“It’s good schnapps, Sam. Come on into the back room and sniff the sawdust. Lodgepole pine from Alberta.”
“I’ll have a beer,” Siringo said. “And throw in a mess of grits. I missed breakfast.”
“Was ist ‘grits’?”
“If he doesn’t know it, he doesn’t have it,” Hammett said. “Give him fried potatoes and onions. Beer for me, too. But hang onto a bottle of that Alberta, will you?”
“Sure thing, Sam.”
“That’s the biggest man I ever saw,” said Siringo, when they were alone.
“Wait till you meet Paddy Clanahan.” Hammett ate. “What kept you from breakfast?”
“You hit on it when you said Clanahan.”
*
They’d left the ranch late. Charmian had told them her experience of Sean Patrick Clanahan, boss of San Francisco.
“Jack was short on cash, a chronic condition,” she’d said. “His books and stories weren’t selling as well as they used to, and to be frank, he was—”
“A spendthrift,” Hammett had offered.
“Extravagant. Profligate would not be too strong a word; yet there are extenuating circumstances. He came from nothing, gentlemen: born out of wedlock, forced to scrounge a living on the wharves of San Francisco at fourteen, working all day in a cannery and robbing oyster beds at night to support his mother and older sister. He stoked coal aboard tramp steamers, sweated in laundries, nearly perished of scurvy in the Yukon, where he hoped to find gold and an end to his labors. That failed, and when he came home hoping to sell his experiences to the popular press, he was rejected a hundred and sixty times in the first year. Surely you can sympathize with that, Mr. Hammett.”
“Sure. I know the feeling.”
“And surely, Mr. Siringo, you must understand his reaction when suddenly his books and stories began to sell, in numbers no one could have predicted. He married, had children, showered his family with gifts. After the union ended in divorce, Bess couldn’t understand when his fortunes turned and he couldn’t provide for her and his daughters as he had in the past, and drenched him in guilt and scorn. His work brought him less money, so he slaved to replace what he’d lost—a thousand words a day, gentlemen, no matter where he was, here in the cottage or sailing to Japan or touring the country on the lecture circuit. When the Snark sank, when Wolf House burned to the ground, he went deep into debt just trying to hold on to what he had, what he’d built.
“Since his death, Clanahan has been buying up all his notes for pennies on the dollar, scheming to gain ownership of the ranch. Some of Jack’s creditors have remained sympathetic, and have promised to hold off on selling until I can gather the capital to redeem the notes, but they can’t wait forever. They have bills to pay and mouths to feed too. I’m negotiating with Jack’s publishers, hoping to persuade them to bring out new editions of all his works, and advance money against royalties; but with pirated copies floating all over and now the moving-picture people hijacking the property of his imagination and labor, it’s a slow process, and Clanahan works swiftly.”
“What’s his object in getting hold of the ranch?” Siringo had asked. “Beg pardon, ma’am, but it don’t look prosperous.”
“Only because Jack was foursquare against pressing his grapes into wine for commercial uses. He supported Prohibition since before it had a name. I can see you’re skeptical, gentlemen; Jack was a bibulous man, and made no secret of it. But if you’ve read John Barleycorn, you know how much that habit cost him and how hard he tried to cure himself. He kept drinking until nearly the end, when his kidneys failed. But he was determined to do what he could to prevent others from following his example, before they started, while they could still be saved. Just before he died, he made me promise I would never permit the fruits of Beauty Ranch to appear on the market in the form of wine. The same holds true for the beer we brew. Our small store of spirits is for personal consumption only.”
She leaned forward. “Needless to say, Clanahan doesn’t feel bound by that vow. He intends to flood the bootleg market with Jack’s private label and make millions corrupting the future of a generation.”
She got up and left the room, to return carrying a bottle of red wine. “From our private stock.” She showed them the device on the label, a pen-and-ink rendering of a wolf’s head staring balefully face out.
