Port Hazard

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Sixty-five even,” he said. “You beat out the nearest man by a dollar. You fixing to charge it to expenses?”

  26

  “Long live the emperor,” Nan Feeny said. “Sluice your gob with this. It’ll draw the sting from that rotten swig what they pour at the Slaughterhouse.”

  I watched her fill a glass with something orange and yellow from a canning jar. It glopped twice and she stirred it with a spoon until it assumed a uniform consistency as thick as sausage gravy.

  “Should I ask what’s in it?” I picked it up and sniffed at it. It had a familiar smell I remembered from childhood, mixed with something never before encountered. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

  “Buttermilk and grenadine, to start. I’m sworn to family secrecy as to the rest. My grandfather in Limerick died with a glass in his hand. Don’t let it funk you,” she said, when I set it down untasted. “He was shot by a vicar.”

  I picked it up again. “What’s it do?”

  “Well, it won’t get rid of that baggage in your room. I ought to charge you extra rent.”

  “I packed her off with two dollars for her time. When was the last time something happened in the Sailor’s Rest you didn’t know about?”

  She touched the ribbon at her throat, thinking. “Christmas Day, eighteen seventy-nine. I was down with the Grippe. Tip it down, and don’t leave off till you can see me through the bottom. It won’t work took in pieces.”

  I drank it in one long draught. It tasted the way marigolds smelled rotting. She saw on my face what was going on in my stomach and pointed at the spitoon in front of the footrail. I bent and scooped it up in both hands. It was a near enough thing even then. When I came up, wiping my mouth with the back of a hand, she was unstopping a bottle of ginger beer. “That should cut the copper.”

  I took two swigs. The metallic taste began to recede, and with it the pounding in my skull. My legs were still weak. I leaned on the bar for support.

  “I’d of warned you away of the Slaughterhouse if you asked,” she said. “The bilge they use to cut the squail’s worse than the squail itself.”

  I’d wearied of the conversation, which I’d only half understood anyway.

  “Where are Billy and Hodge? This is the first time I’ve seen you behind the bar.” I was the only customer apart from a sailor losing steadily to Pinholster. Beecher, who recovered from the effects of strong spirits as quickly as he succumbed to them, had gone out in search of breakfast.

  “It’s Billy’s morning out. He spends every rag he makes on a mollisher up on Telegraph Hill. Axel’s down with a worse case than you, right along with the rest of Barbary. Come this time next week, they’ll all be smacking the calfskin in Goodhue’s congregation; them what ain’t dancing at their death from the gas lamps.”

  “And where will you be?”

  “Well, Goodhue’s calfskin ain’t mine, for all the words are the same. I ain’t touched a drop of the peach since night before last, nor will I through tomorrow night, when I’ll sit on the bed the Commodore bought, with my pepperbox close to hand and loads enough to see me through Gabriel’s blast. I don’t intend to sail to Hell unescorted.”

  “If that’s Barbary’s philosophy, Goodhue’s Hundred are in for subtraction.”

  “A properly raptured Christian ain’t so easy to kill as all that; ask Caesar. And a hundred has a way of becoming a thousand once they’re kindled.”

  I couldn’t argue with her arithmetic. I’d seen it put to the test in too many towns.

  “What’s Goodhue’s draw? Bible slappers don’t kick up much dust most places.”

  “Most places ain’t Frisco. Every few years the swells get their crops full of Barbary and they don’t look too hard at whoever steps up to the mark. After it’s done they call in the army, hang the loudest, and dress for dinner. In the old country, we lit a candle. Here they light Barbary.”

  “Where does Goodhue hang his hat?”

  She pursed her lips. She had something of the school matron in her. I remembered she’d been a governess in Boston before circumstances drove her West.

  “He’s got him a crib on Mission Street, courtesy of the God-fearing folk of San Francisco. It’s a sin to own things if you can trade Paradise Everlasting for bed and board.” She mopped the bartop, sweeping away marble splinters along with the spills. “I wouldn’t aim for his heart, if that’s where you’re bound. The ball would pass through empty air and hit a soul worth saving on the other side as like as not.”

