STAR TREK: TOS #23 - Ishmael

by Barbara Hambly

  “Got what?” Jeremy pulled off the red silk cravat and threw it on the sideboard, and began systematically emptying money out of his wallet and coat pockets onto it. The coins sparkled, gold and silver against the blood red of the silk and the shining black walnut beneath it, bright in the glow of the elaborately shaped lamp at his elbow. The curtains of the suite were, as usual, shut; even had they been open nothing but a wall of charcoal gray dawn fog would have been visible beyond. It was five-thirty in the morning, and cold as the Devil’s icehouse.

  “Those two fellows I saw in Florinda’s Place the other night, remember?” Jason knelt by the well-laid wood in the hearth, and began scratching lucifers on the hearthstone to light it.

  “I remember you spending half the evening fretting over where you’d seen them before.” His tone was good-natured. Jeremy was long familiar with his oldest brother’s memory for names and faces, and knew that nothing drove him so crazy as not being able to place where and when he’d seen someone. It was part, he supposed, of Jason’s impulse to control things—the same impulse that made him so curious about Ishmael Marx. “Are we g—going out to breakfast or do we send for it?”

  “They were the two fellows who came through Seattle last September,” said Jason, ignoring Jeremy’s question in the pursuit of his own mysteries. “You remember, Jeremy. They were dark and kind of strange-looking. I got the impression they were looking for someone—they asked a hell of a lot of questions. ...”

  Jeremy shrugged, and went to warm his hands before the young blaze on the hearth. “You g—got me.”

  Jason frowned at this defection. “It was at Lottie’s.” He pursued the issue. “Maybe you were over at the dormitory. Josh was there, he’d remember ... I think that was a little before your time, Ish.”

  “D—does it matter?”

  “Not really. I just wonder if they ever found the fellow they were looking for.” Jason got to his feet, and prowled restlessly back to the sideboard, beginning to stack and count the coins that his youngest brother had left scattered in such carelessness. “San Francisco would be the place to find someone, though. Everybody on the Coast comes through San Francisco, if you wait long enough. What’d you say about breakfast?”

  “I suggest that we go out.” Ishmael glanced up from his own silent brooding over a pageful of mathematical calculations that he’d made while observing the Wheel of Fortune. “It will take at least an hour to warm this room to acceptable temperatures, and there are better ways of passing the time than shivering over our coffee.”

  “Shall we wake up Josh, then?” Without waiting for an answer, Jeremy strode to the door of the room Ishmael and Joshua shared, his brown eyes sparkling with the relish younger brothers always feel about rousting their seniors out of warm beds on cold mornings.

  Jason laughed. Ishmael began, “I hardly see that ...”

  Jeremy came back into the parlor. “He’s not there,” he said, puzzled. “His bed hasn’t been slept in.”

  Jason elevated his eyebrows and whistled suggestively. Jeremy shook his head. “That doesn’t sound like Josh.”

  “Little brother,” Jason said, laying a patronizing arm over Jeremy’s shoulders, “I ought to tell you a few facts about even that most respectable of men, your brother and mine ...”

  There was a deferential tapping on the door of the suite. The brothers and Ishmael exchanged an inquiring glance, and Ish rose to his feet and limped to answer it.

  It was a hotel porter, a stocky middle-aged man with red muttonchop whiskers, wearing the brass-buttoned livery of the hotel staff.

  “Mr. Bolt?” he asked, his eyes going from Ishmael to Jason and Jeremy. “Mr. Joshua Bolt?”

  Jason stepped forward, “I’m Jason Bolt,” he said. “My brother is out at the moment.”

  The man nodded, seemingly untroubled by the fact that Mr. Joshua Bolt would be out at that hour of the morning. “Well, sir, there’s a lady downstairs asking after Mr. Joshua Bolt.”

  Jason cocked an eyebrow at Jeremy and grinned with ribald triumph; Jeremy shook his head impatiently and demanded, “Did she give her name?”

  “A Miss Gay.”

  It meant nothing to Jason or Jeremy, but Ishmael said, “Is she in the lobby?”

  “Yessir. Said she was on her way to work.” His opinion of women who worked was patent in the inflection he laid on the word said.

