Authors: Elizabeth Bear
The Marshal laughed, not sounding too happy. “I got enough of a look at him to say he’s a white, at least. Not as tall as me. Hat over his hair, more’s the pity, and his face all muffled up.”
“It’s winter,” I said. “So is everybody’s.”
He stood there, stroking Dusty’s nose. He didn’t talk, but I could about smell his frustration.
I sighed, heart hurting as the excitement faded and I remembered the other business at hand. “We should go find out who’s dead.” I hoped it wasn’t somebody I knowed, and I felt awful about that at the same time.
“Miss Memery,” the Marshal said. “I make you a promise that I will do everything in my power to stop this man. I’ll catch him, and if I can’t catch him…” He shrugged. “If that’s what it takes, I’ll bed him down.”
He meant a pine bed, and a narrow one. “God bless you, sir,” I said. “Now come on, let’s go see whose murder you’re next to be blamed for.”
When I walked into Madame’s office the next day, she looked startled and irate. Neither of which was how I was used to seeing her. She had been bent over an account book, pince-nez slipping down her scowl, and now she closed it with a snap that made me think she might be more mad at the accounts nor me.
That weren’t settling to my spirits. In fact, it plumb took me aback. But I grabbed up my courage anyway and I said to her, “I know how to fix all our problems.”
She cleaned the nib of her pen, still frowning.
“That’s a pretty tall order, young lady,” she said. “Are you sure you know what all our problems are?”
Da would say that first you make a list of everything that needs doing. Then you figure out a plan to get it done. If you can’t get it
all
done, you figure out what’s most important and you do that.
“No,” I admitted. “But I know the cause of most of ’em is Peter Bantle.”
Her fingers tapped the leather cover of the account book. “And what’s the cause of Peter Bantle?” she asked.
I must of meant to say something next, because I’d had that feeling of being on a roll you sometimes get. And with her question it was gone—poof—like so much snow falling on the ocean.
There ain’t nothing quite like the sensation of standing there with your mouth agape. “And what’s the reason, you think, that I haven’t moved against him yet?”
“I know you ain’t afraid of him.”
“Afraid?” She laughed gently, which worrited me more than if she’d brayed like an ass. “I’m concerned about him. I’m wary of him. I might be a little afraid—not of Bantle, but of the crazy stupid shit a man like Bantle will do. Normal people, they’re lazy. They want to protect what they got and they won’t risk it. Peter ain’t like that, Karen honey. He’ll risk all sorts of things just for a little power, or the chance to make somebody hurt.”
“But that ain’t why you won’t let me go put a stop to him.”
“Maybe I’m the lazy one here, protecting what I already have.”
I didn’t have no good answer to that, neither. So I just looked at her, because she was Madame and I couldn’t tell her she was full of shit.
“Everybody owes something to somebody, Karen. Bantle owes somebody, you see if he doesn’t. And it’s possible I owe something to somebody else.” She tapped the account book again.
I had the oddest sensation, that of somebody who had always seemed invulnerable, capable, prepared—invincible—showing or admitting weakness. I won’t say it was as bad as when Da died, because ain’t nothing as bad as when Da died. But what I wouldn’t of given for one real good barrage of profanity out of her, just then.
“He don’t have to know it’s us,” I said stubbornly.
She tilted her head. “And just how do you prescribe to prevent him knowing?”
“Sneak,” I said. I must of looked like a shooting dog leaning on the leash, because she shook her head and stared down at her hands and smiled. Indulgently, so I felt more like a child than I had in five years, or six maybe. She must of caught my consternation, because she smoothed that smile out right quick. Not quick enough to keep it getting under my skin like needles, though.
“Because he sure won’t put together the folks that have been stealing his indenturees with whatever it is you’ve got your mind made up about? You’ve been out running around so much I think you don’t know the constables have been here twice looking for that Comanche, and looking for any excuse they can find to shut me down.”
“But…” I thought about how much we all paid in the taxes, about the mayor’s officially nonexistent special relationship with Pollywog, about all the constables I’d taken a turn with. About how secure I’d felt that our position weren’t going to nohow alter. I’d been smug. Maybe I’d let myself feel safe.