  “Don’t believe what you read in the dime novels. I haven’t shot anyone in weeks.”

  She stopped mopping. Her face went blank. “Steer clear of the Major Doctor. He’s Black Spy in a collar.”

  “If he’s human and speaks English, I’ve got nothing to lose by seeking him out.”

  “That’s your second mistake. Your first is wanting to seek him out to begin with. He was a barrel-maker before he took to the cloth, and age ain’t weakened him nor piety gentled his nature. He’s throwed more than one poor sinner down the steps of the East Street Mission just for questioning his interpretation of the Word.”

  “I’ll stay away from stairs.”

  “You’d profit higher staying away from Goodhue.”

  “Now I’m curious. I’ve never locked horns with the clergy.”

  “What’s the percentage? I thought it was the Sons of the Confederacy you was after.”

  “I’m not forgetting that. I’m not forgetting I’m sworn to keep the peace, either.”

  “You got to have peace to keep it.”

  I smiled. I was feeling better by the minute, thanks to either the conversation or Nan Feeny’s orange elixir. It put me in mind of the wisdom of a deputy marshal, dead these five years, who’d told me he couldn’t understand people who never drank hard liquor, rising each morning knowing that’s as good as they would feel all day long. He’d been stone-cold sober the day he was killed.

  “Peace is just a time to reload.”

  She swept up the ginger beer bottle and clunked it into the ash can behind the bar. “I’ll see they cut that into your stone,” she said. “If I live through tomorrow night.”

  The sailor threw down his cards, scraped back his chair, and wove an unsteady pattern toward the bar. I slid into his place.

  Pinholster, stacking his chips, shook his head. “If you ever decide to change professions, I don’t recommend mine. When people win, they crow at you, and when they lose, they bring your parentage into question. You never see them at their best.”

  “I’m short of sympathy. You could have posed as a priest.”

  “Even worse. I’d have to listen to them complain about their losses in confession. I assume, since you’ve cleaned me out of both cash and intelligence, that you come with news.”

  “Sid the Spunk is dead.”

  He shuffled the deck. “May I inquire as to your source?”

  “Let’s just say I got it from the mysterious East.”

  “You surprise me. Celestials are renowned for their wisdom and their unwillingness to share it with the uncivilized West. Obfuscation is the one dialect common to all the provinces of China.”

  “Corroboration is a dangerous business in Chinatown. I’m expected to take a hatchet for the United States of America, not for Allan Pinkerton.”

  “It’s Fat John, then?”

  I said nothing. I’d forgotten how good he was at spotting tells.

  He shrugged and set down the deck. “That’s that, I suppose. My last assignment.”

  “Don’t look so funereal. Now you can go back to Chicago before all hell busts loose.”

  “I’m haunted by the suspicion that Sid the Spunk will show up to see me off. I wouldn’t care to go to my reward knowing I’d failed at the finish.”

  “Your reward may come as early as tomorrow night.”

  He scratched his ragged beard.

  “I’ve never seen a lynching, though I’ve heard it described. I’d still take the rope over what’s in st
ore. Is it your conviction our yellow friend has told you the truth?”

  I shook my head. “You didn’t pay to see my hand.”

  “Nevertheless, I believe you’ve shown it to me.” He picked up the cards. “One last friendly game? Just to determine which of us is the better gambler.”

  “It wouldn’t prove anything. You’ve got nothing to lose.”

  “I believe the condemned is entitled to a boon.”

  “How many last requests do you have coming?”

  We played, however. The game ended in a draw.

  Minutes later, standing on the boardwalk, I looked up at the slanted roof of the Slop Chest, my home away from the home I didn’t have. A seagull, red-eyed and fat with carrion, was roosting on the peak of the stovepipe. That was an omen I scarcely needed on my way to see Owen Goodhue, founder of the First Eden Infantry, Army of the River Jordan.

