Cachalot Inlet.—The southeasterly and westerly winds blow through with great violence.
BRITISH COLUMBIA PILOT, VOLUME I
“You have cut yourself shaving,” says Fan, pointing.
I put my hand to my cheek. My fingers come away sticky and covered with blood. “That’s funny,” I say, “I don’t feel any pain.”
She shrugs.
It is early morning. A calm day at anchorage at Cachalot Station in Kyuquot Sound. Blue jays screech at us from the shore. Swallows flutter and dive above the ruins of the oil house. Although thirty years have passed since the station was operating, its outlines remain. Besides the oil house, there is the wharf, and the slip for hauling out whales; the fertilizer dryer and cutting-up platform; the trying-out tanks; and bunkhouses, cook shacks, and staff bungalows. It was all left as it was so that as soon as the market improved, the whaling could be resumed.
The station grounds are overgrown with brush. The beach is a shambles of broken timbers and rocks. Behind the station clearing there are heavily forested hills. The screaming jays are joined by kingfishers, which dispute the territory.
“Not much here,” says Fan as we row away from the Rose in the little reel dinghy.
“What did you expect, Fan? Eighty men slicing up blubber? They were Japanese and Chinese crews, mostly. When the station was closed they all went home. There was no reason for them to stay.”
“It seems a strange place to have built the station at all,” she says. “Why here? Why not somewhere more sheltered?”
“The men who built the station were businessmen, Fan, not sailors. It looked like a good anchorage to them, and that was enough. Besides, the whaling boats weren’t meant to remain tied up. They were working boats, out for ten days at a time, then taking on stores and coal and going out again. They say that when a storm hit, the whalers ran north to a bay on the other side of Kyuquot. The manager didn’t like to see them tied up alongside the factory.”
We bump up against a rotted piling. I roll up my pant legs and step out of the dinghy into a foot of water. “You could earn good money then, Fan,” I tell my stepmother as I haul the dinghy up the shingle, wincing as I step on barnacles. “As much as ten thousand dollars a season as a skipper, or three thousand as a hand. There were tennis courts here then, and they hunted game for pleasure. The mail steamer, Princess Maquinna, called in regularly. It was not an uncivilized existence.”
We are standing on the edge of nowhere. The birds have fallen silent. The mountains press us near to the rim of water. When we walk, clambering over the fragile, decrepit tangle of boards, ocean debris, and rusted metal, I have to shake my head to clear it of a noise like running water. I shake it, it clears, then the noise begins again. I stop still to listen.
“What’s the matter, Robert Lam?” asks Lam Fan.
“Hush, Fan, I tell her, I’m trying to hear something.”
We both stand listening. “I don’t hear anything,” she says. “There is nobody here, you said so yourself.”
I start to walk again and immediately stumble. When I look down to see what my feet have caught on, I stumble once more.
“I can’t feel anything, Fan!” I say. “My feet have gone numb!”
“Five minutes ago you complained about cold water! I don’t know what you’re talking about, you are not yourself.”
“But I am, Fan, this is me, Robert Lam!”
She regards me coldly. “Sit down then and get hold of your thoughts. I have told you before, you read too many books. They are not good for you. You should get out more, take up sports.”
“Play tennis, Fan?”
“You know what I mean. Now look around you and pay attention.” I do what she says. I see the outlines of some buildings overrun with grass. I see the green of the forest, the mottled blue sky, the blue-green water. I hear a stream running, outside, not in my mind, and when I look for it, find it tumbling down some rocks a few yards behind me.
A hummingbird flies up for a look at the beached red dinghy. The sun shines hotly through a haze of cloud. I wipe the sweat from my brow.
“Oh!” gasps Fan. I look up at her quickly.
“What is it, Fan?”
She averts her eyes. She toes a hole in the beach. “Nothing, Robert Lam, it is nothing important.”
“Fan,” I say warningly. “Don’t do that to me. Whatever it is I am better off knowing. Don’t keep me guessing.”
She takes a breath. I watch a butterfly settle on her wrist then skitter away, plant to plant, along the beach. She lets the breath out. “It is your face, Robert Lam. When you wiped your hand across it, your eyebrow came off.”
She still won’t look at me. “I don’t think that’s funny, Fan,” I say. “I thought you were in real distress, that you were worried about me. God knows I’m worried enough about myself. I told you, I can’t feel anything in my feet.”
