Chapter 3
The narrow streets of Chinatown that reeked of pork fat and dead fish were littered with the red ribboned remains of Hong Kong imported fireworks strewn about the slimy sidewalks. The hour was late, the night chilling to the bone, the air still vibrant with the festive excitement of a welcomed holiday.
Festive ornaments hung in the windows of Chinese merchants up and down the stretch of red and gold decorated gift shops and mom and pop grocery stores. While a handful of late nighters shuffled by in soft soled slump-shouldered fatigue, other of the Oriental population was hidden in decadent privacy in cellar rooms opening obscurely onto the street, appearing to be storerooms for the busy restaurants that make Chinatown a popular tourist spot.
The air in the cellar room was suffocatingly blue with the heady, sweet exotic perfume of opium expiring from water pipes held in the dainty hands of lithe bodied Chinese girls. The darkened room was lined with bunk bed type racks, simple and functional as a place to lie down and escape the world.
Men, all Chinese, paid good money to come here and ride away on a cloud of euphoria. To escape the smelly density of Chinatown's shuffling populace? To experience the old custom of opium den reality and blot out the mundane insecurities of a bastardized Western way of life?
The owner of the den, Ben Chow, was a stout-bodied man of five-feet-seven inches, possessing small, deep set eyes set in a round, yellow jowled face. His smooth, unruffled expression wore the mask of someone who had spent much of his forty-two years under the influence of his own contraband, though an animal glint in his eye hinted at a deeper awareness that gave birth to a cunning that no drug could subdue.
Cunning was a good adjective for Ben. Born in Hong Kong, he and his family had immigrated to the United States in the fifties. His father, a tailor, set up shop down on the lower end of Grant Avenue, then the pulse of Chinatown. The shop was modest and provided a modicum income, and Ben soon tired of his tedious apprenticeship. Like many of the immigrants' sons, he took to the streets and wandered about getting into trouble with one of the Chinese gangs, and it was this street experience that taught him how money was to he made in America and how to leave the Chinese ritual of work and no play behind.
He learned quickly that the Chinese mafia is a touchy business to enter and harder to stay alive in. Chinese are extraordinarily auspicious people who offer one chance and then-Whap! Dead. It requires a nascent intelligence and a good sense of timing and practicality, plus alacrity in the straight-forward language of the streets- something Ben managed to cultivate easily.
Back in the sixties he'd started delving in the opium trade, after working out an arrangement with an Oriental steamship line whose cook smuggled the compressed contraband in rice flour sacks. But working the docks is a tricky business no matter who you are and Ben, after making friends in the right places, opened up the den on Kearny Street below a popular restaurant. Back in the sixties, with the flower child nonsense going on, Haight Asbury's raucous lifestyle had been a boon for Ben's business. It kept the cops off the Chinatown streets, as they concentrated their drug raids in the white trash Panhandle neighborhood. And girls had been easy to get.
The ease slackened with the coining of the seventies. With Chinatown gang murders claiming headlines, the cops were keeping a wary eye. Opium was hard to get.
Ben's cigarette drooped from his pouting lower lip as he sat slumped in a chair behind the beaded curtain separating the smoking den from the brothel behind. He glowered intently at the remarkably unwrinkled face of his girl friend. Kim Moon, who sat in golden skinned beauty in a sleek black silk embroidered dress with a pair of red dragons fighting over her nipples on the bodice, covering the rich swells of her small, upthrust breasts. The slit of her dress showed off a rich expanse of smooth thigh. Her sloe eyes were lined with thick, charcoal lines that offset the slant of her snappy black eyes that showed no sign of pupils.
An intelligent, San Franciscan born child of a local restaurateur, Kim functioned as Ben's right-hand person. Perhaps it was the double Scorpio in her natal chart that explained her penchant for drugs and sex. Wizened to the hazards of city living, she was the perfect accomplice. She possessed a business mind and sharp tongue that enabled her to deal with contraband peddlers in no uncertain terms. Years ago she had earned a black belt in Karate and that combined with her sleek, panther looks, built up a tremendous female ego that often needed a taste of itself to be sharpened.
Indeed, she had begun working in the backroom when the need for working girls to go underground began in the late sixties when the aftermath of acid-rock days of Haight Asbury left City Hall frazzled in a demand for cleaning up the overpopulated city streets littered with runaway teenage prostitutes. Occasionally frequenters would demand a backrub or special attention of a carnal nature. How many men could one woman handle without showing the ragged signs of wilted freshness? And anyway, Kim enjoyed women as much as men.
Ben stared at her intently. "We've got to make some changes," he said sourly. His habit of staring straight ahead while thinking roused her to the urgency of his decision.
Kim, her long straight black hair hanging about her shoulders like a dark mourner's veil, drew a long puff off her cigarette holder clamped in long, blood red fingertips. Her cherry glossed lips pouted in a sensual oval about the plastic tip. Indeed, her soft lips pulled at the tip suggestively, as if it might be a man's organ clamped possessively there. "Orientals have lost their fascination for their own women," she said in a throaty purr. "We need something fresh... Western... intriguing."
His beady eyes surveyed her ripe curves.
"Then get one..."
After a blank, sloe-eyed stare, the golden-fleshed beauty rose from the chair and slinked through the crackling beaded curtain, the curves of her buttocks outlined moonishly in the tight lines of her thigh-slitted dress.
Kim's mind, like a crazy computer, began spitting out combinations. She ran the tip of her pink tongue over the glossy line of her pouting lips as she stood in the dense air of the den where a kneeling golden-skinned beauty knelt beside a customer holding the water pipe in her petite hand and stroking his genitals with the other.
The air was crisp and bitter against the svelte curves of Jan's long sweatered body the sound of her high heels clomping against the deserted sidewalk quick and alert as the mind churning out expletives.
The bastard... the dirty creep... how could he have done this to her? Defiling her mouth like a... a cheap whore. Men! And then falling asleep, leaving her to dress in pouting silence and never bothering to awaken out of a drunken snore with the slam of the door!
Jan headed down Telegraph Hill towards her apartment on the lower slopes of Russian Hill, mindless of her own intentions, then, as she turned right, headed toward the heart of North Beach. As she tripped along, her high heels caught in the red ribbons from exploded fireworks and irritated, she kicked them into the gutter, her rosebud lips drawing up into a curdled pretzel.
That's what started it all-those stupid firecrackers and Chinese New Year that got on everybody's nerves.
A few drunks draped about the street signs on Grant Avenue sidewalk mouthed obscenities in foul alcohol-soured breath, some begging dimes for another glass of wine. She passed them by stiffly, mindless of their degrading catcalls.
There was a small, private bar on the other side of Broadway and the idea of a good stiff drink was Jan's sole intent. Something inside of her was about to burst with sadness. Was it a temper? No, betrayed, she felt betrayed by Paul's rapacious sexuality. Betrayed and intimidated. Even if she married him, could she satisfy that Italian penchant for hot-blooded lovemaking? Oh, he had tested her sexuality, put her to the acid test, she realized, running her tongue tip over the beestung softness of her lower lips where the encrustation of a dribble of his sperm clung tenaciously in salty reminder of her fiance's vengeance upon her femininity.