Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

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Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades Page 21

by Oakley Hall


  “I know of your son’s troubles in London, by the way,” Bierce said.

  “He was victimized by false friends. I do not excuse him, mind you.” Even when she spoke with force there was a serenity to her words that seemed to me the product of a considerable will. She addressed herself to me:

  “Mr. Redmond, I would prefer that any further confidences be revealed only to Mr. Bierce.”

  “Certainly,” I said, rising. “Lady Caroline, I bring a message from Jimmy Fairleigh in Virginia City. He asked me to tell you that he will never forget you.”

  The beautiful mask suddenly became an unhappy human face. Her lips parted, her eyes flared at me, lines showed in her throat.

  “That sweet unfortunate boy! What is he doing, please?”

  “He is a waiter at the International Hotel there.”

  “And the mines are closing down. The town must be dying. I must do something for him!” she whispered, and the mask reformed itself. I bade her good night.

  Marvins showed me into another sitting room downstairs and busied himself lighting lamps and bringing me another glass of port. I had difficulty sitting still, and the wine seemed an overly heavy and sweet appurtenance of aristocracy. After twenty minutes I asked Marvins to tell Bierce I was taking the air and went outside into the brisk damp, to walk along the McNair brass fence toward the top of Taylor Street hill, where a single streetlamp shed a circle of pale illumination in the fog, as though its flame burned under water.

  I stopped before I reached a point where I could look down on the Brittain house and retraced my steps toward the porte cochere. I turned again just in time to see a figure detach itself from the shrubbery, straddle the fence and hurry away from me. As he passed under the streetlight he glanced back and I thought I caught a glimpse of a glint of fair beard.

  When Bierce joined me I told him I had seen Beau leave the house.

  “I believe it could not have been Beau you saw,” he said. “He was playing chess with Rudolph Buckle in the Billiard Room.”

  “Did you see him?” I asked.

  “No,” he said thoughtfully.

  “But Beau was the subject of our conversation,” he went on. “You said once that Miss Brittain had spoken of his researches. He is obsessed with prostitutes. Lady Caroline is disturbed by this and fears he may get himself into trouble again as he did in London. The fact is, he is in trouble! And how can I discuss with her the probability that his obsession stems from his knowledge of his mother’s former profession? Now he is infatuated with a young Chinese woman, no doubt a prostitute.”

  “She is in danger from the Slasher, then,” I said.

  We started back down California Street toward the lights of Chinatown beneath us.

  “There was a general obsession with Chinese prostitutes in the old days,” Bierce went on. “It is still the case! Every yokel who comes to the City must see for himself. The burning question is not What is man? or Why are we here? but Does the Chinese female possess a different arrangement of sexual apparatus than her white sister? Imagine it! Ah Toy is reputed to have made her fortune by this quest for the essential knowledge. Her price list read ‘Two bits lookee, four bits feelee, six bits doee.’ And I believe the bulk of her fortune came in the satisfaction of the lookees.” He laughed, striding along at his military gait. He seemed pleased with himself.

  He announced that he wished to smoke a few pipes of opium, and he commanded me to accompany him. He needed my counsel.

  We descended into Chinatown, where he seemed familiar with an odoriferous alley off Kearny Street. This was not one of the tourist opium dens. We descended four brick steps and passed along a mossy wall in a play of shadows as dense as black velvet. I could smell the opium before we got to the door of the parlor, that pervasive odor that reminds you of something you can’t quite recall. An old Chinese bowed us inside. In an outer room six men, not all Chinese, lay on wooden bunks alcoved into the wall, jackets hanging beside their heads, which rested on leather-covered bricks. Smoke massed gray against the painted ceiling. On the wall was a price list in English and Chinese, for small pipes and large. In an inner chamber was a cot with a taboret beside it, a lamp burning on the table. The old Chinaman indicated this. Bierce, in turn, pointed me to a straight chair, which I pulled over.

  “Tell me everything you know, saw, heard, thought‌—‌everything,” he said. “Not just tonight. Everything. There is something I’ve missed. Just keep talking.”

