“They’re gone,” Sweeney said wonderingly, crawling toward Reuben and the nun on his hands and knees. They were sprawled on their backs on opposite sides of Fireplug’s body, staring numbly up at the sky. Gunsmoke drifted on the air, stinging their nostrils.”Do you think he’s dead?” asked Sweeney, gesturing toward the motionless thug.
“God, I hope so,” breathed Sister.
Reuben sat up on one elbow and looked at her, interested.
“For the sake of his immortal soul,” she said quickly.
Sweeney stared at her, too.
“Well—if he’s alive, he’ll probably just commit more sins, but if he’s dead, at least there’s a chance he hasn’t had time to damn himself for eternity. His soul might spend some time in purgatory, but then—”
Fireplug groaned.
“The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Reuben said thoughtfully.
Sweeney stood up. “I’d better go and check on Mr. Willis and Mr. Blalock,” he said, and trotted off.
Reuben had lost his eyeglasses. He could see them on the ground about four feet from Fireplug’s outflung hand, bent but not broken. He didn’t feel like pretending to grope around for them just now. He and Sister Gus surveyed each other across the body, and after a few seconds she thought to pull the torn halves of her habit together across her bosom. “That was a lucky blow you struck with your cane, Mr. Cordoba,” she said slowly.
“Wasn’t it? God was with us today, no question about it.”
“A miracle?” she suggested, narrow-eyed.
“Exactly—a miracle. Well, let’s see what he looks like.” She went very still. “Figure of speech,” he explained after a pregnant pause. “Sweeney said they all had on hoods.” She eyed him for another two seconds, then reached down to peel Fireplug’s burlap bag away from his face. Without surprise, Reuben took note that he was Chinese, and about twenty years old. “Well?”
“Old guy,” she said without inflection. “Red hair, balding.”
He stroked his chin. “See what he’s got on him.”
“What?”
“Identification.”
“Why?”
“Because his friends have my money,” he explained patiently.
“But the police—” She stopped, obviously seeing his point. With visible distaste, she started to rummage around in Fireplug’s pockets. She paused with her hand inside his coat, and slowly withdrew a small clay object. A statue, about four inches high. They stared at it for a full half minute, neither speaking. Reuben thought it looked like the body of a man with the head of a cat.
“Anything?” he asked.
“Nothing yet.” Deliberately holding his gaze, Sister Gus slipped the statue down the front of her lacy white chemise.
She went back to her search. From the robber’s trouser pocket, she extracted a folded piece of paper. Reuben caught a glimpse of long columns of Chinese characters before she glanced up at him. “Laundry ticket,” she said blandly, and slipped it down her front as well.
Willis hobbled toward them, supported by Sweeney. The driver’s face was ash-gray and there was a swollen bruise on his temple, but his eyes were fairly clear and his voice was steady. “Anybody hurt?” he asked. They said they were fine and asked him how Blalock was doing. “He’ll be okay if we get him to a doctor pretty soon. How’s this one?” He tapped Fireplug’s elbow with the toe of his boot.
“Out cold,” said Sister.
“There’s a Wells Fargo relay station about twelve miles back. I can send a wire from there to the sheriff in San Mateo. Sorry to delay your trip, folks, but the sheriff’ll be wanting to talk to all of us about this terrible business.”
Out of the question, thought Reuben. He saw the same lack of enthusiasm for speaking to the sheriff flicker across the nun’s face, too.
“I must go and see to poor Mr. Blalock,” she murmured, rising to her feet. The pious note in her voice put him on guard. He muttered something to Willis and Sweeney about helping her, and followed.
The bandits had left Fireplug’s horse behind and it was still standing by the stagecoach, grazing. When Sister Gus neared it, the animal shied and trotted a little way down the road, spooked by her flowing black robes. She glanced back then and saw Reuben, and immediately changed direction for Blalock, who had collapsed against the stagecoach’s rear wheel. She knelt down beside him and touched his face, but he didn’t open his eyes.