“Please yourself, Robert Lam,” she says. “You asked me to tell you what I saw that disturbed me.”
“I’m still waiting,” I say crossly.
The hummingbird returns to the dinghy, then it whirrs along for a look at Fan’s red fingernails. “Ha, ha!” I cry. “That proves it, Fan. I knew you were real.”
It is her turn to be cross. “You are such an idiot, Robert Lam. You know nothing about nothing, body or spirit. I’m going back to the Rose.”
“You can’t go without me!” I complain like a child. But she has gone, and I am left sitting on the uncomfortable beach all alone.
“Bitch!” I whisper. Then, “Bitch!” I shout as loudly as I can. The ugly word echoes round the hills, shaming me. The birds, the butterflies, the comforting susurration of my surroundings, all quit. “Who is this man,” says the quietness, “who carries such ugliness in him? Who is he?”
I have no answer to that, and so I say, instead, to myself, “Get hold of yourself, Robert Lam. Get hold.”
I take the Chinese coin from my pocket. It shines dully. I lift it to throw it out into the water, for it has brought me no luck, but it slips between my fingers.
When I bend down to search for it, I find instead a glistening fist-sized object in the grass. It is a whale’s eardrum. And so, naturally, I hold it to the side of my head to listen.
The gambling debt. The fine for drunkenness. The workingmen’s association blacklist. Robert Haack was back where he had started some months earlier. At home in the Johnson Street ravine, with the companionship of his chastened dog, Charlie, and recently shamed in front of the woman he loved.
It was love he now thought about. For in that worst of all moments, when he’d been seen with his hand thrust up a dog’s anus, he had known that he and India belonged together and never should part. There had been a shock, a physical jolt, as if love had progressed beyond their control in spite of his absence. It was chemistry run wild, irrational, unstoppable.
And he was certain that what he’d felt, she’d felt. And he did not want it to stop. He wanted to find her and ask her to marry him. He wanted a home, a family. He wanted to work and be happy. He wanted to take her with him to a new life in San Francisco. He wanted his life to turn out well, as his mother (the teacher) had told him it would. He wanted a happy ending.
So what was he to do about it?
Robert shook out the piece of canvas he had held over himself and Charlie to keep off the rain. He spread the canvas on the ground to dry. Charlie at once sank down upon it.
Robert Haack sighed. Somehow he had to straighten out his life. He had to show India he was the man she thought he was. Then he could go to her with something to offer. Not empty-handed like this, hungry like this, soaking wet and on the verge of a cold. With his clothes in rags and his hair unkempt. Not like a beggar.
He took off his hat and began to swat at the flies, which had risen from the dust the instant the rain had stopped. There were problems to be solved. There were difficulties to overcome. There was the matter of money, for instance.
Slowly, Haack let the thought that had been in his mind all along rise to the surface. The seed that Smiling Jimmy had planted had finally germinated. Time and distance had done it. Plus the need for money. And the need for love. There was a way, if he were willing to risk it. Smiling Jimmy had made an offer to go into business.
But no, no, no. It was impossible. There was his conscience to deal with. There were promises to his mother and others. There was Charlie to consider.
Charlie rose unsteadily to her feet and slurped at Robert Haack’s face. He had seen her grow weaker. He had no money with which to feed her. A man and his dog. The bond between them. He remembered Smiling Jimmy’s face as he’d kicked at Charlie’s belly. After Charlie had bitten him.
No. He could not do it. No.
And wouldn’t the risk be too great? But if he didn’t risk it? Were his dreams to end here, like this? Besides, India was sure to understand once he’d given his reasons. And it wasn’t her opium factory anyway; it belonged to Sing Yuen.
And so Robert Haack left the Johnson Street ravine behind, and also left behind (for obvious reasons) his dog Charlie, and went to call on Smiling Jimmy. For it was clear to Haack that he needed a partner. For while he could gather intelligence, such as the timing of opium shipments, the speed of manufacture of the raw material, the details of the Tai June defences, he knew nothing about the considerable undertaking of distributing and selling the drug. And there was loading to do, and transporting to a suitable beach, and finding a boat and crew—not to mention an ideal hiding place—and there was navigating the straits at night. These matters, Haack thought, could best be handled by Smiling Jimmy, a former skipper himself, who had run up and down the coast in all manner of ships. Whose idea it had been in the first place.
