Port Hazard (14 page)

I gave the boy who brought the telegram an extra quarter to make up for snapping at him for the delay. He explained he'd had to stop and ask several people where to find a place called the Sailor's Rest before he found someone who could tell him it was the Slop Chest he was looking for. To save time on both ends I'd sent my long wire to Helena without coding it, then had wasted a precious hour by respecting Nan Feeny's sensibilities when I told Blackthorne where to send his reply.

I crumpled the flimsy and threw it into a spitoon. It was full, and brackish water slopped out onto the floor.

“'ey!” Axel Hodge smacked the bar with his iron ball. Billy was in back using the outhouse.

I told Hodge to go to hell.

His white porcelains flashed in his beard. “That top don't scare me, mate. I been to Brisbane.”

“Why is it necessary to tell everyone you meet you're from Brisbane? It's obvious every time you open your mouth.”

He stopped smiling. “It wasn't for Nan, you'd be togged out in a pine shirt.”

I let him have that as a gift. He was on Goodhue's list.

I couldn't decide what irked me more: the judge's refusal to bend federal regulations he'd already bent so many times they looked like pump handles, his little barb about forgetting the reason I'd come to San Francisco, or that annoying “H. A.” at the end. In composing telegrams he generally signed himself “Blackthorne,” nothing else. The showy use of initials warned me he might be considering another run for Congress.

I looked around the room, at the bottles on the shelves, refilled so many times with liquor inferior to their labels that the labels themselves were blurred and peeling at the edges; at the pickled eggs in the mammoth jar at the end of the bar, with pickled flies floating on top of the brine; at the glum sailors perched on the footrail and the even glummer creature slumped in her faded satin and wilted feathers at Pinholster's table, taking advantage of the gambler's absence to rest her feet in their broken high-topped shoes. I wouldn't have given a cartwheel dollar for the lot, but it had been home for two weeks, and in less than sixty hours a mob of angry townies stoked up on rotgut and Revelations was due to storm through with axes and truncheons and flaming pitch and reduce it to smoking rubble for the second time. It wouldn't rise again from its ashes, because the woman who had rebuilt it the first time would be strung by her neck from the nearest structure left standing.

Hodge had been right. Nan Feeny had spared Beecher and me both from his portable cannonball after the business with Tom Tulip, and whatever good turn the vigilantes might perform for the Union by destroying Wheelock's base of power, and with it the Sons of the Confederacy, I had to stop them for her sake.

I slung my empty glass down the bar, hard enough to send it aloft when it hit the first dent if Hodge hadn't scooped it up on the fly with his one hand. I'd wanted to break something. I'd violated the only rule I ever bothered to keep, and I'd done it twice, making friends with my partner and a woman I barely knew.

Pinholster came in carrying a thick white mug of steaming coffee from the restaurant down the street where he took breakfast, shooed out the bedraggled boardwalk queen, who snatched up her reticule, snarled something at him that even he didn't seem to understand, and hobbled out into the street. For the first time since we'd met, he gave me an eager glance and shoved the chair opposite away from the table with his foot. I was curious enough to take it.

“I'm a condemned man,” he said brightly, removing a fresh pack of cards from his inside breast pocket. “Did you see the paper this morning?”

“I didn't see your name on Goodhue's list.”

“Yes, I was a bit disappointed. It's stellar company. Little Dick Dugan's done more to support the employees at the city mortuary than the last three fires combined. Ole Anderson's a bigger crook than Jay Gould, and Hugger-Mugger Charlie hung out so much bad paper the first month after he got his printing press up and running, you couldn't pass a good banknote anywhere in town. Even a trusting soul like Nan wouldn't take anything lighter than government silver. It's the more general list I'm talking about. Gamblers and blacklegs are the same thing and they both found a place. How about a quick game of three-card monte before Friday? That's the traditional hangman's day, you know. Leave it to Old River Jordan to come up with that. It saved him having to spell it out and getting his advertisement rejected.” He broke the seal on the deck and shuffled.

“I can see why it would cheer you up.”

“In this work, the ace of spades can be the next card you turn. If you hit a losing streak and it lasts long enough you can starve, or freeze to death sleeping in an alley. If, on the other hand, you buck the tiger too long, someone's bound to think you're shaving the odds and blow a hole through you on a busted flush. Stay in one place past your time and the city fathers think you're driving down property values and deal a wild card to the legal firm of Tar and Feather, which isn't nearly as funny as the cartoons in the
Call
make out. I've seen it; I know what boiling tar can do to a man's complexion, not to mention the effect of twenty pounds of goose feathers on the function of breathing.

