Port Hazard

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Go hoist a huff, you kept jack.” She stepped back and banged the door shut.

  “Old cow.” The Hoodlum bounced the sack of coins a couple of times on his palm, then slipped it into a side pocket and turned away, whistling.

  Beecher’s clothing rustled. I touched his arm again, settling him. When the Hoodlum was halfway up the alley, I drew the Deane-Adams and stepped out of the doorway. Beecher slid the Le Mat out from under his shirt and joined me.

  We were within ten feet of the Hoodlum when he stopped and reached across his body. We thumbed back our hammers. The crisp double-click racketed off the walls.

  The Hoodlum turned, holding his scented handkerchief. When he saw us, he dropped it and reached for a pocket. I fired a round over his head. Both hands shot upward, palms empty.

  There was an awkward pause. I’d never robbed anyone before; I wasn’t sure about the order of events. During this space, no windows or doors opened, no one came running to investigate the report. A night in Barbary without at least one unexplained gunshot would have been worth half a column in the San Francisco Call.

  The Hoodlum’s face was narrow and pinched, old pox scars visible in the gaslight reflected off the Slop Chest’s salt-stained wall. Small clumps of stubble sprouted like Indian paintbrush between the craters. He blinked incessantly—not, I was sure, from fear. Nan had called him squint-eyed.

  “You blokes can’t stick me up,” he said. “I’m—”

  I said. “I know what you are. Molly’s goods.”

  His face went dead. It was a young face. A woman with narrow options might have considered it handsome, despite the scars and his predisposition against razors. I was pretty sure I knew what a ponce was now. Someone had bought him his red vest and it wasn’t Daniel Webster Wheelock.

  “Throw the sack at my feet,” I said.

  He blinked more rapidly. “Cap’n Dan—”

  I snapped a slug into the dirt between his feet. He jumped straight up and down like a startled rabbit. Looked down at his boots to count his toes.

  “The sack.”

  He lowered his hands. One went into his pocket. I made a motion with the five-shot.

  “If anything comes out of there besides a sack of coins, you can ask Axel Hodge who fitted him with his ball and chain.”

  He drew the sack out slowly and gave it an underhand flip. It clanked when it hit the earth.

  “Empty all your pockets.”

  Again he hesitated.

  “Pepper his legs with buckshot.”

  Beecher lowered his aim a notch.

  “No!” The Hoodlum turned out all his pockets and threw the contents after the sack: a squat-barreled pistol, brass knuckles, a weighted sock, three clasp knives in assorted sizes.

  I asked him if he was expecting trouble.

  “Just looking after me regulars. Times are dusty.”

  “Stay away from the waterfront,” I said. “If you fall in they’ll need a crane to pull you back out. What’s your chant?”

  “My what?”

  “Your name. Your monoger. What do people call you when they’re not mad at you?”

  “Tom Tulip.”

  I took aim at his red vest.

  “It’s me name!”

  “Well, Tom, tell your friends there’s a new tax in Barbary. Penny a head for every Hoodlum who shows his face outside the Bella Union.”

  “You ain’t the tickrum to collect it! When Cap’n Dan gets drift of this, you’ll be whiffling out the hole in the back of your nob!”

  “He’ll want names. Mine’s Murdock. This is Beecher.”

  “And who in Black Spy’s skipper is Murdock and Beecher, if you please?”

  I slipped the deputy’s star out of my pocket and flung it at him. He caught it against his chest in both hands, turned it toward the light.

  “Tell Wheelock to take good care of it,” I said. “I’m responsible for it.”

  “U.S. coves.” He leaned forward and spat on the ground.

  “Bang on, Tom. Tell him to send the swag to the Slop Chest. We’re cribbed up there this week.”

  “He’ll send the whole bleeding Bella Union! The frogs’ll fish your black ointment out of the briny.”

  “Put out this spunk,” I told Beecher.

  He tilted the Le Mat a few degrees and emptied the shotgun barrel over Tom Tulip’s head. In those tight quarters it sounded like a powder keg blowing its top. The Hoodlum spun on his heel and took flight, coattails fluttering. We heard his pounding feet long after the echo of the blast faded.

  Beecher changed hands to blow on his fingers. He was chuckling. “I believe I missed my right calling. How much you calculate we got?”

