Port Hazard

by Loren D. Estleman

  “What’s it say, Billy?”

  The bartender read aloud, stumbling over “officially” and “consideration.” It might have been signed by the man who emptied the spitoons for all the impression Arthur’s name seemed to make on either of them.

  “Paper’s cheaper.” Hodge looked patient.

  I slid the Deane-Adams out of its holster and held it toward him butt-first.

  “On the bar. I heard about the border roll in Brisbane.”

  I laid it down, retrieved the star and the telegram, and pocketed them. He picked up the revolver, thumbed aside the loading gate, and rotated the cylinder to inspect the chambers, all one-handed. “English piece. Limeys transported me old man’s old man for picking an earl’s pocket, but I ain’t one to stroke a grudge. What’s a Yank want with a barking-iron made in Blighty?”

  “I don’t care for Colts. The five-shot’s lighter and packs the same fire power.”

  “What happens when you face six men?”

  “I run.”

  He grinned in his beard. His teeth looked too white and even to have grown inside his mouth. I asked him if he lost his hand in Australia.

  “Coming over. Worked my way across. Mainsail bust loose while I was striking it and took me rammer with it. Had me a regular hook till I rolled over on it in me doss and near crushed the old cobblers. Got a smithy on Battle Row to run me up this rig. I count me rise in the world from that day. You don’t need to be as tall as Jack’s hat when you got four pounds of Michigan iron slang off your fam.”

  “How do you sleep?” Beecher asked.

  “Like a rum angel, cock’s-crow to day’s arse.”

  I said, “Sorry we got you out of bed. We need a couple of rooms. A policeman at the train station told us to ask for Nan Feeny.”

  His porcelains gleamed. “Best be mum about that with Nan. She wouldn’t appreciate a fly-cop giving her the oak.”

  “Does anyone in this town speak American?” I asked.

  “Nan’s your mollisher. She was a governess in Boston till they caught her up to her petticoats in the master of the house. He’s still rhino fat up there on Beacon Hill, but the booly-dogs stunned her right out of her regulars and she took it on the rods. She’s fly to the patter when it suits.”

  Now he was just showing off. “You’re the bouncer here?”

  “Keeper of the keys, and Nan Feeny’s knees. Axel Hodge is the chant, and Black-Spy take the cove says it ain’t. You’re this bloke Murdock?”

  “Page Murdock.”

  “Horseshit,” said Billy the bartender. He was the most articulate man in the place.

  Hodge’s face was an opaque sheet. “Well, you may be flush gage out in country, but here you’re just herring. Frisco’s a bufe what eats anything.”

  I’d had my colorful fill of Axel Hodge. I nudged Beecher’s foot with my boot, alerting him, then took hold of the iron ball where it rested on the bar and jerked it across and over the lip of the marble on my side. Hodge’s arm came with it. His chin hit the bar with a snap that was going to send him back to his dentist for adjustments. Billy reacted, reaching under his side of the bar for whatever weapon waited there, but before he could straighten up, Beecher wrenched the Deane-Adams out of Hodge’s startled grip, rolled back the hammer with a gesture that told me he’d been practicing with the Le Mat while I wasn’t looking, and took aim at the spot where the old sailor’s eyebrows met above the bridge of his nose.

  The other patrons took their elbows off the bar and slid out of ricochet range, but not so far away they wouldn’t be able to witness what happened next. This was something new at the Slop Chest, worth repeating when they were back at sea and the tall tales had spun themselves out.

  Hodge tried to pull away, but I leaned my hip against the iron ball, pinning it against the mahogany on my side. He couldn’t get leverage with his short legs.

  “I was told folks are friendly in California,” I said. “If this is how you treat all your customers, I’m not surprised they’d rather draw flies on the front porch than come in and wet their whiskers.”

  The air stirred. Weatherbeaten boards moaned and shifted, leather scraped wood, a dozen voices howled in protest. In a small advertising mirror tilted on one of the shelves behind the bar, I saw sunburned, unshaven faces plastered against the windows and jammed together between the doorjambs leading to the front porch. I thought at first the sleeping sailors had been roused at last by the commotion inside. Then the bodies in the doorway separated as if someone had pried them apart with a pinch-bar and ten yards of taffeta and silk petticoat rustled in through the space, wrapped around six feet of female.