“Oh, the silk hats will make noise afterward, arrest some of the buggers, and maybe send three or four of the loudest to San Quentin for a year; they can make it fifty, and you're just as dead when they come out as when they went in. Let's say you survive all that. The smoky saloons get to your lungs or one day the barkeep miscalculates the ratio of branchwater to wood alcohol and you drop dead in the middle of the biggest pot you ever had going. Just plain living kills you at the end of the day. Why
not
a rope? Cut it.” He smacked down the deck.

I held up a palm. He shrugged and cut three cards off the top. “Don't mistake me for Jesus,” he said. “It's a good life and I don't intend to let go of it at Goodhue's price. The first wave of Substantial Citizens through the door of my room above the Golden Dawn Laundry will come away with a bellyful of buckshot for their eagerness. After that I'll choose my targets. My little Colt derringer holds two. Maybe they'll even give me the chance to reload. That ought to put a hole in the One Hundred. Find the three of hearts.” He laid the cards facedown side by side on the table, sat back, and lifted his mug.

I left them there. “Doesn't anybody run anymore?”

“That's an alternative I hadn't considered. I'll think about it while you're picking.”

“The only reason Nan is on Goodhue's list is she stopped him from drowning one of her waiter girls. He'll have a hard time working that into his campaign for the public good.”

“Granted, he went too far there. The State of California may even issue a bill of indictment before someone gets around to cutting her down. The good founder of the First Eden Infantry was among the conspirators named in the general arrest warrant after Casey and Cora were lynched at Fort Gunnybags. The charges lifted like morning fog. The cards are getting stale.”

“What's the bet?”

“There isn't one. I'm just warming up the deck.”

I watched him pulling at his shaggy moustache. “Where are you from?”

“I was born in Chicago and spent my life there, excluding my time in the navy. I'd flattered myself I'd lost the accent.”

“You still lean a little heavy on your
R
's. How long have you been here?”

“Six months.”

I must have lost my poker face. He did, too; his eyes glittered like a greenhorn's over a king-high straight.

“How does a man who spends all his time at this table find out so much about Barbary in six months?”

“I listen. I watch. You know the process as well as I do. You can't talk all the time and concentrate on the game, and you can't win if you never raise your eyes from your hand. Three of hearts.” He tapped the table.

“I don't feel like playing.”

“Do me a favor. If you like, you can call it the pathetic request of a doomed fellow traveler.”

“You're forgetting I can't be bluffed. You don't have any intention of letting Goodhue's men drag you out and string you up, with or without the shotgun and derringer.”

“I wasn't referring to that. I have a lesion. Four doctors have told me I have a year left. Three, if I stay out of saloons. Which means I'll be gone with next year's leaves. Four of a kind beats a full house.”

I studied his long, unshaven face for tells. Nothing there. “I'm still waiting for my answer,” I said. “A man doesn't pick up as much as you in so short a time without asking a lot of questions of a lot of people. I've known gamblers to be many things, but curious isn't one. Who are you?”

“Pick a card. Please.”

I grabbed one without looking at it and turned it over. It was the three of hearts. There was something underneath it. I turned over the other two. They were each the three of hearts, and each had concealed something. I looked at Pinholster.

He made an apologetic shrug. “I couldn't be sure you'd pick the right one.”

I looked down again to see if anything had changed. Nothing had. Three pasteboard rectangles lay in a row on the table, much smaller than the playing cards he'd placed atop them. Each was engraved with the all-seeing eye of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.

“What's your real
name?” I asked.

“Pinholster. Chicago discourages agents from using pseudonyms during undercover work. Answering to an invented name takes practice, and there's always the chance someone who knows you will see you and call out your name in public. As a matter of fact, I haven't told anyone a thing that wasn't true since I've been here. We're instructed not to unless absolutely necessary. If, for example, someone asks me if I work for Pinkerton, I'm permitted to dissemble.”

We were speaking low and playing blackjack for the benefit of anyone watching. I said. “What about that lesion?”

“True as well, unfortunately. It's the reason I volunteered for this assignment. For obvious reasons, the local office didn't want to use one of its own operatives, and no less an authority than Oscar Wilde has declared that San Francisco has all the attractions of the next world. It seemed an excellent opportunity to find out what's in store for me.”

“Who taught you to gamble?”

“My sainted father. He threw in his hand when a boiler blew up on the Ohio River near Evansville in eighteen sixty. Surviving passengers swore he was holding three aces with the likelihood of another bullet in the hole. The agency favors employing people from a variety of backgrounds. Who better to burrow his way into Barbary than a fellow who knows the history of the four kings?” He dealt himself twenty-one and scooped up the ante.

“What's the assignment?”

