Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

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 height, 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.”

His coat fit him so prettily it weighed on me. I said I didn’t consider that any of his business.

“I speak for Mrs. Brittain, and I will speak frankly. Miss Brittain belongs to a station in life to which you cannot aspire.”

I blew out my breath to keep calm. “I wish you would come down to the True Blue Democracy Club and explain your meaning,” I said.

His face was pinched and schoolmasterish. He looked at me as though I was being purposefully stupid. How I disliked him, Amelia’s half brother.

“We call folks who live on Nob Hill ‘instant Aristocrats,’ ” I said. “Is that what you mean? For instance, your putative father went to the Washoe and found a bonanza, while mine found nothing but borrascas. Is that the difference?” Mine, in fact, had been euchred by his.

I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t, “Aristocrats go to whores and draw all over their bellies. Is that the difference?”

His face turned a dangerous red. “How dare you?”

“You don’t want to try tricks like that here,” I said. “San Francisco whores are tough.”

He stared at me with his mouth open. “Damn you!”

“No, damn you!” I said. “For the spoiled presumptuous twit you are.” I was aware of pushing this into something from which I could not withdraw, which pleased me.

He glared at me down his nose. “I demand satisfaction!”

I laughed at him. “Manhole covers at twenty feet?”

“Damned fortune hunter!”

“Bare knuckles in the basement,” I said.

I led him downstairs into the basement and through the door into the cellar next door, where there was an empty storeroom lighted by dusty clerestory windows that gave onto California Street.

Beau stripped out of the beautiful jacket. He’d had some boxing instruction. He danced around me, feinting lefts and rights while I took off my coat. I felt heavy, lumpish and poisoned.

He danced toward me. I knocked him down. It is easeful to your inner furies when you have bashed someone on the jaw, but the demands and responsibilities of the Brittain family were not Beau’s fault.

He bounced up again. The second time I knocked him down he managed to pop me on the nose, and I felt the claret starting.

Sprawled on the floor he gazed up at me as I mopped at my nose with my handkerchief. He pronounced himself satisfied.

He climbed to his feet, massaging his jaw and moving his shoulders in a manner distasteful to me.

“You know what the Morton Street whore who identified your photograph said?” I said.

“What is that?”

“She said there was a client of Esther Mooney’s who didn’t have a dingle. He used some kind of leather dildo. He might have been the one that killed Esther. That wouldn’t be you, would it?”

“Certainly not! The police—”

“Did they ask to see your dingle?”

“I don’t know what you are getting at, Redmond!”

Glaring, he stood poised with his elbows folded back and his chin out, as though he was going to assault me again or take flight. Suddenly he ripped at his placket and exhibited himself for my inspection.

“What about balls?” I said.

He cursed me in an unaristocratic manner.

“Listen,” I said, holding my handkerchief to my nose. “I apologize for my childish behavior. Don’t you know we are trying to save your bacon?”

“Yes, I do know that, Redmond.”

In the end we shook hands.

“Here’s another communication from our Comstock correspondent,” Bierce said, passing me a handwritten note when I returned to the office with my nosebleed stanched.

Dear Mr. Bierce,

If you are worried about who fathered Highgrade Carrie’s get, worry no more. Everybody knew Dolph Jackson was her beau.

A Former Spade

“He has no occasion for a ‘momento’ in this missive,” I said. “It is the connection between the murderers!” Bierce said. “The ‘Former Spade’ is my benefactor!”

Who was the Gent.