  I began talking.

  A younger Celestial in a pink silk shirt with decorative frogs down the front appeared and, squatting, kneaded a ball of dark brown gum over a flame until it began to bubble and then plunged it into the bowl of the pipe, which Bierce inhaled. The first pipe seemed to take only moments, and the young man went through the preparations for the second. I inhaled free smoke. Bierce had removed his coat and loosened his tie. It was the first time I had seen him with his collar button undone.

  “Continue!” he commanded.

  I pulled from my memory everything I knew about the murders, the trip to the Washoe, the tintype of the Spades, the interview with Pusey, my conversations with Amelia and her father. But not with my father, E. O. Macomber, who had written the Former-Spade letter to Bierce.

  Bierce smoked the second pipe, and a third. “Does Amelia have brothers?” he asked.

  She had a brother named Richard, whom I’d glimpsed at the Firemen’s Ball and who was studying at the Sheffield School at Yale.

  “And she has an uncle, who is her father’s twin, and whom Beau resembles?”

  “Amelia does not think he does.”

  I told Bierce about seeing Beau at the Bella Union, and catching sight in Battery Street of the painting of Lady Caroline as Lady Godiva‌—‌which Mr. Brittain had described and which was apparently Senator Jennings’s property. Bierce demanded a description of the man carrying the painting to safety, which description I was unable to supply other than that the fellow had been young.

  There were more questions, all with no apparent focus to them.

  After what seemed hours of my increasingly dry-mouthed account, Bierce muttered in Chinese to the young man, who bowed and retired. Presently a female entered. I was shocked to see that she was an Oriental prostitute in a short white shift. She had a piquant face, slit-eyed, with high cheekbones. A gap between her front teeth gave her an attractive hoydenish appearance. She squatted to prepare what I counted as the fifth pipe and tossed her head at me with a smoldering eye.

  I went out into the common room where I stood ill-at-ease and angry among the recumbent smokers, and their attendants moving the dim light. I felt trapped in the wrong place and time, breathing smoke of which I disapproved even as I felt drowsy from its fumes.

  I had not told Bierce everything, so I was perhaps hindering his solutions. But I did not want those solutions to involve my father.

  Presently the girl reappeared and with another toss of her head directed me back inside. It occurred to me that I had become prudish since my attachment to Amelia Brittain, but I disapproved strongly of the enslavement of young Chinese girls in Chinatown.

  Bierce lay with one knee raised. He sat up, holding his hands to his cheeks, and shook his head once.

  “I think I have it,” he said.

  “That’s good,” I said. I wanted to get out of this place.

  “I must do Captain Pusey’s work for him in order to accomplish my own ends,” Bierce said, standing unsteadily. I helped him with his coat.

  “Are you going to tell me?” I asked.

  “Not yet. In case I am wrong.”

  28

  RICH, adj. – Holding in trust and subject to an accounting the property of the indolent, the incompetent, the unthrifty, the envious and the luckless.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  When I got to Pine Street and started up my creaking outside stairs in the darkness, I could see some white object on the top step, like a large bag of laundry there. It rose, extending in hei
ght, as I climbed toward it, and it was Amelia Brittain in a white dress.

  “What are you doing here?” I whispered.

  “I had to see you!”

  “Where’s your guard?”

  “I took a hack. I’ve been waiting for hours!”

  I unlocked the door and let us in and bent to light the lamp. Amelia sat on the bed with her hands clasped under her chin. “You smell funny!” she said.

  I said I’d been in an opium den with Bierce.

  “Did you smoke opium?”

  “I did not.”

  “There are ladies that do that. Eleanor Bellingham told Momma it is so marvelously relaxing.”

  She made me feel stodgy and disapproving. “You shouldn’t—” I started.

  “Oh, don’t say that! I’m going to be married!”

  I couldn’t get my breath. When I sat down beside her she leaned her head against my shoulder.

  “He’s a friend of Poppa’s. He’s nice. He’s—”

  “What’s his name?”

  “He is Marshall Sloat. He’s a banker.”

