Bitter Spirits

NINE

SOBER AND BROODING, WINTER ACCOMPANIED AIDA BACK TO Golden Lotus after calling for his own car. They did not discuss the ghost’s identity any further.

They also did not discuss the kiss.

Granted, it wasn’t an appropriate topic for conversation after what transpired in the street. Aida shouldn’t have even been thinking about it. And she tried not to; after all, the man was clearly upset. If she were a decent person, she’d be upset, too—she’d kissed a killer. That’s what he was, wasn’t he? He did say Dick Jepsen was the first man he’d killed, implying there was a second. A third? Fourth? How many? It was easy to forget the dark side of what he did for a living. He’d said he was defending his father’s life the night he shot Jepsen, but maybe there were other times when he was the aggressor.

Could it be possible Winter was bloodthirsty like the racketeers and gangsters reported in the newspapers? No. She didn’t believe that. Not after the gentleness he’d shown when he’d kissed her . . . the restraint he’d used to tease her.

Goodness, how he’d made her body melt.

She tried to tell herself that it wasn’t the absolute best kiss she’d ever had, but that was too monumental a lie for her poor heart, which was madly pitter-pattering beneath her dress the entire way home.

Before she made her way up to her apartment, he stepped outside the car and gave her a business card that said MAGNUSSON FISH COMPANY, with an address off the Embarcadero, on a pier that housed his legitimate business. He penciled his home telephone numbers on the back: a private line that rang directly to his study, and the main line that his housekeeper Greta answered.

“I’d like to retain your services on an ongoing basis. Whatever you think is fair pay, let me know.”

“Uh . . .”

“If you aren’t working at Velma’s, I want you to be available to me in case I need you.”

“For business,” she said, thinking of the kiss.

He hesitated. “Yes. As a medium. Or an exorcist.” He was being very stern and serious, and she felt quite sure this was how he spoke to his own men—as if he wouldn’t take no for answer. And if it were anyone else throwing out this kind of gruff demand, she’d likely tell him to go to hell. But he’d just kissed the bejesus out of her and broke the sensible part of her brain, so she said yes.

In fact, she said, “I’m all yours,” but it was lost under the sound of a loud truck rolling by.

At noon the next day, Aida headed down to Golden Lotus to have a quick lunch of tea and dumplings and collect her mail. “Why so anxious?” Mrs. Lin asked behind the counter as she stuck a pencil into the knotted bun of black hair at the nape of her neck.

“Excuse me?”

“Anxious. Jumpy.”

“Oh, I don’t know, my mind is elsewhere. Listen, you wouldn’t happen to have heard of any superstitious practice in the Chinese community having to do with old coins?”

She considered this. “Don’t think so. Why?”

“I’m trying to figure out why someone would use four old Chinese coins to attract a ghost.”

“A ghost?” She looked around. “Not here, I hope.”

“No, no—at that séance last night.”

“Oh.” Mrs. Lin rubbed the Buddha’s belly and mumbled something in Cantonese. “I don’t know about ghosts, but four of anything is unlucky for business. Four is a curse. Very bad. Everyone knows that. No specific curse associated with coins, though. Is someone cursing you?”

“No. Cursing . . . a client.” She tapped her nails on the counter. “I need to find someone in Chinatown who knows more about ghosts and superstitions and curses. Maybe someone who appreciates my special abilities?”

Mrs. Lin brightened. “I know just the man. My acupuncturist, Doctor Yip.”

“A doctor?”

“He owns an herbal apothecary shop off Sacramento. It’s located in a small alley. I will draw a map.” She lifted spectacles that dangled from the chain around her neck next to the key that unlocked the red lacquered mail cabinet and began drawing a map on the back of a blank ordering slip.

Aida’s pulse increased as a cautious hopefulness sprung up. She waited, watching Mrs. Lin silently until she began sketching what looked to be parts of Chinatown that weren’t exactly tourist-friendly. “Is it dangerous, that area?”

“You will get some looks, and you should avoid the opium den. If you smell sweet smoke, you’ve gone too far. It’s best to take a man with you. Too dangerous for a young woman alone. But do not be afraid to go to Doctor Yip. He came here from Hong Kong a few years ago. Very educated and kind. You will like him.”

“Wonderful. Thanks so much.”

“Anytime. Hope he can help.”

It might be a long shot, but Aida hoped so, too. Maybe Bo had already talked to this herbalist. Best to just contact Winter and find out. She could send him a note through Mrs. Lin’s courier, but that seemed like a silly waste of time when she had Winter’s business card propped against a lamp on her nightstand. That was what it was there for. She worked for him now, after all. He’d probably forgotten all about the kiss.

She’d certainly tried.

Retreating to her room, she bolstered herself and tried his private number, feeling butterflies in her stomach when the operator made the connection and his big voice crackled over the wire.

