Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

19

REPORTER, n. – A writer who guesses his way to the truth and dispels it with a tempest of words.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

My stock had risen at 913 Taylor Street. Amelia insisted that I had saved her life from the Morton Street Slasher, or whoever her attacker had been, and she conducted herself with me with some familiarity before her parents.

The broken railing of the veranda had been patched with pale pine boards, and the policeman on duty there was treated with more hospitality, the cook furnishing him lemonade and shortbread cookies.

I escorted Amelia to the Roller Palace. Roller-skating was a sport with which she was unfamiliar. On the gleaming hardwood floor with the racket of metal wheels on wood, under the balloon ceiling with its central boss of jewel-flashing mirrors, I held an arm around her waist while she took her first rolling steps, her left hand clutching mine, giggling, high-colored, her voice rising an octave in her nervousness. But soon she was swooping along with the best, waving long arms for balance, graceful in her lanky awkwardness with her skirts sweeping in thick folds around her legs, her tight bodice with the two lovely symmetrical mounds of her bosom, her pretty head crowned in a velvet hat with a rolled brim, laughing and laughing in her pleasure. The roller-skating seemed to help her get over her fright at the Slasher’s attentions, though still I would see her eyes fill and she would become very quiet, as if the fact that someone would want to hurt her had swept over her again.

In the steamy little tearoom over cups of Oolong she prattled about marriages of San Francisco young women to European aristocrats. Clara Huntington and Eva Mackay had married titles, Flora Sharon a baronet, Mary Ellen Donahue a baron, Mary Parrott a count, Virginia Bonynge a viscount and her sister Lord John Maxwell. The Holladay sisters had plighted troth with the Baron de Boussiere and the Comte de Pourtales.

And the widow of the multimillionaire Nathaniel McNair had married Lord Hastings Stearns.

“It is so charming!” she said. “The fathers of these women with brilliant careers were Irish saloonkeepers or hairy prospectors with their donkeys, and these European aristocrats are the descendants of crusty old warriors who chose the winning side in some war of succession. Their titles are for sale to charming females with great expectations!”

I wondered if she was regretting her own failed engagement to the son of Lady Caroline, which had been nixed by her father.

I said I didn’t think any of the heiresses of the brilliant careers were as good roller-skaters as she had proved to be.

She laughed and said, “As to my own brilliant career, I’m afraid Poppa’s investments are failing him just now.”

I digested that.

“It is a comic spectacle, Tom,” she went on. “One must learn to view it as a spectator instead of a participant.”

“But you are a participant!”

“A spectator also. I insist on that!” She flattened the palms of her hands together with her chin balanced on her fingers, her eyes fixed on me.

I said I thought the whole shameless business was an affront to a democratic nation.

“It may be an affront to a Democrat, but it is fine comedy. Have you witnessed the Saturday afternoon procession on ‘the line’?”

“The line” was the five blocks along Market from Powell to Kearny and up Kearny to Sutter. Saturday afternoons beautiful young women paraded along the line, for the delectation of the knots of young men watching from the open-front cigar stores on their route.

“Their toilettes are perfect,” Amelia went on. “They are not ‘society,’ they are the daughters of shopkeepers and merchants and doctors. But they are as lovely young women as the heiress-brides of the European aristocracy. Isn’t it wonderful?”

I didn’t know what she was getting at.

“Tom, you must learn to appreciate ironies!” Amelia said. She seemed to be laughing at me. Then I saw her eyes mist again.

When I watched her lips speaking of ironies all I could think of was kissing them. I said, “I wonder if it is such a blessing to be an offspring of Nob Hill aristocrats.”

“There are responsibilities, of course,” Amelia said solemnly.

“So yours cannot be a free spirit.”

“Yes and no.”

“You are a free spirit on your roller-skates.”

“Let us go pretend some more, then,” she said, smiling and patting my hand.

Later she told me that I reminded her of Pierre Bezuhov in War and Peace.

I said, “And is Beau McNair Prince Andrew?”

“No, he is Anatole Kuragin,” she said. Her nose wrinkled as she giggled.

She had read War and Peace in French! “It took weeks!” she said.

