On Friday, Collis and Hannah ate lunch at the California Market, at Darbee & Immel’s, a huge mound of shellfish, a small rump steak each, and a pot of hot coffee. Collis had spent most of the morning with Andy Hunt, arguing about the railroad, and he was going to talk in the afternoon to Horace Johnson, one of the directors of Pacific Mail, in an attempt to soften up the steamship line’s adamant opposition to transcontinental trains. Johnson had once said in public that California’s economy and security depended almost entirely on her isolation, and that to build a railroad link with the east would destroy ‘at a stroke’ her political integrity and her financial strength.
Johnson had failed to add, of course, that a railroad link would also destroy the hugely profitable monopolies of the stage-line owners and the steamship companies.
Hannah ate very little lunch, and looked pale. It was plain to Collis that the strain of staying in San Francisco, only a few blocks away from Walter, was beginning to take its toll. He was sure that she loved him far more than Walter, if love was what it was; and that she was still prepared to ask Walter for a divorce. But the effervescence of their first night together had been flattened by days of waiting alone in her room at the International, of watching the afternoon light sink gradually across the floral wallpaper to the floor. She was beginning to doubt herself again, to worry that her infatuation might not be worth the loss of her respectability, her cosy marriage, and her peace of mind with God.
Collis realised that she was faltering. Her lovemaking on Thursday night had been distant, distracted. He knew that if he didn’t take quick, positive steps to re-establish her social position, he could well lose her.
He said, over the coffee, ‘When I’ve spoken to Horace Johnson, I’ll go down to the store and see Walter.’
She looked up, her eyes widening. ‘Do you mean that?’
Collis nodded. Around them, the lunchroom was noisy and jostling, and the clatter of empty clamshells being cleared off plates sounded like castanets. ‘I want to keep you, Hannah,’ Collis added, and reached out to take her wrist.
‘Yes,’ she said, lovingly but somehow vaguely. ‘But you won’t be cruel to him, will you? You won’t –’
‘I’ll treat him as gently as china,’ Collis assured her.
Hannah picked up her coffee cup, realised it was empty, and put it down again. ‘I shall wait for you then, at the hotel,’ she said. ‘You won’t be too late, will you? You won’t keep me in suspense for too long?’
Collis didn’t answer. There was nothing he could say until he’d talked to Walter. The waiter came up with his white towel slung over his shoulder and demanded laconically, ‘Through?’ and Collis gave him a shrug which probably meant yes.
An hour later, in the oak-panelled offices of Pacific Mail, he stood by the window of the waiting-room, gazing out over a triangular view of Montgomery Street, and waiting, as Hannah was waiting for him, for his appointment with Horace Johnson. He had already smoked two cheroots, to the annoyance of the stiff-bosomed receptionist, and he was thinking about a third.
As three o’clock struck, however, Horace Johnson’s door opened, and Horace himself appeared, a big, broad example of San Francisco’s most robust eaters and drinkers. He was ruddy, white-whiskered, with a pair of mean pince-nez clipped into the fruity flesh of his nose. He waved Collis inside as if he were directing traffic.
‘I know why you’re here,’ he said, in a deep, rich voice.
‘Only to further our acquaintance, and our understanding,’ said Collis guardedly. ‘I don’t really expect to win your support.’
Johnson sat down in a huge leather library chair and stuffed his fat fingers together. ‘You expect right, Mr Edmonds, I’ve already spoken to that flash partner of yours, the one with the checkered suit. And the only reason I’ve taken you up on your suggestion that we meet today is that I want to make my views emphatically clear to all of you, individually – as clear as I damned well can.’
Collis remained standing, his hat in his hand. ‘I appreciate your directness,’ he replied with a sour smile. ‘I’ve heard you’re a blunt man, as well as a big one.’
Johnson stared at him for a moment, and then chuckled. ‘I like your impertinence, Mr Edmonds. I always enjoyed a little impertinence. But mark my words – by the time you’ve lived in this fair city of ours for as long as I have, you too will have a profile to be proud of.’ He patted his stomach as if it were a small boy who had done well at school.
