Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  “Could it have been Elza Klosters doing a job for Nat McNair because Gorton was trying to blackmail McNair?”

  “There’s other possibilities.”

  “The tall man must be Adolphus Jackson.” And the one partially in shadow, E. O. Macomber, was Cletus Redmond. I was in a sweat that Pusey would recognize my father, although surely his face did not appear in the Criminal Photographic Archive.

  They had cheated my father out of a fortune! I would have been the son of a Nob Hill millionaire.

  “What’s that, Poppy?” John Daniel asked.

  “Tintype of some fellows in Virginia City,” Pusey said. He had never taken his eyes off the images. He shook his head slightly, as though recognition did not come, or to make me think it did not.

  “Jackson spent some time in jail here.”

  “Probably before my time,” Pusey said. “I’ll study on it. Who’s the other one?”

  “Macomber.”

  He shook his head.

  “Do you have a photograph of Elza Klosters?”

  He rose, a bulky figure in his uniform, his belly squeezed into two fat bulges by his belt. He stamped out of the office. Outside the window a policeman had dispersed the bottle bums.

  I pocketed the tintype from Pusey’s desk. Bierce had paid two hundred dollars for it, after all. I wished I had never heard of it.

  John Daniel watched me suspiciously.

  Pusey returned laden with a heavy, leather-bound album, which he opened on his desk, and slapped through the pages. There was Brown, whom Bierce had correctly guessed to be Klosters. He was without his hat, his surly features gazing out at me. In this likeness he possessed considerably more hair. On the opposite page was a typed list that I assumed to be of offenses, but when I rose to take a look, Pusey closed the album.

  “Where’s the tintype?”

  I patted my pocket.

  “I want it.”

  “It belongs to Ambrose Bierce.”

  “It is evidence,” Pusey said. He stretched his lips to show me his fine teeth. His eyes were set in his head in a disorienting irregularity. They stared at me as though to mesmerize me.

  “Evidence of what?” I asked.

  His face darkened. “I want that tintype. I’ve got to have some time with those faces.”

  “I’ll ask Mr. Bierce,” I said.

  He was not content with that, but he did not pursue it further.

  When I left, Pusey told John Daniel to shake hands with Mr. Redmond again, which the boy did with another abrupt motion. Outside in the areaway, when I looked back up, Captain Pusey was watching me from his window, a looming figure capped by the topknot of white hair. Beside him was his son’s head, visible above the sill, peering down.

  I stopped in a saloon around the corner for a beer for my dry throat. I had been in such a sweat with Pusey looking at the Gent’s image in the tintype that I hadn’t concentrated on Pusey, but I had the sense that he employed his cunning even when there was no need. I patted the hard shape of the tintype in my pocket uneasily. Surely Pusey could have invoked his authority to relieve me of it if it had seemed important to him.

  My breath came hard when I contemplated how close my father had come to the Big Bonanza. I turned down Clay Street, striding through the pedestrians on the busy sidewalk.

  I did not identify the whiff of sound as a slung shot until my head burst.

  16

  A man is known by the company that he organizes.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  I came to my senses in a dark alleyway between buildings, my back against rough bricks. My head throbbed. My stocking feet were stretched out on paving stones. Where were my shoes? My hat was missing. My jacket was gone also, with it any money I’d had with me and the tintype of the Society of Spades.

  No doubt Captain Pusey had got the tintype. I touched the lump on the side of my head. Probably a bum had made off with my shoes and hat.

  My banging the buggy seat in the Barnacles’ cellar had not helped with the defense of the realm. I had been coshed by a professional. I felt relief that the tintype was gone.

  It required some scrabbling to get to my knees. I rested there. It was another long way to my feet. The little alley stank of urine. I stood looking down at my stocking feet, willing them to move.

  No one paid me any attention as I limped around the corner, and around another. I stood in the paved areaway beneath Pusey’s high window, waiting for him to look out. A policeman strolled up to me, tapping his nightstick against the palm of his left hand. He had a mustache that looked painted on his face. He made moving-along gestures.

