Kissing Comfort

by Jo Goodman

  “That’s good. You can talk to her.”

  “I’m certain I will talk to her, but not about you. I’m going to throw my hat in the ring, Bram. I thought it was fair to let you know.”

  “Throw your hat in the ring? Fight me for her, you mean?” He looked down at himself and then at Bode. “How is that fair?”

  “I hope it won’t come to a fight. I recognize you’re at a disadvantage, but I know you’re not helpless. You never are.”

  Bram pushed himself as upright as he was able. “She won’t have you, Bode. You scare her. You always have. It can’t have escaped your notice that when you walk into a room, she walks out.”

  “Oh, I’ve noticed.” Bode dropped his feet to the floor and rose from his chair. Favoring his brother with a faint but consciously shrewd smile, he buttoned his jacket. “You’re so used to women showing interest in a particular and obvious way that you don’t know that some of them reveal it in another.”

  “Wait!” Bram called after Bode as he started to leave. “What are you saying?”

  Bode merely smiled to himself and kept on walking.

  It was Tuck who insisted at the last minute that they take the carriage to Black Crowne. His decision had nothing to do with Black Crowne’s proximity to the Barbary Coast—after all, it was daylight—or even Comfort’s welfare. No, he explained, it was his lumbago that required a little nursing. As a result, all of them climbed into the open carriage in spite of the relatively short distance they had to cover.

  Comfort opened her parasol and rested the stem on her shoulder while Newt and Tuck adjusted their hats to shade their eyes from the bright afternoon sunshine. The cloudless sky was azure silk without imperfection. She settled back just as her uncles did, in anticipation of an uneventful journey.

  Which was why they were caught unaware and unprepared when the Rangers swarmed.

  Chapter Nine

  Tuck and Newt put up their fists and fought back as best they could. Instinct sometimes took over when common sense should have made them throw up their hands and immediately surrender. They were woefully outnumbered. The thieves swarmed them like flies on carrion. The Rangers all wore roughly made black woolen jackets with only the uppermost button fastened, short black vests that rode up above their trousers, and black derbies jammed on their heads. Their clothing made them virtually indistinguishable. Newt and Tuck were left to know them by their blows.

  One of them favored throwing all his weight into a punch. Another jabbed and feinted. Still another used his head as a battering ram. Newt threw up his forearms, blocking the blows he could and accepting the ones he couldn’t. Tucker jammed his shoulder into the chin of one of the assailants and extended the reach of his long arms and lanky frame every chance he had.

  Their driver used his whip to good effect until it was torn from his hand and wound around his throat like a garrote. He was thrown to the street still clutching his neck and wasn’t steady enough to avoid the carriage wheel when the horse bolted. His scream was louder than the mare’s frightened snort, louder even than the cries from people huddled on the sidewalk.

  A man stepped away from the curb to drag the injured driver to safety and was hauled back by his frightened wife. Someone else ventured out but was driven back by the sight of brass knuckles glinting in the sunlight. People shouted for the police. They shouted for help. They raised the alarm but never their fists.

  As soon as the first Ranger hauled himself up on the carriage step, Comfort closed her parasol. She used the blunt wooden tip to jab at his chest and belly. It was a moderately successful attack, although it lacked the elegance of a foil thrust and only worked when there was one opponent. When the first attacker was joined by a second, Comfort swung the parasol at their heads. If they ducked, she clobbered them.

  Above the shouts from the onlookers, she heard Tuck and Newt yelling at her to jump. To run. To hide.

  They never spoke all at once. They were an undisciplined chorus, and what they said came at her in rapid succession, the words separated by half measures, each one an echo of another. All of it indistinguishable.

  All of it frantic.

  Comfort froze. Her attackers took immediate advantage and snatched the parasol from her nerveless fingers. She stared at them but didn’t see. She had an urge to make herself small, and then smaller yet.

  She had no weapons when they came for her. Someone was calling after her, calling her name. What they wanted from her was a mystery. Was there something she was supposed to do? She always wondered if there was something she was supposed to do.

