Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  We entered the Bella Union through a large barroom packed with men and were seated at a table on the lower level of the pretty little theater, below a stage with a garishly painted drop curtain. Behind and above us were curtained stalls like a receding wall of pigeonholes. We ordered Piscos and watched a madam enter leading her bevy of handsome girls in their finery, with bright mouths and bold eyes glancing right and left while the men clapped and catcalled. The madam herself was stout, with an imperial manner of directing her flock into their stall. These were not the middle-class young ladies of “the line” who had so impressed Amelia, but they were striking women with perfect toilettes also.

  It was the regular Saturday night parade where the madams showed off their girls.

  “I do fancy these flaunting doves,” my father confessed. “There is nothing like them in Sacramento. Women will simply not show bare arms in Sacramento.”

  There was whistling from the barroom as a second madam led in her charges, this one tall with feathers nodding from her hat. Her girls were indeed bare-armed, and proud in their paint and vivid fabrics, their boots crackling on the wooden floor. They were accompanied by more whistling from the barroom. The second group disappeared into their stall as a third group appeared. My father clapped for the feather-boaed madam with her blazing smile for the men appreciating her girls.

  I thought of Caroline LaPlante as a madam in Virginia City, whose beauty and style had captured the town, and whose own heart had been captured by a man whose station would not allow him to marry a low woman.

  And Amelia’s responsibility was to marry a wealthy man. Aristocrats!

  More whores passed in a cloud of perfumery, giggling, rustling fabrics, noisy boots. The gaslights gleamed on the flesh of their necks and arms.

  “Other places,” the Gent said, “the fancy women dress like the society women. In San Francisco it’s the other way round.”

  Including Sibyl Sanderson, who preferred to dress like a Parisian demimondaine. I could inform Amelia that I was aware of the ironies of my father’s views compared to her own, if I were ever to see her again.

  Another bouquet of women made its entrance.

  “I believe it does a man good to watch pretty women in their little boots,” my father said.

  The curtain was raised to reveal a half-circle of male and female performers. The women’s outfits were as skimpy as those of the whores were lush. There was laughter and applause.

  I could feel the heat from the gaslamps that illuminated the stage. A fat comedian told jokes with gestures I found distasteful.

  The Gent leaned toward me. His expression was one of more sorrow than anger. “I heard you had some trouble, Son,” he said.

  “I would be sorry to learn you sent those ruffians after me, Pa.”

  He leaned toward me with a hand cupped to his ear, for the band had struck up a din of music, “What were you doing at a meeting like that anyhow? True Blue Democrats! The Boss and Sam Rainey are common malefactors, my boy!”

  “Well, you work for uncommon ones.”

  “Tommy, those fine gents make our livings along with theirs. They make the state a better place! The railroad is like a mess of arteries that brings the blood to the organs and members, to the fingers and the head and the John Thomas. Without it you have just got nothing at all!

  “Look at these folks you think you like! They have got their fingers in every till. Look at this business with the school board! Your Chris Buckley, the Blind Boss! He is not so blind as not to know the color of greenback dollars. How much do those dummies pay Buckley to be on the school board and pick the public’s pocket? The Water Board? The mayor!”

  “How much does the Railroad pay Senator Jennings to front up the Girtcrest Corridor Bill?”

  “But that is to the benefit of this great state!”

  “It is to the benefit of Leland Stanford, Charles Crocker and Collis Huntington. Will you tell me Senator Jennings is trying to make the Nation great?”

  “Son, son,” my father said and swung around to guffaw at the latest sally from the jokester on the stage. This one wore a hat too small for him and a long necktie, the end of which hung out of his trouser cuff. There was laughter also from the stalls where the madams had arrayed their girls.

  The show of prostitutes at the Bella Union was not what I wanted to be watching when my heart was broken.

  When the Gent turned back, he said, “Jennings had this painting in his office at the legislature. Lady didn’t just have bare arms, she was bare all over. Horseback lady. My, she was a pure vision!”

  I felt the hairs at the back of my neck prickle. “Lady Godiva,” I said.