  27

  Beecher caught up with me three blocks away from the Slop Chest. “What we doing today?”

  I’d grown tired of the question.

  “I’m headed to Mission Street. You can come along if you want. I don’t need anyone to stand behind me this trip.”

  “I hear different, if it’s Goodhue you’re going to see. He broke a deacon’s neck on East Street fighting over Jesus.”

  “I heard something along those lines. I don’t intend to argue Scripture.”

  “Reckon I’ll tag along. I ain’t tried riding one of them cable cars.”

  “One streetcar’s pretty much like all the rest.”

  “You shamed to be seen with me, boss?”

  “Stop drawing lines in the dirt. This is a friendly visit. The reverend gentleman might not take kindly to two deputies dropping in.”

  “I’ll wait outside.”

  “You’re coming inside if you’re coming with me. You’re no good to me with a wall between.”

  “That’s what I been saying.”

  The conductor, a sidewhiskered Scot with a short clay pipe screwed into the middle of his face, scowled at Beecher, but he took our money. We shared the car with some laborers traveling with their lunch buckets and a ladies’ maid with a basket of knitting in her lap; the gentry were wedded to their private carriages and the conductor was adept at blocking access to the steps whenever someone of doubtful character tried to board. We alighted a block short of Mission and walked the rest of the way. Here the buildings were made of proper planed siding and brick, with flower boxes and well-tended gardens fenced off behind wrought iron. Five minutes from Barbary and we might have been separated from it by a thousand miles. The sight of a white man and a Negro walking together drew passing interest from the occasional pedestrian, no more. The Civil War and Emancipation were remote things to genteel San Francisco, like a revolution in Singapore. The male strollers wore brushed bowlers and silk tiles and swung ebony sticks with gold and silver tops. All the women were escorted. Policemen in leather helmets and blue serge congregated on street corners, twirling their sticks. We saw more officers in ten minutes than we’d seen in three weeks. The city had managed to pen up the bad element like Indians on a reservation. I saw then why respectable San Franciscans had little interest in closing down the whorehouses, deadfalls, and opium dens operating within walking distance of their townhouses and colonial palaces; they were protected by a trellis wall, and behaved as if it were made of iron. The place was a powder keg, but they were too busy walking their dogs and raising money to rescue someone else’s wayward daughters to look down at the sparking fuse.

  The address given to us by a policeman belonged to a modest two-story house with green shutters and a boot scraper shaped like a porcupine on the tiny front porch. I turned a handle that operated a jangling bell on the other side of the painted door.

  “Yes?”

  We took off our hats in front of an old woman in a floor-length dress with her gray hair in a bun. I inquired if this was the home of Mr. Goodhue.

  “Doctor Goodhue,” she corrected gently. “He is in his devotions at present.”

  I introduced myself and Beecher. “We’re deputy federal marshals. We don’t require much of his time.”

  She took in this information as if I’d told her we’d come to sweep the chimney and let us into a small front parlor containing some mohair furniture and what looked like a complete set of Bowdler’s Gibbon next to The Bible Lover’s Illustrated Library in a small-book press. “Please wait here.”

  She went out through a curtained doorway, leaving us alone with the smells of melted wax and walnut stain.

  “Smells like church,” Beecher whispered. It was a room designed for whispering.

  I made a tour of the papered walls. Carved mahogany framed a series of Renaissance prints of the Annunciation, the Crucifixion, the Sermon on the Mount, and the usual Montgomery Ward’s run of secular subjects: Cornwallis’s surrender, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, fairies, a beefy tenor stuffed into Hamlet’s tights. With a few variations, it was the same parlor visitors waited in fron New Hampshire to Seattle, a disappointment after what I’d been told by Nan Feeny. There wasn’t a flaming sword or a scrap of brimstone in evidence. I began to wonder if anything she’d said was true, from Goodhue’s participation in the violent uprising of ’56 to the soiled dove she’d saved from drowning at his hands. Tall tales were a staple on the frontier and it looked as if Barbary was no exception.

