Port Hazard (6 page)

“Just the one,
and you're lucky to have it. Them pegos wasn't sleeping on the deck for the fresh air. Twenty-five cents a day.” Nan Feeny opened the door and stepped aside.

“We were told twelve.” I waited for my eyes to adjust. The room, one of several opening off a short hall behind the barroom, was a windowless den no larger than a ship's berth, with two narrow bunks built one atop the other into the wall, which I thought was carrying the nautical theme too far.

“Twelve apiece, and a penny tax.”

“Who collects the tax?” Beecher took his turn looking at the accommodations. There wasn't room for two men to stand inside.

“Little squint-eyed ponce stinks of lilacs, and you don't want to turn him away without his copper. I was burned out once. That's the price of pride in Barbary.”

We'd settled our differences in the saloon. Beecher had checked his revolver and I'd given Hodge back his arm, and when she'd put up the pepperbox we'd straightened out the reason for our visit. Face to face, or almost—the proprietress had two inches on me in my high-heeled boots—she had bad skin, hence the paint, and strong bones that wouldn't give up her age short of another decade. However, she was still two young for her white hair, which didn't look like a wig. She wore it in a chignon that added several unnecessary inches to her height.

I asked her how much for a week, which surprised her. Her natural eyebrows went up almost as high as the ones she'd brushed on.

“Cartwheel dollar. I don't take paper. There's more queer cole hereabouts than treasury. If it's coniakers you're after, I'd best quote you the rate for a year.” She had a granite brogue with no green pastures in it.

I'd shown her the star and the telegram. “We're not interested in counterfeiters, if that's what you're asking. Tell me if this means anything.” I handed her the double eagle.

She studied the coin on both sides. I thought for a moment she was going to bite it, but teeth were scarcer than gold in that neighborhood. She gave it back, and it was my turn to be surprised. I thought I'd have to wrestle her for it. “I ain't even seen one of them in lead. If you take Nan's advice you'll keep it in your kick. There's tobbies'd settle you for spud and lurch your pork in the brine.”

Any way I worked that out didn't sound attractive.

Beecher said, “This one was stamped right here in San Francisco.”

Nan studied him before answering. I couldn't tell where she stood on the subject of conversing with Negroes.

“Strictly speaking you left Frisco behind when you crossed Pacific Street. There's some as would say you passed right on through America and out the other side.”

I said. “You're telling us you'd know if someone was walking around with one of these in his pocket.”

“There's nary a thing Nan don't know what goes on between here and blue water.”

“What about the Sons of the Confederacy?”

She twisted a lip. “I'd swap a week's peck to see one of them Nob Hill noddles try on Barbary. There'd be rebel red from Murder Point to North Beach.”

“I was told they're thick here.”

“I ain't saying you can't spot 'em, all got up in lace goods and lifting their roofers to the mollies as like to give their active citizens some sun. Past dark they don't show their nebs outside the Bella Union. Sons of the Confederacy, my aunt's smicket. They couldn't make war on Queen Dick.”

“They've done a fair job of making war on peace officers,” I said. “Is that the same Bella Union where Daniel Webster Wheelock hangs his hat?”

“There ain't but one.” She took my measure from under her eyelids, one of which drooped a little like a broken window-shade. The powder she used by the pot hadn't quite eradicated an old scar that ran diagonally across its top. “What's your business with Cap'n Dan?”

“I heard he's the man to see in Barbary.”

“That's no packet, though you'll not see him without he gives it his benison. He posted the cole to the Commodore to start the Slop Chest. He's also the cove what sent the squint-eyed ponce and the slubber de gullions what set fire to the place.”

The stubborn fog had found its way into the hallway through the gaps between the boards. I held up the double eagle. “I like to listen to your Irish. Where can we go to hear more out of the draft?”

 

Her private quarters was three times the size of the room where Beecher and I had left our bags, which didn't make it spacious. There was a barrel stove for heating and cooking, a pair of mismatched chairs, one with a broken-cane seat, a cornshuck mattress on an iron frame, and a portrait of Nan's late husband, the Commodore, who had been twice her present age when it was painted and looked like just the kind of old walrus who would undertake to support a woman not yet born when he sprouted his first gray hair. The cut of the men's clothes in the doorless wardrobe—a number of sailors' jerseys and a full-dress suit—bore out Axel Hodge's boast that he was the keeper of Nan Feeny's knees. A seam in one wall showed where the back bar opened into the saloon. The room might have belonged to the master of the ship, if the Slop Chest had been a ship instead of a facsimile thrown together from the corpses of genuine vessels. The carpenter in charge was incapable of building anything that would float in a gentle pond.

