Chapter 144 The Stoker's Story
As she considered these words, Blackie was seized by another coughing
spell, and Erika placed her hand over his lips to shush him, in order to
preserve his strength, but he pushed her hand away impatiently. "I have only a
little time. Please ... let me speak."
At first Erika had listened with only half an ear, as the sweaty,
shivering man told her a rambling tale of his childhood and youth. His name was
Gao Lan and he had been only a boy when the Taiping Rebellion had broken out in
1850, but had been conscripted years later when the bloody conflict dragged into
its second decade. It was only when he mentioned that he had served in a
regiment commanded by General Wang, that Erika began to listen more attentively.
From the haunted look in his eyes, she could tell that Gao Lan had seen and
lived all the horrors of war.
After the war he had returned to Shanghai, and found that his
sweet-heart had left him for another man, and this disappointment had darkened
his life, and he had never married. He did however take up residence near his
brother, who had several children, to whom he had become the fondest of uncles.
He had made a nice life for himself in Shanghai as a painter of water-colors and
portraits, sometimes setting up shop in an arbor near the European quarter and
doing quick sketches and portraits for the wealthy foreigners who promenaded
through the park each day.
Life had been pleasant enough until a few years ago when his brother, an
excellent carpenter, had become increasingly addicted to the dice games in the
gambling halls controlled by the Black Scorpions. Within weeks his brother had
gone through all of his own savings, and had borrowed from everyone he knew in
hopes of recouping his losses. But his luck did not change and one night, late
at night, his brother had appeared at his door, wild-eyed and desperate, flanked
by two black-clad thugs.
As the brace of Scorpions looked on, his brother had explained that he
could not make good his losses, and had nowhere else to turn. The only way he
could buy back his life, he said, was to agree to join the Scorpions and work
for them until the debt was repaid. But his own labor, he said, would only pay
the mounting interest on his debt; it would take another man's labor to pay off
the principal.
Gao Lan had known of the Black Scorpions of course. Who in Shanghai did
not know of their reputation for smuggling, extortion, and vice? Having no wish
to associate with them, he offered to help pay his brother's debts over time by
working harder and selling more sketches, but the gap-toothed leader of the
gruesome pair merely grinned at his massive, slab-faced companion, in a way that
suggested that an artist's pennies would be of little interest to the House of
Chan. But perhaps, the gaptoothed Scorpion leered, he had a young wife, or a
daughter? Sometimes in such cases, he grinned obscenely, special arrangements
could be made.
Blackie had shaken his head, 'No', but had instantly thought of his
brother's children, the oldest of whom, Peony, was a sweet and pretty girl in
her mid-teens, and he knew that he could not let her become ensnared by men such
as these. "For how long must I work for you to pay my brother's debt?" he had
asked, and the gap-toothed man had glanced at a column of figures, scratched his
chin, and finally mumbled, "Two years should do it."
And so the artist had been coerced into working for the Black Scorpions.
Not wanting to have anything to do with the less savory side of their many
interests, he had gotten himself assigned as one of the gardeners at George
Chan's villa, where he had used his artist's eye to create elaborate arbors and
beds of flowers.
********
Erika Weiss's jaw dropped at this revelation. How well she remembered
the beautiful gardens of the villa, the scented bowers which had provided her
only pleasure during her enslavement to the younger Chan. But as lovely as
those perfumed gardens had been, they had had a dark side as well. For George
Chan had not infrequently put some of its produce - fresh, stiff stalks of
young bamboo, and tough switches of willow to uses the goddess of nature would
never have approved.
As Blackie once again slurped noisily from the cup, Erika recalled one
moonlit summer night when George Chan had roughly escorted her to the pergola
which parted a red sea of perfectly aligned rosebushes on the south side of the
villa. Once there he had chained her wrists to hooks mounted high on a pair of
wooden posts which supported a trellis of climbing vines. After shredding her
filmy nightgown with a single violent wrench, George had stared at her naked
body admiringly while he had slipped on a pair of heavy gloves and clipped a
dozen long-stemmed roses from nearby bushes. One by one Chan had held the
rose-stems to her nose, letting her inhale their sweet scent.
But Erika was not only to smell their sweetness, she was to feel their
sting. Because George Chan proceeded to rake each of the thorny stems across
the curves of her nude body until the petals had spilled their sweetness on her
flesh and the creamy skin of her breasts and belly and her inner thighs was
criss-crossed with strands of crimson. When the rose-stems were all in ruins
and a blanket of rose petals covered the ground, Chan had placed his hands
behind her thighs, lifted and spread them and thrust into her vigorously while
his lips worshipped her blood-streaked breasts.
