Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

by Oakley Hall

  I could see the cheek of the Morton Street Slasher, furred with a short fair beard like Beau’s. The muffler had fallen open to reveal the two parallel scabs from Rachel LeVigne’s fingernails. His blue eye was open, staring into infinity; the unchosen boy, the abandoned child crazed by it; the son of James Brittain or Aaron Jennings or someone else, and of Caroline LaPlante. A tongue of dark blood seeped from beneath his side.

  No one else seemed to understand that we had witnessed an ambush and an execution, or maybe they all did.

  30

  COGITO COGITO ERGO COGITO SUM – “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am”; as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

  –THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

  The headline in the Chronicle the morning I cleared out of my room at the Barnacles’ was SENATOR JENNINGS INDICTED. In the text he was referred to as the “Senator from Southern Pacific.” Bierce had struck his blow at the Railroad.

  Jennings was indicted for the death of Mrs. Hamon.

  The Slasher murders remained unsolved.

  Jonas Barnacle helped me tote bags, boxes, books and a bottle of cucumber arnica down the rickety stairs. I glimpsed Belinda through a window and detached a hand from my load to wave to her, but she did not wave in return.

  In my last mail on Pine Street was an announcement of the wedding, in the Trinity Episcopalian Church at Post and Powell, of Miss Amelia Brittain to Mr. Marshall Sloat. The reception would be held at the Palace Hotel.

  Sloat was a childless widower, more than twice the age of his bride-to-be. I remembered Amelia commenting on Judge Terry’s age compared to Sarah Althea Hill’s. A fallen woman, she had called Miss Hill.

  I left my buggy seat nailed to the wall in the Barnacle cellar.

  In the editor’s office at The Hornet Bierce sat with Bosworth Curtis. He beckoned me to a chair, although I saw that Curtis disapproved.

  “Lady Caroline is anxious that George Payne not be identified as her son,” Bierce said. “She has made an arrangement with Captain Pusey.”

  “So Pusey got what he was after,” I said. I was having difficulty controlling my feelings, which Bierce thought not worth having. The chalky skull gaped at Curtis.

  “Her daughter is engaged to a member of the British aristocracy,” Curtis said. “She is anxious to avoid scandal.”

  I wondered if Curtis disliked favors done for the aristocracy as much as I did. I considered Bierce a sitting duck for a grand female like Lady Caroline Stearns.

  Curtis unfolded a sheet of creamy paper.

  “Lady Caroline thought it appropriate to show you this,” he said.

  He handed the paper to Bierce, who studied it before passing it on to me. It was a list of Lady Caroline’s philanthropies.

  Nathaniel McNair had conspired, cheated, swindled, strong-armed and bribed to control his mining properties and fleece the fools who gambled in mining shares to make his pile. Now his widow redistributed it with interest to the needy.

  The item caught my eye: Washoe Miners’ Fund, $10,000. A miners’ fund in Wales was listed as well. There were funds for neglected children and for wayward girls. The Frances Castleman Home for Indigent Women in San Francisco had received $7,000. There were some twenty items, ranging from $20,000 to $500. About half were in England, half in San Francisco and Nevada, two in New York. The $20,000 was for the Sanctuary for Homeless Young Women in Cleveland. The total was a magnificent sum of money.

  “Her secret is safe with us,” Bierce said.

  “She will be grateful,” Curtis said, standing and refolding the paper. The shiny skin of his face gleamed pinkly.

  “Her man Klosters may think he and I have uncompleted business,” I said. “Perhaps she would curb him.”

  “It shall be done,” Curtis said. He clicked his heels and pitched his head at Bierce, with a little bow. He made a lesser bob at me and departed.

  “So you let her off,” I said.

  “You saw the list.”

  “Fancy paper,” I said.

  “She is well known for her generosity,” Bierce said.

  It was true. “That was a murder,” I said stubbornly. “A door was left open, or the same window he got in before. It was a trap. He wasn’t even armed. How was it that he arrived there at just that moment? It was planned.”

