Gold Mountain Blues - Ling Zhang [94]
Ah-Lam stamped up and down in rage. “What kind of a dumb judge is he? Any blind magistrate from way out in the sticks would give a more sensible judgment than that!” The judge did not wait for a translation of what he knew was a rude comment, but tugged his black robe around him and made to leave the court. Suddenly the yeung fan in the public seats stood up. “Your Honour, would you wait a moment? I have important evidence.” The man had been seated for the whole case without opening his mouth. Seeing that he was dressed like a respectable member of the community, the judge put on a slight show of civility and asked: “Who are you?”
The man bowed. “I am Rick Henderson, deputy general manager of the Vancouver Hotel, owned by the Canadian Pacific Railroad.” The judge grunted. “The Duke of Wales and Cornwall stayed in your hotel with his wife when they came to visit and I got an invitation to the cocktail party they gave.” “Not only the Duke of Wales and Cornwall,” said Rick, “every member of royalty stays with us when they visit the West Coast. If you want to enjoy afternoon tea, British style, in the very dining room where royalty have dined, you have to book two weeks in advance. At afternoon tea on Victoria Day in May, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will be coming from London to play chamber music. They include two violinists who played for Queen Victoria at her Golden Jubilee. Of course, all the seats have long since sold out.” Rick took a gold-monogrammed envelope out of the pocket of his lightweight wool suit and handed it to the judge. “Perhaps Your Honour would like to verify that I am who I say I am.”
The judge opened the envelope and took out a sheet of paper with the same gold monogram on it. He turned it over and looked at the back and gradually a faint smile appeared on his lips. He carefully put the letter away in an inner pocket of his black gown and asked: “Mr. Henderson, you have come as a witness for Mr. Hunter?” Rick shook his head. “Quite the contrary,” he said, “I have come as a witness for Mr. Chu—although he didn’t invite me.
“Mr. Chu Ah-Lam is an employee of the Whispering Bamboos Laundry, whose proprietor, Mr. Fong Tak Fat, is also present today. In the last eight years, the Whispering Bamboos Laundry has provided laundry services for the Vancouver Hotel. For the first five years, they washed and ironed the bed and table linen, just for the ordinary guests, of course. We have specialist launderers for the rooms of our most exclusive guests. For the last three years, the Whispering Bamboos Laundry has also undertaken personal laundry and mending for our ordinary guests.
“The Whispering Bamboos Laundry has now, I know, opened another branch in Vancouver with around twenty employees. This branch provides services for hotels and guest houses, and has very few private customers. In the last eight years, the Vancouver Hotel has not lost a single bedsheet or tablecloth. Nor have our guests made a single complaint of this nature. Of course, they have made other complaints, for example, that it’s hard to make the laundry workers understand English and so on. As I understand it, there are several hundred dialects of Chinese within the Empire of the Great Qing alone, so it’s a bit like the Tower of Babel, with everyone speaking their own language. We surely cannot expect them to completely understand the language of the British Empire, just like that, can we? But Your Honour only has to give it one serious thought, and it will become immediately apparent that a laundry business which has serviced the Vancouver Hotel for eight years is hardly