Women often spoke in mysterious allusions or snatches of song, so that you felt stupid when you did not catch the drift. What did her reference to War and Peace mean? Anatole Kuragin had failed to seduce Natasha Rostov. But Pierre Bezuhov was the man she came to love after the death of Prince Andrew. What did that tell me?

I mentioned Vanity Fair.

“Amelia Sedley and Captain Dobbin!”

Her face was bright with excitement to discover that we had read the same books, although I had missed Henry Esmond, and she had not read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. We circled the noisy floor among the other skaters with our left hands clasped again, my right arm around her waist, and compared novels.

“There isn’t anybody I can talk to about books!” Amelia said, brushing her hair back from her pink face. “Beau never read anything, and Poppa doesn’t read much any more.”

I said I had enjoyed my conversation with her father.

“He is not looking forward to Lady Caroline’s arrival.”

“Why would that be?”

“They were friends in Virginia City but something happened so they are not friends any more,” Amelia said. “Of course I know she had an ambiguous position there, and I am not allowed to speculate on what their friendship might have been.” She laughed on an ascending scale.

She was the most delightful entity who had ever entered my life.

I sat with Bierce in the office. Next door we could hear the rattle of Miss Penryn’s machine. Smithers shouted something further down the hall. The window was open on California Street and through it came a clamor of buggy wheels.

Bierce tapped his fingertips together. “It is someone totally committed to malevolence toward Beau McNair. To his guilt‌—‌his incrimination!‌—‌to the damage of anyone connected to him. Someone wants to drink wine out of his skull, but I can’t seem to grasp the core of this anger. Is it one of the Spades?”

He peered at me through his shaggy eyebrows: “In London, as a member of the Diamonds, this young chap drew female organs on the bellies of whores with some liquid that stung but did not disfigure.”

“Which Captain Pusey knew,” I said. “And the Slasher must know also.”

“Would it have been featured in the London newspapers? Copies of The Times or The Illustrated London News might be found in the Reading Room of the Pacific Club. But Lady Caroline would have tried to keep it out of the papers.”

Bierce tugged down on the points of his vest, frowning. “The details of what the Diamonds did to the Whitechapel women would not have appeared in the papers,” he said. “And should be known in San Francisco only to Captain Pusey. It will be remembered that Captain Pusey, by what he calls an educated guess, showed the photograph of Beau McNair to Edith Pruitt of Mrs. Cornford’s establishment.”

“An extremely educated guess, as you said.”

“Pusey had the tintype removed from your possession because he knew that Jackson is Jennings, and he didn’t want anyone else to make the connection. Why would he protect Jennings? Because Jennings is a one-time jailbird who is paying him not to reveal the fact. It is a financial arrangement he does not want disturbed.”

Captain Pusey also possessed the tintype which showed the Gent to have been E. O. Macomber.

“Pusey must have his sights set on a more opulent prize,” Bierce said.

“Lady Caroline. But Jennings is not the Slasher.”

“Jennings is a certified peculator and murderer whom I intend to see indicted,” Bierce said grimly. “The Slasher is Captain Pusey’s affair. Jennings is mine.”

I confessed that I had not uncovered any information on Senator Jennings that Bierce did not already know. Jennings had kept his tracks well covered.

Bierce thought that Pusey might have had a hand in the covering of tracks. I was ordered to keep digging.

When I came back from lunch, and a trot past the Brittain house to make sure a constable was on guard, Bierce was in conference. Elza Klosters sat facing him, with his broad-brimmed hat on his lap. Hat-less, with strands of graying hair combed over his pale scalp, he did not look so menacing.

“Tom, this is Mr. Klosters,” Bierce said.

Klosters made no move to rise, nor I to shake his hand. I turned my own chair around to face them.

“Mr. Klosters has come to protest my attentions to the Reverend Stottlemyer,” Bierce said.

“The Washington Street Church,” Klosters said, nodding. He had a phlegmy rumble of a voice. “I said I would pow-wow with you.” He turned his head slowly to regard me. His jaw was set in a bulldog clench.

“And what are we to pow-wow in regard to?” Bierce asked.

“I have thought of doing you some harm, Mr. Bierce.”

“Is that your role at the Washington Street Church?”

“It is work I have done sometimes.” Klosters ran a big hand over his balding head.

“You were chief of deputies at Mussel Slough, for the Railroad,” Bierce said.