  “Lady Godiva was what she was outfitted as! He had so many complaints from his constituents he had to take her down.”

  Constituents who didn’t object to Jennings in the pay of the Railroad but did object to bare female flesh in his offices.

  “What did he do with the painting?”

  “Got rid of it, I guess,” the Gent said, frowning. “He’d bought it from the Bucket of Blood there in Virginia City that had commissioned it.”

  “It was Highgrade Carrie, wasn’t it?”

  I thought he hadn’t heard me, in another burst of laughter around us. But after a moment he looked back at me solemnly. “Yes, it was, Son.”

  I had not yet presented the information on the painting of High-grade Carrie as Lady Godiva to Bierce.

  “Set up by Senator Sharon, as I understand it.”

  “It seems you have learned a good deal about Virginia City twenty years ago, Son.”

  “I’ve learned that Senator Jennings is a murderer,” I said. “Bierce is going to prove it.”

  The Gent did not respond to that, looking troubled. The slashes of white in his whiskers caught the light. I swigged the sour Pisco Punch.

  A troupe of dancers had come onstage, waving flags in a flurry of red and white stripes, and prancing with plump legs in tights to the beat and horns of the overly enthusiastic band of music. There was a great deal of whistling.

  I said, looking my father straight in the face, “Maybe when you are young you are more concerned with right and wrong. Do you still think about right and wrong?”

  “Maybe I have got a more comprehensive view of what it is, Son. Mr. Bierce has got it screwed up so tight it strictures him bad, it seems to me.”

  “Do you think it is right for Senator Jennings to murder Judge Hamon’s widow?”

  His face slumped. After a long moment, he said, “No, I don’t.”

  I thought I had spoiled his evening at the Bella Union, and I was not enjoying the show either. Amelia admitting she was for sale like any one of these painted women had screwed my insides so tight as to stricture me badly.

  “Pa,” I said. “Why did men change their names on the Washoe?”

  “Same reason they changed their name when they came West. Forty-niners changed their names too. Change their life. Change their luck. Trouble with the law. Trouble at home. Complications with women.”

  I couldn’t bring myself to ask which had been his reason.

  “Did you know Highgrade Carrie well?”

  “Not so well,” he said. “Admired her till she and Nat and Will got together for the euchre. But I expect that was Nat’s doing. I will admit there’ve been some hard feelings.” He chuckled unhappily. “Well, she brought some mementoes of the Washoe to that wedding.”

  The word snapped in my head like a cap pistol.

  “Momentoes,” I said shakily. “How would you spell that?”

  “How would you spell it, Son? You are the educated fellow here.”

  I spelled m-o-m-e-n-t-o.

  “That’d be it,” he said. “Why?”

  “No reason,” I said.

  We stuck it through to the flag-waving end. When we left through the barroom I saw a familiar face. It was Beau with his fair-bearded cheeks and a gray muffler around his neck. I thought he had seen me, but he made no sign of recognition. The mu
ffler and the ill-fitting jacket must be his disguise for the “researches” Amelia had mentioned.

  “Who was that fellow?” the Gent wanted to know, when we had come out onto the street.

  “That is the British gentleman Beaumont McNair,” I said. “The son of Lady Caroline Stearns.”

  I thought for a moment he was going to insist on going back to introduce himself.

  26

  MUSTANG, n. – An indocile horse of the western plains. In English society, the American wife of an English nobleman.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  Bierce returned from St. Helena on Monday. Tuesday morning he was summoned to the offices of Bosworth Curtis in the Monkey Block. He took me along. Curtis, Bakewell & Stewart was on the second floor above Malvolio’s Restaurant, with fine leather furniture in a sitting room with windows looking out over Montgomery Street, and a typewriter at a little table with her black Remington machine before her. When she swiveled ninety degrees she presided over a reception desk from which she asked Bierce and me to have a seat. A neat little person in a tan skirt and shirtwaist, she rose and left the room to tell Lawyer Curtis we were on hand.

