Devil’s garden

9

Sam found Alice Blake two days later, on a Friday, living in a Sunset District row house with her mother. He’d spent a five spot on a phone number from a dancer at Tait’s and used a city directory at the office to find the address, borrowed a machine from a nearby garage, and had been sitting on the house since yesterday. There was a corner grocery up on Irving where he’d buy cigarettes and a sandwich with coffee and use the toilet and pay phone. Most of the houses on the street were brand-new, narrow, two-story jobs with stucco and tile roofs. He’d spotted a nice empty one, directly across from the mother’s house, where he slipped through a window and could make himself comfortable on an apple crate with field glasses. It was late afternoon when he saw a yellow cab pull up to the address and saw Alice Blake skip out to the street and get in back.

Five minutes later, Sam was behind the cab in his machine and trailing across the southern part of Golden Gate Park and then dipping down into the Castro, thinking she was headed back downtown but instead watching the cab slow in front of a theater. She got out, paid the cabbie, bought a ticket at the window, and slipped inside. Sam parked and followed.

The picture had already started and Sam had to adjust his eyes in the darkness. The theater was a fantasy palace filled with gilded Oriental and Moroccan designs, the latter being appropriate since the moving images were of sheiks and the desert and far-off places with camels. The ceiling was a night sky, complete with moving clouds and winking stars. The screen was fifty feet high, bordered by balconies and plush red curtains. The effect made you feel as if you were at an outdoor play.

Sam took a seat in a side row where he had a good view of Alice Blake’s profile while she ate popcorn and stared, openmouthed, at the moving images. A man sat in front of a great organ, as if he were playing liturgy instead of accompaning a woman outside a sheik’s tent, nervous but accepting the invitation to come inside. The flap to the tent was held open and Alice stopped eating. Her big brown eyes remained wide at the sight of the woman removing her pith helmet and belt and the sheik’s servants doing the same for him. Caston, the French valet in service of the sheik since his school days, closing the curtain.

Why have you brought me here?

The sheik, with a great smile, saying, Are you not woman enough to know?

Sam turned to the others staring at the huge screen, watching the man Valentino strut in his tent, standing twenty feet tall in the darkness, hands on his hips, robes flowing behind him. Sam leaned back into his seat. The women in the seats around him breathing so loud that it sounded like one great gasp of a chorus. The sheik pointed to his big bed and the woman tried to run. He caught her in his arms and made his eyes real big. The bigger he made his eyes, the more the women in the crowd gasped.

Sam lit a cigarette and settled in.

Alice Blake resumed with her popcorn.

I am not accustomed to having my order disobeyed.

And I’m not accustomed to obeying orders.

You will learn! said the sheik, banishing her from his tent.

It was almost as if you could put your hands up in front of you and touch them or perhaps walk into the screen and be a part of it all. The light of the screen brought a white sheen to the faces of the women, some holding a single red rose.

After a while, Sam fell asleep. When he came to, the picture still rolling and organ pumping, he looked over to Alice Blake and she was gone.

He left the darkness and pushed open into the light, the new world seeming almost unreal against the desert, and looked for the girl, twice checking her seat and the washroom, then walked out into the Castro. A half hour later, he returned to his machine to ride back to the Sunset District and sit on the house. He bought a loaf of bread and more cigarettes and a Photoplay magazine to read up on this woman he’d seen in The Sheik because somehow the woman seemed like someone he now knew.

When he moved up the landing to the vacant house, he heard a shift and found someone already sitting on the apple crate. The Prohibition agent from the Old Poodle Dog looked over at him, dropping his field glasses by her side, and pulled on a cigarette. She looked at Sam but didn’t smile. The street-light shone off the white blond hair peeking out from under a silk turban.

She turned, cocking a dark brow at him. “Sit down. I won’t bite.”

MAUDE DIDN’T SEE Al Semnacher, didn’t know he was following her, until he plopped down next to her on the cable car just before it started its jerky ride up Powell Street, past the St. Francis and Union Square and slowly up Nob Hill. Maude had to do a double take to make sure it was Al because the dumb son of a bitch didn’t say anything, just stared at the people climbing the hill as they glided by in the car, and even casually waved to an old Chinese woman selling persimmons from a corner. Maude shook her head and checked her watch, already ten minutes late.

