Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

13.

RECONCILIATION, n. – A suspension of hostilities. An armed truce for the purpose of digging up the dead.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

At supper at the boardinghouse we were eight or nine‌—‌depending on whether or not the drummer was out of town‌—‌including The Hooter, a bank clerk, for his hoot of a laugh; and Fuzzy Bear, a horsecar conductor, both of them named by the youngest Barnacle, Johnny. After Mrs. B.’s repast of meatloaf and gravy, cabbage and mashed potatoes, with bread pudding for dessert, the Hooter, Fuzzy Bear and young Johnny Barnacle departed, leaving me with my coffee, and Jonas, Mrs. B., Belinda and her biggest brother, Colbert, a smelly twelve-year-old with a haystack of fair hair and a way of pointing his face away while his eyes regarded you, which made him resemble an apprentice cardsharp. I understood that I was part of a Barnacle family crisis.

Belinda sat with her hands in her lap and her tragic face raised like Joan of Arc contemplating the stake.

“Ain’t you ashamed to have Mr. Redmond know you have done this mean thing?” Mrs. B. said.

Belinda looked unashamed. Her face was at its prettiest when she was under duress.

“What she done was,” Jonas Barnacle said to me, over his coffee mug, “she stole the two bits from the jar where it was kept for the paperboy. Didn’t you, Belinda?”

Belinda rolled her eyes at me. I gathered that my presence was part of the punishment.

“Then she told me Colbert had took it. What she had did, she had stuck it under the scarf on Colbert’s dresser so I’d find it there. To get him whomped. Isn’t that right, Missy?”

Belinda set her lips more tightly together, staring straight ahead.

“That is about as mean a trick as I can think of,” Mrs. B. said. She had her hair done up in a severe bun on top of her head. She squinched her eyes at her daughter. “A mean little snip trying to get her brother in a fix.”

“I just hope Father Kennedy don’t hear of it,” Jonas Barnacle said, leaning his elbows on the table and pushing his face toward Belinda.

“Or Sister Claire,” Mrs. B. said. “That thinks little Miss Pet here might have a vocation.”

The flesh around Belinda’s eyes turned pink. She rose, with dignity, made her way past the empty chairs and out of the room.

“Get out of here,” Jonas Barnacle said to Colbert, who left with a smug glance at me.

The parents assumed expressions of severe sadness.

“Just don’t know what to do with that girl,” Jonas said.

“She’s going to be a fine young lady one of these days,” I said.

Mrs. B. sniffed. She had a tired, angular face in which the features were set in uneasy conjunction.

“Can’t even strop her like she deserves,” Jonas said. “Take a strop to her and she won’t cry, she won’t even flinch, look you straight in the eye and make you feel like a Cossack.”

“Says she’s too old to be stropped,” the mother said with another sniff. “Why would she do a thing like that? Sneaky!”

“Let me talk to her,” I said.

“You talk to her, Tom,” her father said, looking relieved.

I found Belinda seated outside on the rickety stairs to my top-floor room, with her skirt wrapped around her legs, her feet set primly side by side and her arms folded over her chest. She had been crying.

I sat down beside her and put my arm around her thin shoulders.

“They won’t believe me!” she said forcefully. “They just believe him. I said he stole it, and he said I stole it and put it on his dresser. So they believe him.”

“You shouldn’t have said it.”

“Oh, I know I shouldn’t have said it,” she mimicked. “But that’s not the point, Tom! It’s that they’d believe him and not me! Do you know why? Because I’m a girl and he’s a boy. Boys are worth something and girls aren’t worth anything. Girls are sneaky, and boys are‌—‌stalwart! Well, he’s not stalwart, he’s a mean little pig and I hate him.”

“You don’t want to hate your brother,” I said.

“Yes, I do; I hate him! But I hate her worse.”

“Your mother!”

“Because she hates girls. She must’ve been a girl once herself! She doesn’t think girls are worth raising. She thinks girls are sneaky and whining. Well, that’s just what he is!”

“She just sounds like that when she’s angry with you.”

“You don’t know! Everything’s for him. Not so much Johnny. Colbert always comes first. He gets the biggest slice of pie, and if there’s only money for one of us to throw the ring-thing at the fairgrounds, Colbert gets to do it. I can throw better than he can! But I’m second, or third, because I’m a girl. I’m no good because I’m a girl. I hate her!”

“Listen, Belinda,” I said. “You’re a girl and that’s good, and you’re a very pretty girl and that’s even better. One of these days‌—‌before you know it!‌—‌all the boys’re going to be looking at you, and they’ll be trying to talk to you, and they’ll bring you presents at school and share their cookies with you. And then when you are a young woman, the men will ask to be on your dance card and want to take you for rides in their fancy turnouts. And then you will be number one, I can tell you.”