  She showed us into another big room with windows that looked out on the Customs House. Curtis was seated behind a desk the size of a Faro layout, with two people before him. One was Beau McNair, back in fancy tailoring today. The other was a lady in a shiny black hat with a veil covering her face, and gray and black layers of cloaks and jackets and skirts of materials expensive-looking just in their texture, black gloves and polished black boots, one of which twitched with a rhythm of impatience. It was Lady Caroline Stearns, though I couldn’t make out her face inside the black veil. I had a sense of Bierce stiffening to military attention beside me.

  Beau McNair rose. Curtis was already on his feet, an ugly little terrier of a man with his pink, shiny-skinned face and white hair brushed straight back. He didn’t come around his desk to shake hands with Bierce or me.

  “Mr. Bierce, I believe,” he said in his bark of a voice. “Lady Caroline, this is the journalist of whom we have spoken. Lady Caroline Stearns. Mister Beaumont McNair. And this young gentleman?”

  “My assistant,” Bierce said. “Mister Thomas Redmond.”

  “We have met,” I said to Beau, whom I had seen at the City Jail with Curtis and Rudolph Buckle, in the park with Amelia Brittain and at the Bella Union last night.

  Beau glanced toward me solemnly, nodding. I thought it just as well not to give him the wink. He was a handsome young fellow, no doubt about it. Amelia’s half brother. I could see no resemblance. I wondered if I would ever be in a situation to afford a jacket like that. It looked like he spread it on instead of arming into it like lesser beings.

  “How do you do, Mr. Bierce,” Lady Caroline said. Her boot had stopped twitching. Her voice was low, pleasant, with a trace of British accent. The former Highgrade Carrie of Virginia City.

  “How do you do, Lady Caroline.”

  There was a motion of her head, possibly a nod to me.

  “We have a mutual acquaintance in Miss Brittain, Redmond,” Beau said to me.

  “That is so,” I said.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Bierce, Mr. Redmond,” Curtis said, seating himself. Bierce settled in a leather armchair, I on the far edge of a sofa.

  “I have requested this meeting, Mr. Bierce,” Lady Caroline said in her pleasant voice. “It is good of you to come. My son is in difficulty with the police, and I have been led to believe you may assist us. I am informed that you have been following these terrible murders closely and may have come to some conclusions.”

  “I may be able to assist you, madam,” Bierce said.

  There was a clench of tension that froze the assembled in their various postures.

  Curtis tented his hands together on his desk top. “May I ask what you mean, Mr. Bierce?”

  “I believe that these murders and Mr. McNair’s apparent involvement in them have been contrived to bring Lady Caroline to San Francisco, where she is in danger from someone whose hatred has turned to lunacy.”

  The silence had texture and weight, like a block of cement.

  “Who would that be, Mr. Bierce?” Lady Caroline whispered. I had a sense of slimness inside her layers of clothing, of blondness under the hat within the veil. Her black gloves worked together, one sliding over the other. I was aware of a sexual emanation so subtle it seemed to be part of her scent of flowers.

  “I do not know that yet, madam,” Bierce said, folding his arms on his chest.

  Lady Caroline glanced at Curtis, who said grimly, “Have you evidence of this, Mr. Bierce?”

  “Each of the murdered women has been marked with a playing card, a spade. Lady Caroline will remember the Society of Spades in Virginia City. Each of the murders except one has been accomplished in such a way as to implicate her son.”

  “I don’t understand,” Beau started.

  Bierce interrupted. “I have seen you referred to as the Queen of Spades, Lady Caroline. Each of the numerical cards has been a progression toward the face cards.”

  Beneath the veil I could see Lady Caroline’s lips round into an O.

  “There has been a conspiracy to bring you back here, madam.”

  “It is young Mr. McNair we wish to consult with you about,” Curds said. “We have information that the police have evidence against him that has not yet been produced.”

  “Probably that is so,” Bierce said.

  “Captain Pusey,” I said.

  Curtis’s eyes slid toward me, hard as agates. “Yes, Captain Pusey.”

  Bierce flicked a finger that I was to continue.