  I stepped forward, picked up the sack, and gave it a couple of shakes. “Dollar and a half and change. If we’re going to make a living at this, we’d better hold off till Tom finishes his rounds.”

  “Drop the swag.”

  This was a new voice. I looked up to see Nan Feeny standing in front of the open side door with her pepperbox trained on my chest. I dropped the sack.

  “I offered to topper ’em both in their dosses the first night,” Hodge said.

  “Shut your mummer and let me think.”

  The little man stood swinging his iron ball rhythmically back and forth and watching Nan pace the floor of her room. His eyes beneath the brim of his bowler were as expressionless as a shark’s.

  Beecher and I were the only ones sitting. Tom Tulip’s pocket arsenal occupied the bed, along with my Deane-Adams, Beecher’s Le Mat, and the sack of pennies, which had surely established a record for depth of feeling for so small a sum. Hodge had done the disarming and carrying. We had our legs crossed.

  “The swag and Tom’s trinkets blow back to Cap’n Dan, that’s settled,” she said. “If they don’t he’ll hush us all and burn the place for spite. How’s the thing what’s got me smoky. If we come a-crawling with the skep in hand, he’ll hoist the tariff, and who’s to stubble him? We’re scraping close to shinerags as things stand.”

  Hodge said, “Send it to him in an eternity-box with these two inside. That ought to show him we’re plumb.”

  “I ain’t turned up the toes of so much as a slingtail hen in forty years of grief, and I ain’t about to set precedent. What was that game about? You both gone cranky?” She’d stopped pacing to stand in front of us.

  I said. “I got the idea from no one but you, right here in this room. ‘Stifle a Hoodlum,’ you said; but I’m not that blood-thirsty.”

  “I was just pecking words. I never thought you’d try it on, I’ll smack the bishop’s calfskin I didn’t. Anywise, you’d of done better to twist his nub and give him an earth-bath than buzz him and leave him leg to peach to Cap’n Dan. We’ll be up to our arses in Hoodlums come morning.”

  “Take the air, Nan,” Hodge said. “Sluice your gob down at Haggerty’s. When you come back, it’ll all be rub.” He smacked his widow-maker against his open palm.

  She said nothing. Her face was impossible to read. I wondered if I could get to the weapons on the bed before Hodge caught up to me and swung his ball, and if Beecher had the reflexes to slow him down. Then there was Nan and the eight loaded chambers in her pocket. I was thinking about all this when someone knocked. The sound came from the direction of the side door to the alley.

  Nan looked at Hodge.

  “Could be a fish looking to flop,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Tide’s out.”

  The knocking came again, louder. Someone was kicking the door.

  Nan picked up Tom Tulip’s bulldog pistol and gave it to Hodge. “If it’s more than one, empty it. Then leg it for the front door. I’ll be scarce by then.”

  “What about these two?”

  She took out the pepperbox. He nodded and withdrew.

  Beecher started to say something. Nan eared back the hammer. He fell silent.

  The knocking ceased. A powder-charged silence followed. Voices rumbled. Another silence, longer than the first. No
ne of us was breathing.

  A floorboard yelped outside the room. Nan swung her pistol that way. Hodge came in. He had the bulldog stuck under his belt and an envelope in his hand.

  “Just a cove with a stiff.”

  Nan took the pistol off cock and put it in her pocket. She snatched the envelope. The address side was blank. She frowned at the signet on the crimson seal, cracked the wax, and fumbled with the flap. She frowned again and tipped something out onto her palm. It was a deputy’s star.

  Hodge snorted. “Crikey! The old town’s full to the facer with tin. Who’s minding the store?”

  I said the star was mine. He told me to shut my mummer.

  Nan unfolded a square of paper, read what was written on it, and held it out toward me. I got up from my chair and took it.

  The letter was written in neat copperplate on heavy linen bond with gold edges.

  P. Murdock, Deputy United States Marshal

  The Sailor’s Rest

  Dear Deputy Murdock:

  I am in receipt of your communication.

  Your presence is requested in my quarters at the Bella Union Melodeon tomorrow at 11:00 A.M.

