It looked bad for Eberhardt — very bad. Mid-Pacific was solvent and upwardly mobile, on the verge of major status in the computer industry; their stock, when they put it on the market, wouldn’t come cheap, and would escalate rapidly in value if what Tedescu had told me was true. A thousand shares could make you a rich man. Yeah. A much more effective bribe than cash, a much more lucrative payoff — the kind that might tempt the most honest of men. Everybody has his price, so they say. You just don’t know what it is until it’s offered to you.
I kept trying to tell myself it wasn’t that way, he hadn’t gone over — not for any reason. But the evidence seemed damning; and I could not find another plausible explanation for the stock-transfer form in his safe. It made me feel dark inside, fed the anger, gave it a kind of hard focus. I was caught up in this thing now and I had to see it through, no matter that I no longer had an investigator’s license, no matter what it cost me. It was personal. It was Eberhardt and the bribe angle and Mau Yee and the wound in my shoulder and the stiffened arm and a world full of injustice; it was everything, it was me. Until I got to the bottom of it, I could not get on with the business of putting my life back together. It was like a cancer that had to be cut out. Nothing else had any meaning until it was gone.
I stirred myself, straightened on the seat, and started the engine. There wasn’t anything more I could do about Mid-Pacific Electronics and its three principals, not until after Ben Chadwick came up with the information I had asked him for. It was time to see what I could find out about Jimmy Quon. Time for a visit to Chinatown.
Eight
There was a long line of cars waiting to enter the Portsmouth Square garage, as there always was during the noon hour; it took me twenty-five minutes to get inside and deposit my car. The square itself was jammed with people, most of them elderly Chinese sitting on benches or playing cards or Oriental versions of checkers and dominoes on permanent concrete tables. I threaded my way through them, huddled inside my overcoat, and went up Washington to Grant Avenue.
The tourists were out in droves, despite the weather; there were more white faces along Grant than Chinese. The street, Chinatown’s main thoroughfare, had undergone a cosmetic facelift in recent years. Everywhere you looked there was what the younger generation of Chinese referred to derisively as “pigtail architecture” — pagoda-style building facades, streetlamps, even public telephone booths, designed to give the tourists an “authentic” Chinese atmosphere. But Grant Avenue wasn’t the real Chinatown; it was glitter and sham, a Disneyish version of Hong Kong or Canton, a visitors’ enclave of souvenir shops, Chinese art and jade merchants, fancy restaurants, dark little bars. The real Chinatown was along Stockton and Kearny streets, in the back alleys and narrow streets on both sides of Grant. That was where you found the bundle shops, where seamstresses worked fourteen-hour days at their sewing machines for starvation wages; the tenements and projects; the social clubs and gambling parlors and dingy Chinese theaters; the joss houses, the herb shops, the exotic groceries, the Chinese-language newspapers; the Chung Fat Sausage Company and the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory and the First Chinese Baptist Church and the Chinese Cemetary Association and the ironically named Hang On Realty and Insurance. That was where you found the poverty, attitudes, and way of life that had changed remarkably little in over a century.
The address I had copied down for Kam Fong turned out to be on the block between Grant and Kearny, at the end of an alley not quite wide enough for two people to walk abreast. Six numbers, large enough to be read from the alley mouth on Jackson, were painted like graffiti on a board fence where the passage dead-ended. When I got to the fence I found a closed door in the right-hand wall, and when I opened that I was in another alley flanked on one side by doorways. The second doorway was the one I wanted. A pair of mailboxes were racked up beside the door; neither of them bore a name. Under the boxes were doorbells, and I laid my thumb against each of them in turn.
Nothing happened inside. It was gloomy in the passage; not much light penetrated from above. It made me think of the old myth about a honeycomb of underground passageways beneath the streets of Chinatown, where sinister Orientals lurked and opium dens provided celestial dreams; even Hammett and his Continental Op had been guilty of perpetuating it. The myth had been born because a number of hidden, above-ground alleys like this one did exist, and in the days of the tong wars highbinders and hatchetmen had used them as escape routes from the police; the ignorant and the fanciful among the Caucasian population had reasoned, by illogical extension, that there was a similar subterranean network. The legend had been debunked decades ago, but myths, like dreams, die hard. There were still some, here and there, who believed it to this day.
I pressed the doorbells again. Pretty soon a window slid up above me, releasing a wave of cooking odors and the faint singsong of Chinese music from a radio or phonograph. I peered up past the metal framework of a fire escape at an elderly woman with a face like a wrinkled yellow grape.
She said something in Chinese, realized I was not of her race, and switched to heavily accented English. “What you want?”
“I’m looking for Kam Fong.”
“Not here. Never here, noontime.”
“Do you know where I can find him?”
“Restaurant, maybe.”
“Which restaurant?”
“Mandarin Café. You try there.”
“Where is it?”
“Kearny Street. Yes?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
The wrinkled face withdrew and the window banged shut.
I went back out to Jackson, down to Kearny. It did not take me long to find the Mandarin Café; it was in the same block, over near Pacific — a hole-in-the-wall sandwiched between a barbershop and a Chinese dance studio. Inside was a long, narrow room crowded with tables and people, nearly all of them Chinese. They had the heat turned up in there, and combined with stove heat from the kitchen and body heat from the patrons, it gave the room an unpleasant tropical atmosphere spiced with the odors of mandarin cooking. The heat made sweat pop out on my forehead, made me feel vaguely nauseous. Nobody else seemed to mind it, but then none of them had just spent six days in the hospital recovering from a bullet wound.
I opened the buttons on my overcoat. While I was doing that, a Chinese waiter came up and shook his head at me. “Sorry, no tables now. You wait?”
“I’m not here for lunch,” I said. “I’m looking for a man named Kam Fong. You know him?”
“Kam Fong?”
“He lives around the corner on Jackson.”
The waiter hesitated, and then shrugged and pointed toward the back of the restaurant.
“Which table?” I said. “I don’t know what he looks like.”
“Far corner. By kitchen door.”
He went away. I squinted through the miasma of heat, picked up the table near the kitchen door, and made my way back there. It was a table for two, but Kam Fong was eating alone. He was a wizened little guy of indeterminate age, with a wispy mustache and glossy black hair and skin the color and appearance of tallow. He had a plate of fried pork and cabbage in front of him, and a big dish of rice and a pot of tea, and he was sitting hunched forward, working on his food with a pair of chopsticks and plenty of appetite. The meal had all of his attention; he didn’t see me coming and he didn’t look up until I pulled out the chair across from him and sat down.
“Kam Fong?” I said.
He looked blankly startled at first, but when he focused on me, saw the arm sling inside my open coat, his reaction was sudden and surprising. His mouth popped open, his eyes bulged, he made an odd little noise in his throat; one of the chopsticks slipped out of his fingers and clattered against the teapot. Fear, bright and shiny, spread like a flush ever his waxy face.