Sitting up on the bed with her high-laced ankles crossed and peach brandy in a cordial glass in her hand—Beecher and I declined an invitation to join her in the sticky-sweet beverage—our hostess lowered her guard sufficiently to modify her language and, more revealingly, offer her colored guest a cigar from the Commodore's private stock, which she kept fresh by storing the boxes in a cupboard with fresh bread. He accepted it and made himself as comfortable as possible on the chair with the broken seat, puffing up gray clouds that found their way out through the spaces in the siding. Because the place was as private as a cornrick, we kept our voices low and Nan got up frequently to rewind the crank on a phonograph with a morning-glory horn the size of Joaquin's head. “Beautiful Dreamer” drifted out of the opening, interpreted by a tenor with bad sinuses.

Nan, for all her stature and presumed experience with strong drink, became candid under the influence of the peach brandy. We learned that the Commodore, whose given name was Cornelius, had not spent a day at sea, but had profited in Chinatown through the opium smuggled in by way of the pockets of common seamen so far as to have developed an affection for the briny breed. The policeman who had recommended the place had been mistaken about how it got its name. The Sailor's Rest, as the combination saloon and rooming house had originally been christened, had been rebaptized shortly before the Commodore's death, and without his consent, when the leader of a press gang who was variously known as Shanghai Mike, Mike the Crimp, and St. Michael the Persuader (after the effective methods by which he recruited reluctant hands for sea duty) smashed a bottle of green rum over the skull of an opponent in a game of
Rouge et Noir
and proclaimed that he had thus “launched” a new vessel he called the
Slop Chest
. No one dared oppose his fancy until his corpse was found in a Chinatown alley with its face caved in, ostensibly by a tong hatchet-man, but by then a couple of generations of patrons had come to know the establishment by no other name. It stuck, although in respect to her deceased husband Nan had stubbornly refused to take down the much-defaced sign the Commodore had commissioned. After the first structure was burned to the ground for nonpayment of the penny tax and replaced by the current building, there was no need to hang any sign at all, since the patrons themselves had contributed most of the construction work in return for free grog.

I noticed she still referred to the place as The Rest, and never without lifting her glass to the Commodore's bilious likeness. He had taken her off the line at a place called the House of Blazes to make her his wife, and whatever the old man may have wanted in the way of romantic attraction, he had made a lady of her (“swell mollisher” was the phrase she used), and she observed the ceremony of buying a round for the house every year on the anniversary of his birth. The fact that he'd been a solemn teetotaler all his life failed to strike her as ironic. Nan was a woman of contrasts, as well as handy with the portable Gatling she carried in her reticule. She got up once and turned back a corner of the threadbare Oriental rug to show the stain where she'd shot an old acquaintance who'd failed to grasp the significance of her retirement from the horizontal trade.

“Kill him?” I asked.

“He took his own sweet time, but infection done for him in the end.”

“Where was Hodge?”

“Tobing lushies in Brisbane would be my guess. Axel wandered in here a year ago Independence Day, dragging that slag and thimble off his flapper, cute as cows and kisses. You wanted to palm him like a pennyweight. The Commodore was gone to Grim ten years and then some, rest him. Axel ain't a patch on his articles, but an old ewe like me can't be too particular. Any old dwarf in a storm, I say.

“That scrub I put to bed with a shovel was a square citizen,” she went on, refilling her dainty glass from the decanter. Some of the contents slopped over, seasoning further the blot on the floorboards at her feet. “I'd of scragged for it sure as blunt if Cap'n Dan himself didn't stand in with me at the inquest. That hedged the sink he played me on the other, where I'm concerned.”

I actually understood most of that. It was like border Spanish; it made sense if you didn't think too hard or try to speak it yourself. I couldn't tell where Beecher stood. He was enjoying his cigar.

“Why do you think Wheelock spoke up for you?” I asked.

“Who knows what goes through a nob's knolly? I put on this neckweed every day so as not to disremember how near I come to mounting the ladder.” She touched the ribbon at her throat. “I don't mind saying it takes the sting out when the ponce comes for his copper.”

“Does he ever come around?”

“The ponce? First and fifteenth, regular as a yack.”

“Wheelock.”