  “Tom, we have been over this too many times.” His forehead was creased with irritation as he gazed at me with his cold eyes. “Yes, perhaps Lady Caroline conspired to take the life of the madman who had conspired to take hers. She did not know he was her son.”

  “She must have suspected it. Buckle certainly knew something.”

  He sighed and said, “She told me that she did not.”

  “You believed her because she is a grand lady.”

  “Why this sympathy for Payne? He ripped the intestines out of three women. He would have killed Amelia Brittain if you had not stopped him. He had planned to murder Lady Caroline Stearns. He had effected her return to San Francisco, he had access to the McNair mansion. She was in danger.

  “As I have said before,” he continued. “My concern was the murder committed by Senator Jennings. The Slashings were the proper province of the police. I only concerned myself with them to insure the indictment of Jennings.”

  I turned back to my desk. I was at work on an article on the Chinese slave girls but, because of Mr. Macgowan’s anti-Chinese policy. The Hornet would probably not publish it.

  Chubb had produced as a cover for The Hornet, a vast squid with its tentacles spread over California. Its eyes were medallions of the faces of Huntington and Stanford, so labeled. An enormous shining hatchet had chopped off one of the tentacles, labeled “Senator Jennings,” with an anguished medallion face of the Senator attached. The blade of the hatchet was labeled “Crime and Punishment.” The paper was full of the Jennings arrest, a long news piece by Smithers, replete with adverbs, my own sidepiece on the spite-fence. Tattle was loaded with self-congratulation and a lambasting of the Railroad so smug that if Bierce’s definition of self-esteem as “an erroneous appraisement” did not occur to me, it should have.

  Bierce and I were summoned to Captain Pusey’s office to view the painting of Lady Godiva, which detectives had discovered in a warehouse on Sansome Street. It had been concealed by gunny-sacking until Pusey tracked it down. John Daniel was present, dressed in a neat blue suit with a white boiled shirt and four-in-hand necktie. He watched the proceedings from the corner. He didn’t seem much interested.

  Bierce would not speak to Captain Pusey, but he was greatly affected by the painting. “What a lovely woman,” he said, mooning over Lady Caroline as a young woman like a tenor in a romantic aria. She was indeed a lovely piece, Virginia City’s own grande horizontale. Her gardenia flesh illuminated Pusey’s office, her hair hung in golden ringlets, parting over her breasts, her expression of pride and modesty was perfectly depicted. The veins on the neck of the white horse had been graven with artistic perfection. Sgt. Nix regarded the painting disapprovingly.

  “She is Senator Jennings’s property,” I said.

  “He will have hard times getting this beauty back,” Captain Pusey said smugly. It was the writ of I-want-what-you-have-got that Nix had enunciated, and moreover Captain Pusey had the painting in his possession.

  “Shake hands with the gentlemen, John Daniel,” Pusey said, when it was time for us to depart, and John Daniel complied.

  “How I would be gratified to puncture that gelid old efflation,” Bierce said when we left police headquarters at Old City Hall, meaning Captain Isaiah Pusey.

  I was working on the slave-girl piece when the natty little Railroad representative, Smith, called on Bierce again. He had a daisy in his buttonhole.

  “We understand you are to be congratulated on the indictment of Senator Jennings,” he said brightly to Bierce. “Congratulations from the very top, if you know what I mean.”

  “Tell Mr. Huntington that I could not be more gratified,” Bierce s
aid, leaning back in his chair. “The Girtcrest Corridor Giveaway will have to find a new sponsor.”

  “Yes, that will be some trouble.” Smith snapped his fingers to show how much. He took from his pocket a folded sheet of paper, as Lawyer Curtis had done, but this was no list of philanthropies.

  “The investigator investigated!” he announced. “These items!” He held up a single finger.

  “The real owner of The Hornet was‌—‌until recently!‌—‌C. P. Gaines, who is also one of the owners of the Spring Valley Water Company. The author of Tattle castigated the water works while it was advertised and promoted in other parts of the paper. The author of Tattle‌—‌all unknowing, we are certain‌—‌with his great popularity, thus acted as a shill for the very aqueous corruption he purported to be exposing. Is it not true?”

