Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  Although the restaurants and hotels were closing their doors, and sawdust from the floors of the better saloons was being swept out into the streets, San Francisco was still up, noisy and awake. The gaming resorts and gambling tents, illuminated from within by miner’s lamps, were still crowded with shadows and alive with activity. Andrew remarked, as they passed, that the rent on one of those tents could go as high as $40,000 a year, and that a man could make himself a fortune in six months if he operated one.

  From every open door came tinny piano music, wheezing accordion music, raucous barbershop singing, fandango guitars, and scraping violins. There were lights everywhere, in the city centre itself and sparkling all over the surrounding hills, lamps and cooking fires and torches, and it didn’t surprise Collis at all that San Francisco suffered a major fire disaster every four or five years. In one of the worst of the recent fires, in 1851, the old City Hotel, where Knickerbocker Jane had first set herself up as a madam, had been burned to the ground.

  Most of all, though, on the lighted and musical night air, at every corner, was the aroma of food. There was the hot, pungent smell of Mexican food, enchiladas and frijoles refritos; there was the waft of pioneer food, plain and filling, still cooked the same way it was cooked on the wagon trains that crossed the alkali deserts of Utah and the passes of the Humboldt Range, red-flannel hash and Indian-corn stew; there was seafood, breadcrumbed oysters and broiled lobster tails browned in butter; there was meaty South American food and Hawaiian food that was sweet and sharp with pineapples, and Australian beef and dumplings. And everywhere, like an exotic and persistent memory, from dilapidated upstairs rooms where dragon lanterns burned and where the shutters were open to the warm September night, from narrow alleyways and concealed doorways, came the spicy smell of Chinese food, wind-dried ducks and glazed fish, water chestnuts and crackling rice, and that particular invention of the San Francisco Chinese, chop suey.

  ‘One evening, I’ll take you to visit an opium den,’ promised Charles. ‘My servant Wang-Pu has a friend who runs a good place down near the dock. Mind you, I’m not so sure that there’s very much difference between an opium den and the smoking-room at the Sacramento capitol, except that the Chinese tend to lie down when they smoke, and they don’t talk so much claptrap.’

  They reached the Eagle Saloon, on Kearny, north of Portsmouth Square, and climbed down from the carriage. A sour-faced man in dusty black was leaning under the Eagle’s gas-lamp, an ivory revolver handle prominently tucked outside of his coat tails, and Charles called to him, ‘Keep your eye on the rig, will you? I want to send my man for some dinner.’

  The sour-faced man nodded. This was the Eagle Saloon’s ‘minder’, the man who made sure that befuddled customers weren’t robbed and attacked on the saloon’s doorstep. It was all right once they were out of sight and sound around the corner, but the management preferred to keep the street outside moderately quiet and respectable. It was better for business.

  Billy crossed the road to the Barreltop Lunch for a plate of fried fish and pig’s feet, topped with onions, while Charles led the way into the Eagle Saloon. He dropped a silver dollar into the minder’s coat pocket as he passed, but the minder, thin and slitty-eyed and scarred by acne and probably only nineteen years old, didn’t even blink.

  As they went through the saloon doors, decorated with bottle-green glass and engraved with eagle motifs, Charles turned to Collis and said, ‘All you can be absolutely sure of is that if some miner or mulewhacker tries to make off with my horses, then he’s going to have his head blown off his shoulders and no questions asked.’

  Inside, the Eagle Saloon was roaring with voices and laughter and piano music. The air was dense with cigar smoke, and through this haze, waitresses with plumed headdresses and long black dresses sewn with sequins passed with trays of whisky and steam beer. There was a long bar, at which a line of regulars leaned, their thumbs tucked in their vests and their hats tilted back on their heads, and behind the bar an unsmiling man with short-cropped hair and a walrus moustache poured the drinks with almost magical speed and skill.

  The walls were all mirrored, at great expense, said Charles, because the mirrors came from Paris; and the mirrors gave the foggy, glittering illusion that the Eagle Saloon opened on to yet more Eagle Saloons, that the whole place was like an endless steamy railroad depot, through which a disconsolate passenger might wander for hours, and never find a train.

  Collis tugged at his fingers through his evening gloves, so that the knuckles clicked. He was beginning to have a slight case of first night nerves, not because he wasn’t sure of his skill at faro, but because of the loudness and the roughness and the unfamiliarity of the saloon.