Sweeney and the driver staggered up, lugging Fireplug between them. “Mr. Cordoba, we’ve got the outlaw here,” panted Sweeney, “right over here to your left. Do you think you could help us get him into the stage? He’s heavier than he looks, but I think if you grabbed his feet we could hoist him in there. Right over here. Got him?”
Reuben took hold of the bandit’s ankles and helped sling him inside the stagecoach. Sweeney clambered up after him, pulling and shoving at Fireplug’s dead weight until he had him slumped on the floor with his back propped against the far door. Willis, meanwhile, tied his feet together with a rope.
When Reuben turned around, Sister Gus was gone.
“Excuse me,” he muttered to Willis, “I, um, I’m not feeling well.” Cutting a swath with his cane, he shambled down the lane after her.
He saw her beyond the first bend in the road. She had one foot in the stirrup, one on the ground, hopping frantically after the horse while it pivoted away from her. When she saw him, she forgot about escaping. “I knew it!” she cried, dropping the reins and starting toward him, fists clenched, mad as a hive of wasps.
“Sister?” he tried, waving his arms. “Is that you?”
His mistake was letting her under his guard; she darted in and landed a solid right before he could duck. “It’s me,” she said grimly.
He clutched his stinging jaw with both hands, momentarily seeing stars. “What the hell did you do that for?” he sputtered.
“Because you’re a sidewinder and a pervert.”
“Hold it, now, let’s—”
“Degenerate!” She squared off to punch him again. “You’d’ve let that Chinaman rape me!”
“How can you say that? I saved you.”
“Fiend. Coward!”
He jumped back, dodging a deft left hook. “Let’s have this conversation later,” he suggested, grabbing for the horse’s mane before the animal could shy away.
“That horse is mine, I saw him first. Stop! Damn you—”
He leapt onto the animal’s back, out of the way of Sister’s flying fists. The stirrup leathers were way too short; he had to bend his knees like a cricket. He leaned over, offering her a helping hand, but she slapped it away with a sacrilegious curse. He backed the horse up and kicked it into a walk.
“Hey! Wait! Damn it, you wait up!”
“Well, hurry the hell up, Gus, before they figure out we’re gone.” This time she took his outstretched hand with alacrity, and he hoisted her up behind him. When he spurred the horse, she had to fling her arms around his waist to stay aboard.
Nobody appeared, nobody shouted after them from the direction of the stagecoach. After half a mile of tense, bumpy silence, Reuben was ready to believe they’d gotten clean away.
“We did it!” he exulted, slowing the horse to a canter. “They won’t come after us in the stage because they’ve got to go south to telegraph the sheriff.” Behind him, Sister Gus was already fidgeting; he guessed she wasn’t used to bouncing bareback on a horse’s rear end.
“Where are we going?”
He could tell by the tone of her voice that she was still irritated with him. “I thought I’d go home,” he said mildly.
“Which is where?”
“Fourteen Yancy Street, San Francisco.” Now, why had he told her that? “Where do you live?”
“None of your business.”
There you were: it never paid to trust a woman. “I’ve got about four dollars and some change,” he mentioned as they trotted up out of a pine-filled canyon. “And you?”
“Nothing,” she snapp
ed. “Not one thin dime.”
He grunted. “That makes it harder. We’ll have to keep riding, then, at least as far as Woodside. With four bucks, we can probably get third-class seats on a train from there to San Francisco.”
She said nothing.
He decided it was time they introduced themselves. “My name’s Reuben Jones.” He twisted around, holding out his hand. She ignored it. “And you are Miss … ?”
“Mrs.,” she corrected testily. “Mrs. Henri Rousselot.”
He whistled. “Well, that’s kind of a mouthful. Why don’t I just call you Grace, and you can call me Reuben.”
“How do you know my—” The beautiful blue eyes widened. He could tell the second she figured it out: he knew her name because he’d read it on her dressing gown, embroidered in white thread. Right after he’d walked into her room and seen her naked as a straight pin.
Sister Gus shoved back on the horse’s rump as far as she could go without falling off, and didn’t speak another word for twenty miles.
3
What is commonly called friendship is only a little more honor among rogues.