And so, suppressing the counterarguments, most of them to do with his feelings, Robert set out for the Dallas Hotel where Jimmy lived.
Thus, as it had to, the enterprise advanced. A decision balked at on a mountaintop but taken because of love, became timetables and schedules, movements of guards, availability of wagons, trustworthiness of stevedores. It acquired a shape and momentum, a force of its own.
Haack and Jimmy met in the Metropolitan, where Robert lived once again (thanks to a loan from his partner), and worked on their plans. Or they met at the Dallas Hotel, and drank at the bar, with not a word exchanged between them as to import-export. Or sat outside on the hotel’s benches, while the sun, pale as a handkerchief, suffused the sky then shrank, and rain spattered down like paint on the bathing pavilion.
New brides gazed out at them from smart bay windows, and new husbands polished windowsills with brand-new shirtsleeves. And if Jimmy and Haack didn’t become close friends, well, they grew used to each other, and even Charlie learned to let Jimmy pet her.
Spring. As it changed to summer. And the weather settled.
While Robert Haack watched the Tai June factory from morning till night, and saw India arrive each day at noon and depart at six. And wondered what she was thinking. And wondered if she were thinking of him. And daydreamed.
While Smiling Jimmy took care of his share of the work. He gathered up charts. He found a boat, and a crew who, if they had known where the job would take them, would have refused it. He arranged for sale and distribution of the drug in the States.
In short, all was done that had to be done, and the date for the robbery of the Tai June factory was selected and marked.
Calendar time. Pocket-watch time. While the sun went up and down like a martinet. And there was nothing to do but wait.
And talk.
And so Robert Haack, destined to speak when he shouldn’t, and to remain silent when it was vital he speak, told Jimmy about his love for India. How they had met, where they had walked, what they had done. What his plans were for her. The whole kit and caboodle of the relationship.
“But what,” asked Jimmy, not unintelligently, “does a woman like that see in you?”
Robert was taken aback. It hadn’t occurred to him quite that way. “Why, Jimmy,” he answered, “it’s not the seeing that counts, it’s the feeling. We’re like two halves of a peach. I don’t know why it’s so, but we fit.”
“Oh,” said Jimmy, “so it’s like that!”
“No, no,” said Robert. “I mean, she’d do whatever I wanted, but you don’t ask a woman like that. Not without marrying her, anyway. Aw, it’s personal, Jim. I can’t say it, even to you.” And Robert Haack blushed.
“She’d do anything, you say? You’re sure she feels like that?”
“I’d stake my life on it,” Robert Haack said.
Which was a mistake. For there are some words that, once said, can’t be taken back. Not when men have to trust each other. Not when a man’s word is his bond. Not when what is said is what you want to be true.
And who could blame Robert Haack? He had said no more than any man might.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Jimmy a few days later, less than a week before the planned robbery, “if things are as you say they are with your young lady, and certainly I’ve no reason to doubt it, in fact if I had any doubts at all we’d not be partners, I’ve been thinking, I say, that we can simplify our project.”
“What do you mean, Jim?” asked Haack uncertainly. “We’ve got it all worked out now, there isn’t anything more to do.” He was rather hoping to avoid the subject of India. He feared he had been indiscreet.
“You can always make improvements, my friend Robert,” said Jimmy Carroll. “That’s one thing you learn with experience. Experience, as they say, is the best teacher, and experience is telling me there’s an important factor here we’ve missed.
“Let’s say,” he continued, ignoring Robert’s glum appearance, “that we didn’t have to break into the factory at all. That we could walk up plain as you like and unlock the door. Wouldn’t that be safer? Wouldn’t that be the sensible course to take, if we had the choice? Why be caught in a robbery when all we have to do is borrow some keys? See what I mean?”
“I’m not sure that I do, Jim,” said Robert carefully. He was examining a sheaf of drawings—location of locks and bars on windows, schedule of guards—as if it were the first time he’d come upon them.
“You could,” said Jimmy suggestively, “just take them.”
“I’m sorry, Jim,” said Robert, “I still don’t see…”
“Don’t be stupid, man,” said Jimmy impatiently. “Go to see her, take her out to eat, take her to bed. Whatever is necessary. Just bring back the keys!”
“Oh, no!” said Robert in a thin, shocked voice. “I couldn’t do that! It wouldn’t be right! She trusts me! She thinks I’m her friend!”
