Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

“You are a free spirit on your roller-skates.”

  “Let us go pretend some more, then,” she said, smiling and patting my hand.

  Later she told me that I reminded her of Pierre Bezuhov in War and Peace.

  I said, “And is Beau McNair Prince Andrew?”

  “No, he is Anatole Kuragin,” she said. Her nose wrinkled as she giggled.

  She had read War and Peace in French! “It took weeks!” she said.

  Women often spoke in mysterious allusions or snatches of song, so that you felt stupid when you did not catch the drift. What did her reference to War and Peace mean? Anatole Kuragin had failed to seduce Natasha Rostov. But Pierre Bezuhov was the man she came to love after the death of Prince Andrew. What did that tell me?

  I mentioned Vanity Fair.

  “Amelia Sedley and Captain Dobbin!”

  Her face was bright with excitement to discover that we had read the same books, although I had missed Henry Esmond, and she had not read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We circled the noisy floor among the other skaters with our left hands clasped again, my right arm around her waist, and compared novels.

  “There isn’t anybody I can talk to about books!” Amelia said, brushing her hair back from her pink face. “Beau never read anything, and Poppa doesn’t read much any more.”

  I said I had enjoyed my conversation with her father.

  “He is not looking forward to Lady Caroline’s arrival.”

  “Why would that be?”

  “They were friends in Virginia City but something happened so they are not friends any more,” Amelia said. “Of course I know she had an ambiguous position there, and I am not allowed to speculate on what their friendship might have been.” She laughed on an ascending scale.

  She was the most delightful entity who had ever entered my life.

  I sat with Bierce in the office. Next door we could hear the rattle of Miss Penryn’s machine. Smithers shouted something further down the hall. The window was open on California Street and through it came a clamor of buggy wheels.

  Bierce tapped his fingertips together. “It is someone totally committed to malevolence toward Beau McNair. To his guilt‌—‌his incrimination!‌—‌to the damage of anyone connected to him. Someone wants to drink wine out of his skull, but I can’t seem to grasp the core of this anger. Is it one of the Spades?”

  He peered at me through his shaggy eyebrows: “In London, as a member of the Diamonds, this young chap drew female organs on the bellies of whores with some liquid that stung but did not disfigure.”

  “Which Captain Pusey knew,” I said. “And the Slasher must know also.”

  “Would it have been featured in the London newspapers? Copies of The Times or The Illustrated London News might be found in the Reading Room of the Pacific Club. But Lady Caroline would have tried to keep it out of the papers.”

  Bierce tugged down on the points of his vest, frowning. “The details of what the Diamonds did to the Whitechapel women would not have appeared in the papers,” he said. “And should be known in San Francisco only to Captain Pusey. It will be remembered that Captain Pusey, by what he calls an educated guess, showed the photograph of Beau McNair to Edith Pruitt of Mrs. Cornford’s establishment.”

  “An extremely educated guess, as you said.”

  “Pusey had the tintype removed from your possession because he knew that Jackson is Jennings, and he didn’t want anyone else to make the connection. Why would he protect Jennings? Because Jennings is a one-time jailbird who is paying him not to reveal the fact. It is a financial arrangement he does not want disturbed.”

  Captain Pusey also possessed the tintype which showed the Gent to have been E. O. Macomber.

  “Pusey must have his sights set on a more opulent prize,” Bierce said.

  “Lady Caroline. But Jennings is not the Slasher.”

  “Jennings is a certified peculator and murderer whom I intend to see indicted,” Bierce said grimly. “The Slasher is Captain Pusey’s affair. Jennings is mine.”

  I confessed that I had not uncovered any information on Senator Jennings that Bierce did not already know. Jennings had kept his tracks well covered.

  Bierce thought that Pusey might have had a hand in the covering of tracks. I was ordered to keep digging.

  When I came back from lunch, and a trot past the Brittain house to make sure a constable was on guard, Bierce was in conference. Elza Klosters sat facing him, with his broad-brimmed hat on his lap. Hat-less, with strands of graying hair combed over his pale scalp, he did not look so menacing.

