Wilde West

by Walter Satterthwait

  “To talk to.”

  The sergeant shook his head. “Makes it worse.”

  Grigsby glanced at the other policemen. Zack Tolliver was all right—slow, no genius, but honest and dependable. And he hated Greaves. Carl Hacker was one of Greaves’s pets, a bootlicker and a liar. But he was gutless. Without Greaves around, he was no threat and no problem. Grigsby looked back at Hanrahan. “I’m going in.”

  Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hacker turn to the sergeant.

  Hanrahan’s face was expressionless. “Now why is that, Bob?”

  “Somethin’ I’m working on.”

  Hanrahan shrugged. “City business, Bob. No federal jurisdiction, don’t ye know. Greaves won’t care for it.”

  Grigsby smiled. “Guess I just don’t give a shit, Gerry.”

  Hanrahan looked at him for a moment, finally nodded. “Guess ye don’t.” He pulled a small tin flask from his pocket, held it out. “Better have yourself a taste first. Ye’ll be needin’ the help of it.”

  Grigsby accepted the flask and unscrewed its cap. He drank some of the whiskey—Irish, and good—then screwed the cap back and handed the flask over to Hanrahan. “Thanks. I won’t touch anything in there.”

  Hanrahan returned the flask to his pocket. “I know that, Bob.”

  Grigsby nodded again, then turned to the door of Molly Woods’s shack. The doorknob was cold. He twisted it, pushed open the door, and stepped inside.

  THAT WEDNESDAY MORNING, WHEN Oscar awoke, he wished that he were dead.

  His mouth was dry and grainy, his forehead felt heavy and hairy and sloped and hideously ridged at the eyebrows, like an orangutang’s.

  With the window shade down, the curtains drawn together, the room was dim and funereal. Which suited him perfectly.

  Another night with Elizabeth McCourt Doe like last night, and probably he would be dead.

  She and Tabor had come to the dressing room after the lecture. She had looked—impossibly—even more ravishing and radiant than he remembered her, and Oscar had marveled that the cramped little room could contain, without bursting, two souls so extraordinary as his and hers.

  He had marveled, too, when he discovered that his own ebullient good nature extended even to Horace Tabor. Tonight the silver baron seemed so amiable, so childlike and uncomplicated, so exuberant about the lecture (which surely suggested a sliver or two of sound taste buried beneath that awful American vulgarity), that only a boor could have disliked the man. A bit on the uncomplicated side, certainly. But that was nature, not nurture; and none of us can choose our parents. And if he were perhaps a tad preoccupied with the world of commerce, he was also honest, forthright, and totally without malice. Not a bad sort at all. Salt of the earth, actually.

  What a wonderful world it was, brimful with people who were either fascinating or genial; or with people who, like himself (and Elizabeth McCourt Doe, of course), were both. The best of all possible worlds it was. Poor Pangloss was right.

  And the best thing of all in this best of all possible worlds was the secret love he shared with Elizabeth McCourt Doe. And precisely because it was secret, isolate, it would remain forever pure.

  When she shook his hand in farewell, she pressed into it a folded square of paper. He pocketed the paper by reaching into his jacket pocket for his cigarette case, as smoothly as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life.

  After they left, and while Henry, behind him, cleaned away the dressing table, he removed the paper and opened it.

  Tonight at one-thirty. The north corner of Lincoln and Washington Streets.

  Inside Oscar’s tweed trousers, Freddy Phallus stirred expectantly.

  He had supped with von Hesse and the Countess—selecting from the limited menu a rather dismal ragout (one more bloodsoaked steak and he would begin to howl like a wolf) and he had been brilliant. The Countess had laughed merrily as she tossed her shiny blond curls, and even von Hesse had interrupted his methodical chewing and permitted himself a crisp Teutonic smile or two. After the German left the table to use the washroom, Mathilde had leaned toward Oscar and put her delicate hand along his arm.

  “Oscair,” she smiled, “you are a veritable devil. You must tell me. Who is she?”

  He hid his surprise behind a frown, “Whatever do you mean?”

