by Oakley Hall
Ambrose Bierce
and the Queen of Spades
* * *
Oakley Hall
1998
For Emma
1.
* * *
HOMICIDE, n. – The slaying of one human being by another. There are four kinds of homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable and praiseworthy, but it makes no great difference to the person slain whether he fell by one kind or another—the classification is for advantage of the lawyers.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
When Ambrose Bierce heard of the first Morton Street Slasher murder, he said, “It appears there is a fellow who dislikes women more than I do.”
On certain subjects he was so sarcastic that it was plain mean. His eyes got small under shaggy eyebrows and his mouth twisted beneath his fair mustache, and he would say something scurrilous about women or women poets or preachers or the SP Railroad.
He was my hero then. I’d always had to wince when I heard people carry on in a manner that seemed a fraud to me, on the subjects of religion, or the pure goodness of poor folk, or their sainted mother, or someone hailed a hero on not much grounds. Bierce hated fraud right to the bone. When I’d quit the Fire Department for a job assisting Dutch John, the printer of The Hornet, I had in mind becoming a journalist like Bierce. I’d had a good education from the Christian Brothers in Sacramento, and I’d read a library of books. What other training could be necessary? Being a famous journalist seemed a fine way to make a living, and there was some tone to it, too: people greeting you on the street and calling out they’d liked your last piece or go-it after the Railroad some more.
Bierce was the editor of The Hornet and columnist of “Tattle.” I worked up the nerve to bring him pieces of local interest I had written, one on the SP, which he hated especially—the Railroad, that is. He was courteous enough with me, since I wasn’t a female poet who had offended him by publishing a volume of poetry he had to review in Tattle.
In fact when he wasn’t abominating one humbug or another, Bierce was a generous gentleman.
The Hornet was a satirical weekly, with offices on California Street, right next to the Bank of California with its soaring columns. The new owner and publisher was Mr. Robert Macgowan. There were a couple of boozy reporters who hung around the police station at Old City Hall, a lady typewriter, a caricaturist named Fats Chubb, Dutch John the printer and his assistant Frank Grief, a couple of typesetters and Bierce.
Sometimes Bierce and I left the Hornet offices together in the evening, dodging through the traffic of buggies, carriages, hacks, wagons, horsecars, horsemen and bicyclists on California Street, and under the broad green awning into Dinkins’s Saloon. The traffic on the downtown streets was so fierce that it was worth your life to cross over one of them, and almost every day, it seemed, in the Chronicle, the Examiner or the Alta California, there’d be a news piece on another bad accident, people killed and broken legs, and Something Must Be Done. But nothing was done except for things to get worse.
In Dinkins’s with a lager before him, Bierce liked to talk about writing. He was the famous Almighty God Bierce for A. G. Bierce, Bitter Bierce, with his Tattle read all over the City, and I was a lowly printer’s assistant and sometime reporter, who wasn’t sure Mr. Macgowan was going to keep on paying my wages, but Bierce was pleased to give me advice.
“Check it sentence by sentence and word by word. Get the rubbish out! If you can’t find the right adjective for a noun, leave it alone. A noun needs only one adjective, the choicest. Take out all the participles and adverbs you can. Participles grate like wheel rims on gravel.
Three participles in a sentence will ruin it. Too many adverbs makes language spineless.”
Dinkins’s had a long bar solid with drinkers’ backs, behind them a gleaming clutter of mahogany and mirrors and moony gaslight globes. Dick Dinkins laid out eats on the bar for the drinkers to dip into and kept the liquor flowing.
Bierce and I sat where we could see a broad slash of California Street through the door, with the traffic jammed up or moving fast and, on the sidewalk, gents in derbies and plug hats flipping canes in greeting to each other, and sometimes fine ladies or whores in pairs passing. Inside there was a pleasing stink of cigar smoke, beer, whiskey, sardines and cheese, and outside one of horse droppings, dust and busyness.