“He’ll drag that symbol, Jack’s personal totem, through every dive, gin mill, and blind pig in the country, and with it the good name of Jack London. Gentlemen, can you stop him? I promise you, you will not find the estate ungrateful.”
*
“I been to the library, improving my mind,” Siringo told Hammett. “Went through every newspaper in San Francisco going back six months. Couldn’t find hide nor hair of this Clanahan. Even checked the funny pages.”
“I could’ve saved you the trouble. He doesn’t hold any political office, and what he does is only news if you still haven’t got the dope on Santa Claus.”
“There’s got to be one reporter with a backbone in this town.”
“Not if he wants to keep it in one piece. The last one who tried to get an interview wound up in traction.”
“Who put him there?”
“The man himself. He does his own strong-arm work. He saves the eel for serious errands.”
“I thought all that Barbary Coast business was finished.”
“It did. Back then everything was out in the open, like the gimcrackery on all the buildings. The ones built since the Big Shake are smooth as a steel rail and so’s the grafting.”
A waiter came with Siringo’s meal and their beers. Siringo tucked his napkin under his collar and cut into his steak. Blood ran out. “I could save this cow with a tourniquet.”
“You said you wanted it quick.”
“I wasn’t complaining.” He forked a piece into his mouth and chewed. “Buying up London’s debts is an underhanded way of taking over his spread, but it ain’t illegal. I can’t figure why he bothered with us.”
“Clanahan’s got all the money one man can ever use. When he sets out to make more, it’s for seed. Whatever it is he wants to finance—that’s why he wanted us to stop turning over rocks in Sonoma County.”
“Tell me more about this Teapot Dome business.”
“Wyoming’s just part of it. The Elk Hills oil fields here in California are just as productive. The word is Albert Fall, that old cowboy I told you about, is behind the move to turn government control into private profit. He’s the president’s secretary of the Interior.”
“I don’t know what that is, but it sounds like some varmint’s been burrowing where he oughtn’t.”
“He pushed Harding into signing an executive order transferring responsibility for the reserves from the navy to the Interior. He didn’t pop much sweat pushing; that dope’s the worst thing to happen to the Union since Bull Run. Everybody in Washington knows he’s got a piece on the side, including Mrs. Harding.”
“How do you know so much about Washington?”
“The superintendent of the Pinkerton branch there is an old partner. We keep in touch. Where the president dips his wick won’t affect the price of beans, but too many people know what Fall’s about. When it breaks—”
“Does this story have Clanahan in it?”
“Sorry. I told you politics is a hobby. But if there’s a dirty dollar floating around this state, you can lay odds Paddy’s not far behind it. A thing like this can sweep the Republicans clean out of office. I think our native son’s got a bad case of claustrophobia.”
“He wouldn’t be the first cow got too big for its pasture,” Siringo said. “I still got a flea on my tail?”
“Can’t you tell?”
“I got a sting in the middle of my back, but you’re the one with the eye.”
“Not this time, which means either Clanahan lost interest after the horse turned up or it’s the eel. He’s as good a shadow as I know, and I was the best in the Agency. One time, I circled all the way a
round the bird I was following just because I got bored. He never tipped to it.”
“I used to play dumb jokes like that. It got me a bullet in the knee.”
“You didn’t give Charmian London an answer. You staying or going?”
“I like to size up the other side before I commit. What’s this muckety-muck look like?”
“John!”
The proprietor came rolling over and stood over the table swaying against his moorings.
“You still carry around that clipping?”
“Jawohl. A man must remind himself he is not invincible.” He took a wallet the size of a branding book out of his suit coat, licked a thumb, and started paging through the notes and other papers inside.
“Clanahan didn’t used to be bashful around the press,” Hammett told Siringo. “You just didn’t go back far enough. John was the Bay Area arm-wrestling champion nine years’ running before he tangled with the mick.” He accepted a square fold of yellowed newsprint from the German and held it out. Siringo pushed aside his plate to take it.