On the occasion of the next full moon her cruel Chinese master had once
again led her in chains to the fragrant garden. Upon arriving there he had
forced her to lie on her back on an ornately carved lover's bench in the very
center of the pergola, and then chained her wrists and ankles to the bases of
its sturdy legs. Erika had shuddered when he had donned the gloves again, and
with good reason. For that night he had flogged her breasts and belly with
stinging nettles until her creamy torso was rosy in the moonlight and her
breasts were shimmering in a lake of fire. Her soft moans had served as
counterpoint to the gentle metallic music her writhing body had played on the
chains. Those sweet sounds of suffering and the shameless dance of her taut
nipples had all served to inflame the ardor with which George Chan had had
driven his virile member into her spread-eagled body.
********
Erika almost began to speak, to tell Gao Lan that she knew his gardens
all too well, but then stopped herself, anxious to hear the rest of the stoker's
remarkable story.
He had only been a gardener for a short time, Gao Lan went on, when he
and his brother and another man who had had experience in building, were chosen
to build a sort of hunting lodge for George Chan in the distant mountains to the
north. They had labored in the cool forest for weeks, enjoying the fresh air
and the starlit nights. On the day the construction was complete, George Chan
and a beautiful concubine had arrived, with several bags in tow.
Gao Lan paused at this point in his narrative and fixed his pain-wracked
eyes on the lantern, as if its glimmering glow would help him to preserve
forever the mental image of that striking beauty, and then continued his strange
tale.
Her dark lustrous hair tossing lightly in the breeze, the young woman
had watched with interest as Chan directed the three workers to dig a deep pit
in the soft ground behind the house and then to bury the bags. No sooner had
the pit been dug and the bags safely stowed then the three men turned to see
that George Chan and his ravishing concubine had each drawn a pistol.
Gao Lan had watched helplessly as the two fired bullets into the heads
of his brother and the other man. "We can't have people knowing where we have
buried that which belongs to the Scorpions, can we?" George had asked him
rhetorically. "It would never do if my brother were to learn of this. But we
have generously given you another hour of life - because we need someone to bury
the dead and the treasure. And you, my friend, appear to have the strongest
back."
Shaken, Gao Lan had proceeded to bury his brother and the other man with
as much reverence as possible under the circumstances. He had lain the bodies
at one side of the pit and the bags at the other and covered both bodies and
bags with the soil they had unearthed. He had labored for hours, using all of
his gardener's skill, smoothing and raking the ground until there was no
indication that it had ever been disturbed. Then, still at gunpoint, he had
assisted Chan and the woman on the first leg of their journey homeward. When
they had reached the entrance to a familiar forest trail, he had judged that his
assistance was no longer needed and he made a sudden bolt for freedom, pushing
the woman into her companion with such force that she fell to the ground and
twisted her ankle slightly.
"But did Chan not fire at you?" Erika asked breathlessly. She had so
many questions to ask, and from the sound of Blackie's failing voice, so little
time.
"Yes, he did," rasped Gao Lan as another chill shook his body. He held
up his right hand and in the lantern-light Erika see that there were only stumps
where two of his fingers had been. "But the gun misfired and his shot only
shattered the hand I had lifted to my face. Then it jammed completely, and I
was able to get away." Blackie gave his maimed hand a grotesque wiggle. "I can
still just manage a shovel, miss; but my days as an artist," he added glumly,
"were over."
There was no place in Shanghai that was safe for a man wanted by George
Chan the Scorpions, Blackie continued, and he returned there, after an arduous
overland journey through field and forest, only long enough to tell his
brother's wife that her husband was dead. Having no money whatever, he then
hired himself to the docks, hoping to earn passage to someplace far from the
reach of the Black Pagoda. And so he did, only to find that his life as a
stoker on the Yang-tze Dragon, the vessel he had chosen by chance, was a life of
endless drudgery, made worse by knowing that in some small way he was assisting
in the enslavement of its ill-fated cargo, the beautiful young women who
languished in the Bird-Cage before being sold to one of the lurid flesh dens of
the treaty ports.
"But why," Erika asked, "have you told me this?"
"Because I heard someone say today that George Chan was dead."
"Yes, I have heard that, too," Erika replied thoughtfully, remembering
how Cheng, General Wang's young aide, had burst into the captain's cabin with
the news. {Chapter 118} "But what difference does that make to either of us
... now?"
"Because I do not wish that someone as young and kind as you should
die," Blackie mumbled, shaking his mangled fist, before giving way to a groan of
pain. "And I want to give you a reason to live. To fight. To survive."
