Emperor Norton's Ghost

by Dianne Day

  “Sure.” I shrugged in my best postadolescent fashion, as I turned another page and bit my tongue. A piece of fiction resided on the new page, illustrated most tastefully, not to say graphically: Europa and the Bull. Yes, certainly a bull.

  I felt greatly relieved when Wish and Jeremy had gone out of my line of vision, and then out of the room, for I could at last put that magazine aside. I felt as if I should wash my hands, and indeed I did wipe my palms on my trousers.

  I had no intention of staying put, no matter what I’d said to Wish. I was restless, eager to learn something concrete, do something significant, on my own. So I got up, retrieved the fedora, and started to stroll around, playing not the gawky boy but just a young man in a new place, looking around.

  I had some conversations, cautiously at first, and then more confidently as I seemed to be accepted in my country-cousin persona. The men would talk to me, but only perfunctorily; my cheap suit and celluloid collar labeled me beneath their notice and so they did not even look me in the eye. But I did learn two things that were useful. First, Jeremy McFadden was not liked, but he was respected—his support in this, his own club, was rock-solid. Second, the men of the Parnassus cared not a whit that two women mediums were dead. These men were not interested in the occult, the supernatural, or the Spiritualist, and they thought women who were involved in such things were uppity, in some ways worse than whores, who at least knew their place.

  I suppose I could have gotten away with asking, wide-eyed, “And what place would that be, sir?” I was tempted, just to hear them say it, but as I already knew the answer I did not. It would have served no purpose except to further rile me.

  Finally I roamed toward the bar, where I assumed Wish was still conversing with Jeremy McFadden, as I had not seen either of them since they’d headed in that direction. I spotted them standing right up at the bar, where I couldn’t handily eavesdrop on their conversation. That was a disappointment.

  I moseyed on over in that direction anyhow, keeping to the periphery of the room, which was square, not so large as the main room but not small either, and sparsely populated. Most of the men were seated in little clusters of two or three around small tables, muttering low. I kept glancing up at the paintings hung on the walls. I was beginning to see the reasoning behind the Parnassus Club’s décor: It was all mythologically based, what with Parnassus being the Greek version of Mount Olympus, home of the gods; and Greek gods giving artists an excuse for depicting an astounding variety of mostly naked males and females engaged in various activities.

  Then there were the animals and the women, for instance a truly astonishing painting depicting Leda and the Swan—which had me thinking odd thoughts about feathers.

  At last I had worked my way around the room to where I could sit partially concealed by a potted palm and overhear parts of two conversations: between two men at the nearest table and, in the lulls between their words, snatches of whatever topic Jeremy McFadden and Wish Stephenson were so ardently engaged in.

  From Jeremy I heard: “My wife (mumble mumble) serious waste of time. Tried to get her (mumble mumble mumble).”

  And Wish said, “Oh, certainly, I couldn’t agree more. But about that investment, where did you say—”

  It went on in that fashion for a couple of minutes, until the pair at the nearby table drowned out the other pair in the octogenarian enthusiasm of their leave-taking. I used this bit of a fuss to approach Wish directly, and came up alongside him at the bar, using his own body to screen me from McFadden.

  “Hey, cuz,” I said in a stage whisper, tugging on his sleeve, “time to go.”

  I could see from the way the back of his neck tensed up that I’d startled him, but he hid it well. Wish turned his head toward me slowly, without moving his body at all, and said, “Hey yourself, brat. But you know, for once in your life, you’re right.” And in nothing flat, he’d extricated himself from McFadden, stuck him with the bill, and was shepherding me down that long green-carpeted hallway and out the door.

  From the Parnassus we went on to have our stultifying experience with the Native Sons, which owing to that club’s being quite nearby, did not allow us much time for talking in between. Nor did the stuffiness of the latter allow me as a reckless (or perhaps feckless might have been a better word) youth the opportunity to do much more than sit stiffly in the clubroom under the watchful eye of a major-domo, who appeared to be about a hundred and ten years of age. I couldn’t even trail after Wish, which I figured was no great loss, as the men looked about as fossilized as the collections in glass cases spread around the room.