  I pointed to the lump on my head, but I tender-footed on away.

  I found myself in Chinatown. No one noticed my stocking feet, men in blue cotton maneuvering double loads on poles through the crowds and a woman hobbling on bound feet that probably felt like mine. Brown sun-dried ducks hung on gibbets in shop windows, trays displayed unfamiliar vegetables. Slave girls called out from their upholstered window boxes:

  “Fuckee, suckee!”

  My feet were on fire when I finally got home, climbed the splintery stairs, shed my worn-out stockings and flopped onto my bed. I couldn’t rest the bruised side of my head against the pillow. I lay shivering with fantasies of vengeance chasing through my brain and chills of anxiety about Amelia. I couldn’t let myself think about my father’s connection to the Jack of Spades Mine.

  Moving slowly, I dressed and headed for The Hornet, bareheaded because I couldn’t get a hat on my head. Bierce was not in the office, so he was probably at Dinkins’s. I made my way there, to find him sitting with Sgt. Nix at his usual table. Nix had spread himself over the chair seat and chair back with a long leg stretched out.

  I pointed to my lump and pulled a chair up. Bierce looked as alarmed as he ever looked, which was not very. When I had told my story, not leaving out my suspicions of Captain Pusey for Sgt. Nix’s benefit, Bierce said, “The tintype is gone, then.”

  I entertained the irritating probability that Bierce considered me at fault for losing the tintype, for which he had paid two hundred dollars. Good riddance! Nix’s hatchet face was set in a scowl.

  “That’s a pretty good lump you’ve got there, Tommy.”

  “I’d like to find out who put it there.”

  “I can make a guess,” Nix said but didn’t.

  “Captain Pusey wanted that tintype,” I said, hand to my head. “He said it was evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?” Bierce asked me.

  “He didn’t say.”

  “Did he recognize Jackson?”

  “He said he didn’t.”

  “Let me point out,” Nix said. “He is famous for collecting photographs, and he didn’t have to get you bashed on the head to take that tintype away from you. If it was evidence.”

  “What kind of legal compulsion would that be?” Bierce inquired.

  “It’s a writ of I-want-what-you-have-got,” Nix said, with a sour smile.

  “I’m sorry about your head,” Bierce said to me.

  I nodded, still a little aggrieved. Nix patted his helmet on the table. I asked if there was a constable at the Brittain house.

  “He’s there,” Nix said.

  “Sgt. Nix has discovered the owner of the Washoe Angel saloon from the tax appraiser,” Bierce said. “His name is Adolphus Jackson, and tax bills are sent to him at 307 Battery Street.”

  The painting of Highgrade Carrie was privileged information insofar as it concerned Amelia Brittain.

  “Captain Pusey showed me a photograph of Klosters from his archive,” I said. “He was the man in Santa Cruz, all right. The man who tossed the queen of spades at me.”

  Bierce squinted at the sunny doorway of the saloon, stroking a finger along his mustache. “Someone is trying to get Beau hanged,” he said. “Whores on Morton Street where Beau was seen, then Beau’s particular whore on Stockton Street. If it is another progression, the young woman to whom he’s engaged is certainl
y endangered.”

  “The engagement is broken off,” I said. “But the Slasher may not know that.”

  “Could she be thought of as his whore also?”

  “She could not!” I said through my teeth.

  “I don’t know why it is impossible for young men to believe that young women have just about the same slippery morals they have,” Bierce complained.

  I clamped my jaw closed. I had an engagement with Amelia on Sunday!

  “A lecture from the prof,” Nix said.

  “Cynicism is the mother of invention,” I said.

  “The father of wisdom,” Bierce said.

  “The first refuge of scoundrels,” I said, at which he smiled, for it was his own twist on Samuel Johnson’s aphorism.

  “Let us think of it this way,” he said. “All the women of San Francisco are in danger until we can discover what this madman is about, and stop him.”

  When Nix had gone he said to me, “How is your piece on Senator Jennings progressing?”

