by Gary Amdahl
Later he was standing next to the jitney bus of her friend Izzy Minkowski. It was empty and driverless, and he was waiting for that man to emerge from the throng. A blocky, dusty-looking man in a light suit and white fedora walked past several times. Charles tried not to notice him, but saw him often and clearly enough to think he must have suffered some kind of curse and was slowly turning to marble; the man’s eyes, not quite fully closed, gave the impression of the blindness of statues. He walked stiffly but surely, moving out of people’s ways, looking up and down the street they were on, and the one intersecting it.
Suddenly Vera was at his side, touching his arm.
“Oh, what shall we do,” she mock-wailed.
“Go back to the Presidio and bury Durwood Keogh up to his neck. Ride by and let the horse shit on him, I don’t know.”
“Bury Durwood Keogh and yes, sorry . . .?”
The street was loud.
“Never mind. Cavalry drill.”
“Yes, of course I know what you’re talking about, I just didn’t catch the end. Snap off his head like one of those poor chickens?”
Vera came around, faced him, looked at him with pointed noncommittality. The glance lingered and became a searching stare. Charles stared back at her as if his life depended on it, but Vera severed the connection after only a moment or two. Smoothing her hair, she spotted Minkowski muscling his way across the street. He was short and dark, square-headed with a pronounced five o’clock shadow and brilliantly oiled hair. They embraced soundlessly, pecking on both cheeks. Charles meanwhile was fighting off, or rather pretending to fight off while succumbing and finding incredible pleasure in, a plan to offer Vera huge sums of money, everything he could lay his hands on, to literally cross oceans and climb mountains for her, to even—he could not stop himself in time from this darker desire, this outright evil—kidnap her, take her to Kathmandu . . . or Iceland, yes Iceland, and make her a baroness of volcanoes and glaciers, because he could do that, or nearly so, he could do whatever he wanted in this ridiculous illusion of a world and what he wanted, what he wanted more than anything else he could imagine, wanted so badly he felt he was going to explode, was to be with Vera. After perhaps a minute of this mania, he began to calm down, but could not take his eyes off her lips.
“Let me ask you a question,” said Minkowski. “Are you leaving town before or after some sonofabitch gets shot in the head.”
Charles stiffened and Vera exclaimed that she was not leaving. Minkowski narrowed his eyes and nodded.
“This,” she said, “is the American you’ve heard so much about. Charles Minot, Iz Minkowski.”
Charles reached his fine aristocratic hand out a great distance to shake Minkowski’s huge dirty paw.
“Related to the grafter?” asked Minkowski. He held and shook hard and did not smile.
“Graft prosecutor,” Charles said, retrieving his hand with some effort.
“Wha’d I say?” Minkowski demanded.
“You said grafter,” explained Vera, as if her friend were about to fly off the handle.
“I did?” He seemed contrite but still would not smile.
Vera nodded and Charles smiled.
“I guess there’s no love lost between your old man and Keogh either, huh?” asked Minkowski.
“Not a great deal, no,” Charles admitted gravely, dropping the smile, at which Minkowski finally smiled and Charles sneezed, suddenly and without the faintest tickle of warning. He made a big show of it, happy to have some stage business, staggering a little with the force of it, wiping his nose with a flourish and inserting the handkerchief with exaggerated care back into his breast pocket. They walked the few steps to the little bus and Charles shook his pockets for nickels.
“Vera always rides free with me,” said Minkowski. He put his heavy hand on Charles’s arm. And squeezed. “And that goes for Vera’s friends too, see?” He looked back and forth between them, as if to ascertain what kind of friends they were—if in fact friends at all, despite everything he had heard. “Speaking of friends, how is Julie?”
“High as a kite.”
“I would be too. I would indeed be too.”
“How are things with you?” Vera asked Minkowski.
“Oh, fine, fine. Some dick tried to sign up for music lessons with Minnie Moody, you know, and another lunkhead has been trying to get a date with his sister. Moody’s sister, I mean,” laughed Minkowski. “You never know about these shitsuckers. Brother, they are comical. Can you see it? This thug trying to come off like a handsome rake, when it’s clear as the busted veins in his great fucking honker of a nose and the stinking derby on his tiny head that he’s a drunken bully, ignorant and mean like they all are.” Minkowski now sneezed but appeared not to notice. “And how about his pal the gorilla at the keyboard. Can’t you see it? ‘Chopsticks’? ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’?”
Charles laughed, but neither Vera nor Minkowski joined him. He said that Minnie Moody had actually purchased a ticket to come and see him sing Pergolesi the night after the earthquake.
“Goddamn them all to hell anyway,” said Minkowski vaguely, meaning not Minnie Moody, or Charles, but some others.
“Anybody been round to see you?” asked Vera.
“I guess they have!” Minkowski shouted with sudden fury. “Him and his pals in various combinations.”
Vera turned to Charles, but kept Minkowski in view, giving him significant looks as she spoke. “He refers to a man we believe to be more or less running San Francisco’s secret police.”