  At last, late in the afternoon, we caught the cable car and then the streetcar that would take us back to Divisadero Street. Again all talk had to wait because both were too crowded for private conversation. Finally, after we’d dismounted and begun to walk the half block uphill to the double house, I said: “One gathers the Native Sons were not at all helpful about anything.”

  “Too right!”

  “But what about at the Parnassus? We were there such a long time. You must have learned something valuable.” It was impossible to keep the eagerness from my voice.

  Wish tugged at his earlobe, a mannerism as characteristic of him as Michael’s rubbing his hair the wrong way was of Michael himself, and serving approximately the same purpose. “Sometimes,” Wish said carefully, “what you don’t learn can be as important as what you do.”

  “And sometimes you just haven’t learned anything,” I snapped, not in the mood to be coddled. “So which is it this time?”

  Wish looked down at me. Though I am tall, he was much taller, and his warm hazel eyes appeared a bit turbulent in their depths. “Jeremy McFadden is every bit as powerful as your partner Michael Archer—excuse me, Kossoff—was trying to tell us a while back. Nobody is going to cross that man. It would be too dangerous.”

  I stopped walking. The house was only a few yards away, and I wanted to finish this conversation without the assistance of Edna Stephenson. “If he’s that powerful, he could have arranged the murders,” I said. “He’d know how. It would be no problem at all for a man like that to set something up.”

  Wish nodded unhappily. “That’s true. But what is equally true is that we’ll probably never know. If he did it, Fremont, his tracks are so well hidden that they’re damn near impossible to discover. No one I talked to would say anything more definite about the night when we assume Abigail Locke was murdered than that they believed Jeremy McFadden had been at the Parnassus Club all evening as he generally was, but without his wife, who had asked to be excused. It had apparently been Ladies’ Night that night.”

  “Go on.”

  Wish shook his head and shoved his hands deep into his pockets, a sign of resignation, or so it seemed. “I’ve seen men like him get away with murder before. Not to say he necessarily did it, you understand, we don’t really know that.”

  “I realize that,” I said, wanting to be fair and to erase my lingering sense of guilt for having in my head convicted a man who only stood accused—and that by very few.

  “Nobody will be able to shake McFadden. His friends and those who depend on him for their business—and the numbers of people in those two categories are many, by the way—will not let him down. We’ll never be able to prove anything against McFadden himself, Fremont. That just isn’t going to happen. We’d stand a much better chance trying to find out who he hired to do it, if he did indeed hire someone. And that’s really not a job for the likes of us, it’s more for the police.”

  I knew what he said was true; I just hadn’t wanted to admit it. Still didn’t, even if the most incontrovertible piece of evidence to that effect should happen to appear right in front of my face. I didn’t say anything, didn’t respond at all to Wish’s earnest words, but turned on my heel and set off to walk briskly the few remaining steps up to the house. I could not speak for disappointment. We had seemed to be doing so well, and yet we’d learned nothing.

  “Fremont!” Wis
h sprinted after me. A few long strides brought him to my side. “Don’t be so discouraged. This is early stages yet.” His voice dropped a note or two in the register. “And you must really allow me to give you a compliment.” His hand on my arm stayed my progress.

  I looked silently at him. It was late in the day. We had been long at our work, and the softness of the air with twilight coming on seemed to soften his features and to blur the edges of his body.

  “You were … you are … wonderful,” he said.

  Then he paused, while I thought, Oh dear. Such a lovely young man, and while I had often sensed he might be rather more, shall we say, interested in me than was a good idea, I had never really seen it in him. Or felt it, as in the faint trembling of his fingers now lightly touching my arm. I did not know what to do, so I did nothing. Said nothing.