  “It is mysterious that Captain Pusey possessed a photograph of young Mr. McNair, which he showed to a woman who might have seen the murderer in the second instance.”

  “That identification could be successfully challenged in a court of law,” Curtis said.

  “That is not the point, Bos,” Lady Caroline said.

  “The point is that Pusey knew of an escapade Mr. McNair was involved in in London,” Bierce said. “The particularities of that escapade have been copied and made lethal, to convince the police of Mr. McNair’s guilt. The murderer learned of the arrest in London by channels that lead back to Pusey. Pusey had the photograph in his archive of photographs, and he did not show it to the witness by chance. You have evidently been given notice that he has more evidence, which he is withholding.”

  “It is simply blackmail then,” Lady Caroline said. “Captain Pusey’s reputation is known to me.” She did not sound much concerned.

  “Captain Pusey is not as clever as he thinks himself,” Curtis said.

  “It seems I am the target, not my mother,” Beau said. He was sitting very erect. His cropped beard looked like a sheen of gold on his cheeks and chin. I thought his eyes too close together.

  “Your mother through you,” Bierce said.

  “Mr. Bierce, may I ask what is your interest in these horrible murders?” Curtis said.

  “I am a journalist, sir,” Bierce said.

  “May we inquire what more you know of them?”

  “A murderer, who must be considered a madman, slaughtered two women in Morton Street,” Bierce said. “The third murder was not committed by the same person, but by Senator Aaron Jennings. The victim was the wife of a judge who had served with Jennings on the Circuit Court and who had evidence of Jennings’s corruption. This evidence was to be made public, and to that end Mrs. Hamon had an appointment with me the next day. Jennings tried to hire a murderer to accomplish the murder, but the man had meanwhile become religious, so Jennings did the work himself. The crime was made to look similar to the other two murders.”

  “This is a base canard!” Curtis exploded. “Senator Jennings—”

  “Is the murderer of Mrs. Hamon and I intend to prove it,” Bierce interrupted. Lady Caroline’s gloved hand made a motion at her lawyer, who subsided.

  “The fourth murder was the original Slasher at
work again,” Bierce continued. “Again it was an effort to incriminate Mr. McNair, for the victim was an attachment of his. An attempt was made on the life of Mr. McNair’s then-fiancée, Miss Brittain, which Mr. Redmond here was in a position to foil.”

  “The engagement had been broken off,” McNair said in what seemed to me an insufferable tone, as though he had done the breaking off.

  “Nevertheless, she could have been considered to be an attachment at the time of the attack.”

  I could feel Lady Caroline’s gaze. There was a silence of information being digested.

  “Mr. Bierce,” Lady Caroline said. “I have the sense that you want something. Will you tell me what that is?”

  “I will be able to clear this matter up if I am given some assistance,” Bierce said. “I believe that I will soon be able to identify the person who wishes you and your son ill, madam.”

  “If you are given some assistance,” she said gently.

  “I believe you know a man named Elza Klosters.”

  There was another of the stiff silences.

  “Who was employed by your late husband,” Bierce added.

  “I remember Elza Klosters,” Lady Caroline said. She was slowly stripping the glove from her left hand, her head bowed to the process.

  “And Adolphus Jackson?”

  “What is the pertinence of these questions, may I ask?” Curtis demanded.

  “Senator Jennings was known to Lady Caroline as Adolphus Jackson. He was one of the Society of Spades and has cause to feel abused by Lady Caroline and her then husband.”

  “Abused?” Beau said harshly.

  “Swindled then.”

  Curtis said, “Are you implying that Senator Jennings is our madman? I will not believe—”

  “Senator Jennings is no madman,” Bierce said. “He is, however, a murderer.”

  “Is he a part of the conspiracy you have mentioned?” Lady Caroline asked. For the first time she sounded breathless. I could see her hand, spread-fingered before her bosom; it was not a young hand.

  “I do not know that yet, madam. You have perceived that I want something. I am bound to see Senator Jennings prosecuted for the murder of Mrs. Hamon. You can help me accomplish that.”