The Diviners

Evie shook her head. It hurt to do so. “Just a silly song I heard the other day. I wondered if it might mean something and…” What? What could she say that made any sort of sense? “It’s nothing.”

“As you say. Would you like to try the duck?”

Evie fought a wave of nausea as she waved the chopsticks and offending food away. But she felt a sense of relief, too. Perhaps the disconcerting images she’d seen and the song she’d heard had nothing to do with the girl’s murder. They could have been anything, really. Anything at all.

A quiet commotion up front drew Evie’s attention. The hostess, a girl in a red dress, about Evie’s age, shoved a bundle at a young man, speaking to him in Chinese. Her voice carried the tone of an order not to be contradicted. Under the girl’s penetrating gaze, the young man slunk away, letting the door to the kitchen bang behind him. The girl in the red dress appeared at their table with a silver tray of small fortune tea cakes. Evie noted her pale green eyes. “Will there be anything else?” she asked with a hint of polite annoyance.

“No, thank you.” Uncle Will paid the check while Evie extracted the slip of paper from a tea cake.

“What does it say?” Jericho asked.

“ ‘Your life will soon change.’ ” Evie tossed it aside. “I was hoping for ‘You will meet a tall, dark stranger.’ What does yours say, Jericho?”

“ ‘To gain trust you must risk secrets.’ ”

“Intriguing. Unc?”

Will left his untouched on the tray. “I never read fortunes if I can help it.”

They exited onto the narrow, winding cobblestones of Doyers Street, known as “the bloody angle” for its bend and the large number of gangland murders committed there. But that night, the street was peaceful. Across the narrow crooked strip of cobblestone, a crowd of men were lighting candles inside small white lanterns and watching them float up into the dusky sky. The smell of incense wafted into the street.

“Mid-Autumn Festival,” Uncle Will explained. “It is an important cultural tradition, a celebration of harvest.”

Farther down, paper lanterns adorned the front of a shop: Mee Tung Co., Importers. They fluttered in the evening breeze. Pieces of paper with Chinese lettering had been pasted on a brick wall beside the shop. Men on the street gave the postings a surreptitious glance as they passed by.

“What’s that?” Evie whispered.

“Listings of which businesses are not aligned with the Tongs.”

“Those silver things for putting ice in gin?” Evie mimed with her fingers. “Adore them!”

“Tongs are brotherhoods or governing associations, and there are two in Chinatown—Hip Sing Tong and On Leong Tong. They’ve run Chinatown for decades and, from time to time, they’ve also engaged in bloody warfare. The businessmen put up these postings as a plea of neutrality, so that they will be left out of the violence.”

“What’s going on there?” Evie asked. A light shone in the window of a shop where a line of men had gathered.

“Sending letters home to their wives, most likely.”

“Their wives don’t live here with them?”

“The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.” Uncle Will stared at her, waiting for a response. “What do they teach in schools these days? We’re going to have a nation of creationists with no grasp of history.”

“Then I suppose it’s lucky you’re tutoring me.”

“Yes. Well,” Will said uncertainly before settling into lecturing mode. “The Chinese Exclusion Act was a law designed to keep more Chinese from coming here once they’d finished building our railroads. They couldn’t bring their families over. They weren’t protected by our laws. They were on their own.”

“Doesn’t sound terribly American.”

“On the contrary, it’s very American,” Will said bitterly.

They’d passed around the back of the Tea House and saw the boy who’d been browbeaten by the hostess in the restaurant. He was kneeling before a small bowl of fire, feeding thin sheets of colored paper into it.

“What is he doing?” Evie said.

“Keeping the ghosts away,” Uncle Will said. He did not offer further explanation.

A PLACE IN THE WORLD

In the back parlor of Sister Walker’s brownstone, Memphis waited on the pristine blue sofa while his brother, Isaiah, sat at the dining room table concentrating on a spread of downturned cards. Sister Walker held one in her hand so that only she could see the face of it. “What card am I holding, Isaiah?”