  Wish rallied, gathered himself together, and went on in more of a comradely tone of voice: “Your disguise, I meant. It’s very good, really.” His eyes swept over me quickly and returned to rest on mine. “Of course I prefer you as a woman, but you make a very convincing, and handsome, man. Even that voice you used was passable. You must have had to practice a long time.”

  I grinned, giving him an A for effort. “I certainly did,” I said. “And now, before it gets any later, let’s go tell your mother what we did this afternoon. She’s always an appreciative audience, and will make me feel better, since we didn’t get what we set out after.”

  “Oh, I dunno,” Wish said cryptically as we climbed the steps to J&K’s side of the double house, “I got some pretty good stuff there, even if it wasn’t what I thought I was looking for.”

  I assumed he was talking about the Bell case. It wasn’t until much later I found out I was wrong about that.

  ———

  I couldn’t sleep. I missed Michael so much it was like—like what? Like nothing I had ever known. I only knew I could not stay one more minute in the bed alone.

  I got up and went to the window, the one from which I can in daylight see the Golden Gate, that narrow entrance to San Francisco Bay; it was my distant relation, John C. Fremont, who named that strait the Golden Gate—or so the story goes. Always a controversial figure was Cousin Fremont, and his wife Jessie even more so, and so there were some people who would, out of envy, take away all his honors, including the naming of the Golden Gate. But I had adored Cousin Fremont—or at least the idea of him—for almost my whole life. For the most part in secret, because even my mother had not approved.

  Of course at night I could see nothing but a few stars and some wispy high clouds. No fog, because the day had been both clear and cool. It is on warmer days when the sun heats the land in California’s great valleys that the heat in turn pulls the fog in off the water. I shivered, went and got my green wool robe and put it on, then returned to the window as if I had nowhere else to go. Nor did I.

  My eyelids felt stretched tight and the eyeballs as if there were grit in them. Yet I could not close my eyes; if I did, they would pop back open all of their own accord.

  So I stood by the window and thought about my father’s visit to San Francisco, because that was what was really on my mind. Two more days, and on the third Father would arrive and check himself in at the Hotel St. Francis on Union Square. I was immensely glad he was coming alone. Yet why … why would he come without Augusta?

  For my twenty-fifth birthday, he’d said. Something he wanted to give me, now and not later.

  “Another watch?” I wondered aloud. He’d given me an elegant little lapel watch when I turned twenty-one, but it had been smashed in the Great Quake. But no—Father would hardly come all the way across the country to give me a watch that he could just as easily send through the mail.

  No, it must be something important. Very important.

  I liked thinking about this, liked the curiosity welling up from inside me and pushing out the other, more uncomfortable emotions. I nurtured it, making lists in my head of all the things I could think of that Father might want to give me in person: Something of my mother’s that I didn’t know about, something that had been precious between them. Something of Mother’s that he’d kept secret from Augusta, which was why she could not come. Hmm. That certainly seemed possible, as well as plausible. But what could it be?

  Some exotic, valuable piece of jewelry.

  Love letters. (What an interesting thought!)

  The deed to a piece of property that had been theirs alone, a place for secret trysts. Where would such a place be? In the mountains of New Hampshire? No, Mother had disliked mountains intensely, “all that up and down” she’d said she didn’t care for. So, along the sea somewhere, perhaps an island. Yes …

  With my thoughts running thus, I wandered back to bed and lay down to continue my hypothesizing. An island … where?

  And so musing, I fell at last asleep.

  ———

  My two days would have to be packed with activity if I were to make the most of them. Having awakened from my relatively brief sleep as entirely refreshed as if I’d been much longer abed, I dressed with somewhat more care than usual in a real dress rather than the skirt and blouse I usually wore. This dress, although bought, like most of my clothes, secondhand after the earthquake, was one of my best and I knew I looked handsome in it. It was cranberry wool, tissue-light yet warm, with a bit of ivory ruching at the high round collar and edging the cuffs. The color brought out the red in my reddish-brown hair, which for once I took the time to arrange in a pouf on top of my head.

