‘Tell him I’m a merchant out of San Francisco, and that I’m carrying gold.’
‘Well, that’s of interest. Do you want to come aboard?’
Collis wiped sweat from his forehead with his sleeve. ‘If I may. It’s not much fun down here in a dinghy.’
The sailors disappeared for a while; then a rope ladder was dropped from the rail, and Collis was able to scull his dinghy close in to the Aria’s dark, crusted hull and tie up. Swaying from side to side to keep his balance, he slung his satchel over his shoulder and began to climb the awkward, crazily swinging ladder up to the deck. He was coughing as he swung his legs over the rail and jumped down on to the Aria’s cluttered foredeck, among tarry ropes and winching gear and frayed nets.
A small man with a fuzzy blond beard, a nautical cap, and a huge grey Norwegian sweater came walking along the deck to meet him. The man made no attempt to shake hands, but stood a few feet off, his hands in his pockets, his eyes as bright as an elf’s. The fat sailor was bringing up the rope ladder with a great deal of clatter and whistling between his teeth.
‘Are you the master?’ Collis asked the small man, loudly.
The small man closed his eyes, as if that were a signal for ‘yes.’
‘Captain Heikefelt, isn’t it? Captain Erik Heikefelt?’
The small man closed his eyes again.
Collis stepped forwards. ‘I believe you’re carrying some cargo that I might be interested in buying.’
Captain Heikefelt took off his cap and wiped around the inside of the headband with a green handkerchief. His hair was as blond and fuzzy as his beard, and it blew in the soft sea breeze like a dandelion.
‘Coffee, I’m carrying,’ he said, in a strong Swedish accent. ‘Coffee and blankets and mining tools. That’s all.’
‘Do you want to discuss prices?’ asked Collis.
Captain Heikefelt set his cap back on his head, as neat and straight as if he’d used a spirit level. ‘Come to my quarters,’ he said. ‘I don’t like to talk prices out on the deck.’
Collis followed him along the deck, up the companionway, and across to a varnished mahogany door with a fog-dulled brass plate which said Kapitän. Heikefelt nodded towards the plate and said, ‘This came from Lower Saxony, this vessel, out of Bremerhaven. The first owner lost her when he divorced his wife.’
Collis followed him into a conspicuously neat cabin, with maps and shining brass lamps and a green-leather-topped desk. ‘I shouldn’t worry too much,’ he said, as brightly as he could. ‘I mean, think of all the fresh air you’re getting.’
Heikefelt looked at Collis oddly. ‘You want schnapps?’ he asked. ‘You look like maybe you’ve had too much fresh air yourself already.’
‘That would be splendid,’ said Collis.
The captain unlocked a tantalus that stood on a small oak table under the porthole and poured out two tiny glasses of pungent, oily schnapps. He handed one to Collis, said ‘Skoal,’ and knocked back his own glass as if someone had punched him under the chin.
‘Skoal,’ Collis echoed hesitantly and did the same. The schnapps was surprisingly tasty, and very warming. In fact, Collis could feel the fumes rising out of his stomach like the fumes from a ship’s boiler. His eyes watered, and he had to take off his silk hat and wipe them.
Captain Heikefelt pointed across to an upright wooden chair. ‘Sit down,’ he invited Collis. ‘Then we can do some business.’
Collis pulled up the chair and sat down, while the captain sat in his revolving leather-backed chair in front of the desk. Collis noticed that there were no family portraits on the desk, no keepsakes or souvenirs. Only pens, pencils, dividers, compasses, and maps. Either Captain Heikefelt preferred to keep his home life out of his mind when he was at sea, or else he was married to the Aria, and no one else.
‘I was surprised to hear that you were carrying blankets,’ said Collis, in an offhand way. ‘I would have thought it much more profitable to carry nothing but coffee.’
Captain Heikefelt poured them both another schnapps.
‘Of course,’ he said, ‘but the owners had to take blankets from a company in England, in payment of a bad debt. It was either blankets or nothing. So they took blankets. Thousands of blankets. You never saw so many.’
He tipped his head back again and swallowed his schnapps. ‘Skoal,’ he said, wiping his mouth.
‘Skoal,’ said Collis, and tipped his own schnapps down. The second one was definitely better than the first. More warming, and less of a shock to the system. Given time, Collis felt that schnapps might even woo him away from stone fences, which were easily the worst drinks for hangovers in the entire liquid thesaurus.