  “I haven’t got much yet. Am I to include the fact that he was a Spade named Jackson and a San Francisco jailbird?” And the owner of a Battery Street saloon called the Washoe Angel, which had displayed the portrait of Highgrade Carrie as Lady Godiva.

  “Everything you can find out. We will expect a response to that,” he said, squinting at the lump on my head.

  When I got home again there was a message from my father ordering me to meet him for supper at Malvolio’s Restaurant in the Montgomery Block. I sat on my bed feeling dread like an iron harness. I got a towel from the rack and set out for the baths. My bruised feet burned.

  Malvolio’s was on the corner of the Monkey Block, white napery and Italian waiters with handlebar mustaches and steamy smells coming out of the kitchen when the doors were opened. The Gent sat at a table across the room. His black hair was brushed straight back, and his high-color drinker’s face set in a grin as he rose to shake my hand. He embraced me with one beefy arm holding me against his muscular corporation. He had a bottle and a glass of red before him, and he motioned to a waiter to pour a second glass, which the man did with the flourish of one who knows a big tip is forthcoming. The Gent had the quality of impressing lesser mortals with his greaterness. What a fine millionaire he would have made!

  “How is the Bonanza Trail these days?” I asked, wondering right away why I had said it. To try to get some edge on him? He had something to say to me, as I ought to have something to say to him.

  But he was simply not the Slasher, even if he was E. O. Macomber. He had never known how to carry a grudge.

  “It is about petered out, Tommy. Or I am, one.”

  “Surely not!”

  “Probably not,” he said, grinning. “I have a line position, Tommy, working with the Legislature.”

  Carrying the boodle for the SP. “That’s fine,” I said.

  He touched his glass to mine with an upswing that included the other diners at Malvolio’s, who probably felt cheered by it.

  “Course I don’t see it that San Francisco’s heaven-on-earth,” he said in a low voice. “Sacramento’s got as much interest, I’d say. Sacramento’s easy, Son. Life’s easy there. Good restaurants, fine people, the Governor, Senators, Representatives.”

  “Hot too,” I said. “What is it these days, a hundred some?”

  He frowned at me, the Sacramento-supporter in him challenged. “Weather’s not everything, my boy. You’ve got that fog down here, can’t even see sometimes. Murders too. The Morton Street Slasher! You know what causes that? People leading pissant lives, dissatisfied, hating everybody and everything. You don’t get that in Sacramento.”

  I said I was glad to hear it. In fact, the State Capitol might be in Sacramento, but the SP Capital was at Fourth and Townsend in San Francisco.

  “When did you come down?”

  “Last night on the Evening Express. Lot of grand people aboard. Ollie Fenster, Rudy Buckle, a bunch from the Bank of Nevada. We played some poker. Those fellows are paying for this fine supper!” He laughed fatly.

  “Got quite a lump there,” he said, nodding at my head. “Some San Francisco footpad take after you?”

  “I think it was a copper,” I said, and we both laughed at my fine joke.

  I thought of the Gent as one of the owners of the Jack of Spades Mine, and of four other properties. He had said he had been euchred in Virginia City, but he had not said it as though he carried any freight of old hatred. Money had always been a casual thing with him. He had scraped together the funds to traipse off to the latest Bonanza camp, to buy speculative stocks, liquor and fine Sacramento meals for his boomer friends and fancy women, while my mother cut pieces of cardboard and canvas into soles to stuff inside our shoes to stop the holes, and hand-me-downed our clothes.

  Probably his attitude was that if Nat McNair and company had not euchred him out of a share of the Jack of Spades Mine, someone else would have.

  Menus were distributed. The Gent set them aside and ordered antipasti, gnocchi, venison ravioli and clam linguine. We munched on radishes and olives.

  He glanced at me keenly. “Hear you are working for that low-grade newspaper,” he said. “I tell you. Son, I was proud of you when you were a firefighter. You’d’ve made Chief.”

  “Maybe,” I said, nodding.