He handled it carefully; it was tattered at the folds and flakes fell to the table as he opened it. It was dated 13/10/18 in faded pencil on a margin. In the grainy picture, two men sat facing each other across a table, elbows braced on the top and hands clasped, surrounded by a crowd of spectators. John’s whiskers were darker and he had a little less belly. Siringo looked at his opponent.
“That ain’t a man. It’s a whale with feet.”
“He hasn’t gotten any smaller. His breakfast is a side of pork and two loaves of toast slathered with lard.”
“Why ain’t he dead?”
“They don’t make coffins his size.”
“Who’s the shy jasper?”
One of the onlookers, a medium-built man in a dark suit, stood holding a straw hat in front of his face.
“That’d be the eel. He’s superstitious around cameras. Wears a Sunday boater every day of the year, they say, just so you know who’s responsible for your sudden loss of life.”
Siringo returned the clipping to John, who looked at it briefly, then refolded it with a sigh. “Friday the thirteenth. A man should know.”
“It was Friday the thirteenth for him, too,” Hammett said.
When they were alone, Siringo ate potatoes and fries and washed them down with beer. “Worse comes to worse, he’s a hard target to miss.”
“Does that mean you’re taking the job?”
“If you come with it. You’re faster on the draw.”
“It would’ve been awkward if you’d said no.” Hammett picked his hat off the table, removed a telegraph flimsy from the sweatband, and gave it to him. It was from Charmian London, instructing the Bank of San Francisco to pay the bearer a thousand dollars from her account.
“You went behind my back?”
“She did. I think she didn’t want to give us time to decide to turn her down.”
“Thought she was strapped.”
“So she sold some hogs and fired a hand.”
“Hope it was the son of a bitch ruined my hat.” He gave him back the telegram and picked up his Stetson. “Let’s get on to the bank before it closes.”
14
The building appeared to have been carved out of a single chunk of marble, with twice as many fluted pillars necessary to hold up its porch roof and a two-mile hike to a paneled yellow-oak counter holding up more marble yet. It put one in mind of what a Catholic cathedral would look like if the Church of Rome had as much money as the Bank of San Francisco. Once inside, Siringo’s voice fell to an involuntary whisper.
“If you told me about the place, I’d of rented a set of tails.”
“Frisco’s all show,” Hammett said. “That’s new money for you. Rockefeller was already in long pants when the first sourdough saw color.”
“Can you lay off that Red talk just for today?”
The teller, morning-coated with a pair of egg-shaped lenses clipped to his nose, looked dubiously at first at the tall pale tubercular and the short man with holes in his hat, but brightened a bit when he saw the Western Union draft. “Will you be opening an account?”
“Two,” Hammett said.
“The vice president will make the arrangements.” The teller handed back the flimsy and pointed out a pebbled-glass door to their right.
Behind it sat a well-upholstered man in his fifties, also in a morning coat and striped pants, working the black handle of an adding machine the size of an anvil on his desk. He got up to shake their hands, peered through a pair of half-glasses at the draft. “One moment, please.” He got up and went out carrying the sheet, leaving his door open. They watched him cross to the opposite wall and enter another pebbled-glass door marked PRESIDENT.
“Next they’ll yell for the guard,” Siringo muttered.
“Maybe if you left the artillery behind. Your coat sticks out on that side like a bad liver.”
“I didn’t know I was going to the bank when I strapped it on.”
“This place has come up in the world. First time I was here, you only had to go through two people to do business.”
When the vice president returned, all smiles, they each opened an account and made arrangements to deposit four hundred in each, asking for the remaining two hundred in cash. The man went out again, to return carrying a bank envelope with an engraving of the building in a corner. He counted the money into two neat stacks and pushed them across the desk, then rose to grasp their hands again. “Welcome, Mr. Hammett; Mr. Siringo. I hope this is the beginning of a lengthy and prosperous relationship.”
On the way out of the building, they passed three portraits hung in gilt frames: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Warren Gamaliel Harding.