“Friend be damned,” said Jimmy, “you said it was more than that.”
“Well, it is,” said Robert.
“Then what’s the problem, boy?” asked Jimmy, squeezing Haack by the shoulder. “You said she wouldn’t let you down. She’d do anything you wanted, you said.”
“That’s not what I meant!” cried Robert Haack desperately.
Jimmy released his grip on Haack’s shoulder. His eyes narrowed. His face looked more than ever like a well-sharpened hatchet. “You wouldn’t have lied to me about this woman, would you, son? You know what I think of liars. I can’t stomach them. I’d as soon see a man dead as have him lie to me.”
“Oh, no, Jim,” said Robert. “I told you the truth. I swear I did.”
“Then that’s all right,” said Jimmy sweetly. “You just remember that I’m your friend. You’ve not got so many of them in this old town as you could afford to lose one. There are a lot of men who’d like to see you go down, if you catch my meaning.”
Robert placed the sheaf of papers on the bed. “There’s just one problem, Jimmy,” he said turning to face him, although his hands were shaking. “If I took her keys she’d know it was me that had them. I’d get the blame for it. I’d go to jail. Who knows what I’d have to tell them if they made me? You know what they’re like. You’ve said so yourself.” Haack thought, with a sense of relief, that this was a clinching argument.
“That fine girl! That woman who loves you, who’d give you her life! Why, she wouldn’t let the man she worships go to jail! Not for a minute. If there’s one thing I know, my friend, that’s women. She’d go to blazes herself before she’d turn you in.”
Robert rubbed his hand on his forehead where the sweat had broken out.
“Don’t worry so much,” said Jimmy. “This’ll make things easier. Besides, you’ll enjoy it,” he said with a wink, “and she won’t feel a thing.”
When a man like Jimmy Carroll, who had spent his life as a smuggler, who knew the ropes, who had been (for the most part) successful, appears to be simple, to believe, word for word, what his partner has told him, and when the subject his partner has talked of is love; and if this apparent credulity appears a few days in advance of a well-planned robbery and means a change of plans for that partner, and if the idea of burglary is abandoned in favour of keys, then it is time for that partner, Robert Haack, to look after himself. To harbour no illusions about his future. To think deeply about what he is involved in, and with whom. To wonder why a man like Jimmy Carroll needs him.
In other circumstances, with his mind free of worry, with affairs between himself and India settled, with no concerns as to how he was going to present himself, these self-preserving instincts might have made their appearance.
But as it was, once he grew used to Jimmy’s suggestion, Robert Haack quite welcomed it. It meant he would have to see her at last and explain himself, reveal his hopes, and begin his real life.
And so, when he should have been figuring out what Jimmy was up to, instead he went shopping, buying new shoes, a suit and shirt, plus a hat. And getting his hair cut. And standing in front of the mirror in Mrs. Lush’s rooming house, trying out phrases. What he should say first to India. What she might say back. Where it would go from there.
Poor Robert Haack, so immersed in the mist of lies he had told himself that he was lost.
I must have fallen asleep, for when I awaken the tide has floated the dinghy. A fog, thick as snow, has rolled down from the mountains and piled up in the inlet. I can see the stones beneath my feet, the rope that leads to the floating dinghy, but very little else. My feet and hands are tingling but are no longer numb. I stand up.
“Fan!” I cry. “Where are you?”
“Out here, Robert Lam,” she answers faintly. “On the Rose. You’d better get out here, the wind’s coming up.”
“It can’t be, Fan,” I tell her. “The fog’s too thick, there’s no wind at all.”
“Maybe where you are,” she shouts, “but not out here. The barometer is falling, and I think we’re dragging anchor. I can’t see you, either, the shore has vanished. Hurry up!”
I am shivering in my shirtsleeves. The wet folds of the fog surround my body. I clench my teeth to prevent them from chattering as I step into the sea in pursuit of the dinghy. I pull it in by the painter and climb into it. Now where? For already, only ten or fifteen feet from shore and carried by the tide, I have lost my bearings.
“Fan!” I cry. “Keep shouting. I don’t know where you are.”
“Here!” she cries. And “Here, here, here,” the mountains echo.
“Again, Fan. Keep shouting.”
“I’m here, I’m here.”
Her voice seems to move in circles around me, and I feel the keel of the dinghy scrape a rock.