An old fellow with a billy-goat beard came over to ask Bierce if he’d heard the latest about Senator Sharon. Sharon had asked the famous French painter Meissonier if he was an Old Master, because Sharon wasn’t dealing with any painters that “wasn’t Old Masters.”
Bierce said he had heard it thirty-one times now by actual count. And added, “Served in the Senate, for our sins, his time / Each word a folly and each vote a crime.” And he had something to say about the “Rose of Sharon,” for one of Sharon’s mistresses was presently in court claiming the King of the Comstock had married her, and she was divorcing him for adultery with a demand for alimony and her share of his millions.
So the old-timer didn’t go off in a huff because though Bierce would scarify any kind of pretension that raised his ire in Tattle, when he was with fellows in a saloon there was an edge left off, or a joke added to soften his invective.
Bierce was in his forties at this time, a handsome figure of a man, just under six feet with sandy hair, a tangle of eyebrows and a full mustache. He had a smooth pink complexion and smelled of cologne, and he had a military way of carrying himself for he had been a major in the War. He was said to be the best-dressed journalist in San Francisco, with his tweed suit and high collar and fancy neckties with a diamond pin. I thought he was pretty much cock-of-the-walk, leaning back in his chair rubbing his glass against one side of his mustache and looking reflective, probably planning some verbal devilment.
Sergeant Nix stalked inside in his blue double-breasted nine-button uniform and sat down with his policeman’s helmet on the table, one of the corps of folks who kept Bierce apprised of what was going on in the City. “ ‘Lo, Bierce,” he said, and “ ‘lo, Tom,” to me.
Nix and I had been baseball pals when the police team played the firemen, before I took the job on The Hornet.
Dinkins brought Nix a beer with a creamy head on it, and Nix told us about the messy murder last night in Morton Street, which was an alley running off Union Square bounded on both sides by red-light houses.
“Frenchy name of Marie Gar,” Nix said. “Strangled her and slashed her open. Guts spilled out like a trout.”
“It appears there is a fellow that hates women more than I do,” Bierce said then.
“These cunt-hating lunatics,” Nix said. “Their mother run off with a gambler when they was little tykes. Or some whore gave them a dose of Little Casino, and they can’t wait to carve up a female.”
“Any clues?” Bierce wanted to know.
Nix had a face like a hatchet and a black mustache that halfway wrapped around it. He nodded, licking foam from his mustache. “Ace of spades,” he said. “Perpetrator left a playing card on the victim.”
“Interesting,” Bierce said. “Left how, if you please?”
“Stuck in her mouth like a letter in a postbox.”
Bierce made a clucking sound.
“Ace of spades,” I said. “Means death?”
They both looked at me.
“Anything a sterling young journalist like Tom Redmond ought to look into?” Bierce said.
“Ames from the Alta and that fat fellow from the Chronicle is all over it,” Nix said. He scratched his fingers through his coarse hair.
“You could come down to the Morgue and look her over,” he said to me with a bleak grin, and he said to Bier
ce, “If you are going to make a reporter of this young fellow, he is going to have to spend some time at the Morgue.”
“I will make a prediction,” Bierce said. “It has got to do with the Railroad.”
Nix snorted. Bierce had an obsession about the Southern Pacific, the “Railrogues” as he called the Big Four, Leland Stanford, Collis B. Huntington, Charles Crocker and company.
“Simple deduction,” Bierce said. “The Southern Pacific is behind 90 percent of the corruption in the State of California. A strangled and slashed dove is an eruption of corruption. Ergo.”
Nix and I gaped at him.
“When a monopoly controls the state legislature—both houses and both political parties—and runs the state from their offices at Fourth and Townsend, it is a state of disgrace. The SP is the monopoly on transportation in the State of California, and the monopoly on corruption.”
“They don’t control the Democrat party in the City,” I said. “The San Francisco Democracy is Antimonopoly.”