‘It seems to me that blankets, in this climate, are going to be something of a commercial liability,’ said Collis.
Captain Heikefelt shrugged. ‘It gets cold in San Francisco in the winter. I guess people will want blankets.’
‘You try and tell them that now. You’ll be lucky to sell them for fifty cents apiece. How many do you have?’
‘Twenty-five short tons of five-pound blankets. That’s ten thousand blankets.’
‘Ten thousand?’ said Collis. ‘The whole population of San Francisco is only eighty or ninety thousand. You’re going to sell ten thousand blankets to eighty thousand people in the middle of the warmest fall they’ve had for six years?’
‘I have to,’ said Captain Heikefelt. ‘That’s what the owners told me to do. Me, I’d rather sell coffee, and picks and shovels. How about one more schnapps?’
They said Skoal together this time, and tipped their drinks back simultaneously. Collis felt very warm indeed, and extraordinarily pleased with himself. It was remarkable how schnapps seemed to have the capacity to make him feel so pleased with himself.
‘Usually,’ Collis told Captain Heikefelt with great gravity, ‘usually I can only buy commodities that I can sell quickly. Coffee, salt, ice, those kinds of things.’
‘Ice you have to sell quick,’ agreed the captain.
‘Yes,’ said Collis, ‘but usually I can only deal in commodities that I can unload within twenty-four hours. I don’t have the storage space for goods that sell slowly. And nor does anyone else. There’s a great shortage of space in San Francisco.’
‘I know,’ said Captain Heikefelt. ‘I’ve been told that before.’
Collis stood up and went over to the porthole. It was still foggy outside, although he could just distinguish the dim outline of the distant wharves and warehouses.
‘I’ll tell you what I can do, though,’ he said in a confidential tone. ‘Because you’re a splendid fellow, and you look like the kind of man who can do a little business on the side, on his own account, and keep it under his hat, I’ll make you an offer for those blankets.’
The captain poured out two more schnapps. He downed his own glassful at once, and sniffed, but Collis paused before he drank any more. There appeared to be a point, with schnapps, when warmth faded rapidly into lightheadedness, and he didn’t want to be incoherent when the time came for the deal to be clinched.
‘I think I know of a storehouse, where I can put those blankets away, and sell them piecemeal,’ Collis explained. ‘The storehouse owner is a friend of mine, so he won’t charge too much in the way of rental. Admittedly, I still won’t make too much profit, but what’s profit between friends, especially when we can make ourselves the price of a few good meals and a few good women for no trouble at all?’
Captain Heikefelt stared at him out of his fuzzy blond face, his eyes still bright but unfocused now, as if he were seeing Collis in triplicate.
‘What do you want to do, then?’ he asked. ‘A little private deal?’
‘You could call it that. I’ll buy those blankets from you at seventy cents the blanket. Only you’ll tell your owners that all you could get for them was sixty cents the blanket. Now, that leaves ten cents times ten thousand for your own private fee, and ten cents times ten thousand is one thousand dollars.’
C
aptain Heikefelt took off his cap again and laid it upside down on his desk. ‘One thousand dollars, huh?’ he asked. He leaned forward and peered into his cap as if he expected the money to be there. ‘One thousand dollars?’
‘That’s right. All for yourself.’
‘Drink your drink,’ said Captain Heikefelt, nodding towards Collis’s glass of schnapps. Collis picked it up, said, ‘Skoal,’ and tossed it back. He was beginning to wonder if he really liked it or not. The movement of the Aria at anchor, combined with the stuffiness of Captain Heikefelt’s cabin, was making him sweat, and feel distinctly bilious.
‘What I want to know,’ said Captain Heikefelt, ‘is what you think you will make out of it. Why do you want blankets, if they won’t sell?’
Collis smiled his most reassuring smile. ‘I made a little too much money out of a deal I was doing on behalf of a business partner. What I have to do now is lose some of that money by investing it, not disastrously, because that would be too suspicious, but poorly. I have to bury my extra profits under something that will keep them warm and quiet for a few months, and I can’t think of anything more appropriate than blankets.’
Captain Heikefelt nodded. He seemed to accept that explanation. He poured out two more glasses of schnapps, with considerable unsteadiness, and then took a long swig from the neck of the bottle.
‘One thousand dollars would do me very well,’ he said, after a few minutes of rumination. ‘One thousand dollars would do me fine.’