  Until then, I am

  Yours very truly,

  Daniel Webster Wheelock,

  Alderman,

  City of San Francisco

  13

  BELLA UNION MELODEON

  NIGHTLY

  A CONSTANTLY VARIED ENTERTAINMENT

  Replete with FUN and FROLIC

  Abounding in SONG and DANCE

  Unique for GRACE and BEAUTY

  And Perfect in Its Object of Affording

  LAUGHTER FOR MILLIONS!

  A Host of the Best

  DRAMATIC, TERPSICHOREAN AND MUSICAL

  TALENT WILL APPEAR

  Emphatically the

  MELODEON OF THE PEOPLE

  Unapproachable and Beyond Competition.

  The dodger was printed on the kind of paper that could not have associated with The Honorable D. W. Wheelock’s personal stationery. Its coarse fibers were tinted an unappetizing shade of apricot and the edges of the dull black letterpress characters had bled, making them muzzy and hard to read. The character who had thrust it into my hand was of a piece with the stock: short and round, buttoned into a loud checkered vest, a morning coat two sizes too small, and loose trousers belted just under his armpits, with yellow gaiters on his black brogans and a deer-stalker cap. He patrolled the boardwalk in front of the theater, accosting passersby with a nasal bray touting the wonders to be found inside and shoving the sheets into their midsections; forced to defend themselves, they grabbed at their bellies and wound up holding a dodger. No one got past him without one while Beecher and I were watching, and the traffic was heavy.

  The Bella Union was three stories of frame construction—painted, not whitewashed—on the northeast corner of Portsmouth Square at the foot of Telegraph Hill, with shutters on the windows designed to repel invaders and vigilantes. Its name was painted in neat block letters across the false front, and the structure itself appeared as solid as a bank or a county courthouse. Natives referred to it as “The Ancient,” which in a city that burned over every few seasons applied to anything more than ten years old. Neither fire nor scandal nor the cicada-like cycle of Community Cleansing could eradicate it. It kept coming back like a nest of yellow jackets.

  We entered a cavernous saloon, whose gaming tables and long bar were already crowded at late morning, drinking under a glittering canopy of upended flutes, snifters, and cordials and waiting their turns at faro, vingt-et-un, and a seven-foot-tall Wheel of Fortune, the biggest I’d seen outside Virginia City. The place was a dazzle of gaslight and highly polished surfaces, which made a gaudy setting for the dingy sailors’ jerseys, miners’ overalls, and dusty town coats that filled it. The bouncer, whose hair slickum and tailored coat did no more than necessary to disguise the fact he was a pugilist, gave us no expression at all from behind his blisters of scar tissue when we asked where Mr. Wheelock might be found until I gave him my name. Someone had prepared him. He ducked his head and directed us to a stairwell half hidden behind a box containing a mechanical man who told fortunes.

  On the way past the box, Beecher glared at the painted figure inside. It looked like Judge Blackthorne in a turban. “Reckon he’s real?”

  “Cost you a nickel to find out,” I said.

  “I didn’t come here to get robbed.”

  “Try to blend in anyway.”

  The walls of the stairwell had been freshly painted; not a rare thing to find in a combustible city, but scarce enough in slap-bang Barbary. A floral carpet covered the steps, through which we could feel the buzz of brass from the band tuning up in the theater behind the saloon. That was The Ancient’s bread and butter: the little stage where buffoons recited jokes from Captain Billy’s Whiz-Bang and pretty danseuses in tights and short ruffled skirts performed cartwheels to Parisien cabaret tunes penned in New York tenement houses, and the curtained booths where breathy Southern belles with granite eyes inveigled inebriated customers to buy champagne and claret. Where the transaction went from there was strictly between the belles and the customers and the little man in the immaculate black cutaway who collected the take at the end of the evening. You could leave your money at the tables all over town, but when it came to staggering home with your pockets hanging out and an idiotic smile pasted to your face, the Bella Union was the spot—along with the Verandah, the El Dorado, the Empire, the Mazourka, the Arcade, the Fontine House, the Alhambra, and the Rendezvous. There was an unending supply of gulls and of sharpers to pluck them.

  Beecher, climbing the stairs behind me, must have read my thoughts. “You been here before?”

  “Couple of hundred times, from here to St. Louis.”

