Read City of God for Free Online Page B

back what his foolish father had lost.
    He’d been trying to do so from that day to this. Seventeen long years since he’d made his bargain with Astor and brought his first shipment of opium to China, and he’d still not achieved his goal. John Jacob Astor yet held the controlling position in Devrey Shipping, but the opium trade nonetheless changed Devrey’s life forever. It took the young man back to the East, to the Hakka pirates on the Pearl River, and to Mei-hua.
    She was three years old the first time he saw her, and he was twenty-two. She was sitting on her haunches at Ah Chee’s feet on the deck of a sampan tied up to the one on which he was doing business with the man known as Di Short Neck. The river pirates roped their boats together to create equivalents of the mansions of wealthy men on the mainland, and the nursemaid and her charge were on the sampan that acted as the women’s quarters. The servant’s fingers deftly twisted the child’s lustrous black hair into braids. The little girl looked up, straight over at him, and he saw those incredible sea-colored eyes. In that moment something to which he never gave a name was born in Samuel. “Your daughter?” he asked, careful to keep the wonder from his voice.
    Short Neck looked across the deck to see what the yang gwei zih saw, then nodded. “I think so, yes. If she’s the one I think she is, she’s the youngest child of third wife, Mei Lin. She’s called Mei-hua. At least I think that’s her name.”
    “You do not value her?”
    “Girls,” the pirate said with a shrug. “You like little girls? I have a few more the same age. If you care to add an extra two chests of ya-p’ien, I will have two of them brought to you tonight. Four chests for three.”
    Devrey made his voice neutral, ignoring the fire that had been set alight inside him. “One only. And not now. I will claim her when she is bride age. But not one of the others. This one. This Mei-hua.”
    “Three chests of ya-p’ien if I am to lose her forever.”
    Samuel nodded agreement. He could easily make a paper accounting of the transaction and slip it past Wong Hai, the Canton-based company facilitator, the comprador, who had been with Devrey’s for as long as Astor owned the controlling interest.
    The child stood up just then and he saw her unbound feet. “She must have golden lilies,” he said firmly. His first time had been here in China with the exquisitely tiny wife of a wealthy Hong merchant who had delighted in initiating a boy. There had been any number of Cantonese whores since then, always the smallest he could find. He’d tried a few times with white women, but their size, particularly their large feet, repulsed him.
    “Of course. I will give the order for the binding to begin tonight.” Short Neck looked at him without seeming to look, taking the foreign devil’s measure and recognizing the need for power that was like a worm deep in the white man’s belly, eating all else. “You can watch,” he said softly. “And see that it is done for you. The way you wish.”
    The pirate, however, gave orders that the breaking of the instep arch with a heavy stone not be done until the yang gwei zih had left the sampans. He knew these foreign devil white men. They did not have the stomach for much that was real in life. They preferred only the illusions.
    For Devrey there were many trips between the Levant and China after that, and a few times back to New York. But always he returned to Canton, to the Pearl River and the sampans of Di Short Neck to watch as Mei-hua grew. He became her friend and paid for tutors to come and teach her to read and to write, to draw and sing and play music on thezitherlike instrument called a gu zheng. He waited with ever increasing impatience while she acquired all the skills of a highborn lady. Waited for her to be thirteen. Bride age.
    Later he realized he’d been on the river in July of 1823 on the precise day and at the hour when Bastard