Railroad

by Graham Masterton

  ‘You have style, you know,’ she told him, gratuitously.

  He smiled at her. ‘You have style, too. More style than any madam I know. I was going to ask Knickerbocker Jane to help me, but maybe you ought to hear what I’ve got in mind, just in case you can help me instead.’

  ‘Before you start,’ Maria-Mamuska said ‘have you told Hannah about any of this?’

  He looked at her, with cigar smoke dribbling out of his pursed lips. He shook his head.

  ‘All right,’ she said and nodded, as if she understood why. ‘Now, tell me what you plan to do.’

  ‘There’s a letter for you,’ Hannah said. ‘It came at three o’clock, by hand. The crest on the back says “M”. For Melford, I suppose.’

  ‘You’re not still angry with me?’ he asked her, taking the envelope and peering at it closely.

  She was dressed in an oyster-coloured satin dress, with white frills at the bodice and cuffs. Her blonde hair was curled and styled, and she looked classically beautiful. She looked at him and shrugged, and then reached out and gripped the cloth of his sleeve. ‘No. Of course I’m not. I love you.’

  He kissed her. He held her close, and kissed her again. She was warm and she smelled of soap, as well as some perfume that he recognised. He stood straight, and put his head on one side, the way his father always used to when he asked a question. ‘Eau de l’Isle?’ he queried. ‘When did you buy that?’

  She pretended to look offended. ‘Why should you care?’

  ‘I care because you’re my wife,’ he told her. ‘And, most of all, I care because I love you.’

  ‘Quite a good reason,’ she said, pretending to relent a little.

  He sat down at his escritoire and began to tear open his letter with the paperknife. A long silence. Eventually, he raised his eyes.

  ‘What does Laurence Melford say?’ Hannah asked.

  ‘It’s not from Laurence Melford, as a matter of fact. It’s from his secretary. It says that Mr Melford sees no possible point in our meeting, and that his opposition to the transcontinental railroad remains as firm as always.’

  ‘Oh. What are you going to do?’

  Collis rolled the letter into a ball between the palms of his hands. ‘Do? I shall do what I was always going to do. I shall stick to my plan.’

  ‘The plan you won’t tell me about.’

  ‘That’s correct. The plan I won’t tell you about.’

  She let out a short, exasperated breath. ‘Very well. If you won’t tell me, you won’t. But I think I shall dress for dinner now, and if I were you I wouldn’t expect me for at least two hours.’

  ‘Hannah,’ he said.

  But she slammed the door to the bedroom and left him appealing to empty air. He sighed, and sat down at his escritoire. He supposed there was no use letting Hannah upset him. Carefully he uncrumpled the letter and spread it out on the tooled-leather top with the side of his hand. He read it again, whispering the words out loud, by the failing light from the window.

  My dear Mr Edmonds,

  You were fortunate to give your invitation to my best friend among all of our servants, since he passed it directly to me as you bade him. I shall be delighted to meet you on the 20th at W. L. Winn’s, at three and I look forward to a most sociable reunion. I hear that you have married. Should I congratulate you? And should I ask if that makes a difference?

  Regards,

  Sarah Melford

  Collis took out his matches and struck one. Within a minute, the letter was curling up into black flakes in his ashtray. He waved the smell of smoke away with the San Francisco paper.

  Although it was a simple plan, it was both innovative and chancy. Nobody had ever attempted blackmail with risqué calotypes before – not as far as Collis was aware – and he knew that the success of what he was about to do depended as much on Laurence Melford’s temper as it did on his own timing and efficiency.

  If Laurence Melford stayed perfectly calm, and thought the situation out logically, he would soon come to realise that in practical terms the means whereby his daughter’s reputation could be sullied on a wide scale were simply not at hand. It was possible, of course, that postcards could be printed up and sent to some of San Francisco’s most respectable homes. It was possible that J. Walter Walsh, the scandal-sheet publisher, would reproduce a woodcut of one of the pictures in his Illustrated Varieties, or that the California Police Gazette, whose main interests were sex and prizefighting, would mention the existence of unseemly photographs of Sarah Melford in their gossip column. It was even possible that the Bulletin would find a space for a respectable news item about ‘scientific extortion’.

