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KEEPING AWAY THE GHOSTS

“I told you it wasn’t a good idea,” Uncle Will said. They were sitting in a restaurant in Chinatown. Evie’s headache had begun in earnest. All she could do was chase the glistening dumplings in her soup bowl with her spoon.

“Who would do something like that?” Evie asked finally.

“Given the course of human history, the more accurate question is, why don’t more people do things of that nature?” Will said. He expertly navigated a piece of beef to his mouth with his chopsticks.

“It could be a gang killing. Maybe her family owed money to someone,” Jericho suggested.

“But why go to all that trouble, then?” Will mused. “Why make it seem occult in nature—and oddly occult at that?”

Will and Jericho considered various ideas, rejecting most of them. Evie remained silent. She was desperate for a drink.

“Is it taken from the Book of Revelation?” Jericho asked. “The harlot. The Whore of Babylon.”

“Yes, I thought that, too. Revelation does mention the Whore of Babylon. But the harlot adorned… It’s a very specific phrase. I’m not sure I’ve heard that before.” He shook his head and took another bite of his food. “At least it’s not coming to mind.”

Evie stared into her bowl and thought of the terrible things she’d seen while holding Ruta Badowski’s shoe buckle. What if they were important? “Have… have you ever heard this tune?” Evie asked, then whistled the song she’d heard while under.

Will pursed his lips, thinking it over. “What is it, something from a radio program? If you guess it you win a prize from Pears soap or some such?”

Evie shook her head. It hurt to do so. “Just a silly song I heard the other day. I wondered if it might mean something and…” What? What could she say that made any sort of sense? “It’s nothing.”

“As you say. Would you like to try the duck?”

Evie fought a wave of nausea as she waved the chopsticks and offending food away. But she felt a sense of relief, too. Perhaps the disconcerting images she’d seen and the song she’d heard had nothing to do with the girl’s murder. They could have been anything, really. Anything at all.

A quiet commotion up front drew Evie’s attention. The hostess, a girl in a red dress, about Evie’s age, shoved a bundle at a young man, speaking to him in Chinese. Her voice carried the tone of an order not to be contradicted. Under the girl’s penetrating gaze, the young man slunk away, letting the door to the kitchen bang behind him. The girl in the red dress appeared at their table with a silver tray of small fortune tea cakes. Evie noted her pale green eyes. “Will there be anything else?” she asked with a hint of polite annoyance.

“No, thank you.” Uncle Will paid the check while Evie extracted the slip of paper from a tea cake.

“What does it say?” Jericho asked.

“ ‘Your life will soon change.’ ” Evie tossed it aside. “I was hoping for ‘You will meet a tall, dark stranger.’ What does yours say, Jericho?”

“ ‘To gain trust you must risk secrets.’ ”

“Intriguing. Unc?”

Will left his untouched on the tray. “I never read fortunes if I can help it.”



They exited onto the narrow, winding cobblestones of Doyers Street, known as “the bloody angle” for its bend and the large number of gangland murders committed there. But that night, the street was peaceful. Across the narrow crooked strip of cobblestone, a crowd of men were lighting candles inside small white lanterns and watching them float up into the dusky sky. The smell of incense wafted into the street.

“Mid-Autumn Festival,” Uncle Will explained. “It is an important cultural tradition, a celebration of harvest.”

Farther down, paper lanterns adorned the front of a shop: Mee Tung Co., Importers. They fluttered in the evening breeze. Pieces of paper with Chinese lettering had been pasted on a brick wall beside the shop. Men on the street gave the postings a surreptitious glance as they passed by.

“What’s that?” Evie whispered.

“Listings of which businesses are not aligned with the Tongs.”

“Those silver things for putting ice in gin?” Evie mimed with her fingers. “Adore them!”

“Tongs are brotherhoods or governing associations, and there are two in Chinatown—Hip Sing Tong and On Leong Tong. They’ve run Chinatown for decades and, from time to time, they’ve also engaged in bloody warfare. The businessmen put up these postings as a plea of neutrality, so that they will be left out of the violence.”

“What’s going on there?” Evie asked. A light shone in the window of a shop where a line of men had gathered.

“Sending letters home to their wives, most likely.”

“Their wives don’t live here with them?”

“The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.” Uncle Will stared at her, waiting for a response. “What do they teach in schools these days? We’re going to have a nation of creationists with no grasp of history.”

“Then I suppose it’s lucky you’re tutoring me.”

“Yes. Well,” Will said uncertainly before settling into lecturing mode. “The Chinese Exclusion Act was a law designed to keep more Chinese from coming here once they’d finished building our railroads. They couldn’t bring their families over. They weren’t protected by our laws. They were on their own.”

“Doesn’t sound terribly American.”

“On the contrary, it’s very American,” Will said bitterly.

They’d passed around the back of the Tea House and saw the boy who’d been browbeaten by the hostess in the restaurant. He was kneeling before a small bowl of fire, feeding thin sheets of colored paper into it.

“What is he doing?” Evie said.

“Keeping the ghosts away,” Uncle Will said. He did not offer further explanation.


Date: 2015-02-03; view: 659


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