Emperor Norton's Ghost

by Dianne Day

  “It’s pretty wicked, really.”

  “Wish!”

  “Okay, okay,” Wish chuckled, “okay. The rumor is, Ngaio Swann is really a woman.”

  “No!” I had spoken too loudly; several startled patrons looked my way and I smiled sheepishly to let them know that I, a proper lady, was aware of my gaffe.

  “It may not be true,” Wish conceded.

  I leaned forward eagerly, tea forgotten. “I’ll bet it is. It just feels right. It would make such a lot of sense. After that brute of a husband terrorized her, she couldn’t bear to be voluntarily in the company of men. She and this woman masquerading as a brother don’t necessarily have to have had a sexual relationship.”

  Wish’s face darkened. If the lights had been on at a greater intensity, I knew his face would show bright red. “Fremont!” he said in a scandalized whisper.

  “Well, for heaven’s sake, it’s only a word,” I whispered back.

  “If you can say it, you’ll do it, that’s what my mother always told me.”

  “I’ll just bet she did.” I was dying to ask him if he was a twenty-five-year-old virgin male, but that would have been just too wicked of me, and I already had another idea that was equally wicked. In fact, it was so completely delicious that I could hardly bear not to act on it right away.

  Instead, I played the good investigatory partner. I suggested that Wish and I finish our tea as quickly as possible and then go back across to Union Square where he might help me with something.

  “That is,” I said, “if you have the time.”

  “All the time in the world, Fremont. All the time in the world. Mom can lock up on her own. And speaking of Mom: She’s doing pretty well, don’t you think?”

  “Indeed I do. I’m hard put to remember what we did without her.”

  Thus with various tits and tats of small talk, Wish and I paid our check and wandered a bit among all the bounteous offerings on display as we made our way out of the City of Paris and back to Union Square. As we wandered, I explained about Frances and Emperor Norton and the automatic writing.

  Standing once more at the base of the Dewey monument, I showed Wish the Emperor’s first set of instructions: Walk northwest two blocks. With hand gestures for punctuation (maybe even substituting for the occasional word) I declared: “But this is as insane as the Emperor himself was. There are no streets running northwest.”

  “Not exactly, but let us start out anyway. I have an idea or two,” Wish said, starting off. By the time we had crossed Post Street he’d realized that with his long legs he was bound to outwalk me and had courteously moderated his pace so that I could keep up.

  “There’s just one thing you haven’t quite gotten to, Fremont,” Wish said, “and I have to wonder why.”

  “Oh, my goodness!” I exclaimed suddenly, ignoring his remark. “I didn’t know this was here.”

  It was a narrow little street not on the map, more an alleyway than a street. San Francisco is full of such little passages, especially in the downtown area, and I saw that if we took this one we would be making a kind of jog in a northwesterly direction.

  “How clever you are, Wish,” I said as we set off. Then I took up what he’d previously said, taking for granted Wish’s ability to follow my sometimes convoluted mental processes: “I know what you mean, I’m not deliberately being obtuse, it’s just that I’m not in the least sure what I’m looking for myself. The Emperor hasn’t exactly said. He said that since he passed over to the other side his mind has gradually been growing clear, and he can remember now where he hid some valuables of his before he went away on the two-year journey from which he returned insane.”

  “Fascinating,” said Wish. “You know, there have been rumors ever since he died that he had assets stashed away somewhere, and in his, er, incapacity he just forgot where he’d put them. So it makes sense, in a kind of weird way.”

  “Yes. What he specifically says is ‘my most valuable possession.’ That could be anything. Unfortunately he himself—that is, if this automatic writing of Frances’s is really a communication from the ghost of Emperor Norton—”

  “Do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know. Well, of course I don’t really think so. How can one think that? It’s just that Frances is so convinced, and I did see her that one time when she was definitely in a trance.… Wish, I don’t honestly know what to think about any of these things. I only know there will be answers if one keeps on going, and that’s what I’ve decided to do.”