  But Laurence Melford was rich enough and powerful enough to make even Walsh think twice – despite the fact that Walsh was the man who had nonchalantly told his readers one week that only five libel suits were pending against the Varieties. And if Melford was quick, he could make sure that anybody who was liable to be shown a calotype, or to hear about it, was convincingly assured that the whole business was nothing but a scandalous fake.

  What Collis was counting on was that Laurence Melford would not stay perfectly calm, and that he would not think the situation out logically. Like a gamble on the last three cards in faro, Collis was making a half-educated, half-intuitive guess that Laurence Melford would react with nothing but irrational rage. In Collis’s opinion, he would be just as furious if one man had possession of intimate calotypes of Sarah as if pictures had been freely distributed to every miner, winer, and manjack in the whole of northern California. He considered himself a Southern gentleman, and Sarah was his only daughter. The family reputation was paramount.

  The plan depended on one thing more: complete anonymity. Not just now, but forever; because if Laurence Melford ever found out that Collis had played such a trick as this, Collis’s life would be in constant danger from every stray opportunist and bounty hunter who wanted to find an easy way to please San Francisco’s most influential man, and to make a few dollars besides. That was why Collis had felt dubious about asking Knickerbocker Jane for help. She had too many customers who were friends of Laurence Melford’s and she entertained too many enemies of the railroad, and she talked too much. She had told him about Horace Johnson’s liking for ‘discipline’ – all well and good. But what had she told Horace Johnson about him?

  In Andy Hunt’s office, on the afternoon of 19 September, Collis talked to Andy, Dan McReady, and Mr Figgis, the calotypist. He drew a map on a large sheet of brown wrapping paper which he had pinned to the wall, and he explained the plan in detail.

  ‘Sarah’s agreed to meet me at W. L. Winn’s Fountain Head of Luxuries at three o’clock. I shall be there, waiting for her, as conspicuously as possible; and I shall keep asking the waiters what the time is, so they won’t fail to remember me.

  ‘Any time after five minutes of three, but probably later, Sarah’s carriage will draw up in the street outside. Now – here’s where the crucial timing comes into it. Andy has arranged for a wide wagonload offish crates to turn into the street directly after Sarah’s carriage, and to stay so close behind that Sarah’s coachman has no option but to let Sarah alight outside the café alone, so that he can move on directly, and not obstruct the way.

  ‘The coachman won’t suspect anything, of course, because he’ll believe that she’s being helped down by one of Winn’s flunkies – who in actual fact will be you, Dan in a brass-buttoned tunic, and a cap.’

  ‘Not to forget my false moustache,’ said Dan.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Collis. ‘Nor your Navy revolver, either.’

  ‘What happens then?’ asked Mr Figgis dubiously.

  ‘A little brute force,’ said Collis. ‘Dan will take Sarah’s arm, as tight as he can, and propel her past W. L. Winn’s door and into the alley at the side, where a cab will be waiting. He’ll tell her to come along quietly, and that she won’t be harmed as long as she’s quiet and agreeable, and doesn’t struggle. The cab will take her as quick as possible
to Bush Street, while Dan covers her eyes with a handkerchief. That’s essential. She mustn’t ever find out where she’s going, or where she’s been.’

  Collis reached across to the corner of Andy’s desk and picked up the small wax-sealed bottle which Mr Kwang had given him. ‘As soon as Dan brings her in through the door of Maria’s house, Andy and Dan will hold her down and administer the opium tincture. I don’t know how long it takes to have any effect, but Sarah’s coachman won’t raise the alarm for an hour or more, and that should give us plenty of time. When Mr Figgis is through with his pictures, Dan will take Sarah back to Harrison and Third Street, release her, and then make his getaway.’

  Andy leaned back in his chair, his feet planted on his desk, and picked his teeth. ‘It all sounds very fancy,’ he said. ‘But I can think of at least three moments when the whole thing could go horribly and disastrously wrong. Supposing she ignores Dan’s warning and calls for help? Supposing she gets away? And I’m still not convinced that you need to go to such complicated lengths to raise money. Surely we can knock on a few doors, talk to one or two banks. All we need is twenty thousand, after all.’