‘I’m going to build a transcontinental railroad, Mr Johnson, and I want it to terminate right here in San Francisco. Will Pacific Mail stand in my way, no matter what?’
Johnson brushed his whiskers. ‘It isn’t just the Pacific Mail Steamship Company that’s going to stand in your way, Mr Edmonds. Nor is it just the California Steam Navigation Company, nor any one of the ferry lines, nor Wells Fargo. It’s the whole of the San Francisco business community, which is already alert to what you and your little band of Sacramento storekeepers is up to. If you were to terminate a transcontinental road in San Francisco, on the waterfront, then you would effectively control all the shipping that goes in and out of here, and through the shipping, you would effectively control the city itself.’
‘I know that,’ said Collis. ‘But how can you stand in the way of progress? The Sierras will be crossed by rail one day, and what are you going to do? Lay your belly across the tracks and refuse to let the locomotives pass?’
‘I’m going to say one thing only,’ Horace Johnson growled. ‘Any attempt by you or your cronies to bring the railroad into San Francisco will be resisted by the full strength of my steamship company, and by all of those companies that make up the business life of this city. You’ll fail, I warn you, so don’t think you’ll ever collect on any of those bets you made with Arthur Teach and Laurence Melford and all those other fellows.’
‘You know about those?’
Horace Johnson nodded, as if to say, ‘Who doesn’t?’ Then he said, ‘I’ll lay you a bet myself. For every yard of waterfront you ever gain for your railroad, I’ll buy you a bottle of brandy.’
Collis put his hat back on his head and tapped it. ‘Mr Johnson,’ he said, extending his hand, ‘I am about to embark on a very drunken decade.’
Afterwards, closeted with Hannah in the darkness of her hotel room, he tried to think who to blame. Was it Horace Johnson’s fault, for keeping him so long at the steamship office? Was it his own fault, for talking so freely to Mr Kwang? Or was it the fault of the railroad itself, that glittering and apocalyptic vision which demanded so much human life and so much human suffering?
The railroad seemed rapacious. Collis could understand why men like Horace Johnson were afraid of it. He was afraid of it himself. He felt as if he and his partners in the Sierra Pacific were custodians of some dark steel sword, as magical and mythical as Excalibur, which, unsheathed, could cut America’s ties with the traditions of her past in one slice. It depressed him, this thought, but it also excited him. He knew that they were going to wield it one day, and that life in America would never be the same again.
He had left Horace Johnson’s office at a quarter after three. The afternoon had been growing snappish, and he had buttoned up his gloves. He had stopped at a cigar store to replenish his cheroot case, and then walked on to Walter West’s notions emporium. His heart had been beating steadily but distinctly. In his long grey coat he had felt like an apprentice mortician, attending on the decease of a marriage.
The bell above the door had jangled as he had pushed his way inside. The store had been oddly silent. He had paused, then crossed the boarded floor and called, ‘Mr West? Anyone there?’
The stiff shop dummies with their bright-pink faces had smiled back at him sightlessly. The dust of thread and cotton cloth had fallen through the sunlight. There had been that sharp smell of dressing, and of linseed. In a back yard somewhere, a woman was calling, ‘William! William! Here, kitty!’
‘Mr West?’ Collis had called again. Again,
there had been no answer. He had waited a few seconds more, and then walked up to the counter and pinged at the brass bell with the flat of his hand.
The ping had died away. Collis had turned around, his back to the counter, and taken a deep breath. It had been bad enough trying to screw up the courage to talk to Walter West about divorcing Hannah in the first place. To be obliged to wait in this dim and silent store was fifty times worse.
He had heard a shuffling noise, and turned around again. He had listened, alert, his pulse rushing in his eardrums. Nothing for a few moments, but then another shuffling noise, and something which could have been a whisper. It had appeared to come from behind the counter.
Collis had cautiously made his way around a stack of gingham to the end of the counter, and peered over. What he had seen had made his scalp freeze and prickle. On the buff-coloured bolts of calico behind the serving area had been dark splashes and squiggles which were unmistakably blood.