Bierce said scornfully, “Do not be too sure of that, Tom.”
What Bierce said of the SP was true enough. The transcontinental railroad had been completed in 1869 and since then the Big Four’s Monopoly had covered the state like knee-deep muck. The Railroad not only owned the Republican legislature, they hired bullyboys and enforcers and, in the Mussel Slough Massacre, gunmen. And my father worked for them.
But Bierce also denounced the Democrat machine that ran the City government—Chris Buckley, the Blind Boss, and Mayor Washington Bartlett and the Supervisors—in what he called the “hauls of power.”
I was a member of a Democrat club called the True Blue Democracy. Sometimes we had brawls with Railroad toughs who liked to break up our meetings.
Nix finished his beer, clapped on his helmet and rose. “Come along then, Tom,” he said to me.
So I went along with him to the City Morgue in Dunbar Alley, to view my first corpse.
I was born and raised in Sacramento, where my mother and father still lived on M Street, my mother with her children grown and gone, sitting on the porch to smoke a cigar when one came her way, watching the wagons pass. My father, the Gent, was apt to troop off after the latest bonanza. He’d never got the gold fever out of his blood. Between jaunts he worked for the SP at one job or another. In his time, I knew, he had chased women as well as silver strikes.
I left home to move down the Sacramento River to San Francisco as soon as I finished my schooling. I was a fireman for four years. After that I worked at the Chronicle for six months as a printer’s devil. There I began writing pieces and showing them to an editor who recommended me to Bierce at The Hornet.
And I attended Policemen’s and Firemen’s and Charity Balls, in the hopes of meeting my True Love, in San Francisco where there were not enough women to go around.
I roomed with a family named Barnacle, on Pine Street, and made my ablutions at the Pine Street Baths. Jonas Barnacle was a carpenter who suffered from “the weakness” and did not work much, except to make repairs on his house and sit on the stoop observing street passages. Mrs. B. was the harried keeper of a boardinghouse with four male boarders who shared dinners with her and Mr. Barnacle and the young Barnacles aged five to thirteen, the oldest being pretty Belinda, whom I’d promised to marry when she was eighteen.
My room was the third-floor loft, with bed, desk, washbasin and pitcher, three shelves of books and a slice of view out a bay window down Pine to Kearny. An outside rickety staircase gave me more privacy than any of the other tenants, though I had less headroom. Boarders were forbidden to bring women to their rooms.
There was an outhouse in the backyard, with its path obstructed by Mrs. B.’s washing on the clotheslines Mondays. I had nailed a buggy seat to the cellar wall, and went down there to practice boxing maneuvers and straight lefts and right hooks, to help protect the True Blue Democracy Antimonopolies from the Monopoly bullies.
Belinda Barnacle sat on the stoop with a book hugged to her chest, watching me thump up the wooden steps. She was a bright-haired, small-featured, skinny child with no figure to her yet. “Good evening, Tom!”
“Good evening, Belinda.” I was not feeling much like our usual evening literary conversation because of what I had seen at the Morgue. But I asked what she was reading.
She showed me the cover of one of the books I had lent her: Ivanhoe.
“Good book!”
“Is a Jewess like Mr. Cohen?”
“Just like.”
“They wrote things on his store. ‘Jews must go!’ Like ‘Chinese must go!’ ”
“People write things like that about Irishers too, Belinda. It is just low-tone people trying to make somebody else lower still.” The ignorant persecuting the helpless, as Bierce might have said. Belinda had asked to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which had nothing but low-tone characters, but I didn’t think she was ready for it yet. The novel had come out to a lot of criticism from readers who had liked The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Bierce had praised its plain style of narrative, though I suspected him of being jealous of Mark Twain’s successes. Bierce was the only famous writer other than Sidney Lanier who had actually served in the War between the States.
I had to wash off the morgue stink. The sight of that poor, chalk-pale, torn-apart body had laid a pall over me. It was beyond comprehension why anyone would want to do such a thing. I hadn’t been shown the ace of spades.
