Du Mond stuffed his winnings in his inside coat pocket, and left the cockpit while his luck was holding. On the way out, he tipped the owner of his winning bird a generous ten dollars; the awkward country-bumpkin took it and made it vanish with a speed that told du Mond that the man was no more a country-clod than du Mond himself was. He stepped out into the street and moved aside from the door, out of the path of traffic. He gazed up and down the street, at the garishly-lit businesses, the river of men-
Now, the question was-should he go looking for a girl now, or later?
Now, he decided. Go while his luck was still in.
He shoved his hands in his pockets and assumed a slouch that changed his silhouette entirely, then set off down Pacific Street towards the docks and deeper into the district they called the "Barbary Coast." Here were all the things that the good women of the stately homes on Nob Hill despised-the cockpits and dogfights, the gambling dens, the hundreds of taverns, the bawdy-houses, bordellos, and brothels. But this was not to say the district was entirely poor-and many of those good women would faint dead away if they discovered how many of their sons and husbands visited some of the more discreet and luxurious of those Houses on this street. There were none of those in this end of the Coast; as Paul looked up, he saw plenty of second-floor windows with women lounging out of them, calling and beckoning to those below, something that never would happen at the better Houses.
Nor was it to say that the district was wealthy; down sidestreets were the opium dens, squalid, filthy holes where men (and sometimes women) paid for the privilege of lying on a wooden bunk stacked three high, leaning on one hip, and smoking a little sticky ball of gum-opium until they either passed into unconsciousness, nausea, or both. The smoke in those places was so thick that a man walking erect between the bunks stood a good chance of passing out himself from the narcotic fumes.
Down other alleyways were the cribs, the lowest places of prostitution in the city, tiny little closets just large enough to hold an excuse of a bed and a girl to lay in it. "Girl" was a euphemism; most of them were aged far past their years, riddled with disease, drugs, or drink, subhuman creatures a year or less from their own demise. Many, many of them were Chinese; they would strip to the waist and press themselves against the wood slats of their windows, calling out the only words of English they knew. "One bitteelookee, two bittee feelee, three bittee dooee!" The only thing lower than a crib-girl was a street-girl, one who would service her clients in the alley because she had nowhere else to take them.
What Paul sought was in between those two extremes, and he knew just where to find it. He had a selection of three merchants he patronized, though given the current interest Cameron was showing in things Oriental, it would be best to avoid the place in Chinatown. That left Giorgio's, or the Mexican's.
The Mexican's was nearer, which was what decided him.
The entrance to the Mexican's place was a single narrow door in between the entrances to a bar and a peep-show. Recessed in an alcove, a passerby probably wouldn't notice the door unless he was looking for it, which was how the Mexican liked it. The Mexican's given name was Alonzo de Varagas, but he didn't like anyone to use it. Except for this little venture, which was what had made him the money to become a respectable shop owner outside the Barbary Coast and still kept Senora de Varagas in silk and pretty jewelry, he no longer had anything to do with the clientele of Pacific Street.
Paul knocked on the door, which opened just enough to permit the suspicious eyes of the doorkeeper to examine him. Then the door opened wide, and Diego grinned whitely at him in the light from a gas-lamp, gesturing him inside with a flamboyant fling of his arms.
"Hey, Mister Breaker! You come on in, we got a special one for you!" the man said, happily, and spat on the sidewalk before closing the door. "Damn! Good thing you get here, boss begun to think he might have to break her himself!"
The door gave access immediately to a narrow staircase leading up, lit by three gas lamps. Paul went up ahead of Diego, half turning so he could talk to the man. "Is she giving you trouble?" he asked hopefully.
Diego shook his head, but to indicate that she was, indeed. "She wake up from the happy-juice, next thing, she be prayin' and cryin'-you know how boss hates the ones that pray an' start callin' on the Virgin."
"I know." It was a constant source of amazement to him that a procurer like Alonzo had trouble with girls who wept and prayed. Perhaps they reminded him of his wife-who tolerated the fact that he had this little business on the side so long as he didn't sample the merchandise himself. Hence, Alonzo's dual quandary with "breaking" this particular girl.
Du Mond was a man with a talent, and it was a talent the Chinaman, the Mexican, and the Italian all found useful. He was a "breaker," which was the name by which they knew him. The procurers themselves were not brothel-keepers; they supplied girls to the Houses up and down the street. The Chinaman usually bought his back in his homeland; Alonzo specialized in bringing mestizos and Indians up from Mexico. The Italian ran his business a bit differently; he recruited bored country-girls from Illinois, Wisconsin and Indiana by promising them something other than a life of drudgery married to a dirt-farmer, or Chicago shop-girls tired of waiting on surly customers. Given the Mexican's problems with "breaking" girls who cried and prayed, Paul would have expected him to be the one recruiting in the Grain Belt, but evidently Alonzo's conscience never bothered him about recruiting his own countrywomen for a life of sin.
