The Best Bad Things

by Katrina Carrasco

  “You’re bloody old,” Driscoll says, but not without jealousy. It was a classic match. Every sporting man knows the statistics, the big punches, how the fight was busted up halfway through by cops so the final rounds had to be moved to another farmer’s field.

  Alma finishes her beef pie, crinkles up the wrapper. She tilts her head back against the wall, listening to Driscoll and Conaway banter with half an ear, letting her eyes slide shut. She is warm and full. She wants something sweet to chase the buttery crusts. Sugared pineapple. Nell’s caramels.

  “Here’s Mr. Wheeler,” Driscoll whispers at her side, and she blinks, snapping awake, unaware she had been dozing.

  “It’s a fine fucking morning,” Wheeler says at the dogleg, slapping snow off his hat.

  Alma rubs the heel of her hand into her eyes, squinting up at him. When he catches sight of her, sprawled drowsy on the carpet and spackled with pie crumbs, his smile doesn’t wrinkle. He nods at the three of them before walking back down the hall to his office. She looks at Driscoll and Conaway, both of them slack-jawed, then scrambles to her feet, brushing off her jacket.

  Here’s a sound she’s never heard coming from Wheeler’s offices: whistling. It’s a song she knows from her days in Glasgow. “Brochan Lom,” a lilting, cheerful tune.

  “Where’s the party?” she asks, leaning against the jamb.

  “At A. J. Hamilton’s.” Wheeler is at the armoire, taking off his diamond cuff links. “I dined with him last night. And this morning. As of nine twenty, I, am on, the trust papers.”

  He punctuates this last sentence with sharp little jerks on his sleeve, rolling it up and back to sit just below his elbow. Alma notes the openness of the gesture—today, at least, he is prepared to unpeel a layer or two.

  “So are you rich yet?” she says, amused. Readier to smile with her own promotion on the horizon.

  “I’m already rich.” He starts on the other sleeve. “Now I’m respectable.”

  “Think of us commoners when you’re on the hill,” she says. “Throw down a scrap of bread from time to time.”

  “Maybe on a Sunday. The day of charity.” He slides into his chair. “Though I don’t know if it’s the Lord’s work or the devil’s, keeping you lot alive.”

  “Too good for us already.”

  Shaking her head, Alma comes into the office, closes the door behind her. Wheeler is watching her more carefully now, tracking her progress to the liquor board. She deliberately pours two whiskeys. Carries them to his desk and sets them at the edge, staying out of his space. A reassurance. An echo of the other day minus the aggression. You can relax, it says. You can trust me. Since it’s not his post she’s ascending to, there’s no sense in trying to kick him out of it—and cooperating with him just might get the leak solved sooner. He’s in a good mood, and it will be best to keep him that way. She wants to find out if he’s uncovered anything about the missing tar. Despite Delphine’s orders about working together, he has a habit of keeping things to himself. Not that Alma’s telling him everything.

  “Congratulations,” she says, raising her tumbler.

  “I hear Driscoll’s been busy making you into legend since last night.” He tips his own glass in her direction.

  “I should have shot them,” she says. “If we didn’t need Sloan on the hook, I might have. Showing up to the handoff and pulling that shit.”

  “He’s an amateur. It makes him unpredictable. He could go too far afield, and it will make the product a beast to track.”

  “Where is there to unload it locally?”

  “Ah Tong knows to not buy anything from him.” Wheeler sips his whiskey, sets it aside to flip through some papers. He pauses, works out a square handbill. “This is a new spot, opened a few months ago. Run by a merchant called Sing Tai. Otherwise there are a few small dens set behind the laundries, owned by Chinamen. And a scabrous little hovel on the south end of town.”

  The bill is hand-lettered in English, with a lotus flower unfurling at the top. Tea. Silk. Opium. Fine Imports. Along the bottom, tiny and intricate, a row of characters.

  “Let me guess: you can read it, too,” Wheeler says, nodding at the handbill.

  Alma grins, tucks the paper into her vest pocket. She never learned to read the calligraphy, but Wheeler doesn’t need to know that. He is bent over another sheet, marking long lines, writing beside them. She finishes her whiskey as he works.