“Magnusson.”

“It’s me,” she said, suddenly forgetting her manners and good sense.

“Hello, you.” His voice sounded low and friendly in the telephone’s earpiece.

Her stomach fluttered while the line popped and hissed. “I can’t talk long and people might pick up—the telephones in our rooms are connected to the restaurant’s line. Mrs. Lin doesn’t like us to make calls during lunch rush, so if you hear swearing in Cantonese, hang up,” she said, trying to sound casual and breezy.

“Duly noted,” he replied before adding, “I hear it from Bo all the time.”

“How’s your shoulder today?”

“Sore. Greta forced some pills down my throat, so it feels better at the moment.”

“Good, good. Well . . . ah, the reason I rang is because I have the address of an herbalist in Chinatown who might help with information on the coins. My landlady gave me his name.”

“Oh?”

“Don’t get too excited. It might not pan out, but it could be worth investigating. I have a map to show us how to get there.”

“That’s damned resourceful,” he said, sounding impressed.

“You hired me to help you.”

“Indeed I did. Bo should be back from an errand any minute. As soon as he arrives, we’ll head over there. Shall I meet you in an hour, say?”

Bo was coming, too? A pang of disappointment tightened her chest. “Sure. But I have to be at Gris-Gris around five. I’m doing an early show tonight for happy hour.”

“That’s fine. I’ll get you there in time.”

One of the girls who lived in the building clicked on the line and asked to use it.

“In an hour?” Aida said quickly.

“With bells on.”

She hung up and changed her clothes, dressing in a camel-colored skirt and a matching jacket. Casual, but smart. Very businesslike. It looked good with her tan stockings, which had pretty little scrolling shapes embroidered on the calves and hid the freckles on her legs. She finished getting ready, then headed downstairs in time to meet him.

Aida’s heart pounded wildly as she glanced toward the entrance and found him stepping inside the restaurant wearing a long black coat, black suit, and black necktie with red chevrons running down the middle peeking from his vest. Pausing near the door, he removed his hat and brushed away droplets of rain. Gray light filtered in from the windows behind him, where Chinese characters and the pronouncement “Best Almond Cookies in Chinatown” surrounded a painted lotus blossom.

His eyes found hers. “Miss Palmer,” he said politely, as if he were an upstanding gentleman and not a bootlegger. As if they were merely business acquaintances . . . which they were, she reminded herself. “Shall we?”

Dodging customers tottering up to the register, she followed Winter outside into the fresh air, heavy with the scent of wet pavement. She eyed rain dripping from a shallow ledge above the entrance. “Everyone told me it would be dry here in the summer.”

“Usually is.”

“Where’s Bo?” she asked in her best neutral tone as she pulled on a pair of short brown gloves with bell-shaped cuffs.

“He dropped me off.”

“Ah.” Flutter-flutter. She squelched her excitement and glanced around. The newsstand next door had erected a rainy-day tarp that tied to a street sign and a telephone pole. “Maybe we should grab a taxi.”

Winter snapped open a large black umbrella. “Nonsense. It’s barely raining. Come.” He shifted her under the umbrella and out of the entry so an elderly couple could step inside. His hand lingered on her back as they walked to a spot by the newsstand.

Hope and anxiety quickened her hummingbird pulse. Being close to him set her nerves dancing. She was close enough to catch his scent, crisp and clean, a touch of the orange oil that permeated his house. She glanced up and found him studying her. Had he seen her sniffing his coat like a dog? “Sorry. You smell nice.”

“Barbasol cream.” He was hiding a smile. Amused. Relaxed. Very non-businesslike.

Emboldened by his good mood, she teased him a little. “I thought it was eau de bootlegger.”

“No,” he answered with a soft chuckle, “that smells like money and sweat.”

He was joking with her—smiling and laughing and touching her. She was far happier than she probably should be about it. Any second, her feet would be floating over the sidewalk. She forced herself to settle down and dug out Mrs. Lin’s map. “Look at this and tell me if you know where it’s at.”

“All right. No need to be pushy,” he said with good humor. As rain dripped from the umbrella onto his coat sleeve, he studied the hand-drawn path through Chinatown’s labyrinth streets and noted where he’d make a bit of a detour. “A small tong leader has a warehouse here. We’re on decent terms—Bo and I have already ruled him out as a possible ringleader for all the ghost business—but I don’t want him to think I’m sniffing around without his permission.”

The thought hadn’t crossed her mind that it might be dangerous for a notorious bootlegger to be prowling Chinatown, whether or not it meant facing someone he suspected of his recent hauntings. He must’ve noticed the concern on her face, because he opened up his long overcoat and showed her a handgun strapped beneath his suit jacket. “Just in case. Don’t worry.”