“Secret police,” Charles murmured appreciatively.
Minkowski stared with unblinking neutrality at him, then glanced at Vera, who went on. “His name is Rudy Swanson and he used to work, we believe, for the Pinkerton Agency, but now heads something called the Public Utilities Protection Bureau, an organization formed by Pacific Gas and Electric, the Sierra and San Francisco Power Company, and who else . . .?”
“PTT,” holding up three fingers. “And, ummm—”
“Right, Pacific Telephone and Telegraph,” said Vera, holding up four fingers, “and Western States Gas and Electric.” Up came her thumb. “The Northern Electric Railroad. I think that’s it, isn’t it?” Minkowski nodded, then shrugged. “If we have the right fellow, he was the one sitting next to the public prosecutor at Tom Moody’s three Martinez trials.”
“You know Tom Moody, do you?” Minkowski asked Charles.
“We met, yes, coupla times, upstairs, downstairs.” Charles gestured over his shoulder. “We spoke very briefly.”
“They’ve been trying to frame dear Tom for several years now,” said Vera wistfully. “And this person Swanson, who has absolutely no business being in a courtroom, was there helping pick the goddamn jury, whispering advice—but failing, here’s my main point about Swanson, failing three times to get a conviction.”
“He has been all over Farnsworth,” said Minkowski, “for three weeks now.”
An awkward silence ensued. Finally Vera looked expectantly at Charles, who said nothing, waiting.
“He offered Warren some money,” said Minkowski.
“Don’t tell me how much,” pleaded Vera.
“Five grand.”
“Oh my God.”
“Five thousand dollars.”
“That’s too much for Warren to bear!”
“Then he waltzed over here and offered me the same.”
“He did not!” shouted Vera incredulously.
“I told him he should keep his money as he was going to need it when the subornation market heated up. Then I told him to get the hell off my bus. And he says, with a grin that looks like he should be pie-eyed but he’s not, those pale baby blues burning away in their sockets, he says he guessed he could have my jitney license just like that, and he snaps his fingers, if he wanted it, and rip it to shreds right under my big fucking Jew nose. Which he then pretends to do, like a mime, you know, very detailed and precise, ripping it eight times and then brushing his hands off. You’r
e doomed, he tells me, why don’t you wise up, URR’s gonna have you off the heavy traffic streets within a matter of weeks, and then out of business altogether, so wise up, wise up, wise up, it’s like a little refrain he singing to me now, wise up and I said I guessed I could make a living some other way than a nickel at a time driving a goddamn bus and he sings some more at me, wise up wise up wise up, only this time he’s friendly as can be, almost sweet, you know. ‘Won’t take much,’ he says, ‘to convict the sonofabitch, just a little circumstantial what-have-you, and, by the way, what do you have, a detail or two or some general notion we can cook up for show-and-tell later on?’”
Minkowski’s eyes widened startlingly, and Charles prepared himself to laugh at the joke he thought was surely coming, but Minkowski merely whispered, “Here comes the sonofabitch now.”
It was the man Charles had noticed earlier, the man of marble. He was now entering the bus, which dipped, as if with great statuary weight, toward the curb. The man, Swanson, smiled hugely, with his mouth open and red, and raised the narrow slits through which he gazed back out the door at them so wide it became comical and then unsettling. They entered the bus. Swanson appeared to relax: it was as if a statue were coming to life. He held out a nickel to Minkowski, who took it with a show of distaste.
“Remind me,” said Swanson with a rough, deep voice, “to buy you a decent cigar one of these days.” He sniffed the stale air of the bus’s interior and shot a reproving glance at its driver.
“Don’t smoke,” said Minkowski.
“Hell you don’t. Seen you do it.” He touched the wide brim of his marble hat and said to Vera: “Seen you too. Daring for a dame.”
“No, sir,” said Vera, “I do not believe that you have.” She beamed.
“What’s your name again . . .?” asked Swanson amiably.
“Pardon me,” said Vera, still smiling prettily. “I do not hand my name out to just any old clown who happens along with a wish to know it.”
“Warum nicht? Got something to hide?” Swanson’s round face got rounder and redder. “I’m only kidding you, miss!”
“What is your name, sir?” asked Vera. It was unlikely but possible that Swanson did not in truth know who she was, merely of her and not by sight, as Vera had been peripheral to his and his employer’s concerns for several years, and figuring hardly at all on the West Coast. So she pretended not to know his name or face, either.
“Swanson,” said Swanson, “Rudolph Swanson,” leaning toward Vera over the back of a seat and holding out his hand, but looking Charles up and down. “I’m with the public utilities. What do you do, miss? If you don’t mind my asking like you did your name, which I respect but do not understand. Still in school? This must be your boyfriend! Say, don’t look like that! I’m a friend of your owner/operator here, and I guess you are too, by the way you’ve been chatting here so earnestly. So that makes us friends or at least I hope so. That’s how I like to approach folks. Don’t mean to pry, I most sincerely do not.”