‘Is it a deal, then?’ asked Collis.
Captain Heikefelt took out his green handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘You have time for one more schnapps?’
‘You mean it’s settled?’ asked Collis.
Captain Heikefelt closed his eyes. ‘I have the papers for the blankets right here, in my desk. Seven thousand dollars, is it, in gold?’
‘That’s right. I have it in thousand-dollar pouches. You shouldn’t have any trouble transferring one thousand dollars into your own pocket.’
‘I’ll drink to that,’ said the captain.
Collis picked up his brimming glass of schnapps. ‘I was afraid you might.’
On Saturday morning, a bright sharp morning with the first snap of October in the air, Charles Tucker was expected to call for Collis at Knickerbocker Jane’s at seven. They were going to Market Street wharf to board the steamboat Wallace S. Martin at eight, along with Billy, Charles’s coachman, and Wang-Pu, his Chinese buyer. They were bound for Sacramento, for Collis to join Charles in his dry-goods and hardware business, and they wouldn’t return to San Francisco until November. Charles had warned Collis to leave off his woollen underwear and stay with his summer cottons, because it was a good deal warmer inland at this time of year, and ‘there can’t be many things less comfortable than travelling to Sacramento in woollen long johns, when you should’ve worn cotton.’
A little after seven, Charles Tucker arrived, and Billy the coachman was sent upstairs to Collis’s room to bring down his trunk. As Collis came downstairs, with Billy behind him, Knickerbocker Jane came out into the hallway, in a white morning dress with pale-yellow embroidery flowers on it.
‘Goodbye,’ she said, with a curtsy. ‘I hope you enjoy Sacramento. And do come back, whenever you wish. I’ll always make you welcome.’
Collis leaned forwards and kissed her. She wore the same perfume as his mother used to wear, and for a moment he was overwhelmed with déjà vu. But then he stood straight, and smiled at her, and said quietly, ‘Thank you, Jane. I may take you up on that, one day.’
Chapter 7
To any man who might have been disappointed on his first arrival in San Francisco that life on the brink of the world was not boisterous enough, nor eccentric enough, nor crowded with enough gambling and swearing and drinking and womanising, the paddle steamer Wallace S. Martin was a floating consolation prize.
It was a scabby, peeling boat, with its paintwork turned grey by the sun; but as it beat its way northwards between the reddish-brown hills that bordered San Paolo Bay, under a high clear sky, and then wound its way eastwards past Benicia, and through the marshy wind-ruffled approaches to the estuary of the Sacramento River, it was alive with singing, accordion music, laughing, and dancing on the decks. Men in wide-brimmed hats sat in the sloping saloons, betting on poker and faro any money that might have remained unspent after three weeks in San Francisco, and drinking cloudy whisky as if it were medicine. On the foredeck, under a flapping canvas awning, a band of six or seven Poles in red-flannel shirts, their faded pants tied up with string, played a fiddle and a squeezebox and sang ribald folk songs that seemed to have dupa in every other line. Around the galleried afterdeck, bright and tawdry as moths in the panels of sunlight that fell through the windows, girls paraded in dusty dresses, or sat on the knees of bearded and derby-hatted men, smoking and sipping port wine. You could have had any one of them, these girls, in a narrow bunk with varnished sides, for two dollars. They plied their trade up and down the Sacramento River and into San Francisco Bay as regular as pilots or stokers or barges.
Collis sat at a table in the upper saloon, on the starboard side where it was shaded from the midday sun. He was dressed in his light-grey suit, with a checkered hound’s-tooth vest and a light-grey broad-brimmed hat. He was sharing a bottle of whisky with Charles, who was wearing a tight sandy-coloured suit and a ginger hat which matched his whiskers, and with Wang-Pu, the Chinese buyer, who was dressed most conservatively in a black morning coat, a black tie, and grey pinstripe pants. At the next table sat a card school of Sacramento merchants, shoulders hunched, playing their last few games before they returned home to their wives.
Charles was feeling breezy and expansive, and was looking forward to returning home. He had bought up some good-quality hardware and dry goods in San Francisco, all of which were being shipped inland by the steamer Boroughmore, and which would arrive in Sacramento in a day or two, in time for a grand sale. Charles confessed, too, that a couple of weeks in San Francisco was probably enough for any man’s constitution, or at least for his, what with all those girls and all that rich food, and he was almost eager to return to Mrs Tucker’s plain dietary regime, not to mention her plain looks.