“I’ve got to get a bath,” I said.
“Are you going to the Firemen’s Ball?”
“Yes!”
Belinda hugged Ivanhoe to her chest. Tight braids hung down the back of her checked gingham dress. Her feet were pigeon-toed in scuffed shoes.
“Will you dance with ladies there?”
“I hope to.”
“Will you dance the waltz?”
“Indeed we will!”
“Father Kennedy says it is very sinful.”
“I don’t believe Father Kennedy has ever seen a waltz waltzed.”
She grinned, showing outsize front teeth, which gave her a charming raffish air. “Will you take me waltzing some day, Tom?”
“With Father Kennedy’s permission!” I said and trotted up the steps that Jonas Barnacle ought to spend some time strengthening with his hammer and a pocketful of nails.
It was to be the night I met my True Love.
2.
MISS, n. – A title with which we brand unmarried women to indicate that they are in the market.
–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY
Her name was Amelia Brittain, and she had come to the Firemen’s Ball accompanied by her brother, who was home from Yale. I was fortunate to be granted a dance with a young lady whose father was at least minor nobility of what Bierce called the “instant aristocrats” of Nob Hill. She was tall and graceful-gawky with a heart-shaped high-color face and light brown hair frizzed around her forehead like a halo. She weighed no more than an ounce of lace in my arms as we swept around the gleaming floor. I breathed her flower scent and took notice of the engagement ring on the hand I held in mine. The ring cast expensive glints as we circled under the heat of the gaslights.
Yes, she was engaged; to Beaumont McNair. I knew who Beau McNair was, all right. She was Nob Hill, and he was to Nob Hill what Nob Hill was to South of the Slot. His mother, the widow of one of the Comstock kings, had gone to England and married a title so that she was Lady Caroline Stearns. Beau McNair was only recently back in San Francisco. Amelia Brittain was his childhood sweetheart. Some of this I learned around the punch bowl from the socially interested firemen there and other young bachelors working in the City like myself, and some from Amelia herself.
I waltzed sinfully with Amelia past the band of music on its dais, sweat damp on my forehead from the July heat, and a gleam on hers as well. She smiled at me with her pink lips. Her dark stripes of eyebrows were raised as though she was always pleasantly surprised. I may have led her to believe I was a more impo
rtant journalist than was actually the case and did not mention that I turned into a printer’s helper and general tote-and-lift on Thursday nights when The Hornet went to press.
She said she didn’t think she had ever danced with a Democrat before.
We compared educations. I had received my sums, grammar and Latin from the Christian Brothers in Sacramento, she had “finished” at Miss Cooley’s Institute in San Francisco.
I steered her outside onto the balcony that overlooked the Tenderloin and, down to the left, the broad swath of Market Street cocooned in light. To the west the city lights spread out over the hills and ganged together in the valleys, disappearing into the fog bank. We stood at the railing in the cool air off the Bay. I pretended to be intent on admiring the views beneath us. I was unused to women who were almost as tall as I.
“It is so beautiful at night,” Amelia said. “But think of the evil events that may be happening down there even as we stand here.”
“Earlier this evening I viewed the remains of a poor young woman who had been slaughtered by a madman.”
“My father read of it in the Alta,” Amelia said. “A terrible murder. And she was a—low woman?”
“On Morton Street.” I pointed. Between Nob Hill and Market Street was Union Square, fronting on it the fancy parlorhouses of the Upper Tenderloin. Running off Union Square toward Market Street were the red-tinted lights of Morton Street. Out of our sight was Portsmouth Square, another rabbit hutch of cribs and whorehouses and, in between, the warrens of Chinatown where the slave girls shrilled their invitations.
It was shameful, with this young lady at my side, to be thinking of the City as a palpitating mass of fornication.
“It is difficult for a young person to understand—” she said in a low voice. “All these women—”