—Henry David Thoreau
THE GHOSTLY, SOOTHING HOOT of a foghorn intruded on the tail end of Reuben’s dream, just when it was getting good. He was standing behind a lectern, delivering a sermon to a churchful of nuns. Seated in orderly rows, they all suddenly crossed their legs and hiked up their skirts, like a chorus of cancan dancers. Some had pistols tucked into their garters, and some had little floral bouquets. Smiling, swinging their crossed legs back and forth in a leisurely rhythm, they hung on Reuben’s every word, and nodded in unison when he suggested that many of them might benefit from some private spiritual instruction.
The foghorn’s steady, muffled bray couldn’t be ignored, though; half awake, he finally gave up trying to force the dream to its happy conclusion. His conscious fantasies were never as satisfying as his unconscious ones anyway, plus they had a way of turning comical the harder he concentrated on them.
He shifted, trying to uncramp his knees; a spring pierced him in the ribs. He came fully awake and remembered where he was: on his sitting-room sofa, huddled in his underwear under a scratchy blanket that reeked of mothballs. It took a little longer to remember why: because Grace was upstairs in his bed.
Grace Rousselot. An unlikely name if he’d ever heard one. He’d used logic in arguing with her last night about the sleeping arrangements, pointing out that since they’d ridden in close physical proximity on the back of a horse for half the day and then sat side by side on a train for the other half, in nearly as intimate circumstances—well, why not just lie down together in his big, soft bed at day’s end? Why let abstract concepts like horizontal and vertical complicate the simple fact that they were two weary adults in need of a good night’s sleep? But he’d lost the argument. She was a woman, so logic was lost on her.
She’d gotten over her speechlessness around Portola Valley, and harangued him from there all the way to Woodside on the theme of his pervertedness, cowardice, and corruption. The inhibiting presence of other passengers on the train they’d caught at Hillsborough had finally, mercifully, shut her up, and they’d traveled the rest of the way in comparative peace. She still wouldn’t say where she came from. He assumed it wasn’t San Francisco; otherwise she wouldn’t have accepted, with a conspicuous absence of gratitude, his offer of a free night’s lodging. He thought her lack of appreciation showed a certain churlishness of character, and her continued pique over the trick he’d played on her didn’t say much for her sense of humor.
He couldn’t help liking her, though, in spite of her defects. She had a temper and a sharp tongue, but they didn’t wound very deeply; he thought they were more entertaining than biting. And she had guts, first when she’d stood up to Fireplug and then when she’d fired back at his bandit comrade, blasting away like Annie Oakley. For Reuben, who didn’t even own a gun, that had been a defining moment.
He sat up, groaning with stiffness, wondering what time it was. Early, he judged from the heaviness of the wet fog drifting past the window. He stretched painfully and pulled on his trousers, then his socks. Last night he’d forgotten to close the window that looked out over the alley, so his apartment was chilly this morning. He got up to close the window, noticing that the monkey flowers were in full bloom along the fence. The sea-stained cottages across the way gleamed like ghosts in the summer fog, and the shouts of children sounded hollow and deceptively far away. His neighborhood was old, and more colorful than respectable, which, for Reuben, helped make up for its other shortcomings. He lived in a once-grand carriage house behind a once-grand house a few blocks south of Telegraph Hill. He was a month behind in his rent, which wasn’t much; but then his apartment had only two rooms, one over the other, and a tiny second-floor bathroom. He’d lived in worse and he’d lived in better. Mrs. Finney was an asset; she tolerated his eccentricities, asked no questions, and had an endearing habit of overlooking the significance of the first of the month.
He got a fire going in the coal stove and put the coffeepot on to heat. Coffee was the limit of his home-cooking accomplishments, though; he took his meals in restaurants or, if Mrs. Finney was in a charitable mood, in the big house with her other boarders. But he still referred to the corner of his living room that contained the stove and the small cabinet full of cups and glasses as the kitchen.
A sleepy groan sounded from overhead, followed by the creak of bedsprings. He took two mugs from the cabinet and filled them with steaming coffee. “Rise and shine,” he called out on his way upstairs. He heard the fast rustle of covers as, presumably, his houseguest made herself decent.
