The Best Bad Things

by Katrina Carrasco

  “Bound for Tacoma?”

  “That’s right.”

  Twenty feet away at the storeroom’s front Barker and Folkstone count in unison, grunt as they lift a load.

  “Take off the bill.” Alma crouches beside Lyle, pulls Benson’s envelope out of her vest.

  Lyle twists to look at her, his dark eyes narrowed in the lantern’s thin light. He’s the crewman she suspects of helping Benson. He and Barker spend the most time with Benson at the Quincy warehouse. And while Barker was out sick when the last batch of tar went missing, Lyle was not—he was the ride-along man, alone with the product all the way down the Sound.

  “Sir?”

  “I said take it off. I’ve got a new bill for it and one more crate.”

  Lyle hesitates. Cold sweat trails down Alma’s neck. She props her right forearm against the tar crate, leaning hard into the splintered wood.

  “Come on,” she says. “You know how this works. Yeah?”

  “I don’t touch the goods,” Lyle says. “That’s always been Barker’s duty.”

  “Barker’s occupied. And I’ve got orders to reroute two crates to Seattle.”

  None of this alters the set of Lyle’s face: puzzlement, wariness. No flinching at the mention of Seattle. He sets down the crowbar and hand lantern, his upper body vanishing into shadow. The pale shape of his hand scratches at the bill and peels it off the wood. He holds it out to Alma. The underside of the paper is sticky with glue.

  “Get the bill off that one while I fix this,” she tells him. “And take four cases out of another crate—they’re staying in town.”

  He’s not acting the way she anticipated: no averting of the eyes, no bluster to displace suspicion. If he’s not Benson’s man, then it might be Barker. Or Folkstone, though he’s the slowest of the bunch. Playing stupid is a skill, and Alma doesn’t credit Folkstone with that sort of talent.

  She pulls her arm off the crate. Smooths the Seattle bill into place with her palm. Water drips from the low ceiling, taps at her sleeve, her cap brim. She needs to swallow down the nausea for a few minutes more. Then it might pass.

  Lyle gives her the second Tacoma bill. She shuffles sideways to replace it, straw crackling under her kneecaps. Lyle’s thigh is inches from hers as he wedges the lid off a third crate, nails squeaking in the planks. He is warm; breathing quickly. Maybe gearing up to pull a knife on her, back here in the dark—a last-ditch effort to hide his guilt. He digs out four cases. Four solid clunks on the deck. Alma tosses him an empty burlap sack.

  “You’ll have to carry that up for me,” she says. “I can’t manage the weight with my arm banged up.”

  He whacks the lid back into place with his crowbar. Nods.

  “Evening, sir.”

  “Evening, sir.”

  On the gangway, the stevedores are greeting the customs inspector: Edmonds is expected, and the dockworkers’ calls confirm it is him and not some surprise guest. Alma hauls herself to standing. Lyle slides the crowbar into his belt, hefts the bulky sack over one shoulder.

  “Hopefully our customs man has learned the ropes by now,” she says as she walks to the front of the hold.

  “Sure,” Lyle says.

  He is two steps behind, frowning. He doesn’t like this business with the bills. Another notch against him as a suspect; it’s unlikely he is Benson’s inside man. But Alma swapped the bills like Benson wanted. He still thinks he’s got her in a corner, and his next assignment might take her farther up the line—to his Seattle contacts.

  “Evening, sir,” Alma says to Edmonds at the storeroom door. A wave of dizziness blurs his pale face. Alma blinks, wiping her nose on her sleeve to buy time for her vision to refocus.

  Edmonds’s hands are in his pockets, his eyes skittish.

  “I’m here to inspect this ship’s cargo,” he says, the words stiff. He doesn’t even look at Lyle, who’s standing there with a sixty-pound sack of opium on his back.

  “And I don’t aim to stop you,” Alma says.

  She leans against the hull, making room for Edmonds to pass. Wet planks cold against the back of her neck. Lyle glancing at her, mouth pinched, as Folkstone helps Barker lift a brass-striped steamer trunk.

  “We’ll wait till he’s finished,” she tells Lyle, trusting Wheeler’s hold on Edmonds more than she trusts the crewman to walk away unattended with all that product. She’d rather carry the tar herself. But it’s taking all she’s got just to hold herself upright. Just keep standing for a few minutes more.

