Port Hazard

by Loren D. Estleman

  The morning after that first night, while Beecher was using the community washbasin behind the building, I found a place down the street that served biscuits and gravy that would have passed muster anywhere I’d been, a pleasant surprise, and a cup of coffee that was not. I paid too much for the meal and went back to the saloon, where I sat down to a fast, losing game of blackjack with the resident gambler. When he excused himself to use the outhouse, Beecher sat down in his chair.

  He was irritable, and with good reason. In his world, Pullman porter was as high as a man could climb, and the Slop Chest could only remind him how short the fall was to stony bottom. Then again he might have been just tired and hungry. I told him about the place where I’d eaten breakfast, but he appeared to be just waiting for me to stop talking so he could start.

  “What we doing today?” he asked.

  “We’re doing it.”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “Same thing.”

  He scratched at a bite on his wrist. He looked as haggard as I felt. “Ask you something?”

  “Why stop now?”

  “How long you been on this job?”

  “About eight years.”

  He examined the bite, a tiny, white-rimmed volcano erupting from dark skin. “Ask you something else?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “How you know when it’s done?”

  I didn’t answer. He didn’t have to know what I was waiting for until it was here. His cavalry experience would not have prepared him for it or its necessity. I trusted him with my life, but not the truth; not yet.

  The fog, at least, was less persistent than the vermin. It was always there in the morning, although not as thick and choking as it had been on the afternoon of our arrival, but it burned off by midday. However, the presence of the sun did little to brighten Davis Street and its tributaries. The ramshackle saloons, bagnios, and rooming houses didn’t cast shadows so much as drain the sunlight of its energy, and the streets were puddled with slops tossed out through their open doors and upstairs windows the night before. The flies that overhung them in dense clouds barely stirred to make room for the hooves and wheels that churned through the offal, buzzing impatiently until they passed.

  Deprived of forgiving gaslight, the harlots who prowled the boardwalks—where there were boardwalks—demonstrated only too clearly that they found it convenient to paint one face on top of another without removing the previous application, often to a depth of as much as a quarter-inch. The pimps, gamblers, and cutpurses were hardly an improvement. Smallpox, knives, and coshes had left their marks on man and woman alike. On my first stroll around the block, I passed a half-dozen pedestrians, all of whom didn’t total a complete specimen of human being among them. A good man with modeling wax, glass eyes, and timber legs could have made his retirement in six months in that neighborhood, if someone didn’t bash him over the head and turn out his pockets at the end of the first day.

  The maze of sagging, paint-peeling buildings created an impression of incredible age, yet the oldest of them was barely thirty, and most were much newer, their predecessors having burned to the ground in the five great fires that had shorn through the city in the space of eighteen months. Carelessness and arson had failed to eradicate the kind of physical and spiritual corruption that in most cases was centuries in the making. The boomtown years had encouraged construction to the point where two vehicles could not pass in some blocks without risking locked hubs and the inevitable altercation that ensued. The tight quarters bred confrontation and vice, which in turn bred more confrontation, and there seemed not a square yard of earth that hadn’t been baptized in the blood of generations of innocents; which in the local dog-Latin was defined as corpses, mortals removed to a plane beyond guilt. Years later, visiting the East End of London, I was struck by that same perception of ancient evil, but there the process had been going on for four hundred years. By the late summer of 1883, I’d spent a year of wary days in cowtowns, miners’ camps, and end-of-track helldorados, nearly lost my brains to a stray bullet while taking an honest bath on the other side of a wall belonging to an assayer’s office when a client caught him with his thumb on the scale, but had never seen a place to compare with shanty San Francisco for unvarnished wickedry. The place wallowed in it.

  I was encouraged by the law of percentages to believe there were decent people living within hailing distance of the Slop Chest: locksmiths and laundresses, bookkeepers and barbers, wet nurses and wheelwrights, glaziers and governesses; the usual mix of honest laborers struggling to pay the greengrocer from week to week. The difference here was they kept their trades behind closed doors like embezzlers, locked themselves in with their families at night, and scurried by first light and last dusk between hearth and forge, slinging frightened glances over their shoulders as if they were transporting stolen goods. Day was night in Barbary. Killers and pickpockets ran free while the law-abiding paced their cells.