The Chinaman's girls thought they were coming to America to be given to husbands; the Mexican women were told that they would find easy jobs in the households of gold-rich families. And as for the girls garnered from the fields of Indiana and the shops of Chicago, Giorgio posed as a businessman setting up a rival to the Fred Harvey chain on the West Coast; the girls expected easy work waiting tables with big tips in gold nuggets from men who hadn't seen a woman in months.
What they got, was a dose of morphia; they woke up to find their virginity had been taken by men who had paid highly to have it, even from a semi-conscious and unresponsive body. What happened then depended on the girl. The Chinaman seldom needed the services of a breaker; most Chinese girls seemed to resign themselves to their concubinage readily enough. Giorgio preferred to break his girls to the trade himself, but often enough he had more than one who was making trouble, and a man could only do so much in a day. The Mexican girls seemed divided into three types; the ones that gave up, the ones that fought, and the ones that prayed.
They would all end up in the same position in the end; Paul never could figure out why they didn't just resign themselves and make the best of the situation. If a girl played her cards right, she could end up a madam with a house of her own, or even married to a client. But she had to be smart and she had to learn how to play the game quickly, before her looks went. And she had to stay away from drugs and drink, or her looks would go even faster.
"So we've got a weeper, hmm? Well, maybe she'll turn out to be a fighter, too." He preferred it when they fought; they often thought that because he wasn't built like a prizefighter, he couldn't overpower them, and it increased his pleasure to prove them wrong.
It was his job to break them like untamed horses; to prove to them that not only did they have no choice in their new profession, but that he was infinitely worse than any customer they were ever likely to service. The unspoken threat was that unless they proved tractable, he would get them.
He was popular as a breaker because be didn't need to slap the girls around and possibly damage them to break them. He had an infinite number of ways to hurt them that didn't leave any marks. Some of them used nothing more than words; he couldn't use those on the Chinese girls, but his Spanish was as fluent as Alonzo's, and it was words he most often used on the Mexican's girls. By the time he was through flaying them with his tongue, they were convinced that they had brought this life of sin upon themselves, that they were already so black with sin that God had turned His back upon them.
He would pay for this privilege, of course; the exclusive use of a girl wasn't something easy to come by on Pacific Street. But the cost was a fraction of what such a privilege would have demanded in a House. He would be only the second man to touch these girls, which vastly reduced the all-too-real risk of disease.
The girl looked up quickly as he opened the door, which had neither latch nor handle on the other side. She had been kneeling-obviously praying-as far from the bed in the corner as possible. In the light from the single dingy, metal barred window, her face was swollen and tear-stained, and she tried to cover her nakedness with her hands. That was all there was in this tiny closet of a room; the naked girl, the undraped, iron-framed bed bolted to the floor, and four bare walls with bare wooden floor. There was a single gaslight, too high on the wall for her to reach.
He smiled. He would try words, first.
"Hello, little whore," he said, in clear Spanish, his voice smoother than honed steel and just as cold and sharp. "I am your master now."
The first session had gone quite well; Paul was pleased as he gave the special knock that alerted Diego that he wanted out.
"Well?" the little Mexican asked, as he closed the door on the semi-conscious girl.
"Five or six days , Paul said, truthfully. "Not more than that. Today she cried, tomorrow she might fight or weep more; maybe the day after, too. Then she'll begin wearing down, and she'll have it in her head that she's dirt and there's nowhere else that would have her but a whorehouse. She'll probably start drugging once she gets into a House, though. The religious ones usually do."
Deigo shrugged. "Not our problem," he said, dismissively. "Whoever paid for her can worry about that. We'll be seeing you for the next week, then?" He held his hand out, palm up.
"Probably." Paul counted out enough cash to cover the week, then some over. "I'll need the usual."
"The usual," was for Deigo to dig up well-used clothing in Paul's size, send it to the Chinese laundry, and have it waiting here for him. Even if Cameron "followed" him here, the man's fastidious nature would never allow him to keep a more direct eye on his Apprentice. And the moment Paul left here on errands of his own, clad in shabby clothing that had never come within Cameron's reach, there was no way the Firemaster could trace him further.
Besides, as long as du Mond's own clothing remained here, Cameron would probably assume he was with the clothing, if not in it.
"It'll be waiting," Diego replied, without interest. He and his employer had no curiosity about why Paul used their establishment as a way-station. That greatly endeared them to him. Add in the fact that this place was within walking distance of the Nob Hill apartment, and it was altogether an arrangement to du Mond's liking.
But for the moment, with all of his needs satisfied, it was time to get back to his gilded cage. He bade the Mexican goodnight, turned up his collar against the damp and chilly night air, and shoved his hands deep into his pockets to foil petty thieves.Although it was near midnight, the establishments of Pacific street, from the meanest tavern to the Hippodrome, were barely getting warmed up. Some of them were even decked out in electrical rather than gas lights. He wondered what the Coast would look like when electrical lights became cheap enough to use for signage and shook his head.