  26

  JANUARY 22, 1887

  Eleven bells, twelve, from the two spires on Taylor Street. The Methodists’ tower taller than the Catholics’, where Alma and Delphine met. Alma leans against the cold stone of the Methodist church, smoking, set up to have a full view of the school across the road. The school’s doors are closed, and as people arrive for the fund-raiser, they mingle uneasily in the street. The sailors, in their scrappy oilcloth ensembles, clump together, hands in pockets, shifty eyed. Gentlemen in frock coats and watered silk flow between them. Sometimes a woman in gray or pale taffeta linked to a man by the arm. Blue flowers in her hat, or misty netting on her bonnet.

  No Delphine yet. At the far end of the road, by a gray house, Judge Hamilton and Wheeler walk together. Hamilton only half turned to Wheeler. Wheeler tapping his cigar ash out and away, so as not to drift onto the judge’s boots. Keeping a step behind. Not such good friends, then. No wonder Wheeler’s worried.

  Dom Kopp is here, with his cheap flash and tenacity, wriggling into a new stream of Upper Town men each time Alma finds him in the crowd. His sallow cheeks red with cold, or excitement. His walking stick glinting like a beacon.

  And a new face, still flushed from climbing the steps from Lower Town: Edward Edmonds. He was docile as a lamb the night before: toeing a crate or two, then hurrying back up to the dock to report the boat cleared by customs. Alma delivered the four cases to the Madison warehouse, then staggered back to her rented room. She didn’t have it in her to tick off the last stop on her list: she wanted to call at Nell’s, pound on her door, but fell into a hard sleep instead.

  Edmonds passes by and Alma flicks her cigarette into the mud. She trails him into the crowd, keeping his gray felt hat in view, her collar turned up against the rain. Her shoulder burns under its bandage, though her left hand is waking a little more each day. She flexes it with every step.

  Huddled bodies, muted conversation, smells of wet wool and tar. Alma right behind Edmonds now, concealed by the press. He waves at a cluster of men in black coats—clerks, judging by their inky hands and gaudy stickpins, stabs at ostentatiousness—but continues toward the school. On its steps a woman in blue-striped silk stands next to another woman in an apron, who holds a handbell but does not ring it.

  Edmonds pauses at the edge of the schoolyard. Looks back. Alma keeps her cap low over her eyes, using her lack of height to her advantage. The clerk is staring into the crowd and trying to cover it by lighting a cigarette, glancing at the two churches, picking ash off his lip. But he keeps sticking his eyes back to the same spot. She follows his line of sight, and it points directly to Wheeler, still speaking with Hamilton, their gray coats pale shadows under the dark boughs of a leafless maple.

  A high voice, excitable, rises near her aching left shoulder. Dom Kopp. Alma angles sideways, grunting pardon to a group of uneasy sailors in their shoregoing best, and comes to a stop just outside the little circle around Kopp. Four gentlemen in furs and polished boots, Kopp himself in a tweed coat piped with gold thread at the collar and cuffs. Big gold buttons. The lower tip of his walking stick lashed with mud.

  “The Seattle line is a guaranteed success,” Kopp is saying, with no effort to be discreet, his nasal voice spiraling up into the low fog. “And I’ve started construction on a depot in Irondale, with twenty miles of right-of-way land already pledged. But the costs are high, as you might expect. The benefits, excellent, but the costs are high.”

  “I don’t see the point of
funding an Irondale spur,” says a man collared in silver mink. “It will only impede a straight shot to us from the south.”

  “That’s why Hamilton’s trust is a better investment,” another says. “His rail line would link us to Portland.”

  “Hamilton’s trust be damned,” Kopp says too loudly. “The Northern Pacific is coming to you, gentlemen. Routing through Portland will be an antiquated inconvenience, once the Stampede Pass tunnel is complete.”

  “A transcontinental link to our doorstep.” This from a thickset man in a beaver coat. “That’s what I’m betting on. Think of the money we’ll make, getting wares directly from the East Coast, but with Northern Pacific’s rates.”