I swear and rummage in the bow of the boat for a life jacket. If I can find it I can blow the whistle attached, listen for echoes, and at least know where I am in the channel.
But there is no jacket. I must have taken it out. “Fan!” I call again. This time there is silence.
I row the dinghy and try to think. Cachalot is a narrow inlet, lying approximately east to west. I can feel the first breath of wind on the back of my neck. It has to be a southeaster, despite the fog, tunnelling down through the valleys. If the Rose is dragging anchor, as Lam Fan says, then the wind should move her north and towards the entrance. And the dinghy is being carried west on an ebbing tide.
But before I have it worked out, the squall hits, dumping the dinghy’s nose in the water, wrenching the oars from my hands, and tearing the fog into shreds. I scramble for the oars and manage to rescue one. The dinghy is sinking fast, but ahead, just ten feet away, is the Rose, pulling on her anchor and riding the wind and waves like a thoroughbred.
“Help, Fan, help me!” I cry through mouthfuls of water. “Throw me a line! For pity’s sake, help!”
I scrabble at the water with my oar, inching the dinghy onwards. “Help, Fan, please help me!”
“You’ll have to help yourself, Robert Lam,” she cries, “there is no one else.”
And so I do. Calling on tired muscles for further effort, making use of the force of the wind and water to drive the half-sunken dinghy a few feet forward, until I can reach out for the anchor chain of the Rose and pull myself up. Refusing to give up hope.
And so, muscles spasming in pain and desperately afraid of falling, I finally flop over the stem and onto the deck. Where I lie for some minutes spitting out water and laughing. Each breath I take hurts my ribs. But I can’t stop laughing.
“Start the engine, Robert Lam, we’re far too close to the rocks!”
I do what I’m told.
We have run out of Cachalot Inlet, the Rose’s engine purring and humming, and down Kyuquot Channel about three and a half miles to Volcanic Cove. It is just big enough to take us and is sheltered from all winds but northerlies. The storm has blown itself out, and we are basking in the rays of a pale, weak sun.
I have a stern line out: the cove is so narrow that without it we’d swing into shore.
“How’d you find this place?” asks Fan.
“Genius,” I answer, lying on the deck with my eyes shut. I open one eye to see her face screwing up to a question.
“I looked at the chart, Fan,” I tell her. “It was marked as an anchorage. I don’t think that’s cheating.”
“Oh!” she says, as if surprised.
“I’m not as dumb as you think,” I say.
We rest while a deer stands still at the top of the cliff and watches us. “There is just one thing I want to know, Fan,” I say. “Were you afraid like I was?”
“Me?” she says. “Of course not, Robert Lam, I have you to take care of me.”
I smile to myself, then sleep.
And so my mother, waiting for Robert Haack to come to his senses, knowing he was embarrassed by the scene she had stumbled on, eager to help him but not wanting to interfere, asked herself questions.
Did she trust him? Would she want to live with him? Was she willing to have children? How much did she like her life as it was, and would she be willing to change it? Her dreams about him became vivid and frequent. So that she woke up thinking Robert Haack was dead, that he had killed himself or been murdered; or that they were making love. For she was a woman in her thirties, and if not quite experienced then no innocent, either: for she and Fan had seen life as it was in the streets of Hong Kong.
My mother, a woman like and unlike others of her generation. Who had had no mother to protect her. Who believed in reform as taught by her father. Who wasn’t afraid to take a chance with appearances. Who had an inquiring mind, yet knew how to look to her heart for answers.
The pink skin showed above Robert Haack’s ears, where he’d just had his hair cut, as he stood with his derby in his hand in front of the door of the Fisgard Street house in which India lived. He was dressed in a blue worsted lounge coat and trousers. The trousers were pegged over black town boots, the jacket was single-breasted with rounded fronts, four buttons and five pockets, and around the small stand collar of the shirt, Robert had wrapped a sailor’s tie. To say he had taken pains with his appearance would not be enough; in fact, he felt so unlike himself, as if the costume had defeated his personality, that he kept patting the cloth to reassure himself that he was inside it. Mrs. Lush hadn’t helped: catching a glimpse of him as he’d come down the steps of the Metropolitan, she’d burst into laughter. He could hear that laughter still.
He raised his hand to the door and stopped. What in the world was he there for? To see India, of course, and to borrow the keys to the Tai June factory. But which came first? The woman or the robbery? It was a puzzle he had to sort out, for deep in his heart it remained unsolved.