Within the narrow confines of the space left in the air by the detective’s bullying garrulousness, Charles thought he ought to say something, felt something like a manly duty to speak up firmly but diplomatically, but was confused and could think of nothing to say. He felt naked and afraid of what would happen next—not an actor at all. If the man was a big-time Pinkerton or ex-Pinkerton, why did he not know who Vera was? And himself too: How could he not know he was talking to William Minot’s son? Was he pretending not to know? If he was in deep with the URR people, he was capable of any grotesquerie Charles could imagine. He decided, in that moment of equal and opposing forces—youthful bravado working on youthful fear with traces of erotic mania still filtering out of his blood—to act as if he knew the answers to these and other questions. It was a kind of dramatic irony, not as he and Sir Edwin theorized and practiced it, where the real and the faked real were both unreliable, but as he’d understood the idea from lecturers at college: he would know something his audience, the marble detective, did not, thus giving himself the upper hand and perhaps causing the man to see the episode as a show, and be amused, entertained by it, rather than as a part of life and therefore requiring action, a judgment and an action, such as: they are a threat to the public welfare and I must crush them. Yes, that was it. The idea blazed past his eyes, streaked through his mind like comets crashing into planets that awoke and trembled with lust—who would be the actor on this stage? Who would get to act, and in the service of what would that action occur? He raised his head imperiously, and stared with rich-boy hauteur into Swanson’s pale eyes. Swanson closed his mouth and blinked. Charles felt unimaginably powerful. He relaxed.
“Wait, sure,” said Vera. “I know you.” She freshened her smile, making it friendly again. In that instant he felt he could never act again unless she was acting with him. “Don’t I? Weren’t you in the papers a while back?”
Swanson snorted. “Nope. Not that type.”
Charles remembered several articles in the Bulletin that Father had put under his nose over a hundred breakfasts, having to do with abuses committed by private detectives. He continued to stare with a thrillingly detached, level cool—encouraged wildly by his perception of Vera’s similar condition—at Swanson.
“What type are you?” asked Vera.
“Say, you some kind of detective, little girl?” Swanson winked at Minkowski, who was black in the face with rage.
“Who,” asked Vera, “did you say you worked for?”
“I insist you tell me who you are before I start repeating myself!” chuckled Swanson.
“Aren’t you that famous detective? The one that beat up that fellow in the hotel room in where was it?”
“Oh my goodness!” shouted Swanson. “Certainly not!”
“It must have been that business in Stockton, then, the uh . . . oh, let me see, let me see now, the ummm—”
“Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association,” Charles said, drawing on resources he’d not had to measure or verify before speaking as casually as if the subject were baseball and the consequences for error nothing more serious than a corrective wisecrack—or lines in a play. “You played for them couple years ago,” he went on, as everybody ceased what they’d been doing in the scene to stare at him in astonishment. “The, uh, the sheriff there arrested a fellow who’d been, what, attempting to plant dynamite, wasn’t it? In the Sperry Flour Mill? If I’m remembering this right, and I sure could be wrong, don’t quote me—and in the lobby of the Stockton Hotel . . .?”
“Yes!” said Vera, “that’s right, and the Stockton Iron Mill and a couple other places but the sheriff—” she paused to feign a giggle behind her hand, “—the sheriff figures he’s got some kind of anarchist for sure, couldn’t be happier, couldn’t be more proud, you know, and then he finds out to his horror that the man is in fact a detective’s assistant in the employ of the Merchants and Manufacturers’ Association! That wasn’t you? I mean the detective, of course, not the knucklehead assistant.” Vera smiled coyly.
“I’ll tell you what,” grinned Swanson, “you’re one well-informed goddamn little schoolgirl.”
“I’ll tell you what, Mr. Swanson, I’m not a goddamn little schoolgirl. I’m a citizen of the United States of America and I like to read the newspapers, I like to read them all, you know, and the fine print too, just to make sure everybody’s getting a fair shake.”
“Fair shake! Hear that?” Swanson addressed his question to Minkowski. “Fair shake? I don’t—a fair shake, you say. I don’t think so. Not in this world. I mean, really, come now. If you aren’t a little schoolgirl, you’re sure acting like one!” He laughed good-naturedly. “The last thing this world is is fair. You just have to get over that! Find out how things go in a general sort of way, and then do like most everybody else does. But a fair shake now, isn’t that a newspaper itself? Kind our friend the driver here likes to peruse? Get all squinty-eyed and black-furrowed over? I read those rags too. Don’t I?” he asked Minkows
ki, who turned away, started his motor and revved it angrily—probably doing it some damage, Charles thought: settle down, don’t let him get to you.
“How ’bout you, Mr. Minot?”
Minkowski let his motor fall to idle and Charles took a slow, deep breath. He was known, after all, to this disgusting and dangerous man, and was now not at all sure what that knowledge meant. He glanced at Vera, who glanced back as if she thought he was forgetting his lines, and smiled discreet encouragement.
“Mr. Swanson?” Charles began.