  Different day, same conversation:

  “What we doing today?”

  “We’re doing it.”

  “What about tomorrow?”

  “Same thing.”

  Inside Nan Feeny’s place of business, the faces of the clientele kept changing. One set of sailors stopped in for a beer or twelve, gambled, fought, were thrown out by Axel Hodge or staggered off to their rooms, shipped out on the morning tide, and were replaced by another set. Mates, boatswains, swabs, cookies, ships’ carpenters, and the odd captain—the aristocrat of that society, distinguished from the others by his tobacco pipe of unblemished clay and no missing buttons—tramped in and out. By the third morning, Beecher and I were the senior residents. The only constants were Nan, Billy the bartender, Hodge, the proliferating damage to the bar’s marble top, and the tinhorn in the soiled topper and shabby cutaway, who slept under some other roof after he’d skinned his last sea-crab of the evening.

  He called himself Pinholster. I didn’t ask, and he didn’t volunteer, whether he was born with the name or if any other went with it. Frontier etiquette had taught me better than to pursue the point. When he got tired of fleecing me, he confided that he’d served aboard the U.S.S. Minnesota during the late unpleasantness, which was the reason he gave for keeping his game at the Slop Chest when he could have tripled his fortunes at any of the better places on Pacific Street or Kearney. He said he had an affection for sailors—“a place in his panter,” as Nan would have put it—and in any case an old widower such as he didn’t need much to keep himself, just a dram and a plate of hot food and a soft place to stretch out while his nervous stomach processed it.

  I figured he wasn’t quite forty, but there were streaks of gray in his chestnut beard and his face had the tobacco-cured look of a lifetime spent shut up in saloons and fandango parlors. The beard needed trimming, his hat a good brushing, and there was no way left to turn his collar or cuffs that hadn’t been tried, but as to the things that applied directly to his vocation—his hands—they were smooth and white and the nails pared and buffed. He could cut a deck one-handed without showing off, and so far as I could tell he dealt from the top and never palmed a pasteboard. However, he might just have been minding his manners when playing with me. Rumors infested Nan Feeny’s little enterprise like ticks and I wouldn’t have bet a dollar to a dead dog there was a beggar or a spiv between there and the harbor who didn’t know two deputy U.S. marshals were in residence.

  “Here’s a show,” Pinholster said without looking up from the deck he was shuffling.

  I thought he was getting ready to demonstrate a card trick, but just then a hand touched my shoulder. I reached for a revolver that wasn’t on my hip. I hadn’t heard so much as a footfall.

  “Chinee papah, mistuh man?”

  A young Chinese stood next to the table. In his pillbox hat, black smock, and shapeless trousers he was scarcely larger than Hodge, but his limbs were all in proportion and the square lines of his jaw said he was no boy. He wore the queue of his class and held out a fold
ed newspaper covered with Chinese characters. I was about to tell him I didn’t read the language when a loud report and a rattle of shattered marble told me the bar had lost a little more of its value.

  “’Ey!” Hodge’s accent was up on its haunches. “Wun Long Dong! Speel to your crib, chop-chop!”

  “Stubble your red rag, Jack Sprat!” snarled the Chinese.

  Hodge hopped down from his ladder and came around the end of the bar, twirling the iron ball over his head on the end of its chain. The intruder padded out.

  “Two, three times a month that same celestial comes in here peddling his papers,” Pinholster said. “Sometimes he makes a sale or two before Billy or Hodge hares him out.”

  “I didn’t know Nan served Chinese customers.”

  “She doesn’t. The Hoodlums wouldn’t stand for it. You may not think there are rules of behavior in Barbary, but you’re mistaken. Chinatown for Chinamen, the waterfront for the Sydney Ducks, and so forth. Just because you can’t see the lines doesn’t mean you won’t bleed if you cross one.”

  “If that’s true, who buys his papers?”

