Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

15

INK, n. – A villainous compound of tanno-gallate of iron, gum-arabic and water, chiefly used to facilitate the infection of idiocy and promote intellectual crime.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

I was not yet allowed to think of myself as a full-fledged journalist, for I was summoned to assist Dutch John and Frank Grief printing the week’s Hornet in the basement with the dependable-in-its-undependability Chandler & Price press, whose revolving leather belt periodically snapped off its spindles in a flailing flight around the basement, and that acid stink of ink that required much soap and hot water at the Pine Street Baths to wash away.

After supper the Barnacle children often put on a show for the assembled boarders: Fuzzy Bear, The Hooter, Jimmy McGurn and Tom Redmond. We sat with our empty cake plates and coffee cups before us and watched the young Barnacles in performance. Tonight it was charades, in which Belinda was always the principal. She appeared swathed in white, wearing a white cap, dark lines denoting age drawn on her cheeks. Colbert, in his knickers, white shirt and a necktie, stood before her. Between them was a mysterious construction of crumpled newspapers painted white, with unlighted birthday candles stuck in it. Belinda carried a kind of wand, so that at first I thought she was a fairy princess.

But she tapped Colbert on the shoulder and in a quavery voice commanded, “Play, boy!”

“Great Expectations!” I said. There was applause. Belinda curtseyed. The paper construction was of course the decayed wedding cake.

Later she appeared in her Sunday dress, revealing the beginnings of a bosom, hair in neat pigtails, to stand before us and declaim:

“Blow, winds, come wrack! Knit up the ravell’d sleeve of care! There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. And all the clouds that lowered around our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried. There is a willow grows aslant a brook!”

She gestured dramatically.

“Out, damned spot! Wherefore art thou Romeo? At least we’ll die with harness on our back!

“The rest is silence!”

She curtseyed to thunderous applause, her parents joining in. I slapped my hands together with enthusiasm. Belinda’s cheeks were pink with pleasure as she curtseyed again.

My bride-to-be enjoyed applause very much.

When at last a brown envelope arrived from Virginia City, Bierce and I examined the faces of the Spades on the tin plate. They were grouped in front of a building that might have been the Miners’ Rest, with an overhanging balcony that shaded some of the faces. They were young! All smiling. Caroline LaPlante was at the center, very respectable and rather ordinary-looking in her black skirt and white shirtwaist, with a large dark saucer of a hat shading her face. On one side of her was a man not as young as the others whom I recognized as Nat McNair, on the other a large young man, clean-shaven and grinning, derby-hatted. Beside McNair was a monkey-faced little fellow and, beside him, another derby-hatted chap whose face was partially concealed by the shade of the balcony. The three young men must be Al Gorton, E. O. Macomber and Adolphus Jackson, who was Senator Jennings. Bierce had met Jennings but could not identify him as a young man.

“Take this to Pusey,” he said. “We will test his memory for faces and the vaunted Criminal Photographic Archive.”

Brushing at his mustache, he said, “It will be interesting to see if Pusey identifies Jackson as Jennings. Jennings may be paying generously for not being identified.”

He had obtained a magnifying glass to see if he could recognize Jennings. When he passed it to me I bent over the tintype.

The man whose face was partially in shadow was surely my father.

I was in a state when I got to Captain Pusey’s office at Old City Hall with the tintype like a block of lead in my pocket, and, when I entered, it seemed that Pusey had shrunk to only three feet tall in his blue uniform tunic, standing across the room scowling at me. I thought the shock of recognizing my father’s face had been too much for me, until Pusey moved sideways to put a hand on the back of a chair and I saw he was a boy dressed up in a child’s-size policeman’s uniform.

Pusey himself came in through a side door.

“This’s my boy, John Daniel,” he said. “John Daniel, come and shake Mr. Redmond’s hand.”

The boy approached to give my hand an energetic tug and retreated again. Pusey did not proffer his own hand. “Got something for me?” he said.

I handed him the tintype, which he laid on his desk. He bent over it, resembling a heavy-bellied candle, with his shock of hair like a white flame. He poked at the images on the tintype with a blunt forefinger. “These are Bierce’s Spades then. There is Nat McNair and the grand lady herself!”

John Daniel stood silently watching. The office window looked out on an area paved with stones, where a group of bummers were in conversation, passing a bottle among them. A beer wagon rolled past with a rattle of wheels.

“That’s Albert Gorton,” Pusey said. “Got battered on the head in February ‘76. Died without coming out of it.”

“Who bashed him?”

“Never solved.” He grinned at me with his too-perfect teeth. “Somebody that didn’t like him, probably. Unless they bashed the wrong fellow.”

“Could it have been Elza Klosters doing a job for Nat McNair because Gorton was trying to blackmail McNair?”

“There’s other possibilities.”

“The tall man must be Adolphus Jackson.” And the one partially in shadow, E. O. Macomber, was Cletus Redmond. I was in a sweat that Pusey would recognize my father, although surely his face did not appear in the Criminal Photographic Archive.

They had cheated my father out of a fortune! I would have been the son of a Nob Hill millionaire.

“What’s that, Poppy?” John Daniel asked.

“Tintype of some fellows in Virginia City,” Pusey said. He had never taken his eyes off the images. He shook his head slightly, as though recognition did not come, or to make me think it did not.

“Jackson spent some time in jail here.”

“Probably before my time,” Pusey said. “I’ll study on it. Who’s the other one?”

“Macomber.”

He shook his head.

“Do you have a photograph of Elza Klosters?”

He rose, a bulky figure in his uniform, his belly squeezed into two fat bulges by his belt. He stamped out of the office. Outside the window a policeman had dispersed the bottle bums.

I pocketed the tintype from Pusey’s desk. Bierce had paid two hundred dollars for it, after all. I wished I had never heard of it.

John Daniel watched me suspiciously.

Pusey returned laden with a heavy, leather-bound album, which he opened on his desk, and slapped through the pages. There was Brown, whom Bierce had correctly guessed to be Klosters. He was without his hat, his surly features gazing out at me. In this likeness he possessed considerably more hair. On the opposite page was a typed list that I assumed to be of offenses, but when I rose to take a look, Pusey closed the album.

“Where’s the tintype?”

I patted my pocket.

“I want it.”

“It belongs to Ambrose Bierce.”

“It is evidence,” Pusey said. He stretched his lips to show me his fine teeth. His eyes were set in his head in a disorienting irregularity. They stared at me as though to mesmerize me.

“Evidence of what?” I asked.

His face darkened. “I want that tintype. I’ve got to have some time with those faces.”

“I’ll ask Mr. Bierce,” I said.

He was not content with that, but he did not pursue it further.

When I left, Pusey told John Daniel to shake hands with Mr. Redmond again, which the boy did with another abrupt motion. Outside in the areaway, when I looked back up, Captain Pusey was watching me from his window, a looming figure capped by the topknot of white hair. Beside him was his son’s head, visible above the sill, peering down.

I stopped in a saloon around the corner for a beer for my dry throat. I had been in such a sweat with Pusey looking at the Gent’s image in the tintype that I hadn’t concentrated on Pusey, but I had the sense that he employed his cunning even when there was no need. I patted the hard shape of the tintype in my pocket uneasily. Surely Pusey could have invoked his authority to relieve me of it if it had seemed important to him.

My breath came hard when I contemplated how close my father had come to the Big Bonanza. I turned down Clay Street, striding through the pedestrians on the busy sidewalk.

I did not identify the whiff of sound as a slung shot until my head burst.