Black Dove Read Online Free Page A

our third read-through, and Gustav’s brain was abrimming with new nuggets of The Man’s wisdom. An opportunity to put them to use would be difficult indeed to resist.
    That’s the way I had it figured, anyway—and for once, I figured right.
    “Done,” Old Red said.
    Our shake didn’t last long—we’d only just clasped hands when a quick-stepping swell in a checked suit and a flat-topped boater came barreling between us. But it was enough. The deal was sealed.
    “I don’t like the looks of that,” Old Red said of the grin that snaked across my face.
    Come on.
    I led us up to Market and, from there, north up Dupont.
    “You’re walkin’ like you had a particular street in mind all along,” Old Red said sourly.
    “Not really,” I replied. And I wasn’t lying . . . much.
    It wasn’t a street I’d been thinking of. It was a
neighborhood
—one my brother and I had passed through just once before, during an earlier visit to the city.
    Gustav smelled it before he saw it. Four blocks south, and already you could catch a whiff of burning punk and hot braziers, strange spices and the rot of poverty.
    “Shit,” Old Red sighed. “I shoulda guessed.”
    “You know,” I told him, “you really shoulda.”
    A few minutes later, we reached Chinatown.

3

THE WILD, WILD EAST
    Or, My Little Trick Blows Up in My Face . . . Literally
    There was no sign to welcome us to Chinatown—not in English, anyway. But there was a welcoming committee of sorts directly across the street.
    A white fellow wearing sandwich boards was distributing leaflets and spittle-spewing ravings to any and all passersby whose skin color matched his own. The board across his chest read PROTECT THE WHITE WORKING MAN CHINESE OUT OF CALIFORNIA !!!
    “Remember: If you’re going into Chinatown, keep your cash in your pockets!” he barked at my brother and me as we tried to scoot around him. “Every dollar you give a Chink’s a dollar you’re taking away from a real American!”
    “
Was
?” I said, using the thick German accent all my siblings had perfected imitating our dear old
Mutter
and
Vater
back on the family farm in Kansas. “
Schade. Ich spreche kein Englisch
.”
    To my surprise, the man just grinned and pressed one of his pamphlets into my hands.
    “Have someone translate this for you, friend,” he said. “Kraut, Mick, Polack, or Frog—it doesn’t matter. Us whites gotta stick together.”
    “
Danke, Herr Scheisskerl
!” I said, smiling back. “
Ich werde meinen Arsch damit bei der ersten Gelegenheit wischen
.”
    The sandwich man waved me a friendly farewell—unaware, of course, that I’d just promised to make use of his little leaflet the next time I took seat in a privy.
    “That just more of the same?” Gustav asked, pointing at the pamphlet.
    I looked down and read out the title. “ ‘The Yellow Threat, How the Slant-Eyed Hordes Are Destroying America, by the Anti-Coolie League of—’ ”
    “Yeah, yeah,” my brother cut me off. “More of the same.”
    I left the leaflet where our
Mutter
taught us all such hateful things belong: in the gutter. Then Old Red and I crossed Sacramento Street, and it wasn’t just the sandwich-man’s twaddle we were leaving behind us. It was San Francisco.
    With the crossing of a single street, we seemed to have stepped over the entirety of the Pacific Ocean. Mere seconds before, we might have been in the good old U. S. of A. But for all intents and purposes, we were in China now.
    Colorful paper lanterns hung from every balcony like enormous, over-ripe fruit. Every other available space was covered with signs and posters, all of them adorned with the blocky, tic-tac-toe calligraphy of the Celestial Empire. The buildings fell into two camps: squat and dingy or tall-peaked and abristle with bright, elaborately curlicued woodwork.
    As for the
people
, there was one camp and one camp only. The narrow streets were packed solid with Chinese men in black hats or skullcaps, loose-fitting