Maybe wanting to feel safe
was
a mistake.
“If that happens, then where will we all be? I’m too old for whoring on corners, miss.” Madame straightened her shoulders. “Too old for whoring on corners. But old enough to know something you ain’t yet learned. This too shall pass, Karen honey. The luck will swing. And if we hunker down and husband our chips, we’ll still have some to play with when we get that killer hand.”
“I can save us!” I yelled, forgetting that no one
never
raises her voice to Madame Damnable. “I can break his machine! Then nobody will do what he says, and we’ll be safe! Priya knows where he keeps it. Her and me—”
Madame stood up, her chair scraping over the carpet with a final sound. She leaned her hands on the desk like a schoolmarm, and she let me see how disappointed in me she was.
“Karen.”
I shut up. I did. And I fixed my eyes on my hem and didn’t let my lips curl the way they wanted to, I was that angry. Da always said I had my mother’s temper.
“Karen, are you listening to me?”
I made myself nod.
“You need to trust me to handle this. I can’t have you running off to take matters into your own hands again.”
Once again, I made myself nod, though it hurt to do it. Apparently it wasn’t enough, though. Because Madame cleared her throat and said, “Look at me.”
So that was even more hard. I’m not sure how I did it. If it were Da, I imagined he would of been working up to giving me a hiding, but Madame didn’t strike her girls. When I managed to drag my line of sight up there, I saw her staring at me over the gold wire tops of her pince-nez.
“I value your spunk, girl. And your willingness to do what needs done without waiting to be told. But if you go up against Peter Bantle again—unless he directly started it—I will turn you out in the street. Do you understand me?”
I nodded, stunned. And still a touch rebellious, to tell you true—wondering if there weren’t a way I could manage it. Leave Rapid City; take what I had saved and maybe find work or a way to save more. I wouldn’t get another job in a parlor house here if Madame turned me out. And cottage girls worked harder and made less money. Maybe I could go on south to San Francisco—
I’d hate to leave Rapid. But it would be worth it to me to see Priya and the rest of the girls safe. And Madame too, even if she were hell-bent on thwarting me.
Maybe she read rebellion in the set of my lips, because she looked me up and down and said, “And don’t think I won’t turn your friend Miss Swati out as well. I think you care more about her than you do about yourself.”
Damn.
“I’m listening, Madame.”
“Good,” she said. She came around the desk, limping heavily, but without her cane. She put her hand on my shoulder, and this time it was easier to look at her. “I’ve got a great affection for you, young lady. And some wisdom in the world. Please restrain yourself for long enough to let me use it.”
It’s not every night a wild Comanche tumbles in your bedroom window. Some folk might consider that sort of a pity, but it suits me just fine. Especially since the one time it ever happened to me, he managed it so quiet that I didn’t wake up and notice him until he was well inside and closing it behind him.
I woke with a start to a slim man silhouetted against a gray sky, and I probably would have shrieked like a teakettle if I hadn’t been struck completely dumb with terror. By the time I’d gasped in a breath, I recognized Tomoatooah and that he was holding a finger to his lips. “How did you know which room was mine?”
There were probably other questions which bore asking first, mind, but that was the one I managed to think of.
He smiled and pointed at the little wooden horse on the ledge. My da made that for me when I was just little. It was a stiff little critter with a tossing mane—and he mended the leg, too, when I broke it.
“Guessed,” he said. “Also, I peeked inside. You should lock your window.”
“If I locked my window, what would I do for Comanche?” I got up, glad I was wearing thick flannel, and went to the window. “You hiding from somebody?”
He nodded and stood aside so I could get a look. I made sure not to rustle the curtain when I peered around it.
The sky overhead was graying, but the streets were shadowed and dark. Down by the waterfront—about two blocks away—I saw the flicker of torches moving around the street in a pattern that suggested a search. I heard ’em calling back and forth to each other through the mist.
“Lynch mob?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I didn’t stay to ask.”
“They didn’t see you come in here?”