“What for? The knock-me-down at the Bella Union don't burn holes in the glass and he don't have to break Tommy with sea-crabs. Which don't make him no jack cove in my thinking. God rest him, I never seen what the Commodore did in them fish.” She toasted the portrait and drank.

“Do your customers know what you think of them?”

“I ain't said pharse in here what I'd say out front. They think it's top-ropes after eight months on pannam and bad swig. Ask the first duffer you see if Nan don't amuse.”

I followed only part of that. I wondered if she made it up as she went along.

“Most politicians make it a point to get out and shake hands with the hoi polloi,” I said. “What makes Wheelock so shy?”

“Most politicians ain't blessed with Hoodlums. Come ballot day they'll mark your
X
for you. You don't even need to ask.” She gave the phonograph a thoughtful crank. “If guessing was my game, I'd say it's on account of his bully crab, what the squares call a club foot. He don't flash it about.”

I asked if an appointment could be arranged.

She laughed. She was back in bed with her brandy. Two-score years later and I can't hear “Beautiful Dreamer” without picturing every grubby detail of that room.

“Stifle a Hoodlum,” she said. “They've a place in his panter, and he might be peery enough to want to cut his eyes on you before he sends his tobbies to ease you over.”

Beecher looked at me through the smoke of his cigar. “I forgot what's stifle.”

“Put him to bed with a shovel,” I said.

Nan laughed again. “You're a fly one, that you are. I'll wear weeds when you take scold's-cure. See if I don't.”

For the next
three days I did what Judge Blackthorne would consider nothing, or as close to it as one could come in a lively place like the Barbary Coast.

Both our berths were as uncomfortable as they appeared; after our first night, Beecher and I traded places just to make sure. The ticks were as bad as advertised, although after our inaugural experience with them my companion burned two packs of ready-made cigarettes exterminating the ones he could find hiding in the seams by daylight. Smacking the survivors and scratching their bites gave us the benefit of taking our minds off the slats gouging holes in our hides. It all gave me a more friendly opinion of Shanghai Mike and his decision to rechristen the place: This was no Sailor's Rest.

The morning after that first night, while Beecher was using the community washbasin behind the building, I found a place down the street that served biscuits and gravy that would have passed muster anywhere I'd been, a pleasant surprise, and a cup of coffee that was not. I paid too much for the meal and went back to the saloon, where I sat down to a fast, losing game of blackjack with the resident gambler. When he excused himself to use the outhouse, Beecher sat down in his chair.

He was irritable, and with good reason. In his world, Pullman porter was as high as a man could climb, and the Slop Chest could only remind him how short the fall was to stony bottom. Then again he might have been just tired and hungry. I told him about the place where I'd eaten breakfast, but he appeared to be just waiting for me to stop talking so he could start.

“What we doing today?” he asked.

“We're doing it.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“Same thing.”

He scratched at a bite on his wrist. He looked as haggard as I felt. “Ask you something?”

“Why stop now?”

“How long you been on this job?”

“About eight years.”

He examined the bite, a tiny, white-rimmed volcano erupting from dark skin. “Ask you something else?”

“I'm still here.”

“How you know when it's done?”

I didn't answer. He didn't have to know what I was waiting for until it was here. His cavalry experience would not have prepared him for it or its necessity. I trusted him with my life, but not the truth; not yet.

The fog, at least, was less persistent than the vermin. It was always there in the morning, although not as thick and choking as it had been on the afternoon of our arrival, but it burned off by midday. However, the presence of the sun did little to brighten Davis Street and its tributaries. The ramshackle saloons, bagnios, and rooming houses didn't cast shadows so much as drain the sunlight of its energy, and the streets were puddled with slops tossed out through their open doors and upstairs windows the night before. The flies that overhung them in dense clouds barely stirred to make room for the hooves and wheels that churned through the offal, buzzing impatiently until they passed.

Deprived of forgiving gaslight, the harlots who prowled the boardwalks—where there were boardwalks—demonstrated only too clearly that they found it convenient to paint one face on top of another without removing the previous application, often to a depth of as much as a quarter-inch. The pimps, gamblers, and cutpurses were hardly an improvement. Smallpox, knives, and coshes had left their marks on man and woman alike. On my first stroll around the block, I passed a half-dozen pedestrians, all of whom didn't total a complete specimen of human being among them. A good man with modeling wax, glass eyes, and timber legs could have made his retirement in six months in that neighborhood, if someone didn't bash him over the head and turn out his pockets at the end of the first day.

