The Elevated roars above. The bluecoat shuffles his flat feet on the greasy asphalt below. But still the tale is of China—and the dramatic climax, in a Chinaman’s story, from a Chinaman’s slightly twisted angle, differs from that of an American.
To Nag Hong Fah this climax came not with the murder of Señora Garcia, but with Fanny Mei Hi’s laugh as she saw him with the shimmering bauble in his hands and heard his appraisal thereof.
She was his wife, married to him honorably and truly, with a narrow gold band and a clergyman and a bouquet of wired roses bought cheaply from an itinerant Greek vendor, and handfuls of rice thrown by facetious and drunken members of both the yellow race and the white.
Of course, at the time of his marriage, a good many people around Pell Street whispered and gossiped. They spoke of the curling black smoke and slavery and other gorgeously, romantically wicked things. Miss Edith Rutter, the social settlement investigator, spoke of—and to—the police.
Whereas Nag Hong Fah, who had both dignity and a sense of humor, invited them all to his house: gossipers, whisperers, Miss Edith Rutter, and Detective Bill Devoy of the Second Branch, and bade them look to their hearts’ content; and whereas they found no opium, no sliding panels, and hidden cupboards, no dread Mongol mysteries, but a neat little steam-heated flat, furnished by Grand Rapids via Fourteenth Street, German porcelain, a case of blond Milwaukee beer, a five-pound humidor of shredded Kentucky burlap tobacco, a victrola, and a fine, big Bible with brass clamp and edges and M. Doré’s illustrations.
“Call again,” he said as they were trooping down the narrow stairs. “Call again any time you please. Glad to have you—aren’t we, kid?” chucking his wife under the chin.
“You bet yer life, you fat old yellow sweetness!” agreed Fanny; and then—as a special barbed shaft leveled at Miss Rutter’s retreating back: “Say! Any time yer wanta lamp my wedding certificate—it’s hangin’ between the fottygraphs of the President and the Big Boss—all framed up swell!”
He had met her first one evening in a Bowery saloon, where she was introduced to him by Mr. Brian Neill, the owner of the saloon, a gentleman from out the County Armagh, who had spattered and muddied his proverbial Irish chastity in the slime of the Bowery gutters, and who called himself her uncle.