“A soap manufacturer in Exeter, England, died late last year, leaving an estate of seven hundred fifty thousand pounds, with a thousand set aside for an illegitimate son whom no one else in the family was aware existed. The young man was the product of a dalliance with a bookkeeper, who took ship to America with the infant twenty-seven years ago. The fare was a gift from the soap tycoon in return for the woman's discretion. The family cannot claim its inheritance until the bastard surfaces for his part, or until evidence of a good faith effort to locate him is submitted to Her Majesty's court.

“The New York office traced the mother to the charity ward of a hospital in Brooklyn, where she died of an indelicate disease in sixty-three. Circumstances had evidently obliged her to walk the Streets of Gold for victuals and lodging for her and her son. The child was placed in an orphanage, whose records were spotty, but agents managed to find a woman named Cruddup, who with her late husband had adopted the boy. She was uncooperative, but persistence and the bribe of a ton of coal—the interview took place in February—persuaded her to report that the boy, whose name was Seymour, had run away at age fourteen, after attempting to burn down the flat where the family lived. It was not his first attempt. Mr. Cruddup had been driven to flog him with his belt when he caught him pouring kerosene on a pile of clothes and old newspapers in the middle of the kitchen.”

“Did she say what he looked like?”

“She said he was a ‘funny-looking little monkey.' It wasn't helpful, and the inducement of another ton of coal did not succeed in prolonging the interview. I could have told them that. What possible use could one widow have for two tons of coal? One is sufficient to see the average household through an Eastern winter.” He paused to rake in another pot; talking and concentrating on the cards seemed to present no difficulty.

He went on. “County records list a Seymour Cruddup, sixteen, in juvenile detention for nine months ending in sixty-six on two counts of arson, but none of the officials currently serving were there at the time, and there was no description on file. We have no description to date. He vanishes then, possibly committing additional conflagratory depredations under an assumed name, until Seymour Cruddup resurfaces on the employee manifest of the cargo ship
Bertha Day,
which left New York Harbor in eighty-one, rounded the Horn, and docked in San Francisco in January of last year.”

“The ship's officers must have been able to give you a description.”

“One would think that would be the case, but we shall never know. The
Bertha Day
went down somewhere in the Horse Latitudes during a storm last November with all aboard, including the officers who had served with her captain for two years. The rest of Cruddup's shipmates are scattered throughout both hemispheres.”

“And so the trail ends there.”

“So far as can be documented. However, I have a theory, which I've been working on, apart from the occasional inside straight, since March.”

I let him take another hand while I waited. Figuring out what all this had to do with me helped kill time while Barbary was getting ready to blow itself apart.

“Criminals rarely change their lays,” he said. “They're simple animals, and once they manage to work out a system that entertains and supports them, they tend to cleave to it unto death or the penitentiary. Fire appears to be young Mr. Cruddup's vehicle of choice, and an inflammable city like San Francisco is the ideal place in which to pedal it. The leap from there is not too great to the one man who can claim responsibility for most of the celebrated fires not attributable to chance.”

“Sid the Spunk.”

He nodded; the tutor abundantly pleased with his charge. “The young man has something of the poet in him. ‘Spunk,' you cannot have failed to determine, is the popular argot for ‘match' on the streets hereabouts, and ‘Seymour the Spunk,' while equally alliterative, doesn't quite answer. With all these Sydney Ducks about, a fellow with origins in working-class England, reared by a cockney mother, would slide quite nicely in among the many transplanted Brits in this exotic place. Whether he christened himself or the monager was visited upon him by his admiring colleagues is beside the point. Admittedly, it's a long guess, but I'm convinced it's the right one. A good gambler plays the percentages; a great gambler proceeds upon instinct. As does a great detective. I'm a twenty-year man with Pinkerton. The old man is capricious, but he doesn't hold with deadwood.”

“Congratulations. Why aren't you on your way back to Chicago? Sid the Spunk is dead.”

“It's a point, and the conventional wisdom supports it. In the absence of a corpse, I'm not prepared to enter the conspiracy. Which brings me to why I'm taking your money. Blackjack again, old fellow. You must have angered the lords of chance today.” He laid down two tens and an ace.

“I'll get it back when my luck changes.”

“I shan't live that long. I hardly need explain that playing cards is a skill. You're good, but you haven't had my opportunity for practice. When I order breakfast, I am calculating the odds against having my eggs prepared precisely the way I request; and so the day goes, until I retire and dream of percentages. Just now, the law of averages supports Sid the Spunk's extinction, either on the night the Slop Chest burned down by his hand or shortly thereafter. Before that he was a legendary character in a place that does not want for them; a mysterious figure whom no one I've interviewed admits to having met face to face. An example is to be made through a destruction of property; the word reaches Sid; and the thing is done, after which the Spunk is doused and gone, to flare up again elsewhere when another example is required. The steep decline in the arson statistics directly the Slop Chest was put to the torch strongly suggests the Spunk was spent, possibly to prevent him from peaching to the authorities should he be apprehended later.”