  “That’s precisely what I’m talking about, Mr. Weiss,” Kopp says. “More money in your pockets. Port Townsend’s bright future. But if commerce in this town is to thrive, we need infrastructure prepared for the new line’s arrival. And something ought to be done about our less-savory inhabitants.”

  “We have clean streets,” Weiss says. “Much to offer in the way of commercial business.”

  “Commercial business, yes,” Kopp says. “I appreciate your healthy company, and those like it. But I’m speaking of the criminal element. Bawdy houses and crimps aside, there are the smugglers.”

  “Not uncommon along the coastal waters, surely.”

  “But here the smugglers include men of standing.” Kopp’s eyes narrow, and he surveys the crowded street, the gentlemen’s finery among the clots of sailors, Wheeler and Hamilton still in conversation under the maple tree. “Men who might even be here today.”

  The men around him sniff, seem to withdraw a space, though they don’t shift their feet. Alma’s cigarette stings her fingertips, burned down to a mere stub as she listened. She drops it in the mud to hiss out beside her boot. Lights another under the shelter of her cupped palm.

  “That’s quite a charge to level, Mr. Kopp,” the man standing beside Weiss says.

  “Oh, I have names, and proof enough,” Kopp says. “What I need are guarantees that other men in the town will stand up to the corruption.”

  “Monetary guarantees?” Weiss says stiffly.

  “You’ll reap them in kind when the Northern Pacific is stocking your warehouses.”

  Weiss glances at his companion.

  “Who are you accusing, sir?” he says.

  “He’s here today.” Kopp’s sharp little nose twitches. “Among you.”

  Alma could step in now. Call Kopp over on some ruse, just to stop his mouth. But she wants to see how far he’ll go—who he names. It’s hard to believe he’s talking about Wheeler. Benson is already feeding him product from the business. Kopp is expecting more money from Wheeler to protect the smuggling operation from the railroad. It doesn’t follow that he’d compromise his bribe money, or his own supply chain, by selling Wheeler out.

  “I won’t stand here and gossip like a fishwife,” the man with the mink collar says. “Gentlemen.”

  He nods curtly, walks off. A second man follows. Weiss and his companion move a little closer to Kopp, who preens under their attention.

  “Meet me at the bar in the Delmonico,” Kopp tells them. “After this affair. I don’t think I need to remind you that this favor is not free.”

  How many men has Kopp made this offer to? If he’s going the rounds at the gathering, it’s best to shut him up. It’s a risk: he might catch a flash of the girl she played for him under the dirt and stained denim and cigarette haze. But from what she’s seen of him, he’s a dull customer.

  It is not such a great change, to go from invisible to eye-catching. She takes off her cap to wipe mist from her face. Settles it back on so it sits higher on her forehead, showing her eyes. A step to the left puts her in clear view of Kopp, in the space behind his two uneasy companions. She stares at him, unblinking, keeping her cigarette and its flaring spark of light near her mouth.

  The first glance is dismissive, his gaze sliding over her soiled jacket, her dirty hands. The second glance lingers. She nods at him, slow. His face clenches. He shakes hands with Weiss, whose companion declines to do the same, a silent insult Kopp pretends to ignore. When he reaches Alma, he is frowning, sour.

  “Who are you, and what do you want?”

  His right hand, at his hip, is clenched around the loud expense of his walking stick. The big gem that declares him a better man, a wealthier man, than this battered fellow in rain-damp denim. She waits for his eyes to widen, for him to remember her as the clerk from Wheeler’s offices. Or recognize her as Annabelle, now that they’re standing close. But no such knowing lights his face.

  “I’ve got a message for you.” She lowers her voice so he has to lean in, scowling. Their eyes and shoulders level, though his posture droops limply under the thick tweed of his coat. “From a man I know you’re keen to do business with.”

  “Who do you mean?” Kopp says.

  “The man you’re getting awful close to naming to your friends.”

  He goes pale. Then, with no sense of discretion, he looks directly at Wheeler.

  “Don’t stare,” Alma says. What is he playing at? Maybe there’s been a break between him and Benson. And if there hasn’t, that will be a good place to start. Make a fracture.

  Yes. She’s got a plan. Wheeler’s not going to like it. Oh, well.

  “I gave him time,” Kopp says. “I gave him a chance to avoid this. But I warned him I wouldn’t wait forever.”