  “It isn’t the papers. It’s what’s inside.” He cut out the ace of spades and held it up. “Black dreams.”

  “Opium? The Commodore built this place selling dope to the Chinese.”

  He flicked a crumb off his moustache that had been there all morning.

  “You might have noticed Nan’s her own creature. In any event, that was all before Captain Dan. He settled the last tong war by negotiating a licensing agreement between Chinatown and the Hoodlums. The jack dandies don’t peddle dope and the celestials stow their wids outside Chinatown. That means—”

  “Don’t raise hell.”

  “You learn fast,” he said. “You ought to apply that brain-box to cards. Part of not raising hell is keeping their hop inside their own jurisdiction. This fellow that Hodge just prodded out’s a spunk looking for black powder, and he’ll find it if the tongs catch wind. Wheelock doesn’t maintain the peace because the sneak-thieves and swablers are afraid of him or his Hoodlums. They’re afraid of each other, and they all turn to him because he’s one of them.”

  “One of who?”

  “Whoever he’s with at the time.”

  I said. “No wonder the police can’t enforce order. They aren’t politicians.”

  “He’s got the gabs, all right, but they’re no good without teeth. If he thinks Nan’s violating the agreement, she’ll think that fire she had was love’s own sweet song.”

  “The Hoodlums.”

  “They’re what answers for a police force in Barbary.” He dealt himself a hand of poker: four bullets and the king of clubs.

  “Where does Wheelock stand with the Sons of the Confederacy?”

  He lifted his brows. That was one piece of intelligence that hadn’t filtered through the walls of Nan Feeny’s room.

  “About where he stands with the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks, which is not at all. The baby rebels aren’t a force here. If they’re what brought you all this way you wasted the price of a train ticket.”

  “That’s what Nan said. My information is this is their headquarters.”

  “Not knowing who gave it to you, I wouldn’t call him a liar. The Salvation Army’s on every street corner, but I’ve been here a spell and I’ve yet to see a soul saved. If numbers counted, we’d have a Chinaman for mayor.”

  I asked to see the deck. He made a face of mild disappointment and said it wasn’t marked, but he slid it my way across the baize. I picked it up, shuffled, and dealt a heart flush.

  Pinholster smiled for the first time. “You didn’t learn that chasing mail robbers in the territories.”

  “I owned a faro concession and part of a saloon in New Mexico for a little while. You can get good at anything if you do it often enough. Quicker still if you don’t like starving.”

  “You’ve been losing for a reason,” he said. “I think I can guess what it is.”

  I scooped up the cards, cut the deck one-handed, and slid it back toward him. “It won’t take long. You’ve already told me everything I needed to know except one thing.”

  I was drinking a beer at the bar when Beecher came in from the street and checked his revolver with Billy; in the Slop Chest, the municipal ban on firearms only went as far as the door. Beecher was unsteady on his feet and his eyes were hot. He’d found another place that served beer to Negroes.

  “What we doing today?” he said.

  I waited until Billy moved down the bar to fill a sailor’s glass.

  “What’s the date?”

  That gave Beecher pause. “Fourteenth.”

  “Fifteenth. We got here on the twelfth and we’ve been here three days.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The difference is today’s the day Wheelock’s tax collector comes to call.”

  “‘Squint-eyed ponce what smells of lilacs.’” His impression of Nan’s brogue was faulty.

  “I got a more complete description from the tinhorn. Also a time and place. That corner table’s as good as a window on Barbary.”

  “What’d it cost?”

  “Only my reputation as a cardplayer.”

  He steadied himself on the bar. He was on the verge of asking a question he didn’t want to know the answer to. Then he changed directions. “Just what is a ponce?”

  “We’ll ask him when we see him.”

  12

  We smelled the Hoodlum before we saw him.

  This was no small miracle, given the variety of stenches that had laid claim to the venue. The alley between the Slop Chest and the warehouse next door—home to an illegal and unadvertised game of Chuck-a-Luck that Pinholster swore had been going on without interruption, through fire and famine and fanatic reform, since 1851—was so narrow a man could put out his hands and touch both opposing walls at the same time. Beecher and I resisted the temptation. Mold and green slime coated the warehouse brick and a wriggling heap of rats covered whatever had been flung out the side door of Nan Feeny’s establishment.