  I didn’t know the name.

  “It is to be very soon!” She put her arms around me. “It’s a wonderful marriage! Please kiss me, Tom!”

  I kissed her. The kissing progressed.

  “The wedding will be at Trinity, and the reception in the Palace. Everyone will be there!” She was breathing hard. “Governor Stanford will be there. Mr. Crocker will be there, and Mr. Fair. Senator Jennings will be there.”

  I said I didn’t think Senator Jennings would be there, but she paid no attention. Somehow her blouse was off, and her undergarments slipped down to her waist. I kissed her bare bosom. She had raised her arms above her head, twining there like swans’ necks while she sighed, and closed her eyes and turned her face one way and the other. I kissed her breasts and felt the perfumed down beneath her arms tickle my cheek. I kissed her belly. When I tried to go further she whispered, “No, no, no, no, no, no!” on an ascending scale. So I kissed her breasts while she sighed and sobbed and twined her arms above our heads and talked on:

  “Maybe General Sherman will be there,” she panted. “And the Mackays, and the Millses and Mr. and Mrs. Reid, and Miss Newlands, and the Blairs and the Martins and the Tolands. The Thomsons and the Blakes and the Walkers and Miss Osgood and Mr. Faber.”

  It was the Elite Directory of San Francisco.

  Where were her ironies now?

  The ache in my groin felt as though I’d been clubbed there. I kissed Amelia’s breasts while she listed the names of San Francisco’s elite who would attend her marriage to Mr. Sloat, the banker. Her nipples were like pink fingertips. I kissed her nipples while she moaned. She would not lie back on the bed or permit any other attentions. I kissed her until my lips ached.

  When I took her home in a hack she was weeping. This time I mounted the steps at 913 Taylor Street with an arm supporting her. She let herself inside and was gone.

  When I returned to my room a note had been slipped under the door:

  Since you have ignored the rule against bringing women to your room we will require you to vacate these premises as of Monday next.

  Mrs. Adeline Barnacle

  In the morning the books I had lent Belinda were stacked neatly on the fourth stair: Ivanhoe, The Mill on the Floss and Great Expectations, along with three neatly penned lines of script on a page torn from a school notebook ending our engagement.

  Thursday at The Hornet offices I was discussing with Bierce my piece on Crocker’s spite-fence, trying to pretend that my heart was not broken into halves of fury and grief.

  I knew that when Charles Crocker was praised as a public-spirited man who had constructed many works of great and permanent value to the State, Bierce had responded:

  “His tendency to make improvements is merely a natural instinct inherited from his public-spirited ancestor, the man who dug the post-holes on Mount Calvary.”

  He also showed me a newspaper clipping he had saved, a denunciation of Crocker by a lawyer with whom the Railroad magnate had quarreled:

  “I will show the world how an intelligent patron of the arts and literature can be manufactured by the process of wealth out of a peddler of needles and pins. I will visit Europe until I can ornament my ungrammatical English with a fringe of mispronounced French. I will wear a diamond as big as the headlight of one of my locomotives; and my adipose tissue shall increase with my pecuniary gains until my stomach is as large as my arrogance, and I shall strut along the corridors of the Palace Hotel a living, breathing, waddling monument of the triumph of vulgarity, viciousness and dishonesty.”

  “You can’t hope to equal that for invective,” Bierce said. “Just leave the vituperations to others,” he said, and that is what I had tried to do:

  Charles Crocker of the Big Four was the superintendent of construction of the Union Pacific Railroad. He accomplished wonders with the thousands of coolies, “Crocker’s Pets,” who made up the bulk of his construction crews, and were released to unemployment when the Railroad was completed.

  Unemployed himself, he traveled abroad to purchase furnishings and art objects for his Nob Hill mansion, to serve which he financed a cable car line up California Street. The Crocker palace cost in the vicinity of a million and a half dollars to build. The architectural style is called “Early Renaissance.” Its 172-ft. facade is a masterpiece of carpenters’ scrollwork, and its 76-ft. tower commands a magnificent view of the City.