“Wonder which denomination they’ll stick his picture on,” Siringo said.
“Probably a three-dollar bill.”
*
They held their first war council in a speakeasy on Mission Street, where the owner of a face that was too big for the narrow window behind the iron-grille gate recognized Hammett and let them in. At that early hour the place was only half-full and the little bandstand was deserted. They hung their heels on the brass rail at the base of a mahogany bar. The back bar, carved intricately from the same wood, glittered with bottles, siphons, and glasses of every description.
“I know this place,” Siringo said, looking around. “The bat-wing doors throwed me for a minute.”
“There aren’t any bat-wing doors.”
“There used to be. That’s what throwed me.”
“It was a saloon during the Alaska Gold Rush. It’s just about the only one left from the old days. It was called the Golden Slipper then.”
“It was a shithole. I saw Crooked Mouth Hank shoot Jed Corcoran over there by the cigar corner in ought-one. It was over a woman named—let’s see—Buffalo Mattie.”
“It’s usually over a woman, though they’re not always named Buffalo. Big girl, was she?”
“No bigger’n your thumb; but she once swapped her favors for a buffalo coat because the fellow was tapped out. Poor Jed Corcoran was only nineteen. He didn’t last long enough to acquire a colorful name.”
“Why’d they call a place like that the Golden Slipper?”
“The Bucket of Blood ain’t as good for business.”
The bartender asked what they’d have. His hair was slicked back from a center part and he wore waxed handlebars and garters on his sleeves. The place prided itself on its Gay Nineties origins.
“Scotch,” said Hammett.
“Rye,” said Siringo. “Mind you don’t pour ’em from the same bottle.”
“We do all our business from Canada, mister.”
Hammett smiled. “You know Big John over at the States Hof Brau?”
“Can’t say I do.”
“You should make his acquaintance. You’re both honorary citizens of the Dominion.”
Their drinks came. Hammett paid for both and the bartender slid his rag down the bar toward
a party near the end.
“What brought you to town in ought-one?” Hammett asked. “Catch the gold bug?”
“I got my fill of all that digging in Gem. Someone said Ben Kilpatrick was here waiting to catch a boat to Central America and hook back up with the Wild Bunch; but either I missed him or it was a story. I never cared for the place. The Agency superintendent here had the notion he was a detective, went on every stakeout and jawed the whole time about his new baby boy. If Kilpatrick was in earshot it’s no wonder I missed him.”
“He was gone before I joined up. Mine kept goldfish.”
“We here to palaver or drink a hole in another day?”
“Where better, if we’re still being watched? If we shut ourselves up in my apartment or your hotel room, they’ll know we’re plotting. Here we’re just two birds dipping their beaks.”
“Where’s Clanahan hang out?”
“You want to brace him?”
“I want to know him. All I got now is he had his pitcher took once and he can eat and Indian wrestle.”
“You expect him to tell you his life story?”
Siringo smiled grimly. “His woman might.”
“How do you know there’s a woman?”
“There’s always a woman.”
“Not always.”
They shared a look.
“Any reason to think it’s like that?”
Hammett shook his head. “A man of politics? It would’ve come out.”
“You said he don’t care about money, just power, but they’re just the same. When you got the one you got the other. You need to spend the money on somebody besides yourself, and power’s not worth a thing without somebody to brag on it to. I got into one robbery outfit through a woman, and if it wasn’t for my luck in that line I’d still be in Colorado, growing mushrooms at the bottom of some shaft.”
“I don’t mean to insult you, but that was a long time ago.”
“Meaning I lost my good looks?” He stepped back from the bar and stood in front of him. “I ain’t put on more’n six pounds since I joined the Agency. I didn’t have as much snow on top, but I still got most of my hair, and I weren’t Doug Fairbanks even back then. I’ve had these death-dimples since New Mexico in ’90, where I near died; it didn’t slow me down none with the ladies. All’s you need is sound teeth and a smooth line of talk.”
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