‘Oh, my God,’ he had breathed. He had pushed the gingham out of the way and stepped right around the counter. And there, lying amid bloodstained receipt books and unravelled tape measures, his hair and his beard clotted with gore as black and sticky as molasses, had been Walter West.
Collis had been stiff with fright and horror. He had seen men killed before, men crushed by carriages, children left floating and bloated in the East River, but the sheer quantity of blood that had plastered the body of Walter West had been hideous to the point of unbelievability. How could anyone have so much blood?
Dragging over a bolt of linen to kneel on, Collis had crouched, shaking, beside the haberdasher’s body. He had coaxed, hoarsely, ‘Mr West? Walter?’ But Walter West’s eyes had remained puffy and closed, and when Collis had placed his fingertips close to his open mouth, he had felt no breath. Maybe the whispers and scratchings that Collis had heard earlier had been Walter West’s final twitches of death.
Collis had felt very sick. This near to the body, he had been able to see what had happened. Walter West had been attacked with knives or hatchets, so sharp that many of his facial wounds appeared to be nothing more than thin red hairlines. His forearms and his hands had been savagely cut, which must have meant that he had tried to protect himself against his attackers.
His tweed vest had been slashed into bloodstained tatters, and only his watch chain had been holding in a soft bulge of pale-pink intestine.
Collis had stood up. The store had suddenly become oppressively stuffy and hot. He had been sweating, and trembling like a man with chronic pneumonia. He had walked to the door, and stood there for a time looking out at the curious reality of the street outside.
He had known that there was no queston of calling the police. He was living with Walter West’s wife in a situation which even the most broad-minded of investigators would regard as improper, and a first-class motive for murder. He had to leave, discreetly and unnoticed.
He had tilted the brow of his hat down so that it covered his forehead. Then, quickly, he had stepped out on to the sidewalk and closed the store behind him. He had heard the bell jangling loudly. Loud, yes. But not loud enough to rouse the dead, Collis had thought.
The sweat on his forehead had chilled as he walked north on Montgomery as far as Clay. Then he had turned right and gone mechanically downhill towards the waterfront. He had followed the waterfront as far as the old Pacific Street Wharf, oblivious to the wagons and carriages and noisy jostling of merchants and lightermen and stevedores. Then he had turned down a side alley and pushed his way into a notorious crimps’ bar called the So Cheerful. It had been stinking and crowded in there, full of sailors and drunks and cheap whores, but Collis had badly needed a drink. He had elbowed his way up to the bar, where a bald-headed negro with gold earrings had been filling up pots of steam beer, and he had asked harshly for a bourbon. The negro had set down a whole bottle of Kentucky Eagle and a glass. The men who drank at the So Cheerful didn’t generally seek their oblivion in small measures.
He had knocked back one shot, then poured himself another. A young girl with dyed black hair and cheeks rouged into bright crimson spots had pushed up close to him. She had smelled of sweat and lily of the valley. Her pale-brown Spanish-style dress had been left unlaced so that her nipples were bare. She had saucily squeezed Collis’s thigh and said: ‘Got a drink for a good girl, lover?’
Collis had stared at her. Walter West was lying cut to slivers on the floor of his store, and Collis himself, not a week ago, had damned the poor man to hell. Sweet Jesus Christ, he had thought, how little we really want those things which we pray for.
He had walked all the way to Knickerbocker Jane’s. He hadn’t known why he had felt the urge to go there, but he had headed that way, directly, and without any thought of first going to see Hannah at the International. He hadn’t yet worked out how he was going to cope with Hannah, and he had needed to talk to somebody sympathetic about his own shock at discovering Walter West’s body before trying to deal with hers. Knickerbocker Jane could give him an alibi, too, and that wasn’t an unimportant consideration, especially with the law so watchful these days.
Knickerbocker Jane had received him in her parlour. She had been dressed in black, ironically, for the death of a favourite client. He had died on Tuesday – an elderly banker who for nine years had lavished on her his thick bankroll and his thin seed, and had always called her ‘my lamb’. Jane hadn’t been particularly pleased to see Collis, and she had turned her cheek away when he had attempted to kiss her. Like the queen of the whores; which she was. Or like his own mother.