  “Makes good enough sense to me. All right, we’re about to cross Grant Street. Now watch this—” Wish strode along a few steps ahead of me, peering between buildings. We were getting into the edge of Chinatown, and so the buildings seemed to huddle closer together, to take on a different character, somehow less imposing yet more secretive about whatever might be going on behind their facades.

  And then, all of a sudden, Wish Stephenson disappeared. I was left standing on the sidewalk with the sounds of the City around me: the street traffic; the pattering of feet, most of them Chinese in their soft shoes; the sounds of music, the distinctively different harmonies of the East and the West, filtered through the cracks around closed windows and doors.

  A moment later, barely more than time to get my breath back after it had unexpectedly caught in my throat, Wish popped out again.

  “Don’t do things like that to me!” I exclaimed, for although I’d known he was likely to show back up immediately, there are times when what you think is most likely to happen is not what happens at all.

  Wish held out his hand. “Come on!”

  I took it and he pulled me into the narrowest alley I had ever seen. But it did go through, all the way through to Kearney. By making a kind of zigzag through the two narrow streets, we had traversed the Emperor’s two blocks in a northwesterly direction.

  “This is quite amazing,” I said, as I had that realization.

  “Now what?” Wish asked when we came out onto Kearney.

  I reached into my bag for Frances’s papers, but paused before drawing them out. Wish and I had stayed longer in the City of Paris than either of us had realized. Time had gotten away from us somehow, for night was falling. One of those rare, clear nights when the sky turns a deep blue violet that steadily darkens to deep purple and then to black. On the second and third levels of the buildings around us, where people lived over their businesses, lights were coming on. Some were electric, but many had the softer glow of candles inside the pleated white paper lanterns that the Chinese use when they want light primarily to see, rather than to be decorative or festive.

  There is something about that hour of the night, when you can look through the windows of people’s homes and find them for a little while unguarded, before they realize the dark has come and they should close the shutters, draw the drapes, pull down the shades … something about it that is both beautiful and sad. Why sad, I could never say, I only knew that was how I often felt, and I had never tried to express it to anyone, not even to Michael.

  So I said to Wish Stephenson, “It’s too late to continue this now. It’s time to go home. I’ll make a note of where we came out, and return here another day.”

  “Yes, I suppose that’s wise.” Wish sounded a bit disappointed. He took my elbow lightly in his hand and tried his best to tame his long stride to match mine. He talked of inconsequential things, and I paid him little heed. My melancholy mood had taken over, and he sensed it. He did not try to josh me out of it, for which I was grateful. And even though it took him far out of his way, he accompanied me on the streetcar home to Divisadero Street, on account of its being dark outside. And I, who am so independent, unaccountably allowed him to do it.

  Half that night, I sat by my window in the dark, looking out over the City, gripped by melancholy and also severely chastened. Not that Wish had chastened me, oh no, he was far too good a creature for that; I had chastened myself. Wish had merely said, as he stood on the top step outside the door to m
y half of the house, “Fremont, there was something I took it upon myself to do after you left this morning, because I knew it had to be done, and I hope you aren’t going to mind. I don’t want to give the impression I’m trying to interfere with your case.”

  At those words a knot had formed in my stomach, and it hardened as Wish went on to explain that, while his mother was making her phone calls, he had quietly slipped down to the SFPD and put out the word on Ingrid Swann’s husband. “Otherwise,” he had concluded, “we’d make enemies of the police and they’d never cooperate with us. I know you don’t like them, Fremont, because of the way you were treated when your friend Alice was murdered, but still, private investigators and the police department have to get along. We are, after all, trying to do the same things, and we can do it better if we work together.”

  He was right, of course, and I’d told him so. Not only that, I’d thanked him profusely for saving me from a blunder that could have been bad indeed. In my eagerness to garner publicity and praise for J&K, I had overlooked the very point on which Wish had been so sensitive.

