STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael

by Barbara Hambly

  The door across the street opened. Even hidden in shadows he knew her.

  She paused in the doorway, head down against the wind, pulling on her gloves. She had a kind of shabby gray coat on, and long straight wisps of black hair trailed from beneath her bonnet. She came down the steps quickly, glanced up and down the street and started to walk.

  Joshua cut across the sloppy thoroughfare at an angle to intercept her. He didn’t call, but she stopped and turned as if he had.

  “Sarah?”

  “Josh.” Her smile was hesitant, like sun after a dreary and bitter day. Self-consciously she pushed her spectacles farther onto the bridge of her nose.

  “Do you mind if I walk with you?” he asked, as if he hadn’t waited twenty-five minutes in the minimal shelter of the laundry doorway to ask her that question. “It’s getting dark.”

  Diamond Lil’s. The Orient. Montgomery Street, Kearney Street—gold dust from the Sierras and the Comstock. A merry-go-round of color and noise, darkness and gaslight, red and black cards on green baize, gold and silver coins. The blue haze of cigar smoke and the chatter of the Wheel of Fortune, the amber bite of liquor on the tongue and the shrill music of women’s voices, the tinny rhythms of the piano and the soft rattlesnake rustle of shuffled cards. Men’s arguments, the clink of coins, the flash of diamond cuff studs above the dealer’s white hands.

  Night turned to day by the deep gold of kerosene or the soft white of gas. Card laid on card, Jason Bolt in his black broadcloth suit and waistcoat of scarlet and gold that glittered like a king’s robe, a cigar between his teeth and a young lady in yellow silk and black plumes holding his single whiskey and water. Joshua Bolt leaning in the doorway of the gambling rooms, watching, smiling, his blond hair falling in his eyes. Midnight suppers of steak and oysters; champagne breakfasts at dawn.

  Winning and losing—but mostly winning.

  Only twice did anyone attempt to rob them.

  The first time was an attack on the four of them, as they emerged, flush and rolling in winnings, from Florinda’s Place in the small hours of a rainy morning. They strode along Kearney Street as though they owned it, wet wind stirring in their evening cloaks and the lights of the gambling palaces flashing behind and around them. The fog was beginning to roll in, swathing the darker dens of the Barbary Coast and the wharves, then moving up to seep around the wealthier areas of town; and with it the fog brought men who felt safe in its invisibility.

  It might have been worse had not Ishmael, striding along unobtrusively downwind of Jason’s cigar, raised his hand suddenly; the others halted, and he stood for a moment, a dark cloaked form in the darkness, turning his head slightly back and forth as though listening. Very softly, he murmured, “There are men waiting ahead.”

  Jason looked from him to the thickening fog around the dark cliffs of buildings that hemmed in the slanted street. “How can you tell?”

  “I can hear them. They’re moving about a little but they’re waiting. That corner up there, I believe.”

  “You can ...” he began disbelievingly, then stopped, remembering the mineshaft incident. In the increasing dampness Ishmael’s face, surrounded by its mane of Indian-straight black hair, had a strange cast to it, uncanny. Jason shivered without knowing why.

  “We can go around by Grant,” he said finally. “We’re pretty much past Chinatown. We can get to the hotel through the back.” But he knew they would be followed, the men cutting through the vacant lots and alleys between the saloons. All the climb up Pine Street and down the dark slope of Grant he could see Ishmael listening, tracking their pursuers by sound, and in time he could hear them, too. The fog had moved in, thickening closer and closer around them. He whispered, “Get ready,” and hefted his ebony cane.

  The fight, when it was joined, was short. One of the attackers fired a gun, but between the fog and the poor quality of the weapon itself the bullet went wild, and the man hadn’t time for a second shot. Jason could see Ishmael duck under and aside from the big robber’s arm, catlike and trained; in the fog and darkness the man bulked huge but Ish picked him up like a bunch of daisies and hurled him into the muddy mix of wood and asphalt of the street. That was all Jason had time to see. Another man seized him from behind and tried to cosh him, and Jason twisted away from the blow and tried to return it, using his own cane as a club. Even in the fog and darkness he could smell his attacker, body-dirt and grimy wool and booze. He got close enough to have to ward off a knee to the groin, clinched with the man and began slugging.