Although it was obvious that when a man turned up on a lady’s doorstep, after a long absence, washed, groomed, and dressed as never before in his life, that she was entitled to take for granted what he was there for: namely, for her. And, in this instance, to assume that he was sorry for all he had done and was ready to make it up. Although the fact was that he wouldn’t be there at all, at least not at this moment, if he hadn’t had a job to do in which she was involved.
Robert Haack sighed and screwed up his courage. He knocked. Rehearsed for the thousandth time how he would start, and began to shake. Inside the house footsteps approached the door. His eyes filled up in anticipation with grateful, reconciling tears.
The door opened a crack. “Is that you, India?” he asked, peering into the opening through which he could see a fragment of a familiar blue dress. “It is I, Robert.”
She said nothing. Was she afraid of him? Or so surprised to see him there that she couldn’t say anything? Or hadn’t she made up her mind yet how to receive him?
He plunged on. “I know it’s been a long time since I’ve been to call,” he said. “It’s not that I haven’t wanted to, please understand that. It’s just that I’ve been afraid of what you’d think, after all that’s happened.” He waited, but she maintained her silence. He tried to ease the door open a little farther with his foot, but she resisted.
“Well,” he said sadly, “I’ve sure missed you. I’ve been hoping that we might have a chance to talk things over. There’s a lot to be said between us. I should have said it before. But the truth is, India, I love you.
“Please,” he begged, as he squeezed his body through the narrow opening and into the hallway, “can you ever forgive me?”
There are moments in our lives when we see ourselves through the eyes of others, when the ego’s self-deception is torn away and we know exactly how we appear. Such a moment was this for Robert Haack as he looked, stunned, into the bright, inquiring eyes not of India Thackery, his beloved, but of Gook Lang, the reformed child prostitute.
Whom he had helped to rescue some months earlier from the prison of a star house. Who had witnessed his fatal encounter with Henry McMullen, workingman. Who had gone (as he’d forgotten) to live with India, and who now stood before him with her hand covering her mouth in embarrassment, wearing a cut-down version of India’s favourite blue dress.
What lurked behind that hand and in those eyes? Was it laughter, or just incomprehension?
“Where’s India?” he demanded angrily, feeling he’d been fooled. “What are you doing wearing her clothes? What are you doing here?” He pushed past her and peered into the drawing room. It was empty.
“Answer me!” he cried, returning to the dim hallway. He grabbed hold of the girl’s wrist and twisted it.
“She is not here,” Gook Lang whispered painfully.
Robert twisted harder. “I can see that for myself, now where is she?” Gook Lang whimpered. The wrist that Robert held had been broken twice.
“She has gone out,” said the girl, in tears. “She has gone to work.” Haack let Gook Lang’s wrist drop and watched his reflection shrink to nothing in the child’s frightened eyes.
“That can’t be right,” he said in a wondering voice. “She doesn’t work on Sundays. The factory is closed. Why are you saying this?” He felt tired, he wanted to sit down and think, but he could not before he was sure he understood what the child had meant.
“I need the keys to the factory,” he said. “You just get them for me, then I’ll leave. I’m sure you know where they’re kept. You won’t need to tell your mistress.” He did not know why he felt so weak and helpless, what it was that had turned his body, inside the blue suit, into a fixture of wood. He pushed Gook Lang away from him. “Hurry up,” he said.
She turned to face him. “I cannot,” she said.
A flash of his anger returned. “You’ll do what I say or else!” he threatened.
“No,” said Lang. “I already told you, she took the keys with her, she has gone to work.”
Haack’s wooden body turned icily cold. “No, she didn’t,” he said. “She doesn’t work today.”
“Yes,” Gook Lang countered, rubbing her wrist and regarding him scornfully, “Sing Yuen sent a message for her to go there. There is a big shipment for Tai June coming in. Sing Yuen asked her to make the place ready.”
Robert Haack slumped against the wall and put his hands over his face. Jimmy’s visage, as it had appeared at their first meeting, shortly after he had kicked Haack’s dog, Charlie, swam up in vivid detail before Haack’s eyes. He saw the anger and heard Jimmy’s voice as he snarled at Robert, who had threatened him, “We’ll see, Mr. Haack. We’ll see or I’ll be hanged. I won’t forget this.” A warning if ever there was one. A promise of revenge, which he, Robert Haack, had to his folly, ignored.