“Don’t worry?” she repeated, looking around quickly to make sure no one else had seen it. “That makes me even more nervous. What if you have to use it?”

He curled gloved fingers around her chin and lifted her face. “Then the other guy’ll have a bullet in him and you’ll be safe. I promise you that.”

“I don’t like guns.”

He released her chin. “Then try to keep your hand out of my jacket and you’ll never know it’s there.” He gave her a quick wink that made her stomach flip, then, with a gentle hand on her shoulder, prodded her down the sidewalk.

Light drizzle darkened the pavement and carried scents of Chinatown: dried fish, exotic spices, old wood, and tobacco leaves from a nearby cigar warehouse. Across the street, tourists huddled under dark red canvas awnings to get out of the rain and browse ceramics and toys on display in wooden crates. Tin Lizzies and delivery trucks rumbled down the street, splashing through puddles collecting near the curbs.

“Bo said he started working for you when he was fourteen,” she said as they sauntered down Grant, passing a butcher’s window where a row of skinned ducks hung above signs in English and Chinese, promising the freshest meat for the best price.

“He was half your size back then,” he said. “Did he tell you how we met?”

“No.”

“I box at a club on the edge of Chinatown, a few blocks from my pier—”

“That explains a lot,” she mumbled, eyeing a thick arm. Half of him was getting wet, she noticed, as he was tilting the umbrella at an angle to account for their height difference and keep her dry.

He blinked at her with a dazed look on his face and nearly smiled. “Well,” he said, clearing his throat. “Bo lived with his uncle. To bolster the family income, he took to pickpocketing. Was good at it, too. Fast as a whip—you never knew he’d been in your coat. He robbed me blind when I was getting dressed for a match.”

“Oh dear.”

“After the match was over, I caught him in the alley behind the club. He was so small, I could lift him off the ground with one hand. Little degenerate looked me straight in the eye and told me, yes, he’d done it and wasn’t sorry one bit.” Winter smiled to himself. “I knew he was either brave or stupid, so I asked him to do a little spying here and there, paying him mostly in hot meals at the beginning. He can still eat his weight in lemon pie.”

Aida laughed.

“His uncle died a couple years later, on Bo’s sixteenth birthday. Bo called me because he couldn’t afford to bury the man.”

“How awful,” Aida said, feeling for her locket.

“Damn disgrace that the old man didn’t even leave Bo a penny.” His brow lowered, then he shrugged away the memory. “Bo’s been living with me ever since.”

“I thought he told me he moved in with you after the accident? Wasn’t that two years ago?”

“We both moved back to the family home then, yes.”

“From where? Mrs. Beecham mentioned an old house of yours . . .”

Winter stiffened. “She had no business bringing that up.”

“Oh, I didn’t know—”

“I’d rather not talk about it,” he said, cutting her off.

His gruff tone stung. She’d unintentionally touched a nerve, and for a moment the air between them was awkward and tense. Bo had warned her about prying into his past.

“No one’s told you about the accident?” he said after a long moment. “Not Velma?”

“No, but I gather both your parents died.”

The subject hung in the air for several steps. “I didn’t mean to bark at you. I just don’t like talking about it.”

“I can understand that. Everyone I’ve ever loved is dead.”

His hard look softened.

“Apart from that, people talk to me intimately about death all the time,” she said. “Everyone wants to be reassured that there’s life after death, but I always beg them not to forget that there’s life before death—and that’s the only thing we really have any sort of control over. Anyway, if you ever feel inclined, I’m a bit of a specialist in these matters, and you have hired my services.”

He grunted his amusement. “I suppose I have. And I appreciate that, but some things are best left in the past.”

“Now that I agree with,” she said with a soft smile.

It took them a quarter of an hour to make it to the first side street. Avoiding the subject of the accident, they talked the entire way, first about Chinatown, then about what she remembered of the city from her childhood. The smell of fish cooking got them chatting about the Magnusson fishing business and crab season, then he told her a few stories from his childhood—stealing away from school at lunchtime to smoke cigarettes behind the baseball field . . . absconding with one of his father’s fish delivery trucks to meet schoolmates at Golden Gate Park.

Once they’d turned down the side street, the scenery began changing. Gold-painted window frames, pagodas, and curling eaves all but disappeared. Forgotten laundry dripped from balconies, and the smell of sewage wafted from dark corners. By the time they’d taken two more turns, they were sloshing through puddles on narrow backstreets where the asphalt gave way to old paving stones.

They found Doctor Yip’s storefront halfway down a cul-de-sac, right where Mrs. Lin said it would be. The sign was in Chinese, but they spotted the landmark she’d mentioned, a metal yellow lantern that hung near a door under an arch of honeycomb cutout woodwork. A string of bells tinkled when they walked inside.