  “For your rounds.” He slides the paper over the desk. It’s a sketched map of town, with each location marked in clear script.

  “The boys are all talking about the fight tomorrow.” She sets her glass on the desk, leans back in her chair. “You ought to have them draw straws to see who’s on duty; otherwise they might mutiny.”

  If he registers her suggestion of insubordination as she means him to—a reminder of the leak—he doesn’t show it.

  “Fulton’s volunteered,” he says. “He tells me he’s too old for all that.”

  “And at Quincy?”

  “Benson.”

  Wheeler’s leather chair creaks as he reaches over the desk for his ashtray. Clips the end off a cigar. Alma works at a thread of beef caught in her back molars. Match flare, then bitter smoke, vanilla richness, drift over her.

  “Who’s your money on?” she says when he doesn’t give her anything else about his two bickering crew leads.

  “I haven’t thrown in.”

  “You don’t like the sport?”

  It doesn’t seem possible, not for a man who moves like a fighter. Who’s formed like a fighter. Is he that much of a track-and-tally bookkeeper that he won’t bet? And on a fight like this, that’s been brewing for years.

  “I don’t like this Queensberry nonsense,” he says. “Back in my day it wasn’t over till your man didn’t get up.”

  “I knew it,” Alma says, warm with a rush of satisfaction and fellow feeling—she called him right at the start, ten days ago, when she first shadowed him in town. “I knew you were a pug, from the first time I saw you, leaving that theater.”

  Forget the leak for a minute. She wants to know which matches he’s seen. How he fared in the ring. At his size, fifteen years before and a bit trimmer, he’d make a damn good middleweight.

  “What was your punch?” she says. “Your favorite to throw?”

  “Are you a boxing fan?” he says, with a peculiar grimace that seems halfway between a grin and a sneer, as if it could teeter into either in a second. “You do seem the sort who’d sneak into matches. Drinking and shouting with the fancy, for whatever thrill that seems to give you.”

  “Oh, I drank, and I shouted.” Alma sits up straighter in her chair, squaring off her shoulders, taking up more space. “But I wasn’t just betting. I saw those ropes from the inside out.”

  “You’re lying.” Wheeler loosens his tie. “They don’t let women fight, not in any civilized places—that’s a relic of the forties.”

  “I fought as Camp. Made up the name for my first match.”

  “Impossible.”

  “Not at the dives I went to,” she says. “They wouldn’t turn away a featherweight in a flannel shirt as long as he paid the fee.”

  Something about his tie, half-knotted; something about the way they are easily, naturally talking about her as Camp and Alma, at the same time, not as an oddity but simply a body, a fighting body; something about the set of Wheeler’s face, that tight satisfaction from earlier edging into a different kind of keenness. Unsettled air between them. Fire in his eyes as he draws on his cigar. She imagines herself as he must be imagining her, dressed as Camp and in the ring: sweat on her breasts beneath the dirty undershirt; a good punch connecting, so that her nerves sing and her nipples tighten.

  “Always brought a second who knew my ways,” she says.

  Alma leans forward in her chair, sits splay-kneed. Rests her elbows on her thighs. She drops her eyes to a callus on her palm, peeling back the whitened skin, then glances up at Wheeler to see how he’s taking her story, her
posture. He is still amused, but now his gaze is jerky; a minute, constant refocus from her open legs to her face.

  She is pleased by his reaction. Pleased she can still keep him off-balance. Though power has nearly equalized between them, they are still fighting that unspoken, darkly currented fight between her hunger and his, between her jabs and whatever is holding him back from coming at her with his fists, with his mouth. He is deliberate, she’s learned that. Apt to sit there and ruminate for a frustrating length of time.

  “Usually walked out on my own,” she says. “With some money in my pocket.”

  Now Wheeler laughs openly, a deep rumble.

  “Go on, tell me another.” He is in control of his voice, if not his wandering eyes.

  “I could hand you your bollocks,” she says, tumbling into his brogue, into the street-boy banter she learned to mimic in Glasgow. “You’d be supping on sowans for days till your jaw got back on right.”