  Bierce looked sour. “That is not news. I forced Charley Gaines to sell out.”

  Smith held up a second finger. “Sold out to Robert Macgowan, whose brother Frank owns sugar plantations in the Hawaiian Islands. The funds for the purchase thus came from those very sugar planters whom Tattle has abused for their rape of the Sandwich Islands. The Hawaiian men enslaved on the plantations, the women in Mother Hubbards! Nor can we think the investment is a disinterested one. The Hornet is and will be editorializing and promoting favorable terms for Hawaiian sugar exports in the treaty that is presently being negotiated with King Kalakaua, and denouncing the opponents of the annexation of Hawaii, which Tattle has continually opposed. Is this not true?”

  Bierce did not speak.

  “Thus again, the author of Tattle is shilling for the very opposite of the righteous‌—‌so righteous!‌—‌opinions he appears to hold.”

  Smith smiled brightly, holding up a third finger. Bierce appeared to have sunk into his chair.

  “It is reported from St. Helena that Mrs. Mollie Bierce, in her husband’s protracted absences, has been conducting a liaison with an attractive‌—‌and wealthy!‌—‌Danish gentleman there!”

  Smith refolded his paper and returned it to his pocket. He beamed at Bierce. “Is it not true?”

  “Get out,” Bierce said.

  Smith executed a fancy little step as he went out the door.

  “Huntington!” Bierce said, staring at his skull. “The swine of the century has beaten me!”

  Later he sighed and said, “The bubble reputation!”

  He went home to St. Helena that weekend.

  On Monday he showed me the first paragraph of his final column. He had resigned his position despite Mr. Macgowan’s protestations and offers.

  “We retire with an unweakened conviction of the rascality of the Railroad gang, the Water Company, the Chronicle newspaper, and the whole saints’-calendar of disreputables, detestables, insupportables, and moral canaille. We trust The Hornet will not extend to them a general amnesty.”

  I said, “I don’t think you ought to let Huntington badger you into quitting the paper.”

  He sat in his chair, hands in his lap, with his cold, composed face gazing at the skull. “I have considered retiring anyway,” he said. “I require the time to write some fiction.”

  “A novel?”

  “A bastard form,” he sneered. “No, I have a dozen stories in my head, short pieces. They concern ghosts for the most part.”

  “ ‘The outward and visible sign of an inward fear,’ ” I said, quoting him.

  “They come after me in their squads and companies,” he said, with a twist of his lips. “They fill my rooms. They have weight, they have demands, they pursue me until I must forge them into stories that say—” He laughed, without amusement. “That say what? That say ‘Why did we die?’ Did we Federals die to preserve a Union that was not worth so many lives to preserve? Did we Confederates die to preserve the obscenity of slavery, when not one in a hundred of us owned a slave? What did we die for? So Abe Lincoln wouldn’t go down in history as having lost half the Nation? So Bobby Lee wouldn’t have to admit he’d been defeated months, and so many lives, before he finally surrendered? The ghosts present their demands,” he said.

  “I have left Mollie,” he added. “We are separated.”

  Hot wings beat in my head. “Because of some rumor—”

  “It is in fact only a rumor,” he interrupted. “There is no liaison. However, he has written letters to her.”

  “You have separated from Mrs. Bierce because someone wrote her letters?”

  “She must have encouraged it,” Bierce said.

  “Does she admit that?”

  “There are a thousand ways a clever woman can attract attentions.”

  “That is unfair!” I protested, but he turned his cold bitter face away from me.

  “I do not engage in competitions,” he said.

  He was insisting on fulfilling Lillie Coit’s prophecy.

  “Unfair,” I said again.

  He turned. His eyes were cold as steel. “If we have come to personal judgments perhaps it is time to end this association,” he said. “Yes, sir,” I said. I had already returned his revolver to him.

  I went back to my new room on Bush Street and tore up the letter I had written to Amelia Brittain, likening her marriage to a wealthy man more than twice her age not only to Sarah Althea Hill’s liaison with Senator Sharon, but to the transactions of Morton Street. I had even quoted Bierce on marriage: “On the offer of a woman’s body: a custom as a sacrifice of virginity, to earn dowry, or as a religious service, a religious duty.” I didn’t want to quote Bierce any more, for he had made me ashamed of myself. Amelia had warned me against becoming like him.