The maze of sagging, paint-peeling buildings created an impression of incredible age, yet the oldest of them was barely thirty, and most were much newer, their predecessors having burned to the ground in the five great fires that had shorn through the city in the space of eighteen months. Carelessness and arson had failed to eradicate the kind of physical and spiritual corruption that in most cases was centuries in the making. The boomtown years had encouraged construction to the point where two vehicles could not pass in some blocks without risking locked hubs and the inevitable altercation that ensued. The tight quarters bred confrontation and vice, which in turn bred more confrontation, and there seemed not a square yard of earth that hadn't been baptized in the blood of generations of innocents; which in the local dog-Latin was defined as corpses, mortals removed to a plane beyond guilt. Years later, visiting the East End of London, I was struck by that same perception of ancient evil, but there the process had been going on for four hundred years. By the late summer of 1883, I'd spent a year of wary days in cowtowns, miners' camps, and end-of-track helldorados, nearly lost my brains to a stray bullet while taking an honest bath on the other side of a wall belonging to an assayer's office when a client caught him with his thumb on the scale, but had never seen a place to compare with shanty San Francisco for unvarnished wickedry. The place wallowed in it.

I was encouraged by the law of percentages to believe there were decent people living within hailing distance of the Slop Chest: locksmiths and laundresses, bookkeepers and barbers, wet nurses and wheelwrights, glaziers and governesses; the usual mix of honest laborers struggling to pay the greengrocer from week to week. The difference here was they kept their trades behind closed doors like embezzlers, locked themselves in with their families at night, and scurried by first light and last dusk between hearth and forge, slinging frightened glances over their shoulders as if they were transporting stolen goods. Day was night in Barbary. Killers and pickpockets ran free while the law-abiding paced their cells.

Different day, same conversation:

“What we doing today?”

“We're doing it.”

“What about tomorrow?”

“Same thing.”

Inside Nan Feeny's place of business, the faces of the clientele kept changing. One set of sailors stopped in for a beer or twelve, gambled, fought, were thrown out by Axel Hodge or staggered off to their rooms, shipped out on the morning tide, and were replaced by another set. Mates, boatswains, swabs, cookies, ships' carpenters, and the odd captain—the aristocrat of that society, distinguished from the others by his tobacco pipe of unblemished clay and no missing buttons—tramped in and out. By the third morning, Beecher and I were the senior residents. The only constants were Nan, Billy the bartender, Hodge, the proliferating damage to the bar's marble top, and the tinhorn in the soiled topper and shabby cutaway, who slept under some other roof after he'd skinned his last sea-crab of the evening.

He called himself Pinholster. I didn't ask, and he didn't volunteer, whether he was born with the name or if any other went with it. Frontier etiquette had taught me better than to pursue the point. When he got tired of fleecing me, he confided that he'd served aboard the U.S.S.
Minnesota
during the late unpleasantness, which was the reason he gave for keeping his game at the Slop Chest when he could have tripled his fortunes at any of the better places on Pacific Street or Kearney. He said he had an affection for sailors—“a place in his panter,” as Nan would have put it—and in any case an old widower such as he didn't need much to keep himself, just a dram and a plate of hot food and a soft place to stretch out while his nervous stomach processed it.

I figured he wasn't quite forty, but there were streaks of gray in his chestnut beard and his face had the tobacco-cured look of a lifetime spent shut up in saloons and fandango parlors. The beard needed trimming, his hat a good brushing, and there was no way left to turn his collar or cuffs that hadn't been tried, but as to the things that applied directly to his vocation—his hands—they were smooth and white and the nails pared and buffed. He could cut a deck one-handed without showing off, and so far as I could tell he dealt from the top and never palmed a pasteboard. However, he might just have been minding his manners when playing with me. Rumors infested Nan Feeny's little enterprise like ticks and I wouldn't have bet a dollar to a dead dog there was a beggar or a spiv between there and the harbor who didn't know two deputy U.S. marshals were in residence.

“Here's a show,” Pinholster said without looking up from the deck he was shuffling.

I thought he was getting ready to demonstrate a card trick, but just then a hand touched my shoulder. I reached for a revolver that wasn't on my hip. I hadn't heard so much as a footfall.

“Chinee papah, mistuh man?”