  Movement rippled through the crowd, and caps and hats came off heads that had been breeding lice in darkness for weeks. That was impressive.

  “What’s the row, Hodge?” the woman said. “I could hear you punching holes in my bar all the way from Pacific.”

  “Cly your daddles, Nan. It’s all plummy.” With his chin nailed to the bartop, the rest of Hodge’s hard-hatted head had to move up and down to get the words out.

  Nan Feeny—what I could see of her while dividing my concentration among Hodge, Billy, and the woman’s reflection in the mirror—had a handsome head on a long neck with a choker, topped by an elaborate pile of hair—startlingly white, against a face that was still too young to need as much paint as had been applied to it.

  “Plummy as a bag of nails,” she observed, and unslung a pepperbox pistol from the reticule she carried.

  “Red lady,” muttered the tinhorn seated at the table, laying the queen of diamonds on the king of clubs.

  10

  “Just the one, and you’re lucky to have it. Them pegos wasn’t sleeping on the deck for the fresh air. Twenty-five cents a day.” Nan Feeny opened the door and stepped aside.

  “We were told twelve.” I waited for my eyes to adjust. The room, one of several opening off a short hall behind the barroom, was a windowless den no larger than a ship’s berth, with two narrow bunks built one atop the other into the wall, which I thought was carrying the nautical theme too far.

  “Twelve apiece, and a penny tax.”

  “Who collects the tax?” Beecher took his turn looking at the accommodations. There wasn’t room for two men to stand inside.

  “Little squint-eyed ponce stinks of lilacs, and you don’t want to turn him away without his copper. I was burned out once. That’s the price of pride in Barbary.”

  We’d settled our differences in the saloon. Beecher had checked his revolver and I’d given Hodge back his arm, and when she’d put up the pepperbox we’d straightened out the reason for our visit. Face to face, or almost—the proprietress had two inches on me in my high-heeled boots—she had bad skin, hence the paint, and strong bones that wouldn’t give up her age short of another decade. However, she was still two young for her white hair, which didn’t look like a wig. She wore it in a chignon that added several unnecessary inches to her height.

  I asked her how much for a week, which surprised her. Her natural eyebrows went up almost as high as the ones she’d brushed on.

  “Cartwheel dollar. I don’t take paper. There’s more queer cole hereabouts than treasury. If it’s coniakers you’re after, I’d best quote you the rate for a year.” She had a granite brogue with no green pastures in it.

  I’d shown her the star and the telegram. “We’re not interested in counterfeiters, if that’s what you’re asking. Tell me if this means anything.” I handed her the double eagle.

  She studied the coin on both sides. I thought for a moment she was going to bite it, but teeth were scarcer than gold in that neighborhood. She gave it back, and it was my turn to be surprised. I thought I’d have to wrestle her for it. “I ain’t even seen one of them in lead. If you take Nan’s advice you’ll keep it in your kick. There’s tobbies’d settle you for spud and lurch your pork in the brine.”

  Any way I worked that out didn’t sound attractive.

  Beecher said, “This one was stamp
ed right here in San Francisco.”

  Nan studied him before answering. I couldn’t tell where she stood on the subject of conversing with Negroes.

  “Strictly speaking you left Frisco behind when you crossed Pacific Street. There’s some as would say you passed right on through America and out the other side.”

  I said. “You’re telling us you’d know if someone was walking around with one of these in his pocket.”

  “There’s nary a thing Nan don’t know what goes on between here and blue water.”

  “What about the Sons of the Confederacy?”

  She twisted a lip. “I’d swap a week’s peck to see one of them Nob Hill noddles try on Barbary. There’d be rebel red from Murder Point to North Beach.”

  “I was told they’re thick here.”

  “I ain’t saying you can’t spot ’em, all got up in lace goods and lifting their roofers to the mollies as like to give their active citizens some sun. Past dark they don’t show their nebs outside the Bella Union. Sons of the Confederacy, my aunt’s smicket. They couldn’t make war on Queen Dick.”