  Someone grabbed him from behind, feeling for his throat. Jason got a confused glimpse of Josh lying limp where he had been thrown, of Jeremy struggling to get another man off him, of Ishmael being grabbed from behind while another man came in on him with a knife.

  What happened after that Jason was never completely sure, because it happened very, very quickly. What it looked like was that Ishmael twisted like a cat in the grip of the man who held him, dropped to one knee, hurled the man with impossible force over his shoulder and into his partner. Before the pair of them had unsorted themselves Ish was on his feet again. He made no move to go for a weapon or even close his fist. He just laid a hand on the shoulder of first one man, then the other, up near the neck. Their knees buckled and they went down like poleaxed steers. He took one step toward the men who were holding Jason and one of them threw himself at him, cursing in Italian. With that same lightness Ishmael caught him, picked him up bodily, and threw him into the foggy street; Jason could hear the clatter of his body rolling down the steep hill, and his yells of rage and pain. But it was Ish’s face that drew Jason’s eyes—absolutely calm and without a trace of either anger or exertion.

  The man who had been holding Jason and the one who was working on strangling Jeremy had, by this time, not unnaturally, melted away into the fog.

  The Bolt brothers and Ishmael were alone.

  “What the hell did you do to them?” demanded Jason, rubbing his bruised windpipe as he came over to where Jeremy lay, gasping, on the boards of the narrow sidewalk. Ishmael was standing over him, looking at his hands as though he had never seen them before, as though he himself had been as surprised as his victims by whatever it was that he had done.

  “I ...” began Ishmael, and then broke off, his brow folding suddenly, as though with pain. Then he shook his head. “It’s quite simple when you understand the principles,” he said dismissively, in a very different tone of voice. Jason had the momentary impression that he had been about to say that he did not know.

  “Come,” said Ishmael. “Logic forbids that they will resume the attack, but I have never found logic to be the leading characteristic of the human species.”

  He turned, and helped Joshua to his feet, their black cloaks mingling into a single shape of darkness as he supported him along the steep sidewalk toward the back door of the Palace Hotel.

  As they fell into step behind them, Jeremy said quietly, “Well, brother, now you know why he never loses his t—temper.”

  Chapter 13

  THE SECOND ATTACK was against Joshua alone, but Jason always wondered whether the motivations for that attack were robbery, or something else.

  “You have no idea,” sighed Sarah Gay, “how good it feels to be walking around in the daylight, like a normal person.”

  Rare sunlight filled the city, turning San Francisco into a world of glass. The sparkle on the bay was almost blinding, the wings of the gulls flashing like distant pieces of mica, unbelievably bright against the blue. The air was cool and damp, and the smell of the sea filled the city with the strange wild yearning of far-off winds.

  Joshua, walking beside her across the mud of Van Ness Street, felt there could be no more happiness in the world.

  She sighed, the habitual look of worried exhaustion washed from her face by the light. “I feel positively wicked and abandoned, leaving the people at the hospital to fend for themselves this morning.”

  Josh smiled quietly. “I spend my nights in gambling halls
and dens of iniquity, and here I am walking out with a wicked and abandoned woman from St. Brendan’s Charity Hospital.”

  She laughed. They had left the city behind them to the east, where it clustered around the dizzy roll of its hills. Below them lay the sand dunes and rank sea grasses of the north end of the point, that grew below the heights. “And is it working?” she inquired, holding her petticoats clear of the sand as they climbed along the crest of the hills. “This mathematical system you have come to San Francisco to try. I understand that fortunes are lost by men who have systems.”