Collis found Charles subtly changed from the first time he had met him, sitting on his trunk at Broadway Wharf. He was still forthright, still ebullient, but as he neared his home territory his forthrightness and ebullience became almost dictatorial. In San Francisco, when Charles made a humorous remark, you could laugh if you felt like it. But here, within thirty miles of Sacramento, it seemed as if an energetic appreciation of Charles Tucker’s wit was mandatory.
‘You see there,’ said Charles, pointing northwards with his cigar to a small and sorry collection of wooden buildings among the trees and the hills. ‘That’s the town of Benicia. Used to be the capital of California, for one year, in ’53. That was a big joke. General Vallejo, your friend Laurence Melford’s buddy, bought all the land around here and established the town, hoping it was going to grow into a city, and that he’d make himself a fortune on land prices. He called the place Benicia after his wife, and if you’d ever seen Mrs Francisca Benicia Carillo Vallejo, you’d know why the whole project flopped. Homely isn’t the word. What is the word, Wang-Pu?’
Wang-Pu sipped his whisky reflectively. ‘The word, Mr Tucker, is hollendous.’
Charles let out one of his barking laughs, and Collis found his own face twisting into a smile. He didn’t particularly want to smile, but until he had felt his way around Charles’s home territory, and established the rules of the home game, he felt that a little sycophancy might take him a long way. It wasn’t that he disliked Charles. Charles was direct, and aggressive, and emotionally honest. Collis couldn’t yet vouch for his commercial integrity. But he felt that he could learn from Charles, and eventually use Charles’s energy for his own particular ambition.
The Wallace S. Martin plied on, and music and pungent tobacco smoke and an occasional breeze-whipped playing card float
ed across the blue water. Charles, after a heavy breakfast of steak and coddled eggs and whisky, went to lie down for a while, ostensibly for the sake of his digestion, although Collis noticed him pause at the head of the companionway and nod his head to one of the dusty young moth-ladies who stalked the rear saloon. Collis turned away. It wasn’t any of his business how Charles enjoyed himself, and Charles, after all, had been his first and most enthusiastic friend in San Francisco, after Andy Hunt. But Wang-Pu dryly remarked, ‘I would say that Mr Tucker is about to make one of his grand but temporary farewells to the world and all its vices, wouldn’t you, Mr Edmonds?’
Collis, drinking, looked across at Wang-Pu in surprise, almost alarm. It was nearly as startling as if somebody’s pet lap dog had suddenly made an observation about the weather. Up until now, Collis had never really noticed the Chinaman at all. He had regarded him as nothing more important than Charles’s servant and buyer, and he had certainly never heard him say anything remotely sardonic. But in the early-afternoon sunshine which irradiated the steamer’s saloon, he suddenly saw Wang-Pu as a most individualistic person, a man with amusing brown eyes, a longish, northern Chinese face, and a smile which suggested a very secret camaraderie, a shared understanding of the world’s weaknesses.
‘How long have you worked for Mr Tucker?’ asked Collis.
Wang-Pu smiled. ‘Eight years, seven days a week, no vacation.’
‘You have a family?’
‘A wife, two sons, one daughter. I left them in Lianhuachi, near to the Changcheng.’
‘The Changcheng?’
‘The Great Wall. That which was built to keep barbarians like you away from civilised people like us.’
‘Do you think that people like you and people like me are so very different?’ Collis asked.
Wang-Pu shrugged. ‘We both feel pain, if that’s what you mean. I miss my family in China more than any white devil has been able to understand.’
‘Why did you leave them?’
Wang-Pu looked away, out of the dust-bloomed window, at the flat waters of Suisun Bay. ‘There was no opportunity for making money in China. My wife and family were well bred, but the harvests continually failed, and there was terrible flooding, followed by equally terrible drought, and in the end I decided to leave China and seek my fortune elsewhere. It was almost impossible for me to bear the indignity of watching my wife trying to make herself new gowns from worn-out hangings, and see my children’s arms so thin from underfeeding. I suppose you have no children, Mr Edmonds. But to hold your own child in your arms and to feel his bones through the skin, to see his eyes big and listless and hungry for food, that is a far greater pain than leaving him and working in a foreign land for money that will make him well.’
Railroad Page 35