  Collis tossed down his pencil. ‘You’ll never understand, will you? It’s not just twenty thousand we need. That’s only for Theodore’s detailed survey. We need the promise of ten or twelve years of continuing support. We need long-term investment. How do you think we’re going to make sure that Congress approves our route, rather than anybody else’s? How do you think we’re going to pay for our first track, and our first locomotives? By knocking on doors? By going around to two-bit San Francisco banks with our caps in our hands? We’re talking about a project that’s going to cost us millions of dollars. Millions. And that means we need all the most influential San Francisco businessmen behind us, or at the very least not against us.’

  ‘All right,’ said Andy, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘I just think the whole scheme’s pretty bizarre, that’s all. Who ever heard of blackmailing anyone with calotypes?’

  Collis coughed. He had been smoking too much lately, and drinking too much. ‘It’ll catch on,’ he told Andy. ‘One day, everybody will be at it. You wait and see.’

  ‘What happens if something does go wrong, and we get ourselves caught in the act?’ asked Mr Figgis.

  ‘We deny everything,’ replied Collis. ‘We insist that someone must have made a ridiculous mistake, and that we’re all perfectly innocent.’

  ‘And if that doesn’t wash?’

  ‘Then we ride for Nevada as hard as we can,’ Collis told him, with a lopsided grin.

  Andy stood up. ‘There’s only one thing I don’t yet understand,’ he said. ‘How are you going to explain to Laurence Melford that you had a clandestine meeting arranged with his daughter? She’s going to tell him, you know, and so is her coachman. Don’t you think he’s going to suspect your involvement right away?’

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong,’ said Collis. ‘If I go to Laurence Melford and explain that I wanted to see Sarah secretly, just for one last romantic farewell, then he’s more likely to believe that I didn’t have anything to do with her abduction than if I feign innocence. If you plead guilty to a small sin, then people usually believe you when you swear to God that you didn’t commit a big one.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Andy. ‘I’m not at all sure this is going to work. Laurence Melford’s a pretty hard nut.’

  ‘What can we lose?’ asked Collis. ‘Even if Melford doesn’t agree to help us, he still won’t know that we did it. He won’t have any proof at all. And we’ll have the finest collection of calotypes of Sarah Melford that anybody ever owned. They’ll fetch a fortune as postcards.’

  ‘Well …’ grumbled Andy, unhappily.

  Collis put out his hand. ‘Let’s make a pact,’ he said. ‘Let’s agree to try this plan, and let’s agree to carry it off as best we can. If it fails, well, I’ll openly admit that I’m wrong, and that we should try more conventional methods. But I personally believe that it’s going to succeed, and that by next week we’re going to have this stuffy provincial city and its boondock business right where we want them.’

  Andy stared at Collis’s outstretched hand for a moment, and then shook it. Dan McReady stood up and shook hands, too. Mr Figgis stayed where he was, on his bentwood chair, but he said, ‘All right. I’ll go along with that. As long as you pay my bail when I’m caught.’

  That night, at the International Hotel, Collis couldn’t sleep. The plumbing was rattling, someone was singing off-key immigrant songs in an upstairs room, and it sounded as if there was a fight going on in the street outside. After an hour or so, he sat up and walked quietly out of the bedroom into the parlour, closing the door behind him. He lit the lamp on his escritoire and sat down with a sheet of hotel notepaper and a pen.

  ‘My dearest Hannah,’ he wrote, and then hesitated for two or three minutes, his pen in the inkstand, his forehead creased with a frown.

  ‘I have been unusually difficult and hard to live with for the past few days,’ he continued. He crossed out ‘difficult’ and substituted ‘quick-tempered’.

  ‘I want you to know, however, that I love you dearly, and without reservation, and that I shall never do anything to harm you. You are the light of my life. My friend, my wife, and my inspiration. When we cross the Sierras at last I shall be thinking of you, just as I am thinking of you now, and saying a humble prayer to my Maker for bringing us so luckily and so accidentally together.’