A young Chinese stood next to the table. In his pillbox hat, black smock, and shapeless trousers he was scarcely larger than Hodge, but his limbs were all in proportion and the square lines of his jaw said he was no boy. He wore the queue of his class and held out a folded newspaper covered with Chinese characters. I was about to tell him I didn't read the language when a loud report and a rattle of shattered marble told me the bar had lost a little more of its value.

“'Ey!” Hodge's accent was up on its haunches. “Wun Long Dong! Speel to your crib, chop-chop!”

“Stubble your red rag, Jack Sprat!” snarled the Chinese.

Hodge hopped down from his ladder and came around the end of the bar, twirling the iron ball over his head on the end of its chain. The intruder padded out.

“Two, three times a month that same celestial comes in here peddling his papers,” Pinholster said. “Sometimes he makes a sale or two before Billy or Hodge hares him out.”

“I didn't know Nan served Chinese customers.”

“She doesn't. The Hoodlums wouldn't stand for it. You may not think there are rules of behavior in Barbary, but you're mistaken. Chinatown for Chinamen, the waterfront for the Sydney Ducks, and so forth. Just because you can't see the lines doesn't mean you won't bleed if you cross one.”

“If that's true, who buys his papers?”

“It isn't the papers. It's what's inside.” He cut out the ace of spades and held it up. “Black dreams.”

“Opium? The Commodore built this place selling dope to the Chinese.”

He flicked a crumb off his moustache that had been there all morning.

“You might have noticed Nan's her own creature. In any event, that was all before Captain Dan. He settled the last tong war by negotiating a licensing agreement between Chinatown and the Hoodlums. The jack dandies don't peddle dope and the celestials stow their wids outside Chinatown. That means—”

“Don't raise hell.”

“You learn fast,” he said. “You ought to apply that brain-box to cards. Part of not raising hell is keeping their hop inside their own jurisdiction. This fellow that Hodge just prodded out's a spunk looking for black powder, and he'll find it if the tongs catch wind. Wheelock doesn't maintain the peace because the sneak-thieves and swablers are afraid of him or his Hoodlums. They're afraid of each other, and they all turn to him because he's one of them.”

“One of who?”

“Whoever he's with at the time.”

I said. “No wonder the police can't enforce order. They aren't politicians.”

“He's got the gabs, all right, but they're no good without teeth. If he thinks Nan's violating the agreement, she'll think that fire she had was love's own sweet song.”

“The Hoodlums.”

“They're what answers for a police force in Barbary.” He dealt himself a hand of poker: four bullets and the king of clubs.

“Where does Wheelock stand with the Sons of the Confederacy?”

He lifted his brows. That was one piece of intelligence that hadn't filtered through the walls of Nan Feeny's room.

“About where he stands with the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, which is not at all. The baby rebels aren't a force here. If they're what brought you all this way you wasted the price of a train ticket.”

“That's what Nan said. My information is this is their headquarters.”

“Not knowing who gave it to you, I wouldn't call him a liar. The Salvation Army's on every street corner, but I've been here a spell and I've yet to see a soul saved. If numbers counted, we'd have a Chinaman for mayor.”

I asked to see the deck. He made a face of mild disappointment and said it wasn't marked, but he slid it my way across the baize. I picked it up, shuffled, and dealt a heart flush.

Pinholster smiled for the first time. “You didn't learn that chasing mail robbers in the territories.”

“I owned a faro concession and part of a saloon in New Mexico for a little while. You can get good at anything if you do it often enough. Quicker still if you don't like starving.”

“You've been losing for a reason,” he said. “I think I can guess what it is.”

I scooped up the cards, cut the deck one-handed, and slid it back toward him. “It won't take long. You've already told me everything I needed to know except one thing.”

 

I was drinking a beer at the bar when Beecher came in from the street and checked his revolver with Billy; in the Slop Chest, the municipal ban on firearms only went as far as the door. Beecher was unsteady on his feet and his eyes were hot. He'd found another place that served beer to Negroes.

“What we doing today?” he said.

I waited until Billy moved down the bar to fill a sailor's glass.

“What's the date?”

That gave Beecher pause. “Fourteenth.”

“Fifteenth. We got here on the twelfth and we've been here three days.”

“What's the difference?”

“The difference is today's the day Wheelock's tax collector comes to call.”

“‘Squint-eyed ponce what smells of lilacs.'” His impression of Nan's brogue was faulty.

“I got a more complete description from the tinhorn. Also a time and place. That corner table's as good as a window on Barbary.”