  “I shall go down.” Ishmael handed the man a coin, and disappeared into the gaslit gloom of the corridor. As the porter turned to go Jason lifted a hand to stay him, and handed him another few coins.

  “As long as Ish is going to be entertaining Joshua’s lady-bird, we might as well send for breakfast after all.”

  Sarah Gay looked up quickly as Ishmael entered the lobby, and her normally severe face relaxed into a smile when she saw that it was someone she knew. Her plain, dark blue calico with its white collar looked somber and drab in the opulence of the Palace, which had been decorated, as the management was not backward about pointing out, with the finest of furnishings that could be brought around the Horn. Ishmael privately considered the dark crimson velvet of the wallpaper, the purple plush upholstery of the thickly carved furniture, the prism-encrusted chandeliers and perpetually velvet-shrouded windows as a particularly successful exercise in bad taste, but could not for the life of him remember what he had been brought up to think of as good taste. As when he had searched the woods in company with Aaron and Biddy, he had the sensation of almost being able to touch some different and unheard-of thing, aesthetic in this case instead of technological.

  Then the feeling was gone, and he dismissed the question from his mind as he bowed. “Miss Gay.”

  “Mr. Marx,” she said, without preamble, “please don’t think that I’m trying to pry or meddle, but was there some reason Joshua Bolt couldn’t leave the hotel last night?”

  He raised one eyebrow. “On the contrary, Miss Gay. He left it at about seven-thirty, saying he had plans of his own for the evening. He has not returned.”

  Her eyes lowered briefly to her gloved hands, which rested, folded, upon her knee. The delicate line of her mouth tightened. “I was afraid of that,” she said quietly. “He was supposed to come for me for dinner at eight.”

  They agreed that it was best to split up, Jason and Jeremy checking the police stations, Ishmael and Sarah the hospitals. “There’s no way of checking the third alternative,” said Sarah quietly, as she and Ishmael strode along the clammy dawn streets, their cloaks stirring at the fog that still clung to the corners of the buildings like ectoplasmic wool. “In any case the tide’s turned.”

  Her cool voice did not fool him. Long used to reading the subtlest cues to hidden emotion, he glanced sideways at her, remembering what she had once said about the crimps that operated in any deep-water port.

  “Surely there are far too many sailors in this city for professionals to kidnap an obvious amateur such as Joshua?”

  She shook her head. “It depends on how many ships are in port short of hands. There’s ways of finding out, but none that would do him much good if he’s already on an outward bound vessel. The whole of the Barbary Coast is honeycombed with subcellars and tunnels, almost as bad as Chinatown. Anything could have happened to him. I ...”

  From the fog a shape materialized, and a man’s voice said, “Aha, Dr. Gay! We were just coming to seek you, but recognized your voice.”

  Much to Ishmael’s surprise, Miss Gay halted and curtseyed to the man who emerged from the fog of a narrow street. “Your Majesty,” she said. “Mr. Marx—permit me to present you to His Imperial Majesty Norton I, Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico, and his two dogs, Bummer and Lazarus.”

  Ishmael, who remembered very clearly Aaron telling him that the United States was ruled by a president and a democratically elected Congress, looked in some puzzlement from Miss Gay to the slender, dignified Englishman in the tattered crimson military uniform and flowing cloak who stood so haughtily before them amid the vege
table parings and horse droppings of the gutter. The aforementioned dogs—a pair of shaggy curs, one big and one small—slunk back snarling, and the Emperor Norton snapped his fingers peremptorily.

  “Sirrahs, behave yourselves! You do us no credit.” He turned back to Sarah, and bowed again. “When I passed the hospital the other day I saw you with a young gentleman. Since you have in the past done me many kindnesses, when I discovered that same young gentleman this morning lying unconscious in a doorway in Chinatown ...”

  “What?” cried Sarah, her usual cool poise deserting her as she caught at the elaborately braided sleeve.

  The Emperor of the United States put a kindly hand over hers. “There, there, my dear. We assisted him to the home of some friends of ours in the district, then came to seek you. We were fortunate to find you so quickly.”

  “Take me there,” said Sarah.