  He sat reading and re-reading what he had written for a while, and then he sprinkled sand across the paper to dry the ink. He didn’t really know why he had felt the need to write Hannah a note. He could have woken her up and told her to her face how much he loved her. But somehow he felt that she would find a few written words more reassuring. She could take a letter out of her pocketbook and read it when he was out.

  He realised he probably felt guilty, too, about keeping the calotype plan such a secret from her. He remembered his mother saying, ‘If there were no such an animal as guilt, then many a family duty would go undone.’ He wondered briefly how his mother was keeping, and whether Maude had gotten herself married. To walk down the aisle with Maude – now there was a penance.

  He wrote a short letter to Charles, to be taken up to Sacramento in the morning. A Dutch vessel had docked at San Francisco with surveying equipment and machine tools, and the captain could probably be persuaded to do a better deal on the price if Charles sent down a consignment of fresh fruit from the Sacramento Market.

  Upstairs, the immigrant singer was bawling ‘Sweet Betsy from Pike’:

  ‘Oh, don’t you remember sweet Betsy from Pike,

  Who crossed the big mountains with her lover Ike,

  With two yoke of cattle, a large yellow dog,

  A tall Shanghai rooster and one spotted hog.’

  Collis considered having a sharp word with the management in the morning.

  In the morning, it was raining. Collis went to the window and stared through the rain-dribbled glass at the muddy streets, the struggling wagons, the umbrellas, and the glistening rooftops. He hoped that the street outside of Winn’s wasn’t too rutted; and he hoped, too, that the weather wouldn’t put Sarah off their rendezvous altogether. He’d known many girls in New York who never ventured out when it was wet, for fear of muddying their petticoats and spotting their silks.

  Hannah was sitting up in bed. ‘You were late last night, my darling,’ she remarked.

  ‘I couldn’t sleep.’

  ‘You’re not worried, are you?’

  He turned and crossed the room in his billowing nightshirt. ‘Worried? Why should I be? They’re late with the coffee this morning, don’t you think?’

  ‘It’s this plan, isn’t it?’ she asked him. ‘You’re not at all sure if it’s going to work.’

  ‘It’ll work,’ he insisted, opening the bureau drawer to take out his clean underwear. ‘I don’t have the slightest doubt of it.’

 
She was silent, and then she said, ‘I do love you, you know.’

  He stood up straight, holding his combinations up as if they were a pale and shrunken ghost, with buttons.

  ‘I love you, too,’ he said, and he knew that he meant it.

  They breakfasted downstairs in the hotel restaurant on smoked fish and scrambled eggs. Then Collis asked the doorman to hail them a cab, and he took Hannah up to the top of Telegraph Hill, where they walked for almost an hour under Collis’s big black umbrella, holding hands and saying nothing at all, while the rain fell in white misty sheets through the Golden Gate, and the hills of San Francisco rose all around them like islands in a mysterious oriental sea. All the houses on Telegraph Hill were closed and shuttered. There was no sound but the gurgle of rain in their gutters, and the occasional grating echo of a handbrake as a wagon was driven awkwardly downhill past their disapproving frontages.

  As Collis and Hannah made their way down the southern slopes of the hill towards Washington Street, however, the wet day livened up. They walked through Little Chile, where music played, and the sharp aroma of Chilean stews reached their noses from half-open kitchen doors. The rain drummed on their umbrella like a Latin dance, and children ran after them, muddy and brown, and begged for bits.

  They lunched at a German restaurant on Montgomery, facing each other over a circular tablecloth of migraine whiteness. The rest of the room was dim, and darkly panelled as a bank; and if it hadn’t been for the loud laughter of a party from the Deutsches Club on the other side of the room, and the waiters bringing them white wine and Haxe on heavily-laden trays, Collis felt that he could have been back at I. P. Woolmer’s, in New York, before any of this had ever happened.

  As he sliced his pork knuckle, he said quietly, ‘The plan is going to be carried out this afternoon.’

  Hannah stared at him. ‘So soon? You’re sure you’re ready?’

  ‘I’ve been arranging it ever since we arrived here. I’m as ready as I can ever be.’