  “That isn’t the fault of the systems themselves,” said Josh. “Mathematics will always work if you are precise enough. It’s just that most people’s arithmetic isn’t up to the concepts. Ishmael Marx is the only man I’ve met whose grasp of mathematics is such that he can make such a system work. And it is working. It’s just that it works slowly, and that’s the burr under Jason’s saddle. He wants it quick and colorful, and mathematics doesn’t work that way.”

  “Ah.” Sarah smiled. “And that is the secret of gambling palaces and dens of iniquity. That something as precise and structured as the mathematics of the games themselves is hidden under a layer of jewels and brocade; and that most men see only the lights and brightness. Which is why the house wins. Aside,” she added in mock disapproval, “from the copious amounts of strong drink served on the premises.”

  Joshua laughed again, and gave her his hand to help her over the rough ground. “You’ve got it there. But how would you know about dens of iniquity?”

  She raised one curved brow over an eye cool and gray as rain. “You think respectable women are the only ones who fall ill?”

  Joshua was silent for a time, walking in step along the crest of the heights, thinking about those brightly painted ladies in their gay silks. He knew how he felt after less than a week of this nocturnal existence, of the noise and the kaleidoscope of bright and dark, of waking in the afternoon and sleeping in rooms curtained to cut the sunlight through the day so that he might go back to that world of brightly colored night. Like the slender woman who walked beside him, he felt a kind of refreshed relief at being about in the daylight.

  What would it be like to have to live that way all the time? To know the sun only as something you swore at when it leaked through the shades and woke you at four in the afternoon? The thought made him sick with weariness. He, at least, knew that he could go back to Seattle in time. Those ladies with their false smiles and their paint that covered the spoor of weariness had nowhere to go.

  They found a boulder to sit on, at the crest of a particularly high hill. For a time they sat in silence, the city spread out below them and to their right, vast and jumbled, like the mounds of cracker boxes and paper thrown out behind a grocery store. At the waterfront the ships crowded at anchor, white sails furled like the wings of resting ducks; along the rocks by the Golden Gate the waves made tiny patterns of white against the slate color of the sea.

  “Why did you become a nurse, Sarah? How did you go into that?”

  She glanced over at him, the pale sunlight glinting on her spectacles, then looked away. She started to speak, changed her mind and sighed, as though deciding to trust him against a nature that did not easily trust. “I’m not really a nurse,” she said. Her long hands were wrapped around her knees, and he could see that the backs of them had already begun to knot with manual toil. The long black tendrils of her escaping hair brushed her cheeks like cloud trails. “I’m a medical doctor. I read medicine under my Uncle David back in Philadelphia, and passed my examinations.”

  Joshua regarded her with considerable surprise. “A doctor?” And unbidden he remembered Sarah’s wry smile at his own and Aaron’s surprise when Ish had suggested it.

  She nodded, and continued to look out over the city and the bay. “Does that shock you?”

  “It’s just that I—I didn’t know women were allowed to be doctors.”

  “They’re not.” Her voice was thin and clipped. “It’s perfectly legal—but it isn’t really allowed.”

  “Hunh?”

  She sighed, and turned to him with a trace of bitterness lingering on her smooth, wide lips. “If you were hurt, or ill—would you go to a man doctor, or a woman?”

  He laughed uncertainly. “I’d go to any doctor I could find.”

  “But if you had a choice? Of several male doctors, or a woman?”

  He hesitated, putting in mind his own automatic reactions. “I—uh—I don’t know.”

  “Well,” Sarah said, “I do.”

  To his shame Joshua knew she was right.

  She went on, “That’s why I came here to San Francisco. I was naive enough to hang out my shingle in Philadelphia. I was run out of business in a month. Oh, nobody wrote me threatening letters, or burned my house, or anything like that. But—weeks I’d sit, day after day in my consulting room, and no one would come. I applied for residency at the city hospitals and they assumed that I wanted work as a nurse—and offered it to me in the face of my medical credentials. They all seemed to find me a little amusing.”