  “Dr. Goodhue asks that you join him in his cabinet.”

  We followed her down a short hallway with tall wainscoting, at the end of which she opened a door and stood aside to let us pass through. This room was scarcely larger than the parlor and unfinished. Plaster had squeezed out between the laths of the walls and frozen like meringue, the naked ceiling hung six inches above our heads, and the floor was made of unplaned pine, laid green so that the planks had warped and drawn apart; they bent beneath our weight, sprang back into shape when it was released, and invited drafts from the crawl space underneath. The addition of a rolltop desk, a wooden chair mounted on a swivel, and a low, plain table supporting a stack of books with burst and shredded bindings had done nothing to convince me we weren’t standing in an unconverted lumber room. There was no window, just a copper lamp with a smudged glass chimney burning on the desk.

  Our host sat on the swivel with his elbows on the desk and his head propped between his hands, studying a book that lay open and flat on the blotter. He was too big for the chair—nearly too big for the room—and at first glance resembled nothing so much as a tame ape perched on a child’s chair for the entertainment of an audience. His shoulders strained the seams of a homespun shirt, his broadcloth trousers, held up by leather galluses, fell short of his ankles, and his feet were shod in farmer’s brogans, either one of which was big enough to hang outside a cobbler’s shop for advertising. At length he finished the paragraph he was reading, laid an attached ribbon between the pages to mark his place, closed the book, and rotated to face us with his hands on his thighs and his elbows turned out. The book was bound in green cloth, with the legend stamped in gold: The Fairest Cargo, or The Christian Legions’ Crusade Against the White Slave Trade in the New World, by the Reverend Hobart Thorpe Forrestal. Just in case the point was missed, an illustration inlaid on the cover portrayed a female beauty with an hourglass figure and unfettered hair, clasping her hands to Heaven behind iron bars. No room in the clutter for trumpets and cherubim.

  It all seemed like a theater set. I looked around, but couldn’t tell for certain if he’d swept a copy of the Police Gazette into a drawer when he’d heard us coming. There is no showman like a minister, and no minister quite so authentic in appearance as one who is self-ordained.

  “Welcome, gentlemen,” rumbled Owen Goodhue. “I had scarcely hoped that our little campaign would draw the attention of Washington City.”

  His likeness on his flyers didn’t do him justice. His head was the size of a medicine ball, with iron gray hair parted in the center and plastered into curls like a Roman emper
or’s ahead of his temples. Purple lesions traced the S-shaped path of his broken nose, and his close-set eyes burned deep in their sockets. The coarse beard began just below the ridge of his cheekbones and plummeted to its abrupt terminus across his collar, sliced off in a straight line as if with a dressmaker’s shears. Here was yet another dangerous face to hang in my ever-expanding black gallery.

  I said, “We haven’t come that far, and we didn’t hear about your crusade until we read the Call. However, it’s what we’re here to discuss.”

  “And which one are you, Deputy Murdock or Deputy Beecher?”

  He had a powerful voice, shaped by the pulpit, and it required control to keep from shaking plaster loose from the laths. He might have trained it by shouting into the barrels he’d made, tuning it by the sound of the echo.

  “Page Murdock. This is Edward Anderson Beecher. We represent the United States District Court of the Territory of Montana, presided over by Judge Harlan A. Blackthorne.”

  “I’ve heard of the man. Presbyterian, is he not?”

  I said he was. “We’re investigating an organization that calls itself the Sons of the Confederacy.”

  “A wicked lot. I supported Abolition in eighteen hundred and fifty-one, when it was far less popular than it became later. Are you familiar with the work of the Reverend Forrestal?” Without turning, he reached back and thumped the cover of The Fairest Cargo with a forefinger the size of a pinecone.

  “I’ve neglected my reading these past few weeks, apart from the Call.” I was trying to steer the conversation back to his pet crusade. He seemed to have a habit of following up each statement with a question that diverted the course.