  As I sat by the window in the dark, a part of me argued: Of course Wish was sensitive to things like our relationship with the police, because he used to be one of them, he’d been trained to think like that. Which didn’t necessarily make that kind of thinking right.…

  For even deeper down inside of me, in another, darker place entirely, there was a stubborn, usually hidden woman who did not agree with Wish at all. This was my most dangerous self; this was some wildness in me that did not believe justice was necessarily accomplished within the so-called law. And I knew, oh yes, I knew, that when the wild part of me rose up she would not be denied.

  So I sat through the dark hours and struggled with myself, because although I had some skills and some training, and according to Michael, my mentor, excellent instincts, still it was perfectly true that I did not know what I was doing. I was wandering in this strange world of ghostly emperors, mesmerists and somnambulists, mediums and murder. And I felt as if I were wandering in circles, getting nowhere at all.

  It was a long time before I slept, and when I awoke I did not feel refreshed.

  ———

  Several cups of coffee, combined with general good health and comparative youth, soon had me functioning as if my night had not been such an unmitigated sinkhole of worry and indecision. By the time the Stephensons, mother and son, had arrived at J&K, I was ensconced at my table/desk and deep into planning, with calendar at hand.

  Today’s date was April 6. My father would arrive on the ninth, in three days, staying over my birthday, the tenth and returning to Boston by train on the eleventh. I rather wished, as he was coming so far, that he could stay longer, but gathered from the tone of his correspondence that this was not possible—I supposed, because of Augusta. I stared into the distance, lost for a moment in amorphous thought, only vaguely aware of Edna’s scurrying about the kitchen to set a fresh pot of coffee on to perk, and the soothing drone of her son’s voice on the telephone out in the office. I could not seem to make my mind grapple with the essential question: Why, after all this time, was Father coming here for this particular birthday? Why now and not last year, my first birthday post-earthquake (we San Franciscans tend to mark everything now by whether it happened before or after the Great Quake in 1906), when I had wanted so much to see him that I had practically begged him to bring Augusta and meet me at the Hotel Del Monte in Monterey for just a few days. His flat refusal had been such a bitter disappointment at the time that I had tucked away my longing to see him deep in one of those back closets of the mind whence it would be difficult, if not impossible, to retrieve. And now, all unbidden and unexpected, he was coming. Alone. It was rather strange. Wonderful, but strange.

  Edna reeled through the conference room on her way back to the office, patting me on the arm in passing with a cheery, “Working hard already, eh, dearie?” that broke my reverie. It was just as well, for I’d been getting nowhere.

  “Hard enough, Edna,” I called after her, missing the beat by not very much. And then Wish came in to tell me his schedule, and the telephone rang again—new clients, I hoped—and so the day got off to a start.

  I had to see Frances. I had tried calling, on the off chance that one of the servants might pick up the telephone in Jeremy’s study and I could persuade him or her to bring the lady of the house to the phone. That had not worked; the study must have been sitting locked, and the telephone in it, because it rang and rang. That left me no choice but to pay her a call, which in turn did set up the choice of whether I should go in by the front door as a guest or surreptitiously by the side with my own key.

  I walked over to the McFadden mansion. The day was as fine, for weather, as the previous night had been. Such perfect days are rare in my foggy city, and we who live here treasure them. Of course the sun could be shining brightly in one neighborhood while another could be shrouded in fog; or it could be raining on one of the City’s hills but not on any other; and so it went. One accepted good weather as the gift that it was, and enjoyed it while one could, which, as I thought about it, seemed not too bad a way to go about living one’s life in general.

  When I sighted the large house that was my destination, I slowed my pace but did continue walking. As I approached, I wanted to be sensitive to the place itself … not that I believed myself to have psychic powers, but rather that I thought a finely tuned instinct to be one of the private investigator’s best weapons. And as I’ve said, during my training Michael had confirmed something I’d already suspected: I did have good instincts. I just had never paid much attention to them before, and now I tried to—at least, whenever I thought of it.

