far from here. Three French girls they call the Lively Fleas. And Madam Bertha? She has a house very-very near, on Sacramento Street. The girls wear little dresses. They sing gin songs.”
“Gin songs?” Rose asked.
“Yes-yes, gin songs,” Lifang insisted. “Very-very popular.”
She was pushing me to start a whorehouse, even though that fat safe was begging to be opened downstairs. She was pushing, though she had once declared she didn’t want that life for me. Well, that conviction, along with so much else, was gone. I wasn’t having it. The thought of it made me sick in my bones.
“If you want to start up again, go ahead,” I declared. “But I’m not doing it.”
They pretended not to hear me. “You’d need a theme,” Rose mused, her good eye fixed on the ceiling. “Home Away from Home?” She searched the walls, the ceiling, the curtains for inspiration. “Pacific Heights,” she said at last. “Ha! That’s it. You’ll call it Pacific Heights.”
Tan was waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs.
“She’s not opening the safe,” I announced glumly. “We have to think of another way.”
Tan had his hands folded in front of him, his head bowed.
“Did you hear me, Tan, I said—”
He nodded sharply, in that curt way of his. “Lifang,” he whispered. “She’s with her?”
When I said that of course she was, he sighed with relief. “They are two snug cats,” I added, then stopped myself from saying more. I realized Tan and I were having two different conversations, and that he was in a state.
“What is it, Tan? Why are you wondering where Lifang—”
He shook his head to silence me from saying more.
“Whiskey,” he said, changing the subject. He pointed to the basement.
I thought for a minute. “Okay, let’s see what you’ve got.”
He’d been pestering me for days to go with him to see Rose’s stash.
Tan lit a lamp and led the way, his silk slippers scratching on the unfinished wood stairs. The darkness of the basement was sudden, as was the wave of mildew and damp that assailed my nose.
Tan, LowNaa, and Lifang had done the best they could to make a home below ground, with cast-off sofas and tables perched on a foundation of sand. Planks had been laid end to end to form a narrow hallway between the walls and the brick foundation.
I don’t know what I’d imagined, but it shocked me that one floor below Rose’s palace of marble goddesses and twenty-foot ceilings and polished parquet, Tan had been relegated to living on sand.
We passed a closed door.
“What’s in here?”
Tan shook his head.
“Please, show me.”
It was Tan’s room. He’d laid more planks to form a rough floor, which he’d covered with a rag rug. A narrow cot was tucked against one wall, and beside it an old dresser with a missing leg propped up by a book. On the wall opposite the cot, a threadbare sofa was being used as a second bed. I supposed that this must be where LowNaa slept. A lantern, a slop jar—everything neatly in its place. Tan stood behind me, proud of what he’d made out of nothing. I knew he’d consider it an insult if I showed that it hurt my heart to see him living like that. Instead I told him how remarkable it all was.
Lifang had a slightly better deal. Her room had a small window that looked onto the base of a rosebush, with its candelabra of green-leafed canes. A wire had been strung across the room, on which Lifang had hung two American dresses—the ones she was saving for her bright future.
Further on, the planks of the hallway ended abruptly at two doors. The first held odd bits of furniture and tools, and a repair bench with a vise. The second room stank of earth and booze. Rose had lost a fair amount of wine in the quake; the sand in the room was stained red. But some of the crates made it through unscathed. As luck would have it, some of the good stuff. Rose had kept her best hooch at the house so no one would walk off with it at The Rose. There was the odd case of Château Lafite Rothschild Bordeaux, Grand Cru Royal, and some Gruaud-Larose, Martell cognacs, and, of course, whiskey—loads of it.
Tan hefted a crate from the pile.
“How much?” I asked, money and barter being Tan’s and my favored language.
“One month.” He shrugged. “Maybe more.”
“All for a case of whiskey?”
Tan flashed the briefest of smiles. “Rose, she buys the best.”
I didn’t hesitate. “Go ahead, make the trade,” I said.
That first case bought us another month—a month of roles shifting inside the gold house. I left Rose completely to the care of Lifang. Tan, having already established a name for himself as someone who traded silk garters, perfume, and cigars for eggs