"I ... I don't understand."
"Reach into my sock. No, the other one."
Puzzled, Erika reached across the man's body and felt inside a
threadbare sock. After fumbling around for a moment, she extracted a piece of
yellowed paper that had been folded over several times.
She pulled the lantern closer and began to unfold the paper as Blackie
signaled that he wanted another sip of water. Erika, her own throat parched,
gently laid the paper in her lap and filled the cup with the last of the water
in the flagon and held it to his lips. It was only when the feverish stoker had
nearly finished gulping the water down that Blackie noticed that Erika's lips
were as dry as his own. "Forgive me," he said, offering her the inch or so of
water which was left in the cup. "I did not know."
"Perhaps ... just a taste," Erika said thankfully, taking a small sip
before offering the rest to the feverish stoker. She swirled the mouthful of
water around in her mouth, savoring every drop, until she was forced to swallow
it so that she could reassure her patient. "Go ahead. Do not worry. The guard
promised to bring more," she lied, wondering what indignities she might have to
endure to coax a second flagon of water from a man like Froggy. "Go ahead and
finish this."
As Blackie slowly sipped the last of the water, Erika unfolded the
paper, expecting to find it covered with the Chinese characters which she still,
after all her time in China, had some difficulty understanding. But
surprisingly there was very little writing on the scrap of parchment. Instead,
the paper was covered with a diagram or a drawing of some kind.
"During the weeks we were building the lodge," Blackie whispered
faintly, "I amused myself in the evening by drawing little maps of the area. I
had this one with me, on the day they killed my brother."
Turning the map over in her hands until it was oriented properly,
realization slowly began to creep over Erika. "Ein See!" she gasped. "A lake!
The lodge is surrounded by a lake!"
"Of course ... did I not mention that? A beautiful lake in the
mountains. After I buried my brother and the treasure, they wanted me to row
them back across the lake you see, before they tried to finish me off."
"Der Bergsee! The mountain lake!" Erika whispered again in wonderment,
remembering her own sun-scalded journey {Chapter 7} across that sky-blue body
of water, and the erotic enslavement that had followed during her stay at the
lodge.
"The woman," she went on hurriedly. "Tell me about the woman you saw
with George Chan." And as Gao Lan went on to describe in rapturous terms the
lovely hair, the flashing eyes and the exquisite figure of Chan's companion,
Erika had little doubt but that it had been Ming-tsu, her own tormentress, who
had conspired to kill his brother and had very nearly killed him.
As her eyes pored over the diagram, Blackie gave vent to another
lung-wrenching cough, and then, upon catching his breath asked, "Have you ever
been to the mountains?"
"Once ... only once. I shall never forget my stay there. But, why... "
she began questioningly, holding up the map.
"I don't know what was in those bags we buried at the lodge. But for
them to kill us, in order to protect the secret ..." Blackie was interrupted by
yet another fearful spasm of coughing. "There must ... there must be something
of great value. Perhaps one day you can use that secret to buy your freedom."
The stoker fell back on the cot, his thin chest heaving with exertion. After a
moment he laboriously pulled himself up on one elbow and pointed a bony finger
at a spot on the diagram. "We dug here, in the afternoon shadow of this tree."
Erika remembered that tree well. She had hung, naked and defenseless,
from a stout limb of that very tree after her taxing rowboat journey across the
lake. And it was from that tree that her two tormentors had cut the switches
they had used to flog her from neck to knees.
"But what am I to do with this ... now ..., " she stammered clumsily as
she held up the diagram.
"Perhaps nothing. But it is all I have. Maybe one day you can use it to
buy your freedom. But you must promise me one thing," the gaunt stoker
implored, clutching Erika's hand in his with surprising strength.
Erika, trembling, looked around glumly at the grim, gray walls of the
infirmary that served as their prison. "I doubt that it is within my power to
keep any promises I could make."
"I know, I know." The stoker's mangled hand tightened around hers as
his feverish body shook violently. It would not be long now, Erika new.
The dying man raised himself up and fixed his rheumy eyes on Erika's.
"Promise me ... promise me ... that if you ever see Shanghai again, try to find
my brother's family. And tell the children - Peony, Ci-ci, and the little
ones..." A fearful bout of coughing wracked the stoker's frail body as his hand
clutched Erika's in a death grip. "Tell them ... tell them," he choked, "that
their uncle's spirit will look down on them from above."
And with those words Gao Lan's body convulsed in a final, fatal spasm
and then lay still.