In the narrow slit in the street, Maude could see the tension of the cable hoisting them all up the hill, the straining of tons of metal and flesh being brought to the top.

“I’m ready to negotiate,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I saw your picture in the paper. Cute, really. You with the Vigilant Committee and Harry Carey.”

“It was Broncho Billy.”

The cable car stopped and three different newsboys from the Examiner, The Call, and Chronicle climbed on like little monkeys scrambling down the row and hawking the latest news of Fatty. The boy from the Examiner shouted an exclusive: “Nurse Says Fatty Dragged Girl into Hotel Room.”

Maude paid the boy a nickel and looked at the ugly face of that woman who had attended to Virginia at Wakefield. She read the first few lines and shook her head.

“I told the police about the ice and about Fatty threatening to throw Virginia out the window,” Al whispered.

“He wanted to throw me out the window.”

Two old women down the long wooden bench were craning forward to look at Maude Delmont. She pulled her black hat down deeper into her eyes and gave Al Semnacher a sharp one in the ribs.

“I want a piece,” he said.

“A piece of what? I just slipped out of the St. Francis with my bags.”

“You mean your purse.”

“My things.”

“I got you the girl just like you asked for.”

“And you stole her underwear and bolted. Why on earth would I trust you?”

“I didn’t sign on for this,” Al said, whispering. The cable car jerked and strained to the top of Nob Hill, cresting for a moment, the old women getting off at the Fairmont, and then the brake was slowly let go by the conductor onto a turn heading west, and then the car cut hard, flowing down the hill and catching a straightaway on Hyde.

“Then get off.”

“You signed a deal in blood,” Al said.

“I never signed a deal.”

“I want half of what you’re getting or next week I’ll walk right into that police court and tell them everything I know.”

“That you were Virginia’s pimp?”

“She was an angel.”

“Are you getting a conscience on me?”

“I loved her.”

“You didn’t even know her, you dumb yegg.”

“I’ll find you tomorrow.”

“It’s your stop, Al.”

Al leaned in, his musky, sweaty scent of talcum powder and cologne making Maude sick. “You tell your people I’m a part of this.”

“Good-bye, Al.”

Al stood, pulled the cable car’s cord, and stepped down, tipping his hat at a little girl in a sailor suit who took his spot beside Maude.

“Good day,” Al said, grinning with his sharp little teeth, “Mrs. Delmont.”

“WHY DOES A dry AGENT care about the Arbuckle party?” Sam asked.

“Besides making us look good in the papers?”

“Besides that.”

“Arbuckle broke the Volstead,” the girl said.

“A few bottles of gin seems beneath you people.”

“We’re more interested in where he got it.”

Sam nodded and smoked a bit as he stood in the window turret. The girl agent sat on the apple crate, legs crossed, turban perfectly cocked on her head. Light from the blinds fingered out on the wooden floor.

She lit a cigarette, too, and stood and walked to the window, using his field glasses to look down at Alice Blake’s place. “How was the movie?”

“Slept through most of it.”

“What was it about?”

“This sheik kidnaps this English socialite. He wants her, but she doesn’t want him. Then she runs away. Some bandits steal her and the sheik comes to the rescue.”

“That’s it?”

“There’s some kissing, too. The kissing takes a lot of time.”

The girl fingered open the window blinds, the arc lamps brightening the streets, the window looking like a framed, slatted picture. Sam could see the Blake house and a Ford parked outside and a man and a woman pushing a stroller across the road.

The girl let the field glasses dangle from the leather strap against her leg and set her head back, smoking.

“Since I saw you at the Old Poodle Dog, I’ve wanted to ask you something.”

“Does it start with ‘How does a nice girl…’?”

“Something like that.”

“I was in a secretary pool when Prohibition broke,” she said. “They needed someone to slip into speakeasies unnoticed.”

“I wouldn’t say you go unnoticed.”