  She smiled again. “You know very well what I mean. La Femme. Only a woman could have produced this remarkable change. You are positively enthusiastic. I find it charming, of course, but also entirely intriguing.”

  “My dear Countess,” he said, looking levelly into her eyes, “if I act any differently tonight, this is only because the evening lecture went so well. There is no woman, I assure you.” He smiled ruefully; a nice touch, he thought. “Would that it were so.”

  “Ah,” she said. “I understand. She is married. Wonderful! Not another word, then. Only this.” She leaned still closer, lowered her voice to a smoky whisper, and murmured in French, “Always continue to deny. Even if he confronts you, the brute of a husband. Even if he discovers you en flagrante, you understand me? If you never waver, even for a moment, he will begin to doubt the evidence of his own eyes. I promise you that this is true.”

  Oscar laughed.

  Later, as he lay fully clothed atop the bed in his room, he teased and tortured himself with memories of Elizabeth McCourt Doe. Visions, pink-tipped and titian-tufted, twirled across his brain. He heard her laughter, her sighs and moans. He felt the shiver of her flesh.

  And when he opened his eyes, found himself alone in the small, drab room, he experienced within an aching emptiness, a pain at once appalling and delicious. Before he met her, he had thought himself whole, entire; now he discovered that he was merely half a being, a tattered fragment of a soul, yearning wildly, desperately, for that which would complete it.

  The refrain of an old Irish love song kept repeating itself back in some musty, misty corner of his mind. Do not forget, love, do not grieve, for the heart is true and it can’t deceive. My heart and soul I will give to thee, so farewell my love and remember me.

  Irish love songs. Nothing in the history of literature was more perfectly contrived to bring a tear to the eye, or a sneer to the lip. He was becoming pathetic. Soon he would be plucking the petals off daisies, loves me, loves me not, and walking blindly into walls.

  He was mooning and swooning about like a provincial schoolboy.

  He was twenty-seven years old, a grown man in full possession of all his limbs and organs (indeed yes!) and all his faculties.

  But, God in heaven, the woman was like no other he had ever met.

  He slipped her note from his pocket. He opened it, inhaled the dark, exhilarating, remembered scent that clung faintly to the paper.

  Tonight at one-thirty. The north corner of Lincoln and Washington Streets.

  (He had possessed the foresight to ask the desk clerk—with a towering nonchalance—where these particular avenues might happen to converge.)

  Her unparalleled grace and intelligence were obvious even in this simple missive. Not a word wasted, each doing its job in a simple, straightforward manner. The north corner: how sublimely specific. Really, how altogether admirable.

  And the handwriting itself—it was as uncluttered and spare, as pure of line, as Japanese calligraphy.

  He tugged free his pocket watch. Eleven-thirty. Two hours yet.

  Where was she now? What was she doing at exactly this moment? Why was it necessary for them to wait until one-thirty? Why was his mind suddenly achurn with idiotic questions?

  How wearisome this love business actually was. The endless waiting, the endless wanting, the endless futile fantasizing. No wonder that lovers were forever quaffing poison and leaping from bridges. Anything to relieve the tedium.

  Would she like London?

  Of course she would. A woman of instinctive cultivation, of natural, inborn refinement, how could she help but like the most cultivated and refined city (excepting Paris) in the world? And together the two
of them would become its leading lights—arbiters, because paragons, of fashion. They would amaze and dazzle with their taste and flair. Their house, perhaps a small Georgian on Grosvenor Square, would become a legendary gathering place for the cognoscenti.

  A few small obstacles did loom on the horizon, admittedly.

  Money, for a start. Where exactly would they find the lucre to support this enlightened existence?

  Two can live as cheaply as one.

  Yes, so long as one of them doesn’t eat.

  His play. Vera. It would be produced. All he needed was the agreement of that wretched woman in New York who labored under the misapprehension that she was an actress.

  First New York, great success, his name emblazoned across the marquee, Jimmie Whistler gnawing his liver in a paroxysm of envy back in London; and then the West End. Money gushing into Grosvenor Square. He could burn the stuff to light his cigarettes.

