Heyday: A Novel

by Kurt Andersen

  Or perhaps, he thought, he might become a gold millionaire himself. San Francisco seemed to Drumont not like an American city. Its spirit was too loose, and with the sun and blue sea and pretty hills and adobe buildings seemed altogether méditerranéen. Perhaps he would stay.

  He glanced at the receipt the bank clerk had handed him, and noticed the date: the fourteenth of July. He had not carried a calendar out of Salt Lake City. And now he decided this was a fine portent: it was the sixtieth anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, the disorderly beginning of the true revolution, which had been the disorderly but necessary preamble to Napoleon and the empire.

  Once he had determined that Knowles was not a guest at the Parker House, Drumont took a room there, then skulked quickly from hotel to hotel asking quietly if he was in residence. At the fifth place he inquired, catty-corner across the plaza, the young American at the desk was delighted to tell him that, yes indeed, Mr. and Mrs. Knowles were guests of the St. Francis.

  “They are over in Sausalito for the day today,” the fellow said, “but I expect them back late tonight on the last ferry.”

  “It arrives at what hour?”

  “By nine, ordinarily.”

  “And if I wish after to make a gift to them later, from, uh…from a different city, to their room in the hotel, it is the room number…?”

  “Forty-seven, sir, but all you need to write is ‘Knowles, St. Francis, San Francisco,’ and we’ll get it right to them.”

  Drumont returned to his own hotel. He would wait in his room until the end of the day to finish his work. The darkness would make escape easier. And he had always imagined their final encounter occurring at night, like their first.

  He sat on his bed and drank from a bottle of wine as he flipped through Inspector Vidocq’s Mémoires one last time, rereading the great man’s descriptions of lockpicking and of his greatest successes—in particular the apprehension in a Paris street of the confidence man Champaix, whom he had ordered to stop in the name of the law, even though Vidocq was at that late date a private detective.

  At eight o’clock Drumont cleaned his gun and loaded the chambers with new linen cartridges.

  At quarter past eight he examined himself in the mirror as he dressed by the light of the setting sun. When Knowles had first seen him in Paris, Drumont had been shaved and barbered normally. At the time of their encounter in London, his hair had been bristles and he’d worn a mustache. Now Drumont had a full beard and long, shaggy hair, like most men in San Francisco.

  At eight-twenty he returned to the St. Francis, and by half past eight he was in position, standing beside a locked door inside a large, moonlit room on the fourth floor of the hotel, number 47, holding his cocked Baby Dragoon, waiting, listening to his own breaths. The room smelled of lavender and morning glory.

  IT WAS NEARLY ten when Ben returned to the hotel.

  “Good evening, sir,” said the white-haired Mexican who manned the St. Francis’s desk in the evenings. He handed Ben a letter from London and the key to his room. “Should we expect Señora Knowles soon?”

  “Well, Luis, that is a question I cannot answer with any certainty. I left her some time ago down at Hainey’s barbershop. She was initiating Mr. Hainey into the mysteries of ladies’ coiffures, by lamplight, so…for all I know, Mrs. Knowles may not return until midnight.”

  “The most beautiful lady in San Francisco,” Luis replied with a smile, “has certain obligations to her thousand admirers. And for her we have the second key whenever she appears.” As Ben turned toward the stairs, Luis remembered. “Ah, sir—a friend of yours was here earlier, and very eager to see you. A handsome gentleman of the Old World, the same as you, sir.”

  Old World? Ben wondered if it had been Stephen Massett, or the German painter from Coloma, or perhaps Luis meant Ronald Shepley’s mining partner, the Australian…“What is the gentleman’s name?”

  “He would not give it—he told me he had traveled ‘halfway round the earth’ to find you here, and wanted to surprise you. I have probably told you too much.” Luis smiled.

  Halfway round the earth… Ben had a wild thought: Could it be his cousin’s husband, the Count de Tocqueville, dismayed and disappointed by the revolution and counter-revolution in France, returning to explore the new America? Or—might it be?—his brother Philip, come personally to oversee the importation of Chinese laborers and Indian opium through San Francisco? America and California had inured Ben to the occurrence of the incredible and impossible.