  She sighed, and began her futile and never-ending task of readjusting her hairpins, tucking in the trailing ends of her hair, which were perpetually escaping from the darkness of the main mass. “Well, I came to San Francisco. I thought there were few enough doctors in this town that perhaps I might stand a chance of doing what I wished to do, of healing others and learning about the arts of healing.” She shrugged. “I was wrong. Maybe in a town this size in the East I might have stood some chance, if there were so few doctors. But the town is still mostly men, and a man has to be in extremis before he’ll let a woman near him with a scalpel in her hand. Your friend Ishmael is the only man I’ve met to whom it would even occur that a woman could be a doctor. Most of my patients in Philadelphia were women—those whose husbands would trust me with them, which weren’t many. Women are thin on the ground, here.”

  She avoided his eyes, and tugged at the long weeds that grew in the cracks of the rock on which they sat. Her profile seemed to him thin and delicate, but those big hands were strong. They caressed the leaves of the weed she held more lightly than the wind. “So now I work as a doctor at St. Brendan’s, though my title is Nurse. Dr. Killian knows, and Sister Sheila, but even if the board of directors of the hospital would sanction the hiring of another practitioner—which they won’t, in spite of the volume of the work—they’d naturally hire a man.” She shrugged again. “In any case I’m doing medical work, and I suppose it’s all I can hope for at the moment.”

  Joshua took her hands in his. “What a waste. People are stupid. Sarah, I—”

  She disengaged one hand, and touched a finger to his lips. “No, Joshua,” she said quietly.

  “But I—” he began, and she shook her head.

  “I am what I am, Joshua. I am what I will be.” Her eyes were gentle, understanding his words before he spoke them, knowing what he would say, and why. “I am a doctor, Joshua, and a woman in a man’s business right now. Don’t offer me the—respectable—womanly—alternative of marriage, for I would only turn you down.”

  He was silent, looking into her eyes with nothing to say. To have offered her marriage as an escape from striving would have been an insult, both to her pride and to her abilities, but the closing of that door stabbed him with a sudden pang of grief. He knew now that he wanted her—suspected that it had been so since he had first met her earlier that winter at the boardinghouse. And now he could not ask for her.

  After a moment he sighed. “People are stupid. I think you must be a fine doctor.”

  “Because you find me fair to look upon?” Her voice was teasing, but her eyes were not—not entirely.

  “Because you’re honest,” he said. “If you weren’t good, you’d be too honest to try and fight the tide.”

  The slightly baiting look relaxed into a genuine smile. “Thank you.”

  He helped her to her feet. “Will you still have dinner with me tonigh
t?”

  She laughed. “Of course. It’s rare enough that I am asked to dine with a gentleman, even one who does spend every spare evening he has in gambling dens.”

  “Good. I’ve told my brothers I’m taking a vacation. I’ll come for you at eight.”

  She shook her head with mock dismay as they wound their way back down the hills. “Playing hookey from the gaming halls. I fear you are incorrigibly respectable, Mr. Bolt. I—what is it?” For Joshua had stopped as they passed the lee side of a hill, and was looking at the loose, sandy soil with a puzzled expression.

  He reached down and brushed the smoothed depression with his fingers. “Someone’s been here,” he said. “For quite some time, it looks like, and very recently. Look, the kicked sand on the edge of these tracks here hasn’t even settled.”

  Her lips tightened a little, but she only said, “So someone was here. We said nothing that could not have been overheard in mixed company—except for the shameful nature of my profession, that is.”

  Josh straightened up, and shook his head, as if trying to dismiss the thought. “But why would anyone have taken such pains to come and go quietly, so quietly neither of us heard?” He frowned, remembering what Jason had said at the outset of their adventure, about not going about the city alone; remembering also the incident on Kearney Street the other night. He scanned the silence of the hills around them. “I don’t like this,” he said at length. “Let’s get back to town. I’ll see you at eight.”

  “Got it!” Jason exclaimed, with an explosive crack of his fingers that made Jeremy halt in mid-motion of loosening his cravat and look over at him in the fashionable crimson gloom of the hotel suite.