  A sailor bumps into her bad arm, apologizes. She shifts the joint, pushing against the soreness. Moves closer to Kopp.

  “Benson said you were impatient,” she says, her voice a low blur under the conversations around them. “He spoke to me privately. Said you were a bad partner.”

  “That mongrel.” Quivering mustache, fist gripping his flashy stick. Finally dropping his voice into a low hiss. “He’s been the disappointment. Promising cartloads of opium, but producing mere handfuls. I did all the work to set up a buyer for us, and he left me empty-handed more than once. An embarrassment. If I’d known Benson was supplied by Wheeler, I would have gone straight to the source sooner, but I only recently found out. I don’t like dealing with second-tier men.”

  “Don’t say the boss’s name,” she says. “He doesn’t like dealing with second-tier men, either. That’s why he’s willing to link you in directly. He’s decided to take your offer and cut Benson out. But that’s if you keep quiet here, sir. If you burn this bridge, you can’t cross over it come Monday.”

  She needs to give Kopp just enough reassurance of Wheeler’s interest to keep him quiet, but not enough to make him cocky. Set a time limit on the negotiations. Make him think he’s made inroads. And do it all so delicate, setting every snare she needs. It’s tempting to ask him who his buyer is—Alma’s jaw aches with holding back the words—but she can’t scare him off.

  “What’s on Monday?” Kopp says, and though he is still sneering at her, there is interest thickening his voice, excitement in his sparse-lashed eyes.

  “You’re coming back to his offices,” she says. “We’ll have something concrete to offer you. If you bring five thousand dollars.”

  At the Cosmopolitan’s gambling table he crowed about a Northern Pacific investor’s gift: fifteen thousand dollars for his fledgling lines. He might have lost most of it by now—he’s got a reputation for big bets, night after night, at poker—but even if he comes with a third of that, it will serve.

  “That’s too much,” he says.

  “What we’re selling isn’t cheap,” she says. “It’s more than product. It’s a place in the chain. A place to make back your investment tenfold.”

  Only a fool would believe these numbers, but enough men outside the trade talk it up as easy riches, milk and honey, that someone like Kopp might buy them. He is considering it. His face crunched into a knot of concentration, ridges all down the sides of his nose.

  “A hell of a lot more than the tiny sums Benson was filtering to you.” She adds up the missi
ng tar, splits it between Benson, Kopp, and the Seattle contact. “What, you were making one hundred, two hundred a month? Less? Sometimes nothing.”

  “Much less,” Kopp says. “He said he was starting small, getting a supply line set up, but I’ve yet to see the profits I expected.”

  “The profits we can give you,” she says. “Hundreds a week. Don’t piss it away on blackmail. You were going to sell the boss’s name to those men for a onetime fee. And then you’d have no supplier.”

  “A few hundred would have been more than Benson’s made me so far.”

  A tinkling, tinnier than the church towers’ clangs. The aproned woman on the school steps is shaking her handbell. Behind her, the double doors are open. The fund-raiser and its free lunch have commenced. The crowd shifts around Alma and Kopp, flowing toward the stairs.

  “Monday.” Alma exhales a long column of smoke. “Will you be there?”

  Feverish eyes. Nervous hands choking up on his walking stick. She’s got him.

  “What time?”

  “Eleven o’clock,” she says. “At night. Come alone to the office. Knock three times.”

  This last bit she throws in as a jape, mocking him, but Kopp only nods tightly.

  “The deal’s off if you try and sell the boss’s name again—here, or at that Delmonico meeting,” she says. “Did you make that offer to anyone else?”

  “No.”

  “Good,” she says. “Tell those men at the Delmonico you had a change of heart.”

  “Yes. And I want—I want to see some opium when I visit.”

  Amateur. Alma hides her disdain behind a long draw on the cigarette.

  “That’s fine,” she says. “Don’t mention this to Benson. Do you have plans to see him between now and Monday?”

  “We were going to meet in Irondale Tuesday,” Kopp says.

  “Keep that on the books, so he’s not spooked. We’ll talk before then.”

  Alma leaves Kopp fidgeting in the mud. It will be interesting to see what Wheeler wants to do with him when Kopp shows up with his cash. She has some ideas about that, too.