  Joshua lay on a straw pallet in the back room of a noodle factory off Washington Street—a room whose broken windows had been mended with scraps of rotting cardboard but which was warmed by the steam from the kitchens next door. Ishmael glanced curiously around him as he and the Emperor of the United States escorted Miss Gay in from the noisome alley outside. The dozen or so Chinese who occupied the place all bowed as they entered, but he had the sensation of being observed by watchful eyes. There were several other pallets in the room, and the signs of occupancy by at least half a dozen; from the covered trapdoor half-hidden in the shadow in a corner his quick ears caught the vague sounds of movement underground.

  “Please do not think that your young man is drunk, Dr. Gay,” the Emperor Norton was saying. “I am completely familiar with the smell of alcohol, and there is none upon him. I am more inclined to believe he has been drugged.”

  She knelt beside Joshua’s limp body, pulling back the velvet evening cloak that covered him, and one of the Chinese put in, “He not have poppy, either. No smell, no smoke.” He shook his head and bowed, a thin ageless-looking little man with a long pigtail shot with white. “If he sleep in opium den, he no have cloak after, either.”

  “He has a point,” agreed Ishmael, kneeling beside Sarah to feel Joshua’s wrists. “Nor are his clothes damp. He would not have lain in the doorway long.”

  “Nothing on his breath,” said Sarah, leaning over Joshua to sniff at his lips. “Not alcohol or opium.”

  “There was nothing in his pockets, either,” added the Emperor, still standing among the cluster of Chinese at the door. “We sought for some means of identifying him, as all we knew was that he has walked you home from St. Brendan’s these last four evenings. I thought he’d been slugged, myself,” he added, less formally, “but there’s no lump.”

  Sarah leaned forward, carefully lifting Josh’s head and gently felt the back of his skull. She shook her head, puzzled, and lowered his head to the thin pillow again; then she brushed the ivory blond hair back from his temples and frowned.

  The Emperor leaned over her shoulder to look. “What would have caused that?”

  Sarah frowned. “Burns, it looks like.” She glanced up swiftly, hearing the harsh draw of Ishmael’s breath. “What is it?” she asked. “Is something wrong?”

  In the dim daylight that came in from the alley his face looked taut; one hand was pressed to his temple, and perspiration gleamed thinly on his upper lip. But he shook his head, and the pain—if it was pain that he felt—seemed to pass. “Nothing,” he said quietly, “Nothing.”

  On the cot Joshua moved convulsively; his eyes flew open in unseeing panic and he cried, “I won’t!”

  Sara caught at his flailing hands. Joshua struggled against her for a moment, then gasped and lay still, his face shining with a dew of moisture. Quietly, Sarah asked, “You won’t what, Josh?”

  He opened his eyes again, blinking up at her stupidly. Then with a faint moan he moved his head. “I won’t what?” he asked. “What are you—Sarah—I mean, Miss Gay—where am I?” He moved his head to look past them at the dim door with its crowding shapes, and groaned again.

  “You are in the Yee Han Song Noodle Factory on Washington Street,” provided Norton.

  “What? Aargh,” he added, as another pang lanced through his skull. “How did I get here? I ...”

  “Joshua,” asked Ishmael quietly, “what happened? The ...” He paused, realizing how insane it sounded. “The Emperor of the United States found you about an hour ago on the outskirts of Chinatown, unconscious. Do you remember what happened?”

  He tried to shake his head, and quit with a gasp. He gasped again when he tried to bring his hands to his throbbing temples, and touched the blistered squares of flesh there. “No,” he said faintly. “Nothing. It’s like—like it never happened. The last thing I remember was walking out of the hotel to meet Sarah—I mean Miss Gay,” he corrected himself. Then, “Who found me?”

  “I’ll explain later,” whispered Sarah reassuringly.

  From the corner where he stood Ishmael watched them, the lunatic emperor in his gaudy uniform and the elderly Chinese, Sarah sitting on her heels and feeling Joshua’s pulse with calm competence, the dim light reflecting like monster eyes off the lenses of her spectacles. His own head ached with a sharp stab of remembered pain. He put his hand to the small, square scars that marked his own temples, and reflected that Joshua was lucky to remember anything at all.

  * * *

  “And a two for the gentleman.”

  “Hit me.”

  “And a queen for the little lady.”

  “Hit me.”