“Morning, Gus,” he greeted her, sticking his head in the doorway. “Hope you like your coffee black.” She extended a bare arm from the blankets and made a muffled sound, which he decided was meant to express thanks. Handing her a mug, he sat down on the bed’s edge, blowing steam over the rim of his own mug and watching her. She looked good. Her hair was a cloud of sexy blonde tangles, and her sleepy eyes gave him ideas. If he wasn’t mistaken, she didn’t have any clothes on. “How are we feeling this morning?” he inquired politely. “I trust you found the bed comfortable?”
She made another monosyllabic reply and sipped her coffee, eyeing him back. He guessed she wasn’t a morning person.
“It’s a beautiful day, or it will be when the fog blows away. Did the horns bother you last night? I’ve gotten so used to the sound, I don’t even hear it anymore. How long do you think you’ll be staying, Sister? Not that I’m trying to rush you; farthest thing from my mind. You’re as welcome as the day is long, and I mean that sincerely. You could even move in, if you—”
“As long as it takes me to pull a stake together and find some real clothes,” she broke in grumpily.
He must be physically deprived: he even found her hoarse morning croak sexy. “Clothes and a stake. Yes indeed, those are things to consider.” He stroked his chin. “I imagine your husband will be able to help you out there, hmm?’’
“Hmm.” She ran her thumb across the place on the mug where her lips had been. “I’ll need to send him a telegram as soon as possible.”
Which didn’t, he noticed, quite answer the question. “There’s a Western Union office about six blocks from here.” She hummed again and blew on her coffee. “Where exactly is your husband?” he asked offhandedly.
Equally casual, she flapped her hand in the air. “North of here.”
“Aha. Canada?”
She scowled. “South of Canada.”
“Well, that narrows it down. What’s he do for a living?”
“Henri is …” She thought for a second. “He’s self-employed. You might call him an entrepreneur.”
Reuben grinned appreciatively. “Is that a fact.”
Unexpectedly, she smiled back. She had a hell of a smile, wide and full of sly humor. He felt the wariness between them receding; the possibility of joining forces with her tantalized him aga
in. Not because it would be smart, but because it would be fun.
He glanced around the room. She’d draped her black habit across the back of his wardrobe; her shoes were lined up neatly on the floor, black stockings tucked modestly inside. She was an orderly ex-nun. He pulled on his earlobe. “Where’d you put the statue?”
When she leaned back against the pillow, the blanket slipped down, and he saw with deep disappointment that she wasn’t naked; she had on the frilly white shift he’d gotten a glimpse of yesterday. He eyed it now, wondering if the statue could possibly still be in there.
She had her eyebrows raised innocently; he waited for her to say, “What statue?” But after a long minute, during which she appeared to be taking his measure, she set her mug down, reached behind her, and pulled the statue out from under the pillow.
She kept it on her lap, not inviting him to touch it, but they bent their heads over it together. “Priceless?” muttered Reuben. “Sweeney calls this priceless? Look at it.”
“I know, but it’s supposed to be old.”
“What is it, a cat or a man?” He squinted at the faded blue figure; some of its surfaces were worn smooth, and the material underneath looked like ordinary red clay.
“Both. It’s a tiger-headed human figure, one of the twelve earthly branches of the Chinese calendrical cycle.”
He gaped at her. “How do you know that?”
“I know lots of things,” she said smugly. “I’m very well read, extremely well educated—”
“You read it in Sweeney’s catalog.” He laughed, remembering.
She grinned, admitting it. Her left eyetooth was slightly crooked and overlapped the neighboring incisor, a defect that gave a rakish twist to her sly smiles. “Too bad we don’t still have that catalog. I just glanced at it that night in the hotel, and all I can remember about this is that it’s the tiger. The others are the dragon, the goat, the horse, the monkey … I forget the rest. The dog, I think. One for every year of the zodiac, and they all mean something. I think it said they put them in tombs.”
Crooked Hearts Page 4