  John Farwell hurled himself through the hatch into Bode’s apartment and stumbled forward until he caught himself on the edge of a table. He had a more difficult time catching his breath. “You have to come with me. Now. There’s been . . .” He shook his head. “I don’t know what there’s been.”

  Bode didn’t leap from the stool, but he did set down his pencil. “Calm yourself, John. I only understood every third word.”

  “The Rangers. I’m hearing they assaulted passengers in a carriage just thirty minutes ago. It happened outside the Coast, Mr. DeLong. Two gentlemen and a young woman were in the—” He stopped because Bode was on his feet and heading toward the hatch. “I don’t know if it’s the bankers and Miss Kennedy. I couldn’t learn their names.”

  Bode threw back the door. “Where did it happen?”

  The clerk told him the location. “But I doubt that they’re still there. Miss Kennedy—if it was Miss Kennedy—she was . . .” He swallowed hard as Bode dropped below the hatch and then resurfaced suddenly.

  “She was what? Injured?”

  “Taken,” he said. “Mr. DeLong, I sincerely hope it wasn’t Miss Kennedy, because the Rangers have her now.”

  Bode didn’t ask John Farwell to follow him, but the clerk dogged his footsteps all the way to the police station and was left to pace the floor in front of the sergeant’s desk while Bode was shown to the room where Tucker and Newton were being looked after by Dr. Winter.

  Tuck pushed the doctor away as soon as Bode entered. “They took her. The Rangers took her. Damn it. I knew something was coming. I thought taking the carriage . . .” He put a hand to his head. “I should have made her stay back.”

  “All right,” Bode said, looking them over. Dr. Winter was trying to stitch a cut above Tuck’s right eye. Newt had a damp and bloodstained cloth pressed to one corner of his mouth. A button on Tuck’s jacket dangled by a thread. Newt had a torn sleeve and his collar was askew. They both sported scraped and swollen knuckles, although in Newt’s case it looked as if he might also have broken his right hand. There was no question that they’d put up a fight, but they were ten years past their prime, and the Rangers attacked with the ferocity of hounds from Hell. “Tell me where and when and how the attack happened.”

  In their anxiety to have it all said at once, Tuck and Newt spoke over each other, sometimes completing the other’s thought, sometimes running all their sentences together. Bode had to sift through their explanations for the facts he needed to know.

  “What are the police doing?”

  “Organizing men to go into the Coast to find her.”

  Bode didn’t comment. The area had alleys too numerous to count. No one except the denizens knew them all. Some streets had innocuous-sounding names like Hinckley, Bartlett, and Dupont. Others confused their name with their reputation and were called Murder Point and Dead Man’s Alley. Below ground in the dank, dark cellars there existed a whole community of felons, wastrels, petty thieves, and prostitutes. They entered and exited their subterranean homes by means of ladders and poles. The odors were vile, the diseases were loathsome, and the chances that any woman could escape unscathed were almost nil. For a young woman of means and more than modest beauty, the chances were . . .

  Well, there was no chance. Bode pushed away from the doorframe, where he was resting his shoulder. It was not in his nature to accept what others believed was inevitable. The first thing he d
id was ask Dr. Winter to leave.

  “There might be something we can do,” he said, closing the door behind him. “But you have to allow me to act on my own, and you have to trust that I know what I’m doing. When I find her and bring her out, I won’t be placing her in your hands. That’s what will be different. I can’t promise when you’ll see her again, but she’ll be safe. You need to believe that.”

  Newt focused on the single word that gave him hope. “You said ‘when.’ When you find her, not if. You can do that?”

  Bode had plenty of doubts. He didn’t reveal a single one. “Yes.”

  “You also said ‘we,’ ” Tuck reminded him. “Something we can do. If you’re acting on your own, what are we doing?”

  “You’re going to have to decide what you’re willing to pay for Comfort’s return. They’d probably like gold, but they might be willing to accept paper. You’ll have to decide what she’s worth.”