  “Working for Bitter Bierce,” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What’s he like, I wonder?”

  If I said, “Bitter!” we would have a laugh together, but it was as though he had tossed me a floater that I could knock out of the park. If I told him how much I admired Bierce it would cut him to the bone. Or maybe he would consider that I had tossed him a floater to knock out of the park in his innings, hinting at what a disappointment to him and my mother I had been, quitting the Fire Department to run errands for Dutch John and Ambrose Bierce.

  “Well, he goes after every crook, sham, cheat and humbug, crooked preacher and porkbelly politician without fear or favor.”

  “Lot of them in this town,” the Gent said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Gent refilled his glass and passed the neck of the bottle over mine, which was still brimmed.

  “I’ll be surprised if Aaron Jennings doesn’t go after him.”

  “Do you think so?” I said.

  “Aaron’s a gentleman. Lives in the City here. Plump sweet wife and a couple of half-grown kits. Used to be a judge, you know. A fine legislator. Man to ride the river with.”

  “I’m writing a piece on him for The Hornet.”

  “They’ve got you writing pieces?” I strained to hear the emphasis on the “you.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Serving dishes heaped with food arrived in a cloud of smells and an officious waiter shifting plates and glasses to set them down. My father beamed at the beneficence he had ordered and scowled when he remembered the subject of the conversation. He heaped our plates with a silver serving spoon. I was so tightened up inside I wondered if I could get anything down. My head throbbed as some kind of reminder.

  “How do you go about ‘writing pieces’?”

  “There are files at The Hornet, and files at the Chronicle and the Alta and the Examiner. I go through them and put things together.” And there were facts that were not in any files.

  He squinted at me. “Ever occur to you that somebody might come after you?”

  Klosters had already come after me. I said I’d only done a piece on Mussel Slough and some looking into Mammy Pleasant so far, not to mention my researches on Senator Jennings again.

  “Took the side of those Sand-lappers. I couldn’t believe you’d do that. Son.”

  “Well, it is history.”

  “Lot of leeway in history,” my father said.

  He ordered a second bottle of wine.

  “I think Wally could get you a job down at Fourth and Townsend. How’d you like that? I guess they use writers down there.”

  “No, thanks,” I said.

&nb
sp; “What are you, Antimonopoly?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, and chewed and could not swallow.

  “Son,” he said heavily. “Without the Railroad this City would be just a pissant Mexican mud village. This state wouldn’t be a great state. This state would be nothing at all. Who is the biggest employer in this state, Son?”

  I chewed and nodded. The Railroad.

  “I just can’t think how a son of mine can be so misguided. Almighty God Bierce. He has set you against the Railroad, has he?”

  “No, sir. I joined a Democracy Club when I was a fireman.”

  “My, God!” the Gent said. “Son, the Railroad runs this State.”

  “Well, it shouldn’t,” I said.

  “Shouldn’t isn’t the issue, Tommy. “Is is the issue. The SP is.”

  Conversation died as we forked into our food, but I could feel the electricity of my father’s indignations.

  The Gent detached his napkin from his collar, filled our glasses again, squared his shoulders and said, “My boy, there are two ways of looking at life. You can approve of things, go along with things, live the good life God gave you, take advantage of the pleasures, appreciate what comes your way, have good friends that would ride the river with you. So when you come to the end of the road you can look back and say, ‘Thank you. Lord, for the fullness of my days.’

  “Or you can be a cold, hateful, disapproving chap. I will say your Almighty God Bierce is one of those. He may hate preachers, but he is a preacher. He will find the bad spot in every apple, he will look at the foul a person has done, not the decent. I will grant you he is a powerful chap, but, Son, nobody loves a reformer. They start out sour, and they grow sourer day by day. And when they come to the end of their time they can’t look back at fullness or happiness, all they can look back at is that they hated everything and they didn’t change one Gol-durn thing.”

  “Well, but they tried, sir,” I said.

  “Tell me, Son, does he have any friends?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Tell me, does he love his wife?”

  “I don’t believe so,” I said.