  “Tom, this is Mr. Klosters,” Bierce said.

  Klosters made no move to rise, nor I to shake his hand. I turned my own chair around to face them.

  “Mr. Klosters has come to protest my attentions to the Reverend Stottlemyer,” Bierce said.

  “The Washington Street Church,” Klosters said, nodding. He had a phlegmy rumble of a voice. “I said I would pow-wow with you.” He turned his head slowly to regard me. His jaw was set in a bulldog clench.

  “And what are we to pow-wow in regard to?” Bierce asked.

  “I have thought of doing you some harm, Mr. Bierce.”

  “Is that your role at the Washington Street Church?”

  “It is work I have done sometimes.” Klosters ran a big hand over his balding head.

  “You were chief of deputies at Mussel Slough, for the Railroad,” Bierce said.

  “That is neither here nor there, Mr. Bierce.”

  “And you have tried to intimidate Mr. Redmond here, and through him, me. That was not for the purposes of the Washington Street Church and the Reverend Stottlemyer.”

  Klosters shook his head patiently.

  “The Reverend is as fine a man as I have ever known of,” he said. “He has brought me to Jesus. He has brought the sinners in the Washington Street Church to Jesus. We have the Reverend Stottlemyer to thank for bringing us to Salvation.”

  Bierce’s face did not reveal his opinions on organized religion.

  “You have found Salvation, Mr. Klosters?” he said.

  Klosters nodded his heavy head. “I was a violent man. I have become a Jesus-man in the hope of Salvation.”

  “You are to be congratulated.”

  “The Reverend is to be congratulated, not mocked as you have done. I had thought to harm you, but the Reverend has shown me that that is not the way of a Jesus-man.”

  “No.”

  “Still, you fired Judge Hamon’s house in Santa Cruz,” I said.

  “That is one thing,” Klosters said.

  “And is there another ‘thing,’ sir?”

  “The other thing is what I have told you I will not do no more. I have been offered good money to harm a person, and I have said I would not do it although that was the way of life I had led. Because I have been brought to Jesus.”

  “And who was the person you were to be paid to harm?” Bierce asked.

  “That is neither here nor there.”

  Metal wheels screeched noisily past outside. A high-sided wagon rolled by, a colored man in an overall perched in the rear corner.

  “Tell me,” Bierce said to Klosters. “Is the person who offered you good money for this particular harm the same one who hired you to harm Albert Gorton?”

  It was as though these questions required a great deal of thought on Klosters’s part.

  “I did not come here for this kind of palaver, Mr. Bierce. The Reverend has shown me the way and the light. I have come as a Jesus-man to tell you that the Reverend forgives you your trespasses against him, but there is others in that congregation that might not.”

  “Oh, this is a threat after all.”

  “The Reverend would not want you to think of it in that way,” Klosters said.

  His bloodshot eyes regarded me with a kind of total inspection and turned away as though I did not interest him.

  “We are concerned with events in Virginia City in 1863,” Bierce said.

  “Highgrade Carrie,”
I said.

  Klosters raised a hand, palm toward me. “Tell you something, young fellow. You too, Mr. Bierce. Just stay out of Carrie’s business. You will be better off for it.”

  “She is a friend of yours?”

  “That lady is more than friend to anybody that knew her back then,” Klosters said.

  “That lady will presently be in a circumstance of propinquity,” Bierce said.

  Klosters gaped at him.

  “San Francisco,” Bierce said.

  “Is that a fact now?” Klosters said. He rose with a ponderous motion of shoving his chair back and heaving himself out of it. He clapped on his hat. Immediately he looked more dangerous.

  “You came by my boardinghouse to deliver the queen of spades card,” I said. “Did Senator Jennings hire you for that?”

  Sucking on a tooth, Klosters squinted at me. “Tell you, young fellow, there is someone that is interested in you changing your ways.”