  Comfort paced off the space of her dark, nearly airless prison. It was generous enough in length, measuring slightly more than seven feet, for her to lie down if she wished. She did not wish. The floor was packed dirt, relatively smooth, but cool and damp, and nothing had been given to her to make a pallet. The width of the room was considerably less than ideal. The first time she stepped it off, she jammed her wrist against the dirt wall because she came upon it so abruptly. It hardly measured four feet. The height of the room disturbed her most of all. When she raised her hand above her head and stood on tiptoe, she could press the flat of her palm against the ceiling, a distance she judged to be something less than seven feet. Seven feet, by four feet, by six feet and inches.

  Allowing for error in the length of her paces, Comfort thought she might be standing in her grave.

  She leaned back against one of the long walls and forced herself to remember how she came to be here. She wasn’t a child any longer. She hadn’t run to this place to hide, and she hadn’t fainted. There’d been a dirty rag thrust in her face and kept there, but for as long as she held her breath, she was fine. She recalled the coarse black hairs on the back of the man’s hand as he pressed the rag against her mouth. There’d been the rank smell of unwashed bodies, the odor of a rotten tooth in the breath against her ear. She caught the scent of lye soap in their clothes and the cloying fragrance of pomade. There was a tattoo on someone’s forearm, a bird perhaps, a phoenix or a griffin. She saw it when she clawed at his sleeve.

  What else? she wondered. What else had she seen before her lungs demanded that she breathe?

  Someone’s hat had fallen off. She’d glimpsed smooth, shiny hair, more red than blond, but with shades of both. There were beards. Dark. Light. Trimmed. Unkempt. One hairless chin had a dimple squarely in the center.

  She thought she’d drawn blood. Scratched a face or a neck. No matter how closely she tried to examine her fingernails, the darkness was absolute. She couldn’t be sure that she’d fought hard enough.

  Comfort drew a ragged breath, identical to the one she’d drawn with the oily rag over her face. She had no experience with the sweet, heavy fragrance, but she suspected she was inhaling chloroform. Identifying it was her last accomplishment. There was nothing to recall after that.

  That was past. Now Comfort concentrated on the present. She extended her arm over her head again and studied the rough edges of the ceiling with her fingertips. There were narrow spaces at regular intervals. By walking slowly and with great care around the room, she was able to identify the cutout in the wooden slats that was the entrance. There were no hinges on her side.

  Not so much as a scintilla of light filtered through the slats or around the hatch. She supposed that was because someone had taken the precaution of covering the floor with a carpet. That meant the hatch was hidden from view.

  There was a crowd of people overhead that might have seen it otherwise. Their footsteps crisscrossed her ceiling without pause. When she’d had her palm flat to the boards, she could sometimes feel the sag in the slats as someone of more substantial weight pounded across the floor.

  There was too much noise above her for Comfort to believe that she had any hope of being heard, but that didn’t keep her from trying. She called out for several minutes, trying to time her cries so they came during the brief pauses between bawdy songs and raucous laughter. If anyone heard her, no one came to help. The crowd overhead included women as well as men and numbered too many to have been involved directly in her abduction, but Comfort couldn’t imagine there was anyone in that room who didn’t know what had happened that afternoon or who would stand against the Rangers to come to her aid.

  It was easy to guess that she was being held in a concert saloon somewhere in the Barbary Coast, but whether it was Happy Tim’s, Bull Run, the Tulip, or any of a hundred others, she had no idea. Many of the worst dens were in cellars; so the fact that she was being held underground made her think that the establishment above her was at street level. That was only important to know if the opportunity to escape presented itself. Comfort wasn’t hopeful that it would.

  It made no difference to her situation if she closed her eyes or opened them. Feeling inordinately tired and weak-kneed, she closed them and sagged against the wall. The tune being pounded out on the piano was “Camptown Races.” She heard “doo-dah, doo-dah” in her head long after someone began playing another piece. The scuffle that broke out helped remove it from her mind. For the length of the pushing and shoving match, she thought of nothing except that someone might be killed. There was the slender possibility that the police would be summoned, and an even more fragile possibility that they would respond, but what she thought was a likely consequence to the fighting was that she’d end up sharing her confined space with a dead man.