  Somewhere in the direction of the respectable part of the city a tower clock gonged out the hour of eleven. The last chime reverberated on the damp air like a coin wobbling to rest on a plank bar. The spill from a corner gas lamp illuminated the far end of the alley, but fell short of the bricked-in doorway where we waited, a rectangular recess six inches deep in the warehouse wall. The shadows were as thick as poured tar and a light ground fog—light for San Francisco—tickled our ankles. We took turns breathing in the close atmosphere of that medieval corridor.

  The lilac smell when it came was unexpected, and oddly more repugnant than the stink of slops and garbage; it didn’t belong, and like a drop of honey on the tongue when lemon was expected, it struck me as unpleasant, nauseating. It was followed by a low, inaccurate whistling, some tinpenny tune that had swept across the frontier faster than the transcontinental, and had already been forgotten in Montana, and then an amphora-shaped shadow, slung across the Slop Chest wall by the distant gas lamp. The shadow grew smaller and more distinct as its owner came around the corner of the warehouse. Something kicked a loose stone rattling across the hardpack and a wrenlike figure followed it into the alley.

  There the foul odors met him and he paused to draw something from his right sleeve and press it to the lower part of his face. A fresh puff of lilacs reached us. Beecher stirred, blew air out his nose. I touched his arm and he grew silent. We watched the newcomer return his scented handkerchief to his sleeve and continue walking. He wasn’t whistling now. We could hear him breathing through his mouth.

  He was my height, but lighter by at least forty pounds, buttoned snugly into a black frock coat with the kind of peaked sleeves that thrust up above the shoulders where they’re stitched to the yoke and make the wearer appear as if he’s hunching himself against a stiff wind. The lower three buttons were unfastened to expose a velvet vest that looked ruby red even by outdoor gaslight, and he wore calfski
n boots to the knees of his pale trousers and a narrow-brimmed black hat with a low flat crown. The clothes differed in some details from those worn by the Hoodlum who’d accosted us on the train platform, but the effect was identical. They were the regimentals of a strict society. I knew then that the whispers about Wheelock were true; only a man of singular influence and determination could compel a ragtag gang of hugger-muggers and slash-throats to leave their roomy pickpockets’ overcoats and anonymous black watchcaps at home and parade the streets in uniform. It went against centuries of conditioning, of lying low and playing things close to the vest. “You can’t arrest/revile/annoy me,” the clothes said. “I’m a Hoodlum!”

  He stopped before the side door of the Slop Chest and rapped out a jaunty knock; part of the tune he’d been whistling. The door sprang inward and Nan Feeny’s white head showed against the light from inside. She wore voluminous skirts, and a white shirtwaist buttoned to her throat, surmounted by the vigilant ribbon.

  “’allo, Nan,” said the Hoodlum. “Where’s that skycer what shares your crib? Go to blow his conk and bash in his neb?”

  His cockney was even broader than Hodge’s. It had come straight from London and lost nothing during the voyage.

  “He’s tending bar tonight. Billy’s got Venus’ Curse.” She thrust out a sack. Coins shifted inside.

  The Hoodlum didn’t take it. “Don’t lope just yet. Let’s inside and break a leg.” He laid a hand on her hip.

  Nan raised the pepperbox pistol from her pocket.

  He withdrew his hand. “I ain’t so spooney as you think. You wasn’t always no iron doublet.”

  “Who says I am? You’re Molly’s goods. Take your pony and scour back to Queen Street.”

  He snatched the sack from her, hefted it. “The game’s flush this trip. You ain’t been flying hop, by any chance? Cap’n Dan wouldn’t like that by half.”

  “I don’t even let celestials in the place. It’s been a rum week, is all. I’ve got aces over sevens.”

  “Full house is the word. You got tappers in your crib. Two U.S. coves. Been squeaking?”