Numbness crept from the tips of his fingers into his entrails. He could scarcely breathe. He straightened himself, no longer aware of Gook Lang, who stood alertly nearby, and manoeuvred himself outside.
He was like a man who had awakened from a long sleep, or like a grief-stricken man forced to appear too soon in public. He staggered down the road into the June sunset as a golden sheen of light spread over the boardwalks, the windows, the faces of the passersby. His new clothes, his brushed hair, and shiny skin held a hint of gold. The glitter and shimmer of the street was like a dream, and he was caught fast in it.
Where was India, his pounding heart asked over and over. The drumbeat of his feet on the boardwalks repeated the question.
If India was there with Jimmy and his men…if Jimmy had known she would come…if she hadn’t been able to get away…Why hadn’t she come back? He couldn’t remember if he’d asked Gook Lang what time she’d left.
He took his inert body as fast as it could be moved towards the Tai June factory, towards the chasm of his own double-dealing.
The gold faded from the buildings, and as he arrived at the factory, followed by Charlie, who had chewed through the rope that had tied her to a post outside the Metropolitan, night fell like a sudden blow.
All was still. The Tai June flag was lowered. The chimneys were smokeless, as on any other Sunday. But at the side of the factory Haack found a broken window with the bars sawn through, and from inside he could hear the groans of the tied and gagged guards as they began to come to.
The lane gate was open. Robert swung it wider, and exposed to view the gaping doors of the empty warehouse in the courtyard. The place had been ransacked. The guards had been surprised on their rounds, knocked unconscious, and blindfolded. There would be no witnesses.
While the city had gone about its Sunday business, its citizens gathered in churches or at picnics; with its policemen sleeping or playing cards; and with Sing Yuen courting Lam Fan with tea at his restaurant, Jimmy had gone efficiently about his work. Passing cartons of tins out of factory doors and windows, manhandling crates and strapping them into carts; swatting the backsides of horses and sending them and their drivers and wagons into the streets. Where they clattered away into the distance.
The stillness was oppressive. Robert Haack stumbled over broken crates and shards of glass. He looked into the windows; he walked through every room of the factory, ignoring the trussed-up guards; he paced clear to the back of the empty warehouse, where he struck a match. Within the darkness created by this small patch of light, and where the odour of opium mocked its own absence, he saw on the earth floor a swatch of blackness no bigger than his hand, which was not black at all when he looked at it closely, but red. “India,” he said. Charlie, who had followed him on his rounds, began to whine. A torn piece of India’s clothing lay nearby. Pinned to it was the brooch that Haack had given her. He sank to the floor, touched the dry, hard blood, and passed his hand across his eyes.
For the first time in days, his thinking cleared. Jimmy, who had taken over the scheduling when Haack became otherwise occupied, would have known that the opium was expected. He would have known that, as always, India would go in the day before to make sure that the factory was prepared for it; that the earlier shipment had been fully dealt with and was ready for export; that the incoming warehouse was empty; that the processing plant was cleaned up and ready for Monday. He had known, that is, that she wouldn’t be home when Robert Haack called. For, after all, it was Jimmy who had selected this as the day for Robert to obtain the keys.
He understood, at last, that he had been deceived. Jimmy hadn’t needed the keys at all. What he’d wanted, and what he’d accomplished, was to get Robert Haack out of the way for a few crucial hours and to get India into his clutches. Robert: who had given Jimmy not only his drawings and plans, but all the information he had gathered about Tai June, and who didn’t know, in turn, very much about the actual execution of the robbery, or what was to happen after it. He didn’t know where the boat was kept. He didn’t know the names of any of the crew. He didn’t know where, or for how long, Jimmy would hide the drug, nor what his plans were for distributing it.
Pity Robert Haack. Pity the terrible combination of loss and responsibility that confronted him. Pity this man in his new suit of clothes, his freshly revealed ignorance, his dead-end thinking. He was afraid to move. He did not want what he was thinking to be true. And so he stayed where he was, with the factory cats watching him from the shelving, and his frightened dog howling, until the police finally arrived.
“But, Fan,” I say, sitting up on the deck of the Rose in puzzlement, “what did happen to my mother? Obviously she came to the factory while Jimmy was there, and she tried to stop him, but what did he do with her? She can’t have been killed, or else I’d not have been born. It doesn’t make sense.”