“That is neither here nor there, Mr. Bierce.”

“And you have tried to intimidate Mr. Redmond here, and through him, me. That was not for the purposes of the Washington Street Church and the Reverend Stottlemyer.”

Klosters shook his head patiently.

“The Reverend is as fine a man as I have ever known of,” he said. “He has brought me to Jesus. He has brought the sinners in the Washington Street Church to Jesus. We have the Reverend Stottlemyer to thank for bringing us to Salvation.”

Bierce’s face did not reveal his opinions on organized religion.

“You have found Salvation, Mr. Klosters?” he said.

Klosters nodded his heavy head. “I was a violent man. I have become a Jesus-man in the hope of Salvation.”

“You are to be congratulated.”

“The Reverend is to be congratulated, not mocked as you have done. I had thought to harm you, but the Reverend has shown me that that is not the way of a Jesus-man.”

“No.”

“Still, you fired Judge Hamon’s house in Santa Cruz,” I said.

“That is one thing,” Klosters said.

“And is there another ‘thing,’ sir?”

“The other thing is what I have told you I will not do no more. I have been offered good money to harm a person, and I have said I would not do it although that was the way of life I had led. Because I have been brought to Jesus.”

“And who was the person you were to be paid to harm?” Bierce asked.

“That is neither here nor there.”

Metal wheels screeched noisily past outside. A high-sided wagon rolled by, a colored man in an overall perched in the rear corner.

“Tell me,” Bierce said to Klosters. “Is the person who offered you good money for this particular harm the same one who hired you to harm Albert Gorton?”

It was as though these questions required a great deal of thought on Klosters’s part.

“I did not come here for this kind of palaver, Mr. Bierce. The Reverend has shown me the way and the light. I have come as a Jesus-man to tell you that the Reverend forgives you your trespasses against him, but there is others in that congregation that might not.”

“Oh, this is a threat after all.”

“The Reverend would not want you to think of it in that way,” Klosters said.

His bloodshot eyes regarded me with a kind of total inspection and turned away as though I did not interest him.

“We are concerned with events in Virginia City in 1863,” Bierce said.

“Highgrade Carrie,” I said.

Klosters raised a hand, palm toward me. “Tell you something, young fellow. You too, Mr. Bierce. Just stay out of Carrie’s business. You will be better off for it.”

“She is a friend of yours?”

“That lady is more than friend to anybody that knew her back then,” Klosters said.

“That lady will presently be in a circumstance of propinquity,” Bierce said.

Klosters gaped at him.

“San Francisco,” Bierce said.

“Is that a fact now?” Klosters said. He rose with a ponderous motion of shoving his chair back and heaving himself out of it. He clapped on his hat. Immediately he looked more dangerous.

“You came by my boardinghouse to deliver the queen of spades card,” I said. “Did Senator Jennings hire you for that?”

Sucking on a tooth, Klosters squinted at me. “Tell you, young fellow, there is someone that is interested in you changing your ways.”

“With harm in mind?” Bierce said.

Klosters shrugged. “You, too, Mr. Bierce,” he added.

Bierce said, “Mr. Klosters, what would it take for you to give evidence that Senator Jennings tried to hire you to murder Mrs. Hamon?”

Klosters did not reply. He adjusted his hat and departed.

I touched the still-sore spot on my head where I had been harmed by a slung shot.

“So,” Bierce said, seating himself again. “Jennings tried to hire him to murder Mrs. Hamon, but Klosters has taken the pledge, so to speak.”

“Not against arson,” I said.

“Nor intimidation. Although the only real threat he uttered was to stay out of Lady Caroline’s business.”

That consideration opened new doors.

“Both you and I have been threatened,” Bierce went on. “Miss Brittain was actually assaulted, surely by the Slasher. I can only believe these were different protagonists. There is a madman out there, no doubt of that. There is also Jennings, who is not a madman, although he may be a frightened man by now.”

“And there is Jesus-man,” I said.

“Whose loyalty to Lady Caroline is evident.”

“Everyone seems to be loyal to Lady Caroline.”

He nodded grimly and drew his watch from his vest pocket to consult it.

“Time for Dinkins’s?” he said.

I told him I had to attend a True Blue club meeting and help defend the Democracy from the Monopoly.