  Comfort felt her throat begin to close. She rested one hand against it and forced herself to breathe slowly and deeply. The air didn’t stir. It was just damp enough to make her skin clammy, and every time she drew a breath, she tasted it. While no light made its way down to her, the same wasn’t true of the smells.

  It was a blessing that bad cigars created the heaviest of the odors that assaulted her. Tobacco masked some of the more pungent aromas, chief among them sour beer and urine. The hint of opium smoke took her right back to the tent where she’d lived with Tuck and Newt and whores who answered to any name but their own. Butterfly. Li’l Darling. Mokey. Sweetings. No one was ever an Annie or Emma or Susannah. Whoever they’d been before taking up the life, or being forced into it, they were no longer that person.

  Comfort wondered if that was her destiny. She’d been kept alive for a reason. Was that it? There were hundreds of young Chinese girls brought into the city every year to replace the ones who had come before. Suey Tsin had been one of them, held as a sex slave in a crib where she could neither stand nor stretch. Relief from those confines came only when someone spent fifty cents to lie between her legs, or a dollar, and engaged her in some far worse depravity.

  Comfort remembered the auctions where girls were paraded across the bar as though it were a stage lined with limelight. Some of them seemed to enjoy the attention and notoriety that making the walk gave them. Most were unsteady on their feet, plied with drink or drugs, so their steps were slow and halting and gave the customers, who were often equally as drunk, more time to appreciate the offerings.

  Were there still auctions? She hadn’t heard about them for years, but then she was considerably more distant from that hard life than she’d been as a child. Her uncles would be horrified to learn what entertainments she had glimpsed while they were living in the dance hall. The memory of it all made her stomach churn uncomfortably, and the thought that something like it could be her fate brought acid to the back of her throat.

  What she did know was that there was traffic in women that went opposite of the tide. There were stories in the papers, mostly dismissed as rumor and sensational reporting, that women on this side of the Pacific were prized for what they could bring on the Far East shores. Suey Tsin told her it wa
s true, that she’d seen it for herself. Young women, mostly fair-skinned blondes and redheads, were lifted off the streets when certain ships discharged their crews into the Barbary Coast.

  Comfort touched her nape and uneasily fingered the short strands of hair that had fallen free of her combs. Perhaps her dark hair wouldn’t be prized at all. It was nearly as black as Suey Tsin’s. She laid the back of her hand against her cheek. She’d always disliked how fair her skin was, how easily it showed angry or embarrassed color. Now she might have another reason to regret her pale features.

  She shook off the thought. It wasn’t worth her time lamenting what couldn’t be changed when every consideration needed to be given to what could.

  Bode heard the first inklings of Comfort’s fate from one of the crew from the steamer Demeter Queen. Tapper Stewart reported back to him within an hour of being loosed on Pacific Street at nightfall. All of the men from the ship were prowling the alleys and streets that defined the Barbary Coast. With the assistance of the shipmaster, Bode sketched the Coast in detail and then divided the area into sections. Nathan Douglas made the assignments, giving each group of men a list of establishments they should most particularly enter.

  No man who sailed for Black Crowne was unfamiliar with the deadfalls, melodeons, gambling palaces, and brothels that made up the Barbary Coast, but there wasn’t one among them who’d seen them all. Bode directed them to correct that oversight. He gave them money to purchase drinks but warned them they shouldn’t take more than a swallow, and even then they should keep their wits about them because in some of the deadfalls, the drink would blind them.

  He asked to see their weapons and was shown a wide assortment of serrated blades, daggers, filleting knives, brass and iron knuckles, garrotes, and in one case, a small and supple leather bag of buckshot that, when held in a capable fist, worked every bit as well as the knuckles. This armament was what passed for calling cards in the Barbary Coast. Bode didn’t need to remind them to keep their weapons hidden but also to keep them close.