He shook his head. “I came down from the roof.”
“Hm,” I said. “Something tells me you ought to get out of Rapid,
pronto
.”
“No flies on you.”
A sarcastic houseguest. That was just what I wanted to be awakened by at dawn. I sighed.
“Well,” I said. “As long as we’re up, we might as well get some breakfast.”
I managed to rustle up some of yesterday’s bread and scrape some dripping into a pan while Tomoatooah blew up the banked fire and got a little flicker going. I fried up the bread and warmed some cold coffee without waking Connie in her room down the hall—she would have cooked us two breakfasts apiece, but she deserved her sleep as much as any of us—and we ate the greasy salty bread standing up over the plank work top, hands cupped to catch drips.
By the time we were done, Connie had woken up of her own accord, and she got Crispin to help her hide Tomoatooah under some empty coffee sacks in the back of the wagon so we could spirit him away. Crispin promised to get him to the edge of town and then personally take a message to Marshal Reeves as to what had happened and where the Comanche would meet him—Connie suggested an old sawmill up the river two miles—and when that was arranged I went the hell back to bed.
It weren’t the most successful endeavor I ever undertook. Mostly I laid there with a pillow over my face, worrying. Tomoatooah wasn’t safe in the city no more, not with Bantle convincing half the town he was the killer. And how safe was Marshal Reeves going to be without his posseman?
I didn’t like any of it. Not at all.
Hell, for fifteen minutes I even wondered if there was any sense in going to see Horaz Standish and seeing if some kind of a truce could be brokered. He had the reputation of being a reasonable man.
But I figured Madame Damnable would consider that interfering with Bantle without her permission, and at this point I figured if I did that she might just break all my fingers for me
before
she tossed me out on the street.
* * *
So began a long, cold wait.
I read somewhere that there’s little in this world more frustrating than having a plan and the desire to carry it out and being thwarted in expression. But thwarted I was, and all I could do was work, read, write, and fuss over Priya. And frankly, there just weren’t that much work to be getting on with. The parlor was nearly empty most nights—there was more girls than men, even counting Crispin and the Professor. Madame came and went at strange hours, and there was three or four men I didn’t know who came in, spoke right to Miss Bethel, and went up to Madame’s office without further ado. Crispin walked each one up, but they came back down on their own and left likewise.
We got some business from the constables, if you can call it business when they didn’t pay. In fact, I saw Miss Bethel handing at least one of them a little cloth purse as he left. Seems to me as you should take your bribe in money
or
flesh. To ask for both seems like trying to use your fat to fry and spread it on your cornpone, too. But I suppose if you’re taking grease from a whorehouse, you ain’t too concerned with the appearance of venality.
I kept hoping to see the Marshal or Merry Lee, but other than one quick note from Bass Reeves delivered by a street urchin, I heard nothing from either one of them. Priya didn’t go back to see her sister, either, though I know Aashini sent her a letter in some language that looked to me like a whole set of brush doodles. Pretty brush doodles, but Greek made more sense. Going to see her would of been too dangerous—anybody could have followed Priya to wherever Merry had Aashini holed up. Priya, though—she was walking on air the whole time.
And Priya and me … well, whenever she was around I was walking on air, too. I taught her how to braid rugs, and things was so boring she made me one in about three days, to replace the one I’d given her. And there was more kissing, too, although sometimes we’d be curled up all comfortable together and she’d suddenly have to get up and pace or she’d find something needed doing right desperate like, and in a different room.
That’s all I’m going to say about that except the other girls—and Crispin, even—got to treating the two of us as if we came as a set and that didn’t gripe me none at all.
That note from Reeves just told me to hang tight and watch my back. Because I hadn’t been doing that without his urging, nor Priya’s back, neither. It hinted at progress but didn’t spell none out, which made me wonder if he weren’t just telling me something good to keep me quiet and out of trouble. As if I needed anything more than Madame’s threat against Priya to manage that.
I tried like hell not to fuss when I didn’t hear again. Maybe they was lying low or tailing Bantle’s Russian mechanic and they didn’t have much time to chat.