  A round-faced waitress with a large mole on the side of her nose came up to them and led them to a table. Collis took off his gloves, but not his hat, and ordered a straight bourbon. Then he flexed his fingers again and gave Andrew and Charles an uncomfortable smile.

  ‘What do we do now?’ he asked.

  ‘It depends what you want to do,’ said Andrew. ‘If you want to play cards, or dice, we’ll get you in on a game of cards or dice. If you want to suggest something else, then we’ll see what we can do.’

  Collis placed both of his hands flat on the table. Dimly seen through the cigar smoke, a fat pianist whose huge posterior overflowed his piano-stool like two bags of boiled pudding was banging out ‘Bye and Bye You Will Forget Me’, while one of the waitresses stood beside him and trilled the words in such a high soprano that nobody could make out what they were. ‘I haven’t played in a week or two,’ Collis said. ‘How about some practice, to unwind?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Andrew. He took out his leather purse and shook thirty or forty dollars in gold and silver coins on to the table. They spun, wobbled, and then lay flat.

  ‘Okay,’ said Collis. ‘I’ll give you ten dollars the next man to walk through the door will be wearing a checkered vest.’

  ‘Ten dollars it is,’ said Andrew.

  ‘What kind of gambling is this?’ demanded Charles. ‘Ten dollars on a checkered vest?’

  ‘Are you in?’ asked Collis.

  ‘Sure I am,’ said Charles. ‘I never heard anything so damned stupid.’ He fumbled in his pocket and then put down two five-dollar gold pieces on the table. ‘I’d still like to know what kind of gambling you call it.’

  Collis paused, saying nothing, his eyes on the green glass panels of the Eagle Saloon’s doors. He could see the silhouette of somebody outside; then the doors were opened a little way, hesitated, and closed again. Whoever was out there was talking to the minder, or saying goodbye to friends. The doors parted again, stayed half-open for a while, and then a middle-aged man in a brown suit and a yellow checkered vest walked in and crossed to the bar.

  Andrew looked at Collis narrowly as he pushed ten silver dollars across the polished surface of the table. Collis counted them and stacked the coins into a neat castle. Charles pushed his over, too.

  ‘That kind of gambling is called looking around the street before you walk into a place,’ said Collis, without raising his eyes. ‘There was another carriage waiting behind ours, and the fellow riding inside was the fellow you just saw.’

  ‘You won’t catch me like that again,’ warned Andrew.

  ‘I will,’ said Collis, ‘but next time don’t say you weren’t cautioned.’

  Charles, tickled, looked from Collis to Andrew and back again, and then gave out one of his short, barking laughs. ‘I think from now on we’d do better to skin other folks, instead of ourselves,’ he said. ‘I think you and us, we’re going to get along fine together, Collis.’

  With the silk fringes on her hips swaying and her plumes bobbing, the waitress came across the saloon with their drinks, and Collis winked at her as she set down his bourbon. He had to admit that he was feeling a hundred times improved in spirit.

  ‘Shall we skin the house, then?’ he asked, taking a sip of his whisky. ‘I see some faro tables by the far wall ther
e.’

  ‘Faro it is,’ agreed Andrew, and they left their seats and walked across to find themselves a game.

  They joined a table where three grizzly-bearded miners were tossing the last of their drinks down their reddened throats, gathering up their winnings, and preparing to leave. They were horny-handed, these miners, and their faces were creased by years of squinting into brilliant sunlight, but their suits were cut from the best broadcloth, and they were all doused in enough French toilet water to fuel a bordello’s bedroom lamps for months. One of them said to Collis, as he passed, ‘Watch out for the dealer. He’s a goddam unpleasant cuss, and he’s got himself a Navy revolver under the table.’

  Collis glanced across at Andrew and raised an eyebrow. But Andrew simply shrugged, as if it was quite usual for a card dealer to have a pistol at hand, and pulled out a chair for him.

  The dealer was a humourless sort, with an off-white hat and a striped silk shirt. He had pale-blue eyes with needle-sharp pupils, and a moustache clipped as close as a currying brush. ‘Good evening, gents,’ he said in a marked New Orleans accent, and proceeded to shuffle the pack.

  ‘I’ll be casekeeper, unless there are any objections,’ Collis said, sitting.