  “They’ve done a fair job of making war on peace officers,” I said. “Is that the same Bella Union where Daniel Webster Wheelock hangs his hat?”

  “There ain’t but one.” She took my measure from under her eyelids, one of which drooped a little like a broken window-shade. The powder she used by the pot hadn’t quite eradicated an old scar that ran diagonally across its top. “What’s your business with Cap’n Dan?”

  “I heard he’s the man to see in Barbary.”

  “That’s no packet, though you’ll not see him without he gives it his benison. He posted the cole to the Commodore to start the Slop Chest. He’s also the cove what sent the squint-eyed ponce and the slubber de gullions what set fire to the place.”

  The stubborn fog had found its way into the hallway through the gaps between the boards. I held up the double eagle. “I like to listen to your Irish. Where can we go to hear more out of the draft?”

  Her private quarters was three times the size of the room where Beecher and I had left our bags, which didn’t make it spacious. There was a barrel stove for heating and cooking, a pair of mismatched chairs, one with a broken-cane seat, a cornshuck mattress on an iron frame, and a portrait of Nan’s late husband, the Commodore, who had been twice her present age when it was painted and looked like just the kind of old walrus who would undertake to support a woman not yet born when he sprouted his first gray hair. The cut of the men’s clothes in the doorless wardrobe—a number of sailors’ jerseys and a full-dress suit—bore out Axel Hodge’s boast that he was the keeper of Nan Feeny’s knees. A seam in one wall showed where the back bar opened into the saloon. The room might have belonged to the master of the ship, if the Slop Chest had been a ship instead of a facsimile thrown together from the corpses of genuine vessels. The carpenter in charge was incapable of building anything that would float in a gentle pond.

  Sitting up on the bed with her high-laced ankles crossed and peach brandy in a cordial glass in her hand—Beecher and I declined an invitation to join her in the sticky-sweet beverage—our hostess lowered her guard sufficiently to modify her language and, more revealingly, offer her colored guest a cigar from the Commodore’s private stock, which she kept fresh by storing the boxes in a cupboard with fresh bread. He accepted it and made himself as comfortable as possible on the chair with the broken seat, puffing up gray clouds that found their way out through the spaces in the siding. Because the place was as private as a cornrick, we kept our voices low and Nan got up frequently to rewind the crank on a phonograph with a morning-glory horn the size of Joaquin’s head. “Beautiful Dreamer” drifted out of the opening, interpreted by a tenor with bad sinuses.

  Nan, for all her stature and presumed experience with strong drink, became candid under the influence of the peach brandy. We learned that the Commodore, whose given name was Cornelius, had not spent a day at sea, but had profited in Chinatown through the opium smuggled in by way of the pockets of common seamen so far as to have developed an affection for the briny breed. The policeman who had recommended the place had been mistaken about how it got its name. The Sailor’s Rest, as the combination saloon and rooming house had originally been christened, had been rebaptized shortly before the Commodore’s death, and without his consent, when the leader of a press gang who was variously known as Shanghai Mike, Mike the Crimp, and St. Michael the Persuader (after the effective methods by which he recruited reluctant hands for sea duty) smashed a bottle of green rum over the skull of an opponent in a game of Rouge et Noir and proclaimed that he had thus “launched” a new vessel he called the Slop Chest. No one dared oppose his fancy until his corpse was found in a Chinatown alley with its face caved in, ostensibly by a tong hatchet-man, but by then a couple of generations of patrons had come to know the establishment by no other name. It stuck, although in respect to her deceased husband Nan had stubbornly refused to take down the much-defaced sign the Commodore had commissioned. After the first structure was burned to the ground for nonpayment of the penny tax and replaced by the current building, there was no need to hang any sign at all, since the patrons themselves had contributed most of the construction work in return for free grog.