  “And where is this gentleman now, Luis?”

  Luis shook his head and shrugged. “I cannot say, sir. He did tell me he craved a glass of good French wine. He arrived in San Francisco only today.”

  “Thank you, Luis.”

  Ben read the letter from London as he climbed the three flights.

  It was from his sister Isabel. And it was shocking. It filled him with grief and shame and delight, a bewildering mixture of all three. The old dreamlike giddiness overtook him as he reached the fourth floor—floating above the earth, a balloonist without a balloon, his flight not quite under his own command but powered, in some obscure way, by his very astonishment and vertigo.

  He tried to imagine what Polly’s reaction would be to this news from England.

  He unlocked the door and lit a match. During the second or two of phosphorescent flash he sensed something awry in the room, the balance of light and shadow slightly different.

  But he had turned right to light the candle on the sconce and Drumont was on his left, behind the open door, so when the whispered command came—

  “Stop, Knowles, in the name of the law.”

  —Ben was startled, and dropped his burning match to the floor.

  “I have the gun.”

  When Drumont slammed the door shut with his free hand, the breeze extinguished the flame of the match on the floor.

  “Fermez—eh…boulonnez la porte, ah, the door, lock the door.”

  Drumont was so excited that his English was in retreat.

  Ben did as he was told, unthinkingly. He was confused. “Monsieur le Comte?”

  There was no reply. And even in the dark, Ben realized that the intruder was not, of course, Tocqueville. Eager to find you…the Old World…halfway round the earth…would not give his name…wanted to surprise you. I have the gun. The truth was even more incredible.

  Drumont, his eyes long since accustomed to the dark, stepped carefully into the center of the room, keeping his pistol aimed as he took his place a few paces behind Ben. During their three previous encounters Knowles had surprised and humiliated him.

  “Make the hands above the head.”

  Drumont took a deep breath of profound satisfaction. La fin. Nous sommes finis. “We finish,” he said. “Killer of French boys. Killer of la France.”

  The man is perfectly mad, Ben thought.

  He was too far from the window to leap, and would likely die in the fall anyway. The knife he had brought from Ashbyville was packed away. Then he remembered one of his brother-in-law’s tedious disquisitions on lunacy—how making ordinary conversation, Roger Warfield had said, could soothe madmen. It was ridiculous, but he would try, for the extra minute it might give him.

  “Hallo, sir. I understand that you are extremely angry with me. But I do not understand what you think I have done. I have killed no French boys, I—”

  “Liar! Liar!”

  Drumont nearly pulled the trigger, but he did not wish to finish in anger. He was a soldier. This was to be an execution. Nor did he want his moment of triumph, delayed so long, to pass so quickly.

  Ben expected the pistol to fire. Roger was unfortunately mistaken would be his last living thought.

  “Who is dead in the Rue du Helder on the twenty-three of février, eh? My boy, mon petit frère, my brother Michel, I bring him out of la Corse, from la Corse to Paris like I am his father. And he is dead in Paris. Because of you. Because of your revolution. By my pistol, but you make his death.” He to
ok another breath to regain his dignity. “Now you, Knowles. By my pistol and I make the death of you.”

  From la Corse, Ben thought, as in Dumas’s Les Frères corses: this fellow and the soldier he accidentally shot were brothers, from Corsica—literally Corsican brothers. If only Ashby could hear this would be Ben’s last living thought.

  “I am sorry to learn that he died. Very sorry indeed. May your brother rest in peace.”

  Ben’s eyes had adjusted to the dark. He saw Drumont nod.

  “And I am no revolutionary,” he continued, “I assure you of that. My late friend and I were simply…walking around Paris that night, sightseeing.”

  “Your ‘late friend’?”

  “The man with me, who died…Whom—whom you killed.” At least his last living thought would be dignified.