“No!” she moaned.

“You just watch. Then, you’ll see, you can have anything you want, anybody you want! Because you are a girl, and good and beautiful. But, see, Colbert doesn’t get anything like that. He has to go out in the world and make a living and try to make something of himself, and maybe he can’t and then he’s a failure and he’ll start drinking and people will call him worthless. Because he’s a boy, because he’s a man, and if you’re a man nobody forgives you anything. So then you’ll have to feel sorry for Colbert.”

“He’s a rotten little turd!” Belinda sobbed.

“I know that,” I said. “But you don’t want to be one, too.”

She leaned against me and sobbed while I patted her shoulder.

A heavy-set customer in a big hat had stopped at the Barnacles’ gate to regard us with a steady gaze. It was the man who called himself Brown, with his sweat-shiny pocked face, and no doubt his revolver tucked into his belt. He drew something from his vest pocket and flipped it over the gate onto the walk twenty feet away from Belinda and me, a playing card. I had no doubt what suit it was. I felt paralyzed with fury.

Brown marched on out of sight past the next house as Belinda rose and scampered down to pick up the card.

“It’s the queen of spades, Tom!”

I snatched it from her, let myself out the gate and trotted after Brown. He had disappeared. I hadn’t really tried to catch up with him.

Belinda met me at the gate. She looked frightened. “What does it mean?”

I said it was just a joke.

When I brought the queen of spades to Bierce I was angered all over again because I knew that I had been counted on to deliver it to him.

“I suppose it means we should stop fretting the Railroad about Mussel Slough,” I said.

“It is a clumsy attempt at intimidation,” Bierce said. “The queen of spades was employed because spades have been in the newspapers in connection with murders.” He slipped the card into his desk drawer. “It must be an anticipation of your Jennings piece,” he said.

“I’ve hardly started it!”

“It is known you are researching it. Miss Penryn may have communicated the information to Smithers, or Macgowan. Someone who has a Railroad friend. There are not many secrets around a newspaper office.”

The neat little man said his name was Smith. He shook hands with Bierce, and introduced himself to me. “Clete Redmond’s son?” he said.

I admitted it.

He had a diamond pin in his cravat, a gold chain across his vest. Child-sized shoes gleamed beneath the cuffs of his trousers. He had silver hair and a neat triangular silver goatee. His eyes twinkled.

“We read your recent piece in The Hornet,” he said to Bierce, when he had seated himself, crossed his legs and settled his hat in his lap. “Yours also, Mr. Redmond,” he said to me.

“May I ask who ‘we’ is?” Bierce said amiably.

“Certain gentlemen at Fourth and Townsend, who have been regularly insulted by you, sir!” Smith chuckled.

“Why, I thought I had complimented them!” Bierce said.

“I have a message for you,” Smith said.

“I am all ears.”

“It is very brief,” Smith said. “It is that those who investigate may also be investigated.”

He rose, clapped his hat on his head, said, “Good day, sir. Good day,” he said to me and was gone, his heels clicking in the corridor.

The headline in the next morning’s Chronicle that lay on the Barnacles’ breakfast table was: SPADE SLAYING #4, and upper tenderloin SLASHING, and the smaller head: MAYOR OFFERS REWARD. I snatched it up to skim the article:

Dr. Manship, after a hasty examination of the body, said he thought the terrible deed could have been accomplished in a few moments. The victim had been attacked near the backhouse behind the establishment on Stockton Street presided over by Mrs. Mamie Overton. The victim’s throat had been cut with one stroke of a sharp weapon, and, in the familiar pattern, her torso shockingly slashed. The young woman’s name has not been revealed.

A reward of one thousand dollars for information that will lead to the apprehension of the knife-wielding maniac has been authorized by Mayor Washington Bartlett.

I took the horsecar to Dunbar Alley. Captain Pusey was there, with two other policemen. The Morgue stank of old blood, sweat and cigar smoke. The latest victim lay naked, paper white and pathetically thin on her slab, red-haired, a calm face unlike the contorted faces of the three who had been strangled. This one had not been strangled, but her throat was slashed to the bone. There was a gaping wound in her belly, but she had not been opened up like the others.

“Look at her fingernails,” Captain Pusey said, pointing his cigar at her hand. There were deposits of flesh under her fingernails. This woman had fought her assailant.

Her name was Rachel LeVigne.

Rachel LeVigne was Beau McNair’s redheaded Jewess, and Amelia Brittain was his fiancée, or had been anyway. And had a “shadow.”

When I told Captain Pusey that Miss Brittain was in danger he ordered a constable to 913 Taylor Street immediately.