A luxurious bus, glistening with plate-glass and polished brass, drove up to the side entrance, the guide signaled the party, and we filed out into the car, some eighteen of us.
A plain-clothes man watched us sharply. A motorcycle cop stared at each passenger. I met the stare frankly, curious.
The bus lurched forward, rounded the corner and slid down the boulevard. Behind us sounded the bark of an exhaust, the wail of a siren. A police car slid alongside, packed with officers.
“Pull over to the curb,” ordered the man in charge.
The bus pulled in to the curb and stopped.
The police car waited. Had a man made a break for liberty he would have been riddled with buckshot.
A policeman climbed out of the car, walked impressively toward us. He searched each of our faces, then paused — and drew some pasteboards from his pocket.
“Your last chance to get tickets to the policemen’s masquerade ball, folks,” he said. “It starts tonight and the hotel management asked us to reserve tickets for any of the guests who wanted to go.”
I chuckled. It had been a great police bluff. According to their theory if I had been in the car I would have tried to escape.
As it was, I held up two fingers.
“Give me two,” I said.
Fifteen minutes later we were in Chinatown. The guide began his stereotyped lecture consisting of a garbled mass of misinformation. The Eastern tourists thrilled with the atmosphere of mystery, rubbered at the red signs with their weird characters, and followed the guide about like sheep.
I waited until we were on the sidewalk where a secret passageway came from the back of the Yat King Café. Here I pressed a concealed button, heard the click of a lock, and stepped inside.
The guide turned sharply.
Once within the Yat King Café I enjoyed more leeway. Many white people as well as Chinese were dining. My evening clothes attracted but little attention, and I obtained a curtained booth.
My dinner at the Clearview had been interrupted, so I ordered some of the more palatable Chinese dishes. At the entrance was a telephone booth, and I risked a call to the residence of Soo Hoo Duck, the uncrowned king of Chinatown.
Luck was with me. His daughter, Ngat T’oy, whose name, translated, meant “Little Sun,” answered the call. She it was I wanted. I knew that I could count upon her as a friend. Guardedly I suggested that if she would join a gentleman in booth twelve at the Yat King Café she would meet an old friend.
“Does this friend wear a ring?” she asked.
I knew she was referring to a great dragon ring her father had given me, a ring which was well known in Chinatown. I had earned this ring at the old man’s hands by resenting an insult to his daughter. At the time, I had thought but little of it. Later, I realized the ring was the symbol of his power in Chinatown. It had some sacred or political significance.
“Your friend has a ring,” I told Ngat T’oy, “but it is not for the vulgar gaze. He carries it in a pouch about his neck.”
“Tell my friend that I will come at once. I have much to tell him,” she said, and hung up.
Feeling well pleased with the world, chuckling at my last escape from the police, I stepped from the telephone and into the curtained booth.
And then, suddenly, my feeling of security underwent instant change. A stoop-shouldered, hawk-faced man entered and swept the diners with cold eyes.
Something special had called Captain Mansfield to the Yat King Café.
I stepped within the curtains, adjusted them so I could see the entrance to the café, and waited anxiously. This was different from the Clearview. The police would be under no compunctions about disturbing the trade here. Given the right incentive, they would bring up the wagon and take every diner there to headquarters.
Mansfield was reputed to be the cleverest crook-catcher in the department. He had worked up to a position of power by framing such men as the police wanted put away, and making the frame-ups stick.
Did he suspect I was in the café? The police had noticed the Chinatown party leaving the Clearview. They might well have planted a plain-clothes man in the crowd. Then when I had left and a check-up showed seventeen instead of eighteen...
No need to speculate longer.
A pock-marked, evil face flitted across my range of vision. It clung to the shadows back of the entrance, and was itself a shadow. Chuck Gee, head of the hatchet-men, the organized killers of Chinatown. He was there for a reason, and I was the reason.
Two and two make four, and Captain Mansfield and Chuck Gee added up to the grand total of discovery.
I gathered my feet under me, wondering if I had eluded the police of so many states, almost at will, to be finally trapped in this Chinese restaurant by a crooked police officer and the head of the Chinese highbinders.
At any rate, I could only do my best, and that quickly...
Ngat T’oy was in the doorway.
In the excitement I had almost forgotten my appointment with her. She was decked out in Chinese finery, pink silk trousers, an embroidered jacket to match, a box-like hat, Chinese slippers. Under her arm she carried a pasteboard box, and her attitude was that of one who was hurried.
I wondered at the Chinese costume. Usually she dressed as a graduate of one of the best Western colleges should dress. And her clothes were just as flapperish as the law allowed.
She was pure Chinese. Yet she had been educated in California, and she combined the East and the West, the education and air of the flapper, the reasoning processes of the Oriental.
She slippety-slopped her embroidered slippers directly to my booth, parted the curtains and entered.
I arose and extended my hand.
“Greetings, Little Sun.”
“H’lo, big boy. How’s tricks? You’re in a jam.”
I grinned at her.
“I always am. What now?”
She scowled, then shrugged her rounded shoulder.
“Sergeant Hollman telephoned my father. He said that you had again come to Chinatown. You escaped an hour ago from the Clearview Hotel and have been traced to this block.”
I sighed. Damn it, life was just one mess after another now that Paul Boardman had decreed my death. As a fugitive, wanted by that powerful politician, the police trailed me with a relentless efficiency they had never displayed when they sought to capture me as a mere crook.
“Little Sun, you shouldn’t have come here. There’ll probably be trouble. If they know I’m here they’ll be watching the whole district.”
She nodded and grinned.
“That’s why I’m here. To help.”
I patted her hand.
“Ngat T’oy, you’re a pal worth having, but there’s nothing you can do, and you might get hurt.”
Her dark eyes flicked over mine in a gaze of whimsical humor.
“Key down, big boy. The worst is yet to come.”
I met the smile in her eyes.
“Break it to me gently, Little Sun. You know my nerves are weak.”
And then, even as we sat there, grinning at each other, her dark eyes lost their smile, became as impassive as polished ebony. Her face assumed the mask of the Oriental, and a veil dropped between us. When she retired back of the Western veneer into her Chinese psychology she was a closed book to me.
“It is written that gratitude is a noble emotion. It is also written that respect and honor of parents come before all else in the world. Because of you, because of my gratitude to the girl whom you love, I have violated the teachings of my race and have committed a great evil.”
I searched her face with narrowed eyes. It was a bland mask of Oriental impassivity. She might have done anything from murder to treason.
“Yes?” I prompted.