  Sometimes there are houses, or certain well-defined outdoor spaces, that one can read rather like a book. They have a certain mood to them, as if at some indelible point in time something had happened there so momentous that the event and its lingering echoes of energy had become embedded in the place forever.

  What was it I felt from the McFadden house?

  I drew closer. It was as if a kind of aura surrounded the house itself, a field within whose bounds the house could grab you and draw you inevitably in; but if you stayed beyond that invisible perimeter you were safe and could pass by unscathed. I let the house have me. I would indeed enter in, but on my own terms; and so I used my key and went in by the side door.

  Disturbance. That was the aura this house exuded. Not violence so much as simple turmoil. Things moving, nothing ever truly quiet, nothing ever really still. No peace, no love, no … quietude. A favorite word of my mother’s, that had been: “quietude.” And it had been she who engendered that atmosphere in our Boston home.

  Having crossed the garden room, braved that hall space near the kitchen, and entered the back stairs, I paused, still sharpening all my observational senses. There had been bacon here for breakfast. The smell of it lingering in the air made my mouth water—though since I’d learned bacon was sliced pork belly (Michael told me; I hadn’t particularly wanted to know) some of the pleasure of eating it had been ruined. Whatever midmorning routines the housekeeper and the maid—and the gardener if he should happen to be about—maintained, they were apparently at them. There was no talking and carrying on, but there was a sense of general busyness in the air. And of course that ever present disquietude. Ah! Yes, that was the word that described the atmosphere of Frances McFadden’s house to a T: “disquietude.”

  I silently thanked my dead mother for her powers of description and went on up the stairs as quickly and soundlessly as possible, holding my skirts up close to my body, so that I would not trip or brush against anything that might be knocked down and thus cause an alarm. I passed through the stairwell and out into the second-floor hallway uneventfully. The door to Frances’s little suite of rooms stood open and I headed straight to it. Rapped lightly with my knuckles once, and then again. If she was inside, she took no heed.

  So I went on in.

  Frances
was there. She was not alone.

  18

  ———

  The Mesmerist and the Somnambulist

  The mesmerist and the somnambulist were deeply engaged with one another. In point of fact, if I were any judge (and by now I should be, Michael being not at any disadvantage in this department), they were engaged in one of the deepest kisses I had ever had the luck—bad or good, it depended how one looked at it—to intrude upon.

  The kiss went on while I observed that they had at least made some pretense, perhaps even a sincere effort, to get down to their peculiar work before becoming, shall we say, distracted. Both Frances and Patrick were fully dressed, Frances in a demure frock that looked about as designed for seduction as Little Miss Muffet’s tuffet had been for comfortable seating. Her hair was down; but then, I had learned myself that her hair was often down in the mornings. Patrick was buttoned up to his earlobes in a stiff white collar, along with the usual shirt and dark suit. They were each sitting in a straight-backed chair, facing one another, with a small round tea table between them. On the tea table were a small round crystal ball that looked suspiciously like a paperweight to me, and a deck of cards, face down. Cheap cards, the kind with bicycles on the backs, which suggested that Patrick had brought the cards and the paperweight. Er, crystal ball.

  So they must have started out to work, and then … Yes.

  If they had leaned any harder toward one another over that little table, some architectural or engineering law having to do with pressure points or irresistible forces would have been broken, I was sure of it.

  I turned my head away, burning in the place one might think one would burn if one happened to be watching a kiss such as theirs. It was shameful … and yet, not.

  “Tell me when you’re done,” I said in a clear voice.

  I couldn’t help smiling as my remark brought a little stifled yelp from Frances, followed immediately by much rustling and settling into place, and finally Patrick clearing his throat preparatory to saying, “Good morning, Fremont!” in his most stentorian tone of voice.