  All this care with my appearance was in part practice for when Father would be here, and in part it was for the benefit of Dr. William Van Zant, the hypnotist and debunker of Spiritualist fraud. I had decided to pay him a visit at his earliest convenience—this morning, if possible. Some instinct told me that he might hold a piece of the puzzle; but then, I might just be grasping at straws.

  21

  ———

  Cries in the Night

  Dr. William Van Zant was a type of man I remembered all too well, though I had not recently encountered one: a self-assured intellectual, as well groomed as he was undoubtedly well read. He would have seemed at home on any of the great university campuses back East, but out here in the West he appeared somewhat at a loss, as if he might have forgotten the directions for how to get home to his ivory tower.

  “Miss Jones,” he said when I arrived promptly for our one o’clock appointment, “I recall your, er … um, partner Mr. Kossoff. Charming fellow, interesting as well. Russian extraction, I think he said?”

  “Yes,” I acknowledged, inclining my head and moving to take possession of a chair to one side of the huge desk that dominated the room, “but I am here on an entirely separate matter. As you were so helpful to my partner, I hoped you might prove to be equally so for me.”

  Van Zant, who was a man of average height and weight but excessive neatness—from his carefully waxed mustache down to the mirrorlike shine of his black shoes—leaned against his desk and crossed his ankles precisely. The pose appeared studied, affecting a casualness this man could never hope to achieve. He nodded his head up and down and made a sound that might have been “Um-hm,” or any number of indistinct offerings of encouragement.

  So I arranged the skirt of my cranberry-colored dress somewhat more prettily about my legs, crossed my own white silk-clad ankles, which I had taken care should be just visible, and said: “I understand that you are an authority in the field of—how should one say—the mesmeric arts?”

  “Oh no! My dear woman, you have been sadly misinformed.” This galvanized him into uprightness once more, and quickly, too. He raised his eyebrows and puckered his mouth in disapproval, which rounded up his cheeks and chin in an unattractive way. Van Zant was one of those unfortunate people whose faces are defined more by flesh than by bone. He raised his arm with index finger pointed upward pedantically. “I am a scientist, a practitioner of psychology in the new tradition being pioneered in Europe by the followers of Dr. Freud.
Dr. Freud, you see, has proven the existence of the subconscious mind. My specialty is the scientific use of hypnotism to access the subconscious.”

  As this was exactly the direction I’d intended to lead him in, I was not distressed by either his words or his tone. Meekly I ventured, “I do beg your pardon. I’m afraid I haven’t the slightest idea what the difference is between mesmerism and hypnotism. I had thought them to be identical processes.”

  Now Van Zant went behind the desk, sat, and folded his hands on top. He had short, stubby fingers with nails impeccably groomed. I glanced at him quickly, and then away. As one might have expected of a hypnotist, or a mesmerist, his eyes did have power once he had trained them on you in a certain manner. They were such a dark brown they were almost black, and had a curious intensity of focus that was compelling, although the orbs themselves were no handsomer than the man; they were rather too small and too close together.

  So, as he talked, I did not look directly at him but rather in a subtle manner took in the various accoutrements of his office: A fine carpet of silken wool in shades of muted red fading to rose, worked in an elaborate pattern with other colors too numerous to recount; mahogany glass-fronted bookshelves; the huge desk itself, also of gleaming mahogany; heavy curtains of ivory damask with an excellent drape that spoke of expensive material; a scent in the air of fine cigars—which, though I loathe the things, I had to allow was another indication of no expense spared by this man.

  “A mesmerist,” he was saying, or rather lecturing, “is not a follower of the scientific process. The mesmerist seeks to establish a link between himself and his subject, whom he deliberately makes dependent upon him. He reduces the subject’s will to compliance with his own will, and while she is in that state—I say ‘she,’ you understand, because those with illnesses that respond to this type of treatment are virtually always females—he makes the suggestions that are designed to, upon their adaptation, return her to health.