‘Do you want a drink?’ she had asked him. ‘You look as if you could use one.’
‘I’ve had enough, thanks. Down on the waterfront.’
She had watched him silently for a while, her back straight, her freckled cleavage swelling over her tight black ruched bodice. ‘Something’s happened,’ she had said, and her voice had been a touch softer. ‘Have you had a spat with your Hannah?’
He had had trouble speaking. Whisky and delayed shock seemed to have swollen his lips, and made it difficult for him to enunciate. ‘I went around this afternoon to see her husband, to talk about their divorce. We thought it was best if I faced him directly. More honourable. But when I got there, he was dead.’
‘Dead? What do you mean?’
‘Exactly that. Murdered. Cut to pieces like meat. There was so much blood I don’t know how I kept my lunch down.’
‘Did anybody see you there?’ asked Knickerbocker Jane. She was immediately alert to the danger of the law.
‘I don’t think so. I left right away.’
‘Well, that’s one blessing at least. If anyone asks, you spent the afternoon here, with my new girl Laura from Denver. Brunette, she is, with a birthmark inside of her thigh the shape of Rhode Island.’
‘Rhode Island?’ Collis had asked incredulously.
Knickerbocker Jane had stood up, with a rustle of black skirts. ‘Do you know who might have killed him, or why?’
‘I don’t have any idea. He was only a shopkeeper. I mean, miners get killed, gamblers get killed. But shopkeepers?’
Knickerbocker Jane had laid a hand on his arm. ‘Did anybody know you were going to see him, apart from your Hannah? Did anybody know you were in the vicinity?’
‘I saw Horace Johnson at the Pacific Mail Steamship Company directly beforehand. But I don’t think he knows about Hannah. He wouldn’t connect me with her husband’s death.’
‘You have to be careful of Horace. He’s fat, but he’s sly.’
‘You know him?’
Knickerbocker Jane had smiled. ‘Horace Johnson has appetites far beyond food and drink, my love. He’s one of my regulars.’
Collis had looked at Knickerbocker Jane with his head on one side. ‘You, er, you wouldn’t – tell me what those particular appetites are? By any chance?’
‘I shouldn’t.’
‘But supposing he’s heard about Hannah? If he doesn’t know about her now, he’s bound to
hear about it sooner or later, when we marry. Or, if we marry. Wouldn’t it be safer if I knew just a little about him? Something to protect me?’
Knickerbocker Jane had nodded. Then, with a flourish, she had sat down again, and set her glass on the wine table beside her.
‘Horace Johnson,’ she said, without any preamble, ‘is a devotee of that very special kind of sport we call “discipline”. He likes to be manacled to the bed, and abused by two or three girls at once.’
‘Horace Johnson?’ Collis had asked, raising his eyebrows.
‘It isn’t uncommon for powerful men, men who inspire fear in everyone they meet, to need an occasional moment when they are completely at the mercy of someone else. I have state senators come here from Sacramento for “discipline”. Even a Congressman once.’
Collis had rubbed his chin thoughtfully. ‘Wouldn’t Mrs Johnson give him the treatment he needs?’
Knickerbocker Jane had laughed. A laugh as dry as her sherry. ‘You still need to know a little bit more about San Francisco society, my love. Mrs Esther Harris Johnson is the daughter of Milward Harris, the chief executive of the state harbour commission. A strict, upright, churchgoing lady, not to Horace’s taste if you’re talking about sex, but one whose family connections have given Pacific Mail a tight, tight grip on the waterfront. Horace Johnson didn’t marry for love, or even for “discipline”. He comes here for that. Horace Johnson married for commerce.’
‘Well, well,’ Collis had said. Knickerbocker Jane’s worldly wisdom and complete equanimity had begun to calm him down. And for the first time since he had knelt down beside Walter West’s butchered body, he had allowed himself the callous but irresistible thought that Hannah was now a widow, respectably free, and that no divorce would be necessary.
‘Do you think I should tell Hannah?’ he had said quietly. ‘Tell her myself? About finding the body, I mean.’
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