It was a lengthy walk, but not bad for a man in the physical condition of Paul du Mond. He strode east, watching the traffic around him with a wary eye and wondering what secrets some of those faces held.
One day, soon, he would have the power to find out. And San Francisco herself, the biggest whore of them all, would have a new master.
When he had a number of errands, Paul always solved the difficulty of finding a cab by hiring one for the entire day. They were Cameron's errands, so Cameron's money might as well pay for them. He ran the more mundane chores first, and they took him all over town before it was finished. Among those was the list the Hawkins girl had supplied, and he took some savage amusement in wondering what her reaction would be if she ever learned it had been him who had purchased her requested supplies-
She'd probably faint from embarrassment alone. He'd like to see her embarrassed, or better still, humiliated. He'd imagined her prim little face superimposed on Lupe's last night. He'd like to have a chance to break her. Damned women, thinking they had a right to careers, taking money out of a man's pocket to do so, getting ideas about equality ...
Perhaps he'd have the opportunity, if things worked out properly. She was an orphan; there'd be no one to miss her or inquire after her if she vanished.
Among his errands, he contrived to drop a message in a certain tobacconist's when he bought his own Cuban cigars. Tonight, after Lupe, he would find out if there was an answer to that message.
Meanwhile, the day plodded along like the weary cab-horse, straining its way up the hill of time towards noon, then straining to keep from tumbling headlong down the other side. Why anyone had ever chosen to build a city here, in this maze of hills and valleys, was beyond him. The inhabitants suffered from enough back and foot ailments to keep every purveyor of quack medicine in the country happy. There were no real places to leave a carriage, and even if you found one, it wasn't one where he'd want to leave a horse standing for long. The cable car system that ran up and down the Slot on Market Street had been invented because the life of a trolley-horse in San Francisco was a fraction of one in any other city. They had dropped dead in their traces all the time before the mechanical traction device took over their chore.
Paul, of course, did not have to walk unless he chose, nor suffer the press of the Great Unwashed on the cable cars unless he wished to. He always hired cabs with strong horses with some draft-blood in them; horses that were up to a long day of traversing the streets. He had stopped by the tobacconist's early; on impulse, on the way back from the final errand of the day, he had the cabby stop there again.
Much to his pleasure there was already a reply to his message-a single slip of paper with three words, none of which would have given the game away even to Cameron. Twelve, the usual. It could have been someone's order, picked up by accident, for boxes of cigars or cigarettes, or any other product the tobacconist sold, which was precisely the point.
None of the parcels he obtained today required the special handling Jason had specified, so he simply left them piled in the hallway with orders to have them sent to the waiting carriage. The cook had prepared an excellent meal, and du Mond settled in to eat it with full enjoyment, now that his duties were over for the day and the evening lay before him.
He had a cab take him as far as the end of Pacific Street that was only risque; what harm, after all, was there in his taking in a bawdy show? He even entered the theater, although he came right back out again as soon as the cab was gone. From there, he walked to the Mexican's, where events proceeded as he had predicted they would.
He was finished by eleven, and the man who left the Mexican's in no way resembled the man who had entered. Seedy cap pulled low over his forehead, hands stuffed in the pockets of his dungarees, warding off the chill with a shapeless, baggy flannel shirt, Paul would not have been recognized by anyone who knew him as Cameron's secretary, and he knew it. All of the clothing was old, threadbare, patched. He had altered his posture, even his gait. He did not bother attempting to find a cab-no one looking the way he did would have money for such a thing, and the use of anything other than his own two feet would only reveal that he was not what he seemed.
It was a long way to the docks at the end of Pacific Street, but that was "the usual." So near water-both in the form of fog drifting in off the Bay and of the Pacific Ocean itself-it was the last place one would expect to see a Firemaster.
Which was why Simon Beltaire had chosen this as a meeting site.
Even if, by some incredible ability, Jason Cameron was tracking Paul by means of the flames of gaslights all across the city, he would not be able to do so on the docks. Nor would a Salamander ever come here, where the Salamander's worst enemies, the Undines, hel
d sway. Humans, of course, could go anywhere they chose, no matter what their Magickal Natures, and if the Undines resented the intrusion of a Firemaster into the edges of their domain, they were wise enough to keep quiet about it.
The docks were silent at this hour. Perhaps someday there would be work around the clock-but not until either science created brighter gaslights or electrical lights became cheaper. For now, this was a good place to meet someone when you didn't want to be seen-although you had to listen carefully, for some of the street girls brought customers here for the little privacy that the darkness and piles of crates afforded.
Paul walked five steps, paused, and listened before walking five more; in this way he made his way to the end of one of the docks without interfering with anyone's pleasure. It didn't matter what dock he chose; Beltaire would find him easily enough. He chose one that didn't have any boats moored up against it.
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