  The dealer glanced at him acutely, shrugged, and passed over the abacus. On it were painted small pictures of all the cards in the suit of spades, and beside each painted card was a wire, holding a row of four beads. Whenever a card was played – any card in any suit, because the spades on the abacus had no special significance – Collis would record it by moving a bead. It was supposed to help players keep track of what was being dealt, and prevent arguments; although here, Collis reflected, it was probably necessary to save players from having their kidneys blown out.

  ‘Are we all happy, gentlemen?’ asked the dealer. ‘Do you want a refill before we start?’ He nodded to the waitress, who went to the bar to bring them more drinks.

  On the green cloth table in front of them, stained by whisky and burned by abandoned cigars, the suit of spades was marked out again, full-size. The players could bet on any rank of card to win, or any rank of card to lose, simply by piling silver or gold dollars on the appropriate picture. If they were betting on a card to lose, they would top their pile of money with a small hexagonal copper token, stamped ‘Eagle Saloon’.

  Collis took out his purse, produced ninety dollars in silver coins, two-thirds of all the money he had left, and bet on aces to win, threes to win, and queens to lose, thirty dollars on each. Andrew, with an unlit cheroot in his mouth, watched him carefully and then placed his own bets. He, too, bet on queens to lose. Charles bet on aces to lose.

  The dealer held the pack, face up, in the dealing box in front of him. He played the first card, soda, which didn’t count in the game. Then he played the second card, the five of diamonds, and that was a loser. Collis recorded the play on his abacus without taking his eyes off the dealing box. Underneath the five of diamonds was the ace of clubs, and that was a winner.

  ‘Nice one,’ said Andrew, striking a match and lighting up his cheroot. The dealer, expressionless, paid Collis thirty dollars. All stakes, on winning or losing cards, were paid off at even odds. Collis placed thirty dollars on nines to lose.

  The dealer took the winning card out of the box and placed it on the table to form a pile of winning cards. The next loser, the seven of hearts, he put down to form a losing pile. The next winner was the three of hearts. He paid Collis another thirty dollars, still, as Andrew was later to remark, ‘with a face like a brass doorplate’.

  Collis, stimulated by the whisky and the noisy saloon, began to see the game in his mind with the brilliance of a kaleidoscopic picture show. This was his particular talent, and it had won him hundreds of dollars in New York faro games. He could imagine the whole pack of cards in his mind, like a brightly lit choir in their choirstall, and whenever one was played he could immediately picture it leaving the ranks, saying good night, and going off home. At any moment throughout the whole game he knew how many cards had been played and what they were, and so he knew which cards remained in the box. More than that, he could work out the odds on the order in which they were most likely to be played next.

  It was impossible to predict which cards would be turned up as winning cards and which would come out as losing cards, and yet Collis believed he had a nose for that, too. Whether it was magic, or intuition, or self-delusion, he always felt that he could detect an underlying rhythm in the way the cards came out of the box, especially when he knew the dealer.

  He had kept his bets down to thirty dollars on each card in the first game. As they came to the twenty-fourth winning card, three cards away from the end of the game, he had won two hundred and ten dollars and lost sixty.

  ‘Do you want to name ’em?’ asked the dealer, in a rusty voice, his eyes fixed unmovingly on Collis’s necktie.

  ‘Sure,’ nodded Collis. ‘One hundred fifty dollars says they’re king, deuce, jack.’

  Charles and Andrew placed their bets, too. The dealer dealt out the king of spades, the two of diamonds, the jack of hearts. The usual house odds on naming the order of the last three cards was four to one. The dealer sniffed, tugged at his moustache, and then pushed across a pile of gold five-dollar pieces.

  They played for four hours at the same table. At three o’clock in the morning, the Eagle was still crowded, the blue cigar smoke hanging in dense and suffocating veils, and the noise and laughter was even louder than before. The piano player, revitalised by a supper of ham and eggs, was thumping out marches and stirring Republican songs, while an old hardware-store owner with a bald head tried to demonstrate to his friends how he used to dance the quadrille with his late wife’s family. Outside in the street, there was the fiat sound of pistol shots, but they were too far away for the Eagle’s customers to be bothered.

  Between Collis and the faro dealer a strange antagonism had grown up, a cold and uncomfortable atmosphere which both Charles and Andrew had obviously sensed as well. Collis had felt the man’s dislike for him when he had first sat down at the table, and had ascribed it then to nothing more than the natural hostility that most pioneers felt for slickly dressed Easterners. But as Collis had amassed more and more money on the table, the dealer had grown increasingly rigid and chilly in his manner, and his eyes hardly ever moved from Collis’s face.