Winter shook the umbrella outside the door as Aida looked around. The apothecary shop’s walls were wrapped in wooden shelves that stretched to the ceiling, each of them brimming with ceramic jars lined up in neat rows. Tracks of wooden drawers stood behind a long counter to one side. Near the back of the shop, sticks of pungent sandalwood incense smoked from a brass bowl filled with sand.

The shop was empty until a thin, elderly man appeared from a dark doorway. “Good afternoon,” he said with a British accent as he shuffled around the counter to greet them. He was shorter than Aida, with salt-and-pepper hair braided into a queue that hung down his back. And though he was dressed in western clothes—black trousers, white shirt, gold vest—he was wearing a pair of Chinese black silk slippers embroidered with honeybees.

“Hello,” Aida said. “We are looking for Doctor Yip.”

“You have found him.”

When Winter turned to face him, Yip froze. Aida tensed herself, hoping the elderly man hadn’t recognized Winter as a gangster; Winter had said this street was on the edge of a tong leader’s territory. But before she could worry any further, Yip exhaled. “Forgive me, but I do believe you are a very large man.” He grinned, laughing at himself, then nodded at Aida. “Quite wise to have a protector like this when walking some of these streets, young lady.”

She introduced the two of them and the herbalist heartily shook their hands before ushering them farther into the shop. “How can I help you?”

“My landlady sent me here.”

“Oh? Who might that be?”

“Mrs. Lin. She owns the Golden Lotus restaurant on the northern end of Grant.”

“Ah yes. Mrs. Lin—always brings me cookies, trying to fatten me up.”

Aida smiled. “Yes, that’s her. She said you might be able to help us.”

He stepped behind the counter and faced them. “I can try. What do you need? A remedy?”

“Information,” Winter said as he propped up the closed umbrella and removed his gloves.

“About . . . ?”

“Black magic.”

“Black magic,” Doctor Yip repeated, drawing out the words dramatically. “Sorcery? Spells and things? Can’t say I know much, I’m afraid. I’m a healer, not a sorcerer.”

“We don’t need a spell,” Aida clarified. “Something’s been done already. We’re wanting to know how to stop it.”

Curious eyes blinked at Aida. “What kind of something?”

Aida said what she’d rehearsed with Winter on the walk. “We have a friend who’s been cursed. A sorcerer used a spell to open his eyes to the spiritual world—ghosts and things of that nature. And now he’s being haunted by ghosts that have been manipulated by magic.”

“Oh my,” the herbalist said. “Very interesting.”

“Do you believe me, or do you think I’m crazy?” Aida asked with a half smile.

“Strange things happen every day. If you say it’s true, I believe as much as I can without having witnessed it myself. I’ve felt things that I couldn’t explain. I am a Shenist. Do you know what that means?”

Aida nodded. “Mrs. Lin says it’s the old Chinese religion.”

“Most religions are old,” he said with kind smile. “I believe in shens—celestial deities made of spirit. I also believe in lower spirits, other than the ones I worship—what you would call ghosts. It is not a stretch to think that someone could manipulate a spirit of the dead. Though I wouldn’t know how, exactly.”

“Four Chinese coins were found on the person being haunted,” Winter said. “We’ve been told that’s considered unlucky?”

Doctor Yin crossed his arms over his black and gold vest. “Four is very unlucky. In Cantonese, the word for ‘four’ sounds like the word for ‘death.’ In Hong Kong, many buildings do not have fourth floors—or fourteenth, or twenty-fourth. People are careful to avoid the number four on holidays and celebrations, like weddings, or when family members are sick. Westerners call this tetraphobia. But four Chinese coins, you say?”

“Yes. Old gold ones.” Winter described them briefly.

“There is an old folk magic belief that if you leave four coins on someone’s doorstep with ill intent, you curse the home’s owner. I’ve heard stories of businessmen in Hong Kong leaving four coins under the mat of a rival’s shop to give them bad luck and steal their customers.”

“What about in regards to a spirit or a haunting?”

He shook his head. “Sorry, that I don’t know.”

Winter groaned softly.

“But . . .” Yip added. “Someone else might. One of my customers has told me about a man who reads fortunes at a local temple—what used to be called a joss house.”

“Yes, I’m familiar with those,” Winter said.

“My customer, she says rumors are that this man knows more than fortune-telling. That he’s also a skilled sorcerer.”

Aida glanced at Winter, then asked Yip, “Can you tell us where the temple is and what the fortune-teller’s name is?”

“I don’t know which temple, sorry.”

“How many temples are there in San Francisco?” she asked.

Winter grunted. “Dozens.”

“He’s right, unfortunately,” the herbalist said. “If my customer returns, I can ask for the exact temple. I doubt the name of the man is known to her, but the moniker he uses for fortune-telling is Black Star.”