  “I? I kill? Liar! I kill no man from you. The friend he run to go with the radicaux, et alors…he escape to them…I fire, ma balle ne l’a pas frappé…”

  While the lunatic was making his unintelligible French excuses for murdering Ashby, Ben remembered his fondest souvenir from Ashbyville, which hung now an arm’s length away on the wall, near the door. During their two weeks in the city he had come to see it as a mere decoration…

  “And you,” Drumont was saying, “you carry the bombe of the girl, the radical, the friend Marie. And you are cinquante mètres from the other radicaux in the boulevard when they charge to the battalion of the army. When my pistol fire—you make this fire—the army hear this, et ils ont mis le feu pour se défendre. They fire to defend! The error of my gun was the cause of the revolution—the error made by you.” He sighed deeply. “C’est énorme,” he said, “c’est énorme…”

  Ben had nothing more to say. The man was insane. And there was no escaping.

  They both heard the iron latch shake and jiggle. Drumont, alarmed, leapt back to his original hiding place, on the far side of the door from Ben.

  And as the door opened, blocking the Frenchman, Ben turned and reached with both hands toward the wall.

  In one second he had grabbed the bow off the sconce where it hung.

  In two he had nocked an arrow.

  In three he had drawn it to his cheek.

  And the instant the Frenchman kicked the door shut, Ben released the string and let the arrow fly, inches in front of Polly’s face, and then hurled himself onto her to drive her down, out of harm’s way.

  Drumont’s pistol had fired once, and did not fall from his hand as he fell backward. He lay on his back, on the floor.

  Ben was unhurt. And when Polly sat up and discovered why her husband had tackled her to the floor, she found that all of her injuries—a sore shoulder, a very sore haunch, a sprained hand—were the result of his tackle.

  The assassin was still. The arrow, traveling several times as fast as a railroad locomotive, had entered his left eye, enfiladed his brain, and pierced the back of his skull. Only its last few feathered inches poked out from his face.

  Ben removed the smoking revolver from his grip and picked up the bow and quiver.

  When they left the room, they encountered a single curious person, the man who occupied the adjacent room, standing in the hallway, staring.

  “I thought I heard a shot,” he said.

  “We were ambushed. By a lunatic. But we are both all right. And he’s dead.”

  “Well, congratulations,” the man said, “you’re lucky,” and with that returned to his room and shut the door.

  They would go and tell Luis what had happened, and ask him to notify the proper authorities—whoever those were, since San Francisco still had no police force.

  As they walked downstairs, Ben told Polly the main news in his sister’s letter. During Philip and Lydia’s honeymoon in Gibraltar in April, he had been badly beaten in the street (“by an insurgent of some sort, evidently”) and had died a day later of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  “Oh, Ben, good Lord, how awful. How terrible! What a terrible year for your poor family.”

  He said nothing more as they walked down the last flight to the lobby. He decided that to explain at that particular moment the various ramifications of his brother’s death—I am no longer a younger son, I am now Sir Benjamin Knowles, Philip’s widow is the Dowager Lady Knowles, and now you, Polly, are the Lady Knowles—would be inappropriate.

  “Ah, Mr. Knowles,” said Luis delightedly when he saw them, “I was about to send a boy up for you—the gentleman has returned, your amusing friend.”

  “He was not my friend, Luis. He was…my great enemy. And he is dead.”

  Luis was perplexed—Mr. Knowles was carrying a pistol and Indian archery gear, and he appeared to be serious and shaken, not drunk or joking. “No, Mr. Knowles, no, no—I spoke with the gentleman not five minutes ago—he is just there, in the small saloon, sir, awaiting you. With joy.”

  Given what had already occurred, Ben was willing to entertain any dreadful possibility. Perhaps there was an accomplice—the third soldier from that night in Paris. He instructed Polly to wait with Luis while he went to confront the mysterious stranger who claimed to be his friend. He cocked the Frenchman’s pistol.

  BEFORE HE HAD stepped into the saloon, Ben spotted him.