“It's a sound bet,” I said. “I wouldn't take it up.”

“You'd be wise not to. However, I'm persuaded to do so, by a piece of intelligence that recently came my way from the direction of Captain Dan's own firehouse.”

He'd dealt me two cards, one up, one down. I left them.

“Since you're not a blind better, I'll assume the game is finished.” He gathered it in, shuffled the deck, and placed it on his side of the table. “The alarm was delayed going into the firehouse. That was what was reported in the
Call,
and the veracity of a free press is above question. In any case, by the time the brigade reached the scene, the building was engulfed, and there was no help for it but to extinguish the blaze before it spread through the neighborhood. The volunteer I spoke to was not in the firehouse when the alarm came in, but came running toward the flames and smoke from the establishment across the street, where he had been taking his leisure with a woman of flexible reputation. I don't mind telling you I lost a substantial amount of money to the fellow in the course of winning his confidence, nor that it was the hardest work I've ever done, because he was an abomination with cards in his hands. You aren't the only man in this city who has cheated against himself, though I'll take an oath there aren't three.”

“Play your card.” I was losing patience with him, lesion or no.

“The young man swore he saw two men carrying a body away from the blazing building; which would signify nothing, except no casualties were reported in the fire, in the columns of the
Call
or anywhere else. I quite believed the fellow, for what would he gain from a lie? He already had most of my money.”

“You think Sid died in the fire?”

“With the possible exceptions of a cannon loose aboard a ship at sea and the heart of a woman, nothing is less predictable nor more capricious than a fire in full blossom. Even an experienced arsonist, lingering to ensure the success of his enterprise, can find himself standing in the wrong place when a beam falls or a chimney collapses. Do I think Sid died in the fire? I have serious doubts. Why should anyone risk the victim's fate removing a corpse from the scene? Even money says he survived; or in any event that he did not expire on the site. He was injured, possibly fatally, but if so his condition was not so obvious his rescuers didn't think him worth saving. Was it Sid the Spunk? A steeper bet, perhaps, but not so steep I wouldn't hazard the odds. The man's very existence is a secret. Life is cheap in Barbary; one more struck down is unworthy of even a paragraph on the same page with the ships' arrivals. A life
saved
is a rarer thing altogether, and even a naysayer like Fremont Older could hardly be expected not to keep the details alive through three editions. Who but the man responsible for the fire could expect to remain invisible under the circumstances? Will you take the bet?”

I said. “I haven't seen your hole card.”

“It's a common one hereabouts; but even a deuce can claim a pot if you know how to play it. My fire volunteer insisted the two men he saw carrying away the injured party were Chinese.”

I don't know how long I sat there without moving or speaking. It was long enough I thought I might be attracting the attention of others, who would wonder why two men were sitting at a gaming table with a deck of cards sitting between them undisturbed. Pinholster thought so, too. He swept up the deck and began shuffling.

I anted, not bothering to look whether I was laying down a dollar chip or a twenty. “Your man could have misinterpreted what he saw. For all he knows, he was looking at two men carrying away a drunken friend.”

“It's possible. It's probable.” He dealt. “It's probable I don't have blackjack on this ten-spot. The hole card would have to be an ace, which is a chance of one in forty-six. What would you bet?”

I folded my hands on top of my cards. I hadn't even looked at what I had in the hole.

He turned his up. It was a seven.

“Too bad,” he said, gathering in the chips. “However, cards are not life; and life in Barbary is not life anywhere else on earth. Sid the Spunk lives, and may even now be mastering the mystery of chopsticks in Chinatown.”

“What if he does? That's good for you, but nothing to me. Why even bring it up?”

“It's nothing to me as the situation stands. I'm an undercover man, the hole card in this game, and as we've just seen, the hole does not always conceal the solution. I'm nailed to this table, whereas a face card such as yourself is free to act. I can't go haring into Little China, demanding answers and evidence. You can; you have, and the fact that you're here now proves you're the straight flush in this game.”

“You don't have the bank to offer. Why should I sit in for you?”

“I can see you've never played bridge. No patience with partners.” He fanned the cards out in a straight line, flicked one with a glossy nail, and flipped them all back the other way so that the suits showed. “You haven't seen my bank. I know where the Sons of the Confederacy are holding their next meeting.”

“So does everyone in town. No one knows when.”

He looked at me. His face didn't slip.

I sat back. “Oh.”

He swept up the cards, reshuffled, and laid out two hands of bridge. “I'll teach you the basics. It's a civilized game, unknown in Barbary. Keep your cards high and your voice low.”