“Think, Robert Lam,” instructs my stepmother. “Robert Haack had found no body, only a small stain of blood.”
I think. “She wasn’t killed, she was kidnapped,” I say. “But why would Smiling Jimmy do that? Why not just kill her? We know that she was the only witness to the burglary—the guards who were knocked out and blindfolded could have identified no one.” I go on, working it out. “And Jimmy would never have let her testify as to his guilt. We know that he feared jail and would do almost anything to keep out of it.”
“Except reform,” says Lam Fan dryly.
“On the other hand,” I say, “he was a smuggler, not a murderer, he must have had his ethics.” I shake my head, unable to go further.
Fan nervously taps her long red fingernails on the hatch combing. “You’ve forgotten one thing,” she says.
“What’s that?”
“Jimmy hated Robert Haack because he had insulted him. Jimmy never forgave a slight.”
“Which was why he made a fool of Haack over the robbery,” I say, “I know that.”
“And?” she asks.
“India?” I say, the light dawning. “She was part of his revenge, as well?”
Lam Fan nods.
“So tell me,” I say, “what did Jimmy do with her?”
“He put her in a perfect place,” she says. “A place that no one would think of.
“Just remember,” she adds as she gets to her feet, “that Robert Haack believed, at first, that India was dead. He was so guilt-stricken over his part in the whole terrible affair that he assumed the worst. Once he realized there were other possibilities—that indeed she could have been kidnapped and hidden somewhere—he’d been taken away by the police. He did hear, though, while in jail, that Jimmy had returned to town and was looking for him. But before he had a chance to find out why, whether Jimmy wanted to torment him, or make sure he kept his mouth shut about Jimmy’s role in the robbery, Jimmy was killed. It was in a brawl in Chinatown, and it was said to do with money.”
“But Fan,” I ask her, “why on earth would Jimmy come back? Wouldn’t it have been better for him to stay out of the country? After all, he had to go to the States to get rid of the opium.”
She shrugs her shoulders. “I don’t see why,” she says. “There was no one left who could connect him to anything illegal but Robert Haack.”
I pause to think about this. There is something troubling me. Some thread or loose end, but I can’t catch hold of it.
“Also,” says she, “Robert Haack was the man on the spot in this instance—he’d been found at the scene of the crime and so was the logical suspect.”
“And Haack never said anything about Jimmy’s involvement?”
“Of course not,” said Fan. “Not while he knew that Jimmy held the key to India’s disappearance, and not while Jimmy had the power—which he did—to have Robert Haack silenced even where he was.
“He was trying to find a way to get a message to Jimmy, possibly to make an arrangement of some kind, when he heard of Jimmy’s death. He was devastated, of course.”
“Devastated?”
“With Jimmy dead the secret of India’s fate was lost. The police tried to implicate Haack in Jimmy’s murder—they had suspected all along a connection between the two men—but I think even they believed Robert when he wept and cried out, ‘Why would I want dead the only person in the world who could tell me what happened to the woman I love?’ ”
“You seem to know a lot about it, Fan,” I say.
“Everyone did,” she says indifferently.
“You had a personal interest, too, I suppose,” I continue. “Sing Yuen must have lost a lot of money.”
“We weren’t married then,” she says. She blushes. “He had insurance, he said.”
“You still haven’t told me where India went, and I still don’t understand,” I say as Fan turns to walk away.
“Just a minute, I’ll be right back,” she calls as she leaves the deck. How futile and sad it is, I think. My mother’s future husband left in ignorance as to my mother’s fate, yet knowing he was the cause of it.
Failure after failure piling up.
Fan returns shortly carrying a small blue book that I dimly recall having glimpsed in the depths of the lawyer’s briefcase. “What’s that, Fan?” I ask.
“It belonged to your mother,” she says. “She gave it to me, and now it is yours.”
I take the book from her hands. The numbness and tingling in my own hands returns. I fumble at the covers to open them. “Help me, Fan,” I say. “For some reason I cannot do it myself.”
She gives me a look that chills my spine. “Fan,” I moan, letting the book drop, suddenly completely helpless, “I can’t, I can’t read it.”
“Do I have to tell you again to face the truth, Robert Lam? Do I have to keep on begging you to do what’s best for yourself?”
I scoop the book towards me with cupped palms. The wind flutters the pages open at the beginning.