  His face twitching between amusement and sharpness and something she can’t read, a softer emotion that hovers around his eyes. It’s not the wistfulness he displayed while getting to know her as Alma Macrae, but close to it. She watches him, waiting to see what he’ll do, which mood will prevail, but then Conaway is knocking at the door, calling out there’s a parcel for Mr. Wheeler.

  The thread between them snaps. Wheeler lets out a mouthful of smoke. Alma opens the door. Conaway is waiting outside, a brown package the size of a bread box in his hands.

  “Expecting something?” she asks Wheeler.

  “In fact, I am.”

  She takes the box from Conaway. On the side that was pressed to his body is a neat row of canceled stamps. The box came Special Delivery. From Missoula, Montana Territory.

  “Didn’t know you had friends in cow country,” she says, setting the box on Wheeler’s desk.

  “I do now,” he says.

  “After the dens—do you need me tonight?”

  She is close enough that the lip of the desk pushes into her thighs. The phrasing, the set of her hips, are intentional. If they are easing back into their game, she will play it.

  “No,” he says, cigar at his mouth.

  The muscles in his exposed forearm twitch. He is tensing his hand. Walking a fine edge, as she is.

  “I have a meeting with the trustees.” He taps ash into the glass tray. “Until late.”

  “And you’re still keeping mum on the sixty-pound problem.”

  “Are you going to report me?”

  “Not if you keep me informed,” she says. “We’re supposed to be working together.”

  “So I’ve been told,” Wheeler says, with a half twitch of a grin. “Tom spoke to Lyle. He gave an exact account of the ride-along and handoff. There was a weather delay in Seattle, but Lyle claims it was otherwise an uneventful trip.”

  “Have you had problems with Lyle before?”

  “I don’t mingle with the second-tier crews. Tom finds him a solid man, generally. And he was not the ride-along when the other thefts happened.”

  “All right,” she says. “See you in the morning. You know where to look for me if something comes up.”

  Out into the hall, past Driscoll on his own and shadowboxing. He goes red in the ears when she whistles, claps him on the shoulder, says, “You’ll be the next Mac with that uppercut, kid.” Out into the street, ground uncertain with ice. Wind on her bruises, on the bared slice of skin at her throat. Wheeler’s map in her pocket, but she can go anywhere. Butter pie crusts, sugar chasers, rise out of the always-waiting appetites that keep her prowling. She turns southwest on Water Street toward Nell’s shop. Nell is not as useful a liaison as Alma had hoped, but she has other charms. Alma stops to buy a stalk of tuberose tied with silk ribbon, then a paper bag of caramels. Snow drifts over her jaw as she walks, the paper bag crackling, the pink-tipped buds breathing honeyed musk. Cart wheels crunch through frozen mud. Boys crouch in alleyways, sharing cigarettes and shivering.

  “Jack be nimble,” Delphine had said, when she first found Nell. A scene so near to how she first found Alma, seven years ago. Still reeling from Yuma, its body count on her bill. Not finding much in the detective line with her Pinkerton’s agent’s badge vanished. San Francisco all grit and edges, her rooms shrinking to a borrowed closet, shrinking to a stolen cot as money ran low and her dresses coarsened. Then meeting John Devine, who ran with a fencing crew, where everyone was slippery, playing three angles at once. A chance to visit the Nob Hill house where the queen of thieves was rumored to hold court. At the house trying to sell a paste necklace to a beautiful woman whose red lips were painted to match her red dress, and the woman saying in a luscious Southern drawl, “Oh, dear, you must be new at this.”

  That kicked off the wild days, stale bread and water one night, an invitation to a champagne feast the next. Quick-tongued and hungry in Delphine’s bed. Then some betrayal brought the law to Nob Hill, policemen breaking down the gilded door. Delphine was not home. She had disappeared and was rumored to be dead. A long period of shock, Alma’s days blurred with gin. Scraping by. Until, nearly a year later, the note: Go to Zhu Kang’s shop at North Point. There, Zhu handing her a jangling box, telling her where to run it and for how much. “Who’s behind this?” she asked, not wanting to hope but hoping. “Geem nuey lhoo,” he’d said. Then translated, “The golden lady.” Delphine’s nickname, for her warm-brown complexion, and for the filigreed ornaments that sparkled on her ears, her neck, her wrists.