  My father had been right about him. Lillie Coit had been right about him. He would die a lonely and a hated man.

  That night I sat down to write a letter to Amelia, addressed to her at 913 Taylor Street, expressing my hope that she would find great happiness in her marriage.

  In the Alhambra Saloon the backs of the Democracy solidly lined the bar, and Chris Buckley sat in his corner, surrounded by his crowd. With him were fat Sam Rainey and skinny Mattie Mogle. I had been summoned, and I made my way through my fellow Democrats to present myself to the Boss.

  “It is Tom Redmond of the True Blues,” he was informed. His unblinking eyeballs fixed on me. He sat in a big chair leaning his two hands on the head of his cane. His pals, seated and standing, regarded me in a moment of silence. I had the feeling of a schoolboy brought before the headmaster.

  “Your boss has quit The Hornet,” Buckley said, smiling. “And what will you do, Tom?”

  “I will look for another position.”

  “Would you be interested in a job as a schoolmaster? There are positions available.”

  “I’ll try to get work as a journalist.”

  “What paper?” Sam Rainey said in his gravelly voice. Seated beside Buckley he looked like a wise old frog.

  “I have a friend at the Chronicle.”

  “Republican,” Buckley said, shaking his head, smiling.

  “We can talk to George Hearst,” Mogle said. “The Examiner’s Democrat for sure.”

  I shrugged.

  “Your boss was not always a reasonable man,” Buckley said.

  So I was to defend Bierce.

  “He was not pleased by the scandals in the school directors, that was for certain,” I said. Where there were jobs Buckley could pass out.

  “ ‘A crying roguery,’ I believe he put it,” Sam Rainey said.

  “That was mild for Bierce,” I said. I was feeling a little more cheerful, all these Democrats looking at me with disfavor because I had worked with Bierce, who was as hard on Democrats as he was on Republicans.

  “He especially didn’t like the Board of Supervisors granting a substantial portion of Beach Street to the Spring Valley Water Company,” I went on. “It reminded him of the Girtcrest Corridor giveaway.”

  “That is the Railroad, Tom,” Buckley said reprovingly.

  “And this was the water works.”

  “Bierce is a ve
ry negatively minded kind of fellow, Tom. You will admit that yourself, I’m sure. We are trying to ascertain if you are going to be that kind of journalist also, to the detriment of the Democracy.”

  “Why, Mr. Buckley, I would think the Democrats ought to be reproved as well as the Republicans, when they go in for boodle, and dummies on the payrolls and giveaways. Don’t you?”

  “Those things should be corrected in the Party councils, not in the newspapers.”

  “Oh, my!” I said. “Is that what you called me here to tell me?”

  There was another silence.

  “For instance,” I said. “Captain Pusey has collected a deal of money from Lady Caroline Stearns for services rendered. For silence, that is. As for many years he collected the same kind of boodle from Senator Jennings. And everyone knows he has been collecting it from Mammy Pleasant’s employer, Thomas Bell, for decades.”

  “Isaiah Pusey is a good Party man, Tom,” Buckley said. He was no longer smiling.

  “I suppose his tendencies to blackmail that come from his position, and from his archive of photographs, will be corrected in the Party councils?”

  Silence again.

  “I think ‘a crying roguery’ like that has to be addressed in the newspapers,” I said.

  “We understand you were given a beating by the Railroad ruffians,” Sam Rainey said.

  “Is that a threat?”

  “What we are dying to understand,” the Blind Boss interrupted, smiling, “is if it is your intention to carry on the same kind of warfare with the Railroad as Bierce has done.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “There have been some accommodations made, Tom. We are not going after the Monopoly so hard, and the SP is giving us some funds for the fall campaign.”

  “I see,” I said. I felt as though I was dropping down a mine shaft. “Well, don’t count on me, Mr. Buckley. I am Antimonopoly to the grave.”