  “With harm in mind?” Bierce said.

  Klosters shrugged. “You, too, Mr. Bierce,” he added.

  Bierce said, “Mr. Klosters, what would it take for you to give evidence that Senator Jennings tried to hire you to murder Mrs. Hamon?”

  Klosters did not reply. He adjusted his hat and departed.

  I touched the still-sore spot on my head where I had been harmed by a slung shot.

  “So,” Bierce said, seating himself again. “Jennings tried to hire him to murder Mrs. Hamon, but Klosters has taken the pledge, so to speak.”

  “Not against arson,” I said.

  “Nor intimidation. Although the only real threat he uttered was to stay out of Lady Caroline’s business.”

  That consideration opened new doors.

  “Both you and I have been threatened,” Bierce went on. “Miss Brittain was actually assaulted, surely by the Slasher. I can only believe these were different protagonists. There is a madman out there, no doubt of that. There is also Jennings, who is not a madman, although he may be a frightened man by now.”

  “And there is Jesus-man,” I said.

  “Whose loyalty to Lady Caroline is evident.”

  “Everyone seems to be loyal to Lady Caroline.”

  He nodded grimly and drew his watch from his vest pocket to consult it.

  “Time for Dinkins’s?” he said.

  I told him I had to attend a True Blue club meeting and help defend the Democracy from the Monopoly.

  20

  VALOR, n. – A soldierly compound of vanity, duty and the gambler’s hope.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  The meeting was in the basement of the Stoller building on Mission Street, about thirty of the True Blues on a collection of rickety wooden chairs, and Boss Chris Buckley at the podium with his toadies around him. He gazed out over us with his blind eyeballs and managed to appear amiable and impatient at the same time, as though he still had to talk to half a dozen Democracy or Antimonopoly Clubs tonight.

  He waved his hands for silence.

  “When the Lord created the Universe,” he began, “He looked around and said it was good enough for ordinary folks, but there must be a better piece of handiwork for the Democracy, so He created California. And then He said that the special folks that lived in California ought to do something to earn this special piece of His Handiwork, so He let the Enemy create the Monopoly so that California would have to do some labors to get rid of it.”

  That started things off with a laugh and applause, and the Blind Boss went on from there. I sat with Emmett Moon and August Leary in the third row.

  There were other matters than Regulation of the Railroad to discuss, and after Buckley and his bunch had gone on, Sam Rainey took over the meeting, and we listened to opinions on the United Street Railways of San Francisco who wanted to install overhead trolley lines, and the latest scandals from the water works.

  So we were a long way off the evils of the Railroad when a dozen bullies crowded in and began breaking up the furnishings. A good many of the True Blues evaporated out the door into Mission Street, but those of us who had sworn off being pushed around went into action. I engaged a fellow with a black cap on and hit him a couple of good wallops before he took up a chair to swing at me. Emmett and August and Fred Till were in action also, but, though we outnumbered the toughs, they were more certain what they were after. I heard my name.

  Three of them came for me. Small, Medium and Large, Large with a puffy clean-shaven face, an undershot jaw and a chest like a barrel in a faded blue shirt. “Redmond!” he shouted at me. He had fists balled up like melons.

  I hit him left and right and backed up and hit him again, but he kept coming with his cronies blocking the flanks so I was pushed into the corner, panting like a locomotive and wondering where my own pals were. Large hit me so hard in the belly that I spewed any air I had left in me along with my dinner. When I was crawling on the floor he kicked me in the chest so I thought my ribs were broken. After that he stood back with his meathooks on his hips and watched Small and Medium kick me around.

  “Back off!” Large said. “Hear?”

  I lay there aching all over and half fainting, and I nodded.

  “Back off!” the chief tough said again, and the pack of them banged off, kicking chairs over and stamping on them, and trooped out and were gone.

  August and Fred Till helped me home and up my stairs where they washclothed the blood and vomit off my face and rolled me into bed. It felt good to groan. I waked up to see a figure in a tweed suit standing with the light from the window turning him black with bright edges. Bierce was looking through the books in my bookcase. Morning sun gleamed in his frosted hair. He swung around to stand over me, looking down.