She looked at him and brought her lips together, looking down at her velvet shoes with bows, blew smoke up into the ceiling and then crushed the cigarette underfoot.

Sam shrugged and switched to the apple crate. “You after LaPeer?” “What do you think?”

“I read he was out of jail so fast the ink wasn’t dry on his thumbs. You don’t have a clue where he gets the stuff.”

“We know he has this Australian fella who works for him and we know that same fella was at the St. Francis bringing in cases through the back door.”

“But you don’t know his name.”

“And here we are looking for Miss Blake.”

“Seems like a lot of work just for a dumb skirt.”

“Maybe she knew the bootlegger.”

“Or maybe you think some knucklehead Pinkerton will point you in the right direction?”

The woman walked over to Sam and placed a velvet shoe on top of the crate, hitching up her black skirt just a bit, showing off a nice long stretch of stocking and garter before plucking out a silver flask and handing it to Sam.

“Will you arrest me?” Sam asked.

“Only if you do something bad.”

“You have a name?”

“I do.”

“Wanna tell me?”

“Let’s drink first,” the girl said. “Wait till I know you better.”

MAUDE MADE THE CALL at nightfall from the back of a mom-and-pop place on Columbus, the kind with red-and-white tablecloths, salami hanging from the ceiling, and dago red sold out of the basement. She had a couple glasses of the red before lifting the handset, giving the operator the number, and hearing the man’s voice. Thirty minutes later, she was out on Columbus walking toward Washington Square when a long green touring car pulled up to the curb and a man hung out the driver’s side and said, “Sister, you look like you could use a ride.”

She got in the passenger side and closed the door and he sped off, rounding the square by the big church, and headed up and over a hill down by the wharf.

It was him.

He didn’t say much for most of the ride, one of those tight-lipped fellas that made you all spill it out to them because they know you’re feeling uncomfortable as hell in the silences. And usually that was Maude’s trick, but not today. Today, maybe because she had two nickels to her name and had been booted out of the St. Francis with nowhere to go, she laid it all out there. She talked about the two beefy Irish cops and the dyke woman Eisenhart, the crazy old Vigilant broads and Al Semnacher following her on the cable car and wanting some more dough.

“Can you believe the nerve of the son of a bitch?”

The man driving said nothing, turning down by the wharf, hugging the last of the Embarcadero, and scattering a gathering of seagulls pecking at a dead fish in the middle of the road.

“He skipped town with the girl’s bloomers and now he’s coming back for more.”

The man was silent, passing the cannery and heading up the hills and south toward Lombard and then taking a turn west up into Pacific Heights, where Maude had once bamboozled a ninety-year-old man out of his dead wife’s jewelry. Maude had been running the good ole sweetheart swindle ten years back when there wasn’t a man with a pulse who could turn her down. But, God, letting that old man’s old wrinkled head between her tits almost wasn’t worth it.

They hit a bump. The driver was talking to her. “I said, what do you want?”

“I need a place to stay and the money I was promised.”

The man turned to look at her as he drove, leaning over the wheel at an intersection and then cutting up to Union Street. He spit out an open window and looked back at Maude and nodded.

Ever since she’d met him in Los Angeles, the guy had given her the creeps. He wasn’t a bad-looking fella, maybe fifty or so, with iron-colored hair and kind of a dark complexion. He wore a black suit with a black tie and a fedora-type hat made of velour. A real dandy.

He kept on driving and nodding to himself before making a big, sloppy U-turn on Union and then meeting Van Ness and heading south again.

“Where we headed?” she asked.

“You tell me. I’m just driving.”

“We have a deal?”

“You’ll get half tomorrow.”

“What about Semnacher?”

“Set a meetin’.”

Maude smiled and fixed her hands on the empty purse in her lap, feeling the rumble of the six cylinders under the big, long hood with all that space in back. She adjusted in the seat and stared straight ahead, smiling, and asked him to drop her at the Palace Hotel. As they drove, the streetlights clicked on along Market, shining down into the cabin and showing a good chunk of the man’s right ear missing, as if someone forgot to complete the picture.