  At Nell’s blue door she knocks. Tuberose pressed soft and fragrant against her bound chest. No footsteps; no movement in the narrow, curtained window. Alma tries once more. Unwraps a caramel to leaven her disappointment. Browned butter in her teeth as she loops the flowers’ ribbon over the doorknob. The caramels she pockets for herself, then digs out Wheeler’s map.

  The closest den, from his reckoning, is the flophouse at the south end of town. Not far from the lodgings where Max Beckett breathed his last. Alma picks her way along the same ruined road, the same pebbly stretch of beach, all of it as bleak in the gray daylight as it was under the moon. A neat X on the paper indicates a low-roofed scrap-board shanty. Even upwind Alma can smell it from fifteen feet away: coal-fire char, cloying smoke, unwashed bodies laid out for hours to sweat and moan.

  Inside, threadbare blankets line the floor; six of them, arranged side by side. Two white men, in denim jackets and peeling leather boots, occupy the spots along the far wall. Their faces and hands pallid. Despite the noisy brazier the room is freezing. Another white man, sinewy, face cragged, stands from beside the brazier and points her to a mat. Alma is used to the city dens, operated and mostly frequented by Chinese. Standing in this cold shack feels like a memory corrupted, as if she were hearing a familiar song in which the lyrics have changed.

  “How much?” she says, not sitting down.

  “A dollar a pipe.”

  “That’s cheap. What kind is it?”

  He scratches his ear. Scuffles about on a low shelf and hands her an open can, the paper label splotched with reuse, the dark lump inside smelling of cane sugar. Cut with molasses. The markings on the can are not from any refinery she knows, and in any case its contents are several substances removed from the original.

  “You don’t have anything else?”

  “What’s wrong with that?” The man has blackened gums, a toothless slur. “Lights up just fine.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Sloan’s not been here. Not yet. Though it’s doubtful this den’s man would pay nine dollars a can even if Sloan did come selling. The thirdhand trash she’s holding probably costs half that, with the recycled can and the cutting.

  She hands him the tar. Shoulders back out into the snowy wind. The flakes are thickening as the day goes on, from the morning’s icy dust to a fat whiteness. She opens her mouth as she walks back up the beach, breathing deep the clean cold air, catching clots of ice to melt on her tongue.

  The shop that produced the handbill is at the opposite end of to
wn. Tucked into a row of Chinese laundries, the sandstone cliff rising behind. Sing Tai’s is done up in the style of Ah Tong’s shop, though it is only half its size. The same red banners ripple in the wind, framing a window stocked with plucked-bare ducks and jarred spices. Inside, smells of chili paste and dried shrimp. Sing is doing brisk business—groups of men converse as they sort through piled silk shirts, share newspapers. The shop’s opium is stacked by the front window. A dozen half-pound cans of Wah Hing anchor the display. Sloan’s made his first sale.

  “You carry Wah Hing,” she says, taking a can up to the counter.

  “Ah,” the shopkeep says. “A discerning gentleman.”

  “How much?”

  “Eleven dollars.”

  “That’s a Portland price,” she says.

  “If you know the brand, you know it is worth the cost.”

  “Are you Sing Tai?”

  He bows, and she sets the can on the wood before him.

  “Where’d you buy that?” she says, nodding at the tar. Double-checking her proof for Wheeler. It’s beautiful when a plan works out, and even more so when she gets to report that success.

  “I have trusted suppliers, sir,” he says.

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  Sing’s pleasant smile goes brittle at the edges. He lays both hands on the counter. The conversation around them quieting. They are the same height, and he meets Alma’s eyes directly, coolly. He’s not getting nervous as quick as she wants.

  “You’ve been open a few months,” she says. “So I can understand if you’re still learning the ropes around here. But I’ll tell you that a smuggling Chinaman doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of avoiding the law. I’ll have you shut down and cleaned out if you don’t cooperate. Where’d you buy that.”

  Now the store is silent, save for the crinkling of a newspaper being closed.

  “I purchased ten pounds at auction,” he says, still standing tall. “In Seattle.”

  The swell of Alma’s satisfaction is punctured, withers.

  “For how much?” She’s hoping to catch him in a lie if Sloan was here, after all, and left instruction to keep his presence quiet.