  “It wasn’t Pusey this time,” he said.

  “No,” I croaked. I ought to be asking him to take a chair, but it was too much trouble. I ached from my face on down. I moved a leg carefully.

  “Back off,” I said.

  “Pardon me?”

  “The message was to back off.”

  He paced over to be haloed at the window again. “Tom, I am sorry. You have taken punishment that should more rightly be mine. I cannot ask you to be the recipient of any more of it. Should we abandon the piece on Jennings? For that is what this seems to be about.”

  “Be damned to them.”

  He turned, his cold face twitching into a slight smile. “Very well. Be damned to them shall be our motto.”

  It was easier to nod than to speak.

  “I have brought you something.” He took a Colt’s revolver from his jacket pocket and placed it carefully on the taboret beside my bed.

  When he had gone I sat up, groaning, and stashed the revolver in the drawer of the taboret.

  Mrs. B. brought me breakfast and left it even though I told her I couldn’t eat anything. I slept the morning away. I was wakened by a rap on the door. “Lady to call,” Mrs. B. said, disapproving. An exception to the no-women-in-the-rooms rule had been made in my case.

  I was trying to sit up and brush a hand over my hair when Amelia swept inside.

  She seemed to provide sunlight in the dim room as she circled around, exclaiming at everything she saw. She stood over the bed with her gloved hands clapped together, gazing down at me from under her considerable bonnet with an expression of dismay.

  “My hero has been brought home on his shield!”

  “You are not to leave your house without a guardian!” I raised myself to say.

  She flapped a hand toward the open door. I could see a helmeted policeman leaning on the stair rail.

  “Constable Button is my sentry today!” She seated herself on the end of the bed with a graceful swing of her hips. She held her hands clasped together before her as though to immobilize them.

  “Mr. Bierce said it was a Railroad gang who did this.”

  “It was a message for me to back off.”

  “What does that mean, please?”

  “I’ve been writing a piece on Senator Jennings that
they don’t want published.”

  She sat looking down at her hands with her pretty mouth pursed. I admired the sweet symmetry of her bosom. “And will you back off?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Poppa knows Mr. Crocker and Mr. Stanford.”

  I laughed, which hurt in my chest and belly. She laughed with me. I thought it must be the irony that amused her.

  “What can I bring you, Tom?” she said.

  “You’ve already brought me the best thing you could bring me.”

  I was astonished to see her blush. It swept up her throat and over her chin into her cheeks like a pink shadow. She clasped a hand to her throat as though to stop it.

  “My mother makes a bruise remedy from cucumber cream and arnica,” she said. “I will send you a bottle.”

  I asked if she would accompany me to Marin on Sunday, up Mount Tamalpais.

  “I would love that!”

  She rose swiftly. “I must be going. I don’t know what Constable Button will think!” She swooped toward me. The brim of her hat scraped my forehead, her lips brushed mine, and she was gone.

  Late in the afternoon Belinda arrived for a visit. She sat in the chair just inside the door with her feet tucked close together and her hands in her lap. She had on her Sunday dress and a bonnet that made her face look like a china doll’s.

  “Miss Brittain came to call on you,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Mother doesn’t think she should have been alone in your room with you.”

  “She stayed two entire minutes.”

  “Ladies aren’t allowed in the boarders’ rooms.”

  “You are here,” I said.

  “I’m not a lady yet,” she said, looking down at her hands in her lap. “Mother thinks she is very pretty,” she said.

  “Well, so are you, Belinda.”

  She didn’t look up. “Tom.”

  “Yes?”

  “That man followed me home from school yesterday.”

  “What man?” I knew what man.

  “The playing-card man.”

  I was breathing hard suddenly. “What did he do?”

  “Well, he just followed me home. Then he stood at the gate for awhile after I’d come inside. I watched through the window. Then he went away.”