  The clock behind the bar mirror struck three-thirty. Collis took out his watch, checked the time, and turned the winder a few times.

  ‘Are you playing, or what?’ asked the dealer.

  ‘I’m playing,’ said Collis. ‘Keep your shirt on.’

  ‘I just dealt a card. Did you see it, or were you too busy with your timepiece?’

  ‘You just dealt the nine of clubs. I have one hundred dollars on nines, to lose. Therefore you owe me one hundred dollars. Now, are you playing, or what?’

  There was a tense silence. The dealer’s eyes didn’t blink, even through the thick cigar smoke, and his face might have been some failed bank robber’s death mask.

  ‘I’m playing,’ he said, and dealt a six.

  By four, Collis was beginning to feel the strain of his first day in San Francisco. His sleep during yesterday afternoon had eased the worst of his fatigue, but now he was ready for bed again. He asked for one more whisky all round and then said to the dealer, ‘I’m set for one last game. You want to play?’

  ‘I’ll play,’ said the dealer.

  The girl brought more tumblers of bourbon and set them down. She glanced at the heap of silver and gold in front of Collis. ‘If you get out of here with half of that, you can walk me home,’ she said. ‘You’re pretty.’

  The dealer said, without changing his expression, ‘If he tries to get out of here with even a quarter of that, he won’t be so pretty any more.’

  Charles looked up, glared, and then snapped loudly, ‘What kind of a dumb remark is that?’

  But Collis reached across and restrained him. Feeling unnaturally unruffled, he gave the de
aler one of his worried, sincere smiles. ‘You’ll have to excuse my friend,’ he said. ‘Do you want to play faro, or do you want to spend the rest of the night making cheap remarks?’

  The dealer, for the first time that evening, gave a grin. Most of his front teeth were brown, and more than half were missing. Collis turned to Andrew and remarked, ‘I wish I hadn’t amused him now.’

  They played. Collis lost steadily for the first part of the game, but then, as the odds narrowed, he began to win. He staked thirty dollars on queens to lose, and the next card was a losing queen. He staked forty on aces to lose, and the next card was a losing ace. By the time the dealer dealt the twenty-fourth winning card, Collis had nearly one thousand dollars in front of him.

  ‘Do you want to name ’em?’ asked the dealer coldly. ‘I’ll give you four to one.’

  Collis puffed steadily at his cheroot. ‘Not me,’ he said amiably.

  The dealer stared at him. ‘You’ve bet every other game. You’ve bet big.’

  ‘Sure. But there’s nothing in the rules says I have to.’

  ‘Supposing I say you have to?’

  ‘You and that Navy revolver under your table?’

  The dealer’s eyes flickered, but his face stayed hard. ‘That’s right, mister. Me and that Navy revolver under my table.’

  Collis took a sip of whisky, almost delicately. Then he set down his glass. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’ll make you a bet. I’ll name those cards, but for particular stakes. If I’m wrong, you can have all of this money here in front of me. If I’m right, I get your Navy revolver. No money, just your Navy revolver.’

  ‘Come on now, Collis,’ Charles said, ‘if you’re right at four to one you could walk out of here with a good grubstake.’

  ‘There’s always tomorrow night,’ said Collis. ‘Right now, that’s all I want. This cardwhacker’s Navy revolver.’

  ‘Please yourself,’ said Andrew. ‘If you want to act crazy, act crazy. That dark girl on the steamer said you were crazy.’

  The dealer was rubbing at his moustache, frowning and confused. At last he nodded agreement and reached below the green-cloth-covered table. He laid a long-barrelled blue-steel revolver on the table, and as he did so, the players at the next table abruptly went quiet and nudged their neighbours, and before anybody knew what was happening, the Eagle Saloon was hushed, and the tables all around them were cleared. Collis looked around and saw that almost the entire clientele was staring fixedly back at him, stiffly crowded in a circle as if they were posing for a group-photograph, hats on their heads, cigars in their mouths, coat pockets sagging. The piano player, the last to realise that there was anything unusual happening, went on pounding at ‘The Green Hills of Virginia’; but then he sensed trouble, and turned around, and the music died on one clumsy chord.