  “Me, too. Through the back door.”

  The stairwell opened onto a corridor with more floral carpeting, ending in a door marked PRIVATE. My knock was answered immediately by a young beanpole in a morning coat and high starched collar, balding in front. Gold-rimmed spectacles pinched his nose, with a ribbon attaching them to his lapel. A pair of watery blue eyes went from my face to Beecher’s, registered annoyance there, and returned to me. “Yes?”

  “Page Murdock and Edward Anderson Beecher to see Daniel Webster Wheelock.”

  “Nero.”

  I was wondering what response to make to this when a man approached the beanpole from behind. He was two inches taller, which made him six inches taller than I was, and his shoulders stuck out several inches on both sides of the other man. He was blacker than Beecher and better dressed than any of us, in a rose-colored Prince Albert cut to his frame and a ruffled white shirt. His face had the thick bone development of a born fighter, but no scars. That made him either very good or very discouraging to a potential opponent.

  “I am Roland Quinn, Mr. Wheelock’s personal secretary,” the beanpole said. “He made no mention of a Mr. Beecher.”

  “He made no mention of a Mr. Quinn, but here we all are.”

  He touched the nosepiece of his spectacles. “Nero is Mr. Wheelock’s personal bodyguard. He will look after your weapons.”

  “Nero?” Beecher wore his thin smile.

  “My father taught himself to read from Gibbon.” The big man’s voice was a silky rumble.

  I unholstered the Deane-Adams and spun it butt out.

  “Not out here.” Quinn glanced irritatedly past my shoulder, then stepped aside, holding the door. Nero moved the other direction with a gliding maneuver, as if he were mounted on oiled casters.

  We stepped inside and gave him our revolvers. His hickory-colored eyes swept us from head to toe and returned to our hats. We removed them and gave him a look inside the crowns. He nodded, laid our pistols next to some others on the shelf of a massive rack with an oval mirror set in its center, then took our hats and hung them on pegs beside a couple of straw skimmers, several bowlers, and a silk topper. His gliding gait took him from there to a door at the back of the room, wh
ere he turned his back to it and became part of the architecture, hands at his sides with his thumbs parallel with the seams of his trousers.

  Quinn shut the door and tipped a hand toward a row of shield-back chairs facing a Chippendale writing table.

  “Mr. Wheelock is running late this morning. He’ll be available presently.”

  It was a reception room, scattered with chairs and setees and decorated with grim-looking landscapes in heavy gilded frames. Several of the seats were occupied, by as wide a variety of humanity as could be found anywhere outside a train station: gents in morning coats and sidewhiskers, Hoodlums in their trademark motley, a decomposing old salt in his sodden woolens, tying and untying knots in a length of tar-stained hemp with his duffel at his feet, two painted tarts in laddered stockings, and a handsome woman just on the shady side of forty, seated knees together in a modest floor-length dress of costly manufacture with her reticule in her lap and her hair pinned up flawlessly under a becoming hat. What her story might be kept me occupied for much of the long wait.

  A Regulator wall clock knocked out the time between chimes, patiently and in spite of one of the sidewhiskered gents, who kept dragging out his pocket winder and confirming the hour. After twenty minutes, he got up, collected his topper and stick from the rack, and pranced out, blowing out his moustaches and muttering something about how folk from the wrong side of the tracks needed taking down a peg. Quinn, seated at the writing table, went on scribbling with a horsehair pen and never glanced up. One of the tarts waited until the door shut, then said something in a low voice to her companion, who cut loose with a short nasal bray and resumed contemplating the tin ceiling. Two Hoodlums came in to take his place. When, five minutes later, the gent returned, he found all the seats taken, and resigned himself to stand next to the hat rack. No other defections were attempted during the time Beecher and I were there.

  A third Hoodlum, decked out in a long navy coat with gold frogs over tan trousers, came in and shook hands with one of the pair who’d preceded him. This one wore high-peaked shoulders like Tom Tulip, with a dirty white scarf wound around his neck that only brought out the pits in his pasty complexion. I eavesdropped on their conversation, and wrote down what I remembered of it later on the greasy square of paper that came wrapped around the smoked herring I had for supper. I still have the sheet, in case anyone wants to study the exchange and translate it for later generations: