Fortune Is a Woman - Elizabeth Adler [115]
Annie stared at her wide-eyed. “Then what will you do?” she asked, suddenly afraid for her.
Ollie climbed from Annie’s lap and ran to Francie as she stood up, anxiously clutching her skirt. “Where are you going?” he asked.
She stroked back his hair, managing a smile. “I’m going to see Lai Tsin,” she told him.
Lai Tsin’s office was at the back of his big warehouse near the waterfront and it was as sparse and neat as the man himself. The walls were lined with shelves of reference books and catalogues; details of monthly tides and sailings were pinned to the notice board and a map of the world was marked with the routes of his current cargoes. A huge iron walk-in safe, to which only he had the key, housed ledgers with details of every transaction he had ever made, the accounts showing his net worth, and a considerable amount of cash, as well as the worn wooden treasure pillow containing a small silken black braid of hair and a faded sepia photo of a young girl holding a fan.
Lai Tsin sat behind a big wooden desk, his fingers flying over his old wooden abacus as he checked long columns of figures. Besides the straight-backed wooden chair on which he was sitting the room contained one other chair, a small stove that he rarely lit because he never felt the cold and a narrow blackwood altar table with two beautiful nephrite jade statues, one of Kwan Yin, the goddess of mercy, and one of the goddess of good fortune.
In the cavernous depths of the gloomy warehouse itself were stored hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of goods of every sort: silks, laquerware, paintings, rugs, and antiquities from many parts of Asia, as well as more mundane household goods. A second warehouse contained only enormous wooden chests of tea of every sort and flavor. Lai Tsin had taken the money the Elders had lent him and multiplied it a thousandfold, though no one would ever know it because the company did not trade under his name. It was Francie who was owner of the “L. T. Francis Company,” but it was Lai Tsin who did the work. It was he who, when he had stopped off at Hawaii on the way back from the Orient, had picked up a bankrupt pineapple plantation for a song and by putting in his own canning factory had turned it into a profitable concern. It was he who had bought the ships’ chandlers on the San Francisco waterfront and made it the biggest and the best in the port. It was he who had invested in a rope works in Shanghai and a carpet manufacturer in Hong Kong, in silkworm farms in China and in sheep with the best wool in Australia. It was Lai Tsin who had canvassed the merchants of San Francisco and Los Angeles and Seattle and persuaded them to let him act as their agent, and he who had organized the bigger freightloads that made it possible to cut costs, and he who employed agents to scout for the antiquities and treasures coveted by the Westerners. Lai Tsin had cornered the tea market by importing delicate flavors specially blended for Western tastes. In the eyes of his Chinese contemporaries Lai Tsin was a success, his business had grown by leaps and bounds, he was rich. But for him it was not enough; he had reached a plateau and he knew it was time to move on.
There was a knock on the door and he looked up as Francie walked in. He smiled and said, “You are just the person I need to see.” But then he saw her eyes and knew something had happened. He walked over to her and offered her a chair. “Are you cold?” he said anxiously. “I will light the stove.”
Francie shook her head. She couldn’t wait to unburden herself and the whole story about Harry spilled out, about how she had gone to the house and seen him and now he knew she was still alive, and how