  Yes. Convince her. Tonight. Convince her to leave Tabor, a decent chap certainly but clearly wrong for her. Convince her to leave Denver, come along to finish up the tour, and then sail with him for England. Together, they would burn their bridges behind them.

  But what about Mother? How would she react to a daughter-in-law who was not only American, which was accidental and therefore possibly forgivable, but also penniless? Which to Mother was an indication of willful stupidity.

  We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it.

  He smiled. He rolled over, lifted his fountain pen from the notebook lying atop the mattress, opened the book, and wrote:

  Burn that bridge when we come to it.

  At one-thirty he had been waiting on the north corner of Lincoln and Washington Streets for three quarters of an hour. It was an empty, cold, and exceptionally inhospitable intersection. The wind moaned over the rooftops of grim brick buildings, mournfully, drearily, as though it had been reading Dickens. The air was chill. A skein of hard white stars winked overhead: so distant, so frigid, so utterly indifferent to the fate of Man that finally they had become quite irritating.

  He heard the hurried clop of horses’ hooves against hard-packed earth, heard the clack and rattle of a carriage. Looked up and saw the animals, two of them, suddenly appear at the corner in an insane gallop. Coal-black flanks agleam in the yellow light of the streetlamp, they dragged behind them a small black hansom that careened to the left as it reeled in its turn.

  The driver, Oscar saw as the vehicle approached, was swathed in a long black topcoat and muffled about the face with a long black scarf that concealed his face and trailed over his shoulder. A black hat, flat-crowned and flat-brimmed, was pulled low over his head, its shadow masking his face.

  Just before the carriage reached Oscar, the man reined in the horses and pushed down the wooden brake lever with a booted foot. Silently he nodded, tapped the gloved forefinger of his left hand against the brim of his hat, and then indicated, by a curt swing of his whip, that Oscar should enter the cab.

  “Ah,” said Oscar. Elizabeth McCourt Doe had apparently laid on transport.

  But he hesitated. He peered inside the carriage. Empty. He looked up at the driver. Extremely romantic, to be sure, bundled up like Dick Turpin; but what guarantee was there that the woman had sent this chap? Who knew what sort of villain he might be? A genuine Turpin, perhaps: a real highwayman. Plotting to cart Oscar off and plunder him at gunpoint in some dusky deserted alleyway.

  But highwaymen, if memory served, didn’t drive carriages. Carriages were what they robbed. They rode horses, or they bounded out of bushes.

  Perhaps this was something else they arranged differently in American cities. A lack of suitable bushes.

  The driver leaned over and impatiently slapped the carriage door with the tip of his whip.

  “Are you quite sure,” Oscar asked the man, “that you’ve found the right party? Mr. Oscar Wilde?” The impoverished and entirely harmless poet, he almost added.

  The driver nodded, a single brusque movement, and then again, brusquely, smacked his whip against the carriage side.

  My heart and hand I will give to thee …

  Sighing sadly, Oscar opened the door and stepped into the cab.

  Even before his other foot had left the ground, the driver cracked the whip and the horses bolted forward. Oscar’s shoulder slammed onto the seat’s back as his knee smashed against its front. His breath suddenly gone, he wrenched himself awkwardly around, clutched for handholds along the carriage’s side. The carriage lurched to the left and he was thrown against the door, which sprang open and, for a frantic moment before he jerked it shut, revealed an expanse of dark, disagreeable roadway racing away below.

  The carriage bounced and bucked, leaped and bounced as it plunged along. Oscar attempted to support himself, hands braced against the sides of the vehicle, feet braced against the opposite seat, while the darkened city of Denver hurtled by the windows. Dry goods stores, blacksmiths’ stables, laundries, warehouses, small obscure factories, even a church or two skittered past. Conceivably, someone out there witnessed this mad dash through the empty streets; but no one called out, no one tried to save him.

  At last, in a dark and dismal neighborhood of small, mean wooden houses shouldering each other along the narrow street, the carriage began to slow. Frowning out the window at the desolation around him, Oscar rearranged his cravat.

  The vehicle stopped before a house that seemed somewhat larger than the rest, a two-story building looming up out of the starlit shadows. Its windows unlighted, its facade dark and blank, the place appeared abandoned.

