The Six Messiahs - Mark Frost [35]
Fung Jing Toy noisily sucked out the marrow between the webbing of the pickled duck's foot. A delicacy his lower-caste family could never afford, duck's feet served every afternoon was one of the more genteel ways in which Little Pete reminded himself of the good fortune that twenty years of back-breaking work and self-sacrifice had given him. Although of modest stature befitting his nickname and an outwardly mild disposition, Little Pete was in his basic nature a man of ravenous appetites, and he rarely obeyed any impulse to hold them in check.
He was the only tong leader with whom "Blind Chris" Buckley and the corrupt white political establishment of San Francisco could negotiate comfortably; the rest of these top-dog Chinamen acted too high and mighty by half for their taste. Little Pete was the only one of them who laughed at the insults they casually tossed in his face, a clown who bowed and scraped in a manner reflecting his inferior racial status.
But Chris Buckley and his cronies recognized in Little Pete a man fiercely dedicated to an objective dear to their own hearts: the perpetual containment, subjugation, and enslavement of the city's Chinese population. The residents of Tangrenbu lived in mortal fear of Pete and the vicious henchmen of his Sue Yop Tong. Although five other criminal tongs owned significant holdings in Tangrenbu, Little Pete's On Leong Society controlled the flow of opium into the quarter. He owned many of the sweatshops where addicts slaved away for the pennies they spent to fill their bowls every night and most of the verminous flophouses where they slept it off.
In trade for their cooperation with the political machine, the six tongs had been granted sole responsibility for the importation and regulation of all workers from mainland China. And through Buckley's cozy association with the powerful railroad barons of San Francisco—Hopkins, Huntington, Crocker, and Stanford—Little Pete had become chief supplier of "coolie" labor for the expansion of the western lines. In Mandarin dialect, kuli signified "bitter strength."
So for the privilege of resettling in this land of opportunity, once a lower-caste worker passed through the sheds at the embarcadero he was chattel, owned and exploited to the grave by Little Pete and the Six Companies. At which point one of Pete's funeral parlors would perform the cremation and turn a tidy profit on shipping the ashes—by no means necessarily those of the worker—back to the departed's family in China.
Bitter strength, indeed.
Little Pete was a creature of habit. One of his established routines: hearing requests from his constituents during the business day lunch hour on the second-floor balcony of his Kearney Street town house. Little Pete liked to stuff himself heartily while his workers and shopkeepers humbled themselves before him. On occasion, if a request was sufficiently innocuous or inexpensive enough, he would demonstrate his rare and therefore legendary magnanimity.
But here it was half past noon; already on his third helping of duck's feet and no one had yet arrived to petition him with their stupid problems. He yelled out to his houseboy, Yee Chin: Why is no one here? If they have been left waiting downstairs, someone will be punished!
No answer. He threw down the bones on his plate and demanded more food. No one appeared. Now he was angry: His kitchen boys had orders to stand by inside the balcony with extra helpings to bring out the moment he called; they had all felt his crop on their back when a dish landed on his table cold. Little Pete rang the little porcelain bell he kept by his plate and shouted again.
Nothing. Yee Chin would catch unholy hell for this incompetence.
Little Pete wedged his bulbous stomach from behind the table, lifted his generous behind off the silk pillows on his hand-carved Tang dynasty chair, picked up his riding crop, and waddled into the sitting room, thinking of creative new ways he was going to punish these useless domestics.
A silver dome covered the serving that