  I noticed she still referred to the place as The Rest, and never without lifting her glass to the Commodore’s bilious likeness. He had taken her off the line at a place called the House of Blazes to make her his wife, and whatever the old man may have wanted in the way of romantic attraction, he had made a lady of her (“swell mollisher” was the phrase she used), and she observed the ceremony of buying a round for the house every year on the anniversary of his birth. The fact that he’d been a solemn teetotaler all his life failed to strike her as ironic. Nan was a woman of contrasts, as well as handy with the portable Gatling she carried in her reticule. She got up once and turned back a corner of the threadbare Oriental rug to show the stain where she’d shot an old acquaintance who’d failed to grasp the significance of her retirement from the horizontal trade.

  “Kill him?” I asked.

  “He took his own sweet time, but infection done for him in the end.”

  “Where was Hodge?”

  “Tobing lushies in Brisbane would be my guess. Axel wandered in here a year ago Independence Day, dragging that slag and thimble off his flapper, cute as cows and kisses. You wanted to palm him like a pennyweight. The Commodore was gone to Grim ten years and then some, rest him. Axel ain’t a patch on his articles, but an old ewe like me can’t be too particular. Any old dwarf in a storm, I say.

  “That scrub I put to bed with a shovel was a square citizen,” she went on, refilling her dainty glass from the decanter. Some of the contents slopped over, seasoning further the blot on the floorboards at her feet. “I’d of scragged for it sure as blunt if Cap’n Dan himself didn’t stand in with me at the inquest. That hedged the sink he played me on the other, where I’m concerned.”

  I actually understood most of that. It was like border Spanish; it made sense if you didn’t think too hard or try to speak it yourself. I couldn’t tell where Beecher stood. He was enjoying his cigar.

  “Why do you think Wheelock spoke up for you?” I asked.

  “Who knows what goes through a nob’s knolly? I put on this neckweed every day so as not to disremember how near I come to mounting the ladder.” She touched the ribbon at her throat. “I don’t mind saying it takes the sting out when the ponce comes for his copper.”

  “Does he ever come around?”

  “The ponce? First and fifteenth, regular as a yack.”

  “Wheelock.”

  “What for? The knock-me-down at the Bella Union don’t burn holes in the glass and he don’t have to break Tommy with sea-crabs. Which don’t make him no jack cove in my thinking. God rest him, I never seen what the Commodore did in them fish.” She toasted the portrait and drank.

  “Do your customers know what you think of them?”

  “I ain’t said p
harse in here what I’d say out front. They think it’s top-ropes after eight months on pannam and bad swig. Ask the first duffer you see if Nan don’t amuse.”

  I followed only part of that. I wondered if she made it up as she went along.

  “Most politicians make it a point to get out and shake hands with the hoi polloi,” I said. “What makes Wheelock so shy?”

  “Most politicians ain’t blessed with Hoodlums. Come ballot day they’ll mark your X for you. You don’t even need to ask.” She gave the phonograph a thoughtful crank. “If guessing was my game, I’d say it’s on account of his bully crab, what the squares call a club foot. He don’t flash it about.”

  I asked if an appointment could be arranged.

  She laughed. She was back in bed with her brandy. Two-score years later and I can’t hear “Beautiful Dreamer” without picturing every grubby detail of that room.

  “Stifle a Hoodlum,” she said. “They’ve a place in his panter, and he might be peery enough to want to cut his eyes on you before he sends his tobbies to ease you over.”

  Beecher looked at me through the smoke of his cigar. “I forgot what’s stifle.”

  “Put him to bed with a shovel,” I said.

  Nan laughed again. “You’re a fly one, that you are. I’ll wear weeds when you take scold’s-cure. See if I don’t.”

  11

  For the next three days I did what Judge Blackthorne would consider nothing, or as close to it as one could come in a lively place like the Barbary Coast.

  Both our berths were as uncomfortable as they appeared; after our first night, Beecher and I traded places just to make sure. The ticks were as bad as advertised, although after our inaugural experience with them my companion burned two packs of ready-made cigarettes exterminating the ones he could find hiding in the seams by daylight. Smacking the survivors and scratching their bites gave us the benefit of taking our minds off the slats gouging holes in our hides. It all gave me a more friendly opinion of Shanghai Mike and his decision to rechristen the place: This was no Sailor’s Rest.