  “And eight lovely clubs for the gentleman.” The dealer’s eyes, dark and cold as a shark’s, gleamed flatly from a smiling face. “Bets up, folks, who’ll buy another round?”

  The gaslight gleamed soft and white above the tawdry blazon of the cards. One in the morning, the long drag end of the night. Joshua Bolt, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Ishmael in the doorway to the billiard room, felt he’d lived his entire life in gambling dens. The tiredness he’d felt, walking with Sarah on the hills above the bay nearly a week ago, had grown to an all-encompassing sense of exhaustion. He felt it had been years since he’d seen daylight. Bridal Veil Mountain, the place they were doing all this to save, seemed like some far-off dream. But a dream close enough to touch, close enough that he could hear the unending whisper of rain on the pine needles, and the throaty clucking of the black, ice-choked stream that ran five feet from the kitchen door.

  He glanced sideways at his companion in this combine of mathematics and glitter. Despite the shirtsleeves and rumpled hair, Ish looked capable of playing pool for the rest of the night. Jason was right. The man was inhuman.

  Jeremy, faithful to the system, had folded on nineteen. Jason was still in, but if the card he pulled next round was three or over he must fold. And he did. They’d been losing all night.

  That was the hardest, Joshua knew. The times they stuck with the system and lost. Even harder was to refrain from betting everything when the odds were that they would win, in order to recoup. Since his own interest in cards was almost entirely mathematical he knew that this was how it must be, but he knew that there was enough of a gambler in Jason’s more extravagant makeup that every loss, especially the close ones, or the ones that could have been wins, rotted his soul.

  It had, Josh knew, little to do with the money. Watching the angry glitter in his older brother’s eyes, he knew this to be true without understanding it. Jeremy could win or lose with reasonable equanimity; the brief elation over his wins balanced the annoyance over his losses—and in any case in some things Jeremy was longer-headed than Jason. Jeremy could accept Joshua’s and Ishmael’s guidance and stick with the tedium of the system. Jason’s bolder nature fretted under the restraint.

  And it didn’t help, Josh reflected, that they’d been losing for two days.

  It was all in the odds, of course. He and Ishmael had explained it to Jason, and Jason had claimed to understand. But Josh didn’t like the glint in Jason’s eyes as he threw down an eighteen.


  Behind them in the billiard room a man’s voice grumbled, “Damn kid’s game. Not a man’s game in the place.” The speaker intruded his wide shoulders between Ish and Joshua; a big man dressed in black clothing a bit too dandified for a rancher, a knight’s head stickpin glinting in the dark silk of his cravat. The smell of whiskey hung faintly about him, but there was, too, an edge of danger, a readiness for trouble that said, Gunfighter.

  At the blackjack table, Jason leaned forward, his red-and-gold waistcoat bright as blood against the white of his sleeves. He looked at his cards, leaned back, and folded.

  Behind them, the big man grumbled, “About as much skill and thinking as Faro. Spit in the Ocean! Acey-Ducey Under-My-Shoosie! Doesn’t anybody in this Godforsaken hell play chess?”

  Without so much as turning his head, Ishmael inquired, “At how much a piece?”

  Mate was set at two hundred dollars. Queen went for a hundred (“About the price of any woman in this town,” remarked someone), rooks seventy-five, bishops and knights fifty. Pawns were twenty dollars apiece. A mystified owner scoured the surrounding saloons for a chess set and finally came up with one that the owner of Florinda’s Place kept for decoration in her parlor.

  Ishmael beat the stranger in seven moves.

  “By God!” roared the big man. “Let me see you try that again, stranger!”

  He caught him with a reverse fool’s mate, in three.

  “But that,” he said, pocketing his cash, “is a classic fakement.”

  The big man stroked his narrow black mustache and regarded his closed-in king thoughtfully through a haze of cigar smoke. Then he looked back up at Ish. “After I beat you this time,” he said, “show me that one again.”

  Warned, stung and $600 poorer, the gunfighter settled down to grim play. Joshua stayed in the corner of the billiard room with the little knot of spectators who knew enough about chess not to be bored to distraction, watching the slow progress of the game. The man in black was no slouch; he studied every move carefully before he made it, working through in his mind possibilities that Ishmael clearly saw three and four moves ahead. Yet it was clear to Joshua from the outset that Ishmael would win.