  Which showed, Oscar felt, excellent judgment on the part of the abandoners, whoever they might have been.

  The carriage dipped as the driver vaulted to the ground. Peering out the window, Oscar saw the man’s dark form glide through the gloom to the front door.

  There must be some mistake. Surely Elizabeth McCourt Doe would never orchestrate a meeting in a place like this.

  Suddenly a pale yellow strip of light pitched across the weedy lawn. Silhouetted against the opened door, the driver waved an impatient, beckoning arm.

  Once again, Oscar hesitated.

  The place could be thick with desperadoes. Thieves, thugs, cutpurses and, worse, cutthroats.

  And if she were there? Surrounded by assassins, gunmen, skulking felons?

  Enough of this.

  Perhaps these louts imagined that an Irishman, and a poet, would be easy pickings. They deceived themselves. The blood of Cuchulain surged in his veins. And he knew a thing or two about the Manly Arts. Self-defense was something a poet quickly learned in an Irish public school.

  He did rather wish, however, that he possessed somewhere on his person a small but powerful handgun.

  He unlatched the carriage door, pushed it open, stepped down. Head held high, he stalked across the lawn to the house.

  The driver watched him approach, then turned and entered the building.

  Oscar trailed resolutely behind.

  Just to the left of the door, startling Oscar by his presence, stood a small Chinese man in sandals, black silk pants, a black silk top, and a round, black silk skullcap. He might have been thirty years old; he might have been fifty. Grinning with enormous enthusiasm, bowing as rhythmically as a metronome, he shut the door behind Oscar and gestured for him to follow the driver.

  Oscar did so, feeling as disoriented as if he had somehow entered into another universe. The hallway was broad and airy. The floor was oak, spotlessly clean, draped along its center with a runner of Oriental carpet, black and scarlet, so perfect in its elegance and simplicity that it must be authentic. Brass sconces along the walls provided a soft gentle light. The walls themselves, unadorned, were wainscoted with some dark, rich wood, teak or mahogany.

  There was a smell in the air of jasmine—incense, doubtless—and of something else, something darker, heavier, more penetrating.

  Oscar followed the driver’s back. The hallway ended where it met, perpendicularly, another passage. Here
a small alcove set into the wall held a wonderfully wrought bronze Buddha.

  The man turned to the right, down a hallway longer than the first. His boots thumping on the carpeting, the driver passed several closed doors, stopped at one, opened it, and stepped inside.

  Behind him, Oscar entered the room.

  It was a large, uncluttered space. White walls, white ceiling, a gaslight softly glowing overhead within a white paper globe. Bleached oak floors, a strategic scattering of Oriental carpets in subtle shades of cream and pearl. Against the far wall, where the window might be hidden, a tall and broad Chinese screen displaying painted vistas of dreamy mountains strung with waterfalls, steep remote valleys draped with mist. Against the wall to the left, a large double bed framed in brilliant red-lacquered wood, covered by a quilt of red embroidered silk. Against the wall to the right, a low, red-lacquered table, atop which sat a slim ivory-colored vase containing (Good Lord!) a single white lily. Lying beside the vase, a teakwood box and a long narrow smoking pipe of elaborate Oriental design. Next to these, a silver salver holding two crystal tulip glasses and an iced-champagne bucket; inside this, a bottle of Krug.

  Very inviting, very charming, all of it. But it lacked, manifestly, one rather important item.

  Elizabeth McCourt Doe.

  Where was she?

  Oscar looked at the driver. Silently, churlishly, shoulders hunched, hands in the pockets of his coat, the man stood with his back to Oscar.

  Really, this was too much. The fellow’s maniacal steeplechase through the streets of Denver had been bad enough. But this insolence was altogether intolerable. The oaf deserved a thrashing. And unless he produced an explanation, and right now, Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde was just the person to give it to him.

  Abruptly, the man turned and tore from his head the broad, flat-brimmed hat. Rich red glistening curls cascaded down his shoulders, and his bright violet eyes sparkled, and suddenly he was a she, and she was laughing.