  He was sitting with a glass of red wine and a book, a candle pulled close to illuminate the pages. He still wore a beard, and his hair was quite long and knotted into a queue, like a gentleman of their grandparents’ day—no, like a Chinaman. He wore a collarless pink silk robe brocaded with blue clouds. For an instant Ben thought it was Skaggs playing a prank.

  As he approached he saw the red cap lying on the table beside the candle, the bonnet rouge purchased last February in Paris from the clarinetist’s child for two francs.

  He now felt himself flying and swooping through the very heavens, among stars and comets, in sight of a true miracle.

  “Christ Almighty,” he shouted, “how can this be?”

  Other patrons turned to stare.

  Lloyd Ashby smiled and stood.

  “Look at this rough and shaggy mountain man,” he said, “Hawkeye himself, with gun drawn and Chingachgook’s bow and arrows.”

  They embraced furiously, exclaiming and laughing.

  “You did not die!” cried Ben.

  Only as the words left his mouth did he realize that the denials of the man he had just killed upstairs—I kill no man from you, the friend—had been the truth. “But you never returned to the lle Saint-Louis, I waited all night and day, your friends believed you were dead, we all did.”

  “The crappo bastard fired at me, but I plunged into the back of the mob running away, running east, and escaped by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin. Notwithstanding the tragic misinformation you supplied to my grieving parents—and the dead Jewish bloke you shipped across the Channel to Cadogan Place.”

  “He—he wore a waistcoat like yours.”

  It took the two of them some time to sort out exactly what had happened in the Rue du Helder and during the chaotic days afterward.

  Juliet, Ashby’s mistress, had been a close associate of some of the leading red republicans—and had actually stored a small cask of black powder in her apartments. Given that the success of the revolution was highly dubious on that first night, and with the Garde Municipale pursuing him, Ashby and the “rather panicky and operatic” Juliet had decided to leave the country and embark on their Oriental journey immediately. “And our folly was prudent, as things turned out,” Ashby said, “for if we had been in Paris in June, she doubtless would have died on a barricade, and probably her silly English lover along with her. On the other hand, she would have been deprived of the opportunity to leave me for the French consul in Shanghai.”

  Ashby had written his parents from Constantinople, en route to China, so it was not until summer that they’d learned he was alive—and only this past winter in Shanghai had he learned that they and all of London had for several months believed him dead.

  “I wrote to you in New York,” Ashby said—but
by then, of course, Ben had gone missing on his trip across America in pursuit of Polly. As Ashby had been about to board his China clipper bound for London, “a Foreign Office fellow” informed him that Benjamin Knowles was now living in San Francisco.

  And thus there was Lloyd Ashby, in the drinking saloon of the St. Francis Hotel, stopping in America for a visit with his old friend on his way home to England.

  Ben informed him that their French sergeant—a true Corsican brother on a vendetta that had taken him to London and then all the way to California—was at that moment lying dead upstairs with an arrow in his head.

  “He says that those two shots in the street in Paris,” Ben continued, “his brother’s shot and his shot at you, running, were the provocation that caused the troops at the ministry to panic and fire on the mob. He insisted that we therefore caused the massacre, that we were therefore responsible for everything that followed. Everything. Inadvertently. Accidentally.”

  They stared at each other, speechless, unsure whether to believe it—that their bumbling lark was the spark that had ignited the first of fifty revolutions—and unsure whether to be appalled or proud or simply astounded. It is enormous, Ben thought, enormous…

  “HALLO…?”

  “Polly,” Ben shouted as she approached them, and then in his dither forgot her married name: “Miss Mary Ann Lucking, allow me to introduce you to my great friend—Mr. Lloyd Ashby.”

  Polly’s mouth fell open, and Ashby bowed.

  73

  late July 1849

  Ashbyville

  IT WAS ANOTHER week before they learned of Skaggs’s death, and the burning of his observatory, and the killing of the miner Shepley at their camp. Why had the Frenchman murdered Skaggs and Shepley? This Gabriel Drumont was a monster, a destroyer beyond understanding.

  “You may think me awful,” Polly told Ben, “but it makes me glad that you killed him.”