  Although he could have extended his domain to almost any corner of the country that he desired, he was unable to purchase the northeast corner of the block of Nob Hill bounded by Jones, California, Taylor and Sacramento Streets. He had acquired all the other lots that made up the block for his mansion, but a stubborn German undertaker, Nicholas Yung, would not sell his corner.

  Crocker consequently had constructed on three sides of the Yung property a fence 40 feet high, closing off Yung’s sunlight and views except for a narrow frontage on Sacramento Street. Eventually Yung moved his house to another part of the City but would not release the property, so Crocker left the fence standing.

  The spite-fence has become one of the landmarks of Nob Hill and has come to signify the arrogance of the rich in general and the Railroad millionaires in particular.

  Denis Kearney’s Workingman’s Party was viewed by Nob Hill as anarchistic. Kearney’s Irishmen often gathered at the spite-fence as the focus for their rage against the Railroad moguls who had amassed fabulous wealth and who had discharged an army of Chinese after the completion of the Railroad, contributing to the post-Railroad depression and to general unemployment. It is claimed that Crocker had his tower fitted with slots for pouring boiling lead down on the heads of besieging Communists, but, although the Sandlotters’ rallies began at the spite-fence, the rioters usually drifted downhill to sack Chinatown. The hot-lead slots have so far not been put to use.

  “That is adequate,” Bierce said. “Now go through and take out half the adverbs.”

  “There are only three.”

  “Remove two.”

  Miss Penryn announced Mr. Beaumont McNair. Beau strode into the office, with his gold-leaf beard, his arrogant chin, his close-set eyes, his well fitted jacket and his affected manner of walking, as though testing the floor with the stretched-out toe of his gleaming boot before trusting his weight to it.

  He halted, gazing at the chalk-white skull on Bierce’s desk. Bierce rose. I did also.

  “Good morning, Mr. McNair.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Bierce. Redmond,” Beau said, with a dip of his head in my direction.

  I produced a chair and he seated himself with some style, this young man whose pleasure it was to draw cunts on the bare bellies of whores and who was, in fact, obsessed with low women.

  “There was an incident last night,” Beau said, chin up, eyes fixed on Bierce. “An intruder.”

  Bierce glanced once at me but only nodded to Beau.

  “Someone broke in,” Beau
said. “Marvins pursued him but lost him. There was a window open.”

  “The ghost,” Bierce said.

  Beau looked startled.

  “Mr. Buckle told us there was a permanent ghost.”

  “Well, yes,” Beau said.

  “This was when I was in conference with your mother?” Bierce asked. “If so, Mr. Redmond observed the ghost leaving the house. He thought it was you.”

  Beau looked confused and irritated.

  “Have the police been notified?”

  Beau removed a linen handkerchief from his pocket and patted his forehead. “My mother thought you should be advised first.”

  Bierce leaned back in his chair with his fingers knitted together over his vest. “Someone hates you, Mr. McNair.”

  “I understand that. And I understand that you and my mother came to some meeting of the minds last night. She is prepared to meet your condition, Mr. Bierce. I am to inquire if you will come to us this evening and present your solution to these matters. She believes that you will require that others be on hand also.”

  “I shall present you with a list. Tom, if you would write down these names for Mr. McNair.”

  I did not much like taking orders in Beau’s presence, but I brought out notebook and pencil. Bierce dictated. I wrote. It was not the Elite Directory of San Francisco, but it was not entirely different.

  With his list in hand. Beau McNair remained standing, scowling. “I must speak with Redmond,” he said.

  “I’ll just take these to the typewriter,” Bierce said, flourishing a sheaf of papers. He left us there.

  “I will ask your intentions towards Miss Brittain,” Beau said.

  I still ached from last night’s frustrations. “My intentions are not intentions,” I said.

  “That is very glib,” Beau said. “I say, I demand to know your intentions!”

  “I am telling you I have no intentions. Miss Brittain is engaged to marry a man named Marshall Sloat.”

  “Her mother is worried that you have formed an attachment to Miss Brittain. She does not wish any complications.”

 

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