“Pinkerton’s, eh?” he said. “And Samuel’s Jewelers.” The alleyway fell silent for a minute, then there was a faint click followed by the rustle of clothing, and the Englishman stepped out into the alley. Accident or intent placed him in a patch of light, and the American could see the man’s hands, the left one holding the wallet, the other outstretched and free of weaponry. “Holmes is my name, in the event you don’t know it already. Might I buy you a drink while we talk about why you’re following me?”
The American retrieved his wallet, looked at the open hand, and slowly extended his own. “The name’s Hammett, Dashiell Hammett. And I guess we might as well have a drink.”
They shook hands, with a certain amount of probing on both sides, and then Holmes released his grip and clapped Hammett on the shoulder. “I sincerely hope you do not wish to return to that . . . would it be called a ‘joint’ in American parlance? My palate may never recover.”
“You like our Volstead Act, huh? Sure, there’s a place up the street with liquor that’s never seen the inside of a bath-tub.”
“Actually, I have to say I’ve been pleasantly surprised at how civilised this city is when it comes to the availability of drink. I’d expected the whole country to be as dry as the Sahara.”
“This side of the country, it’s a bit of a joke, the cops don’t even charge much to turn a blind eye, but like you say, in some places, things are getting tough. Chicago—wow.”
Down the alley and out onto the street, and Hammett asked the question that had clearly been tormenting him since the moment he’d heard the trigger go back. “How’d you know I was on your tail, anyway? I’ve got something of a reputation as an invisible man.”
“Invisible, yes. But the Pinkertons might wish to reconsider their policy of sending out a man with a tubercular cough on surveillance, particularly on a cold night. When one hears the same cough coming from a lounger outside the St Francis, and later on the other side of a speakeasy, one begins to wonder.”
“Yeah,” Hammett admitted with chagrin. “It’s sometimes hard to sit quiet. But most people don’t notice.”
“I, however, am not most people.”
“I’m beginning to think that. C’mon, it’s down here.”
The place Hammett led him to was more neighbourhood pub than urban speakeasy; one table hosted a poker game and at another a friendly argument about boxing. There was even a darts board on the back wall. When they walked in, the man drying glasses behind the bar greeted Hammett as a longtime acquaintance.
“Hey there, Dash. Guy was looking for you earlier.”
“Evening, Jimmy. What sort of guy would that be?”
The man’s eyes slid sideways to take in Holmes, and his answer was oblique. “The sort of guy you sometimes work with, seen him with you once or twice a while back.”
“Well, he’ll find me if he wants me. I’ll have my usual, Jimmy. This is my friend Mr Smith. He’s got a doctor’s prescription you can fill.”
“What’s your medicament, Mr Smith?” the man asked as he reached for a bottle of whiskey, poured a glass, and set it in front of Hammett.
“No chance of a decent claret, I take it?” Holmes said wistfully.
“I could give you something red called wine, but I’m not sure a Frenchman would recognise it.”
“Very well. What about a single malt?”
The barman shook his head sadly. “The state of my cellar’s tragic, that’s all you can call it.”
“Never mind, I’ll take a—”
“Now, don’t be hasty. Said it was tragic, didn’t say it was completely empty. Just explaining to you why the good stuff’s limited and the price’ll make you wince.”
The quality was fine, although the price did truly make Holmes wince. But he counted out his money and followed Hammett over to a quiet table, taking out his cigarette case and offering one to his companion. When the tobacco was going, the two men sat back with their drinks, eyeing each other curiously.
They were of a size, Hammett an inch or so taller, but he possessed the folded-up quality of the man whose height fit him ill, and was so emaciated that his suit, nicely cut though it was, nonetheless draped his shoulders like one of the shrouded chairs in Russell’s house; when he spoke, one was aware of the skull’s movement. By comparison, Holmes looked positively robust. Hammett’s thick, light red hair, combed back from his high forehead, showed a great deal of white at the temples, although he couldn’t have been more than thirty. His clothes were good, his collar white, his ever-so-slightly flashy tie was precisely knotted beneath a face composed of watchful brown eyes, thick brows, knife-straight nose, and a mouth that skirted the edge of pretty. Strangers seeing the two men at the table might have taken them for father and son; certainly their long, thin, nervous fingers were of a type.
“So,” the American finally broke the silence. “You want to tell me why you didn’t shoot me in the face back there?”
“Personally, I’ve always found leaving a trail of corpses inconvenient, although I admit it has been some time since I lived in America—perhaps strictures have relaxed in the past ten years. However, as it was I who got the drop on you, perhaps I should be permitted the first questions.”
“Fair enough. Shoot.”
“Clearly, the most fundamental question in our relationship has to be, Why were you following me?”
“I was paid to.”
“By the Pinkertons?” Holmes had had dealings with the American detective agency before; not all of them had gone smoothly. His manner gave away none of this, merely his familiarity with the company.
“By whoever hired the Pinkertons.”
“You don’t know the identity of your employer?”
“Nope. Which also gives you the answer to your second fundamental question.”
Holmes took a swallow of the passable single-malt Scotch, slumping back into his chair in a way that made the other man think the Englishman was enjoying himself, and said, “That question being?”
“Why didn’t I have my pal Jimmy there pull out his shotgun and take your pistol away from you?”
“Two men having a drink together, Mr Hammett—surely that indicates a truce agreement, even in these farthest reaches of civilisation?” Holmes rested his cigarette in the flimsy tin ash-tray and picked up his glass again, left-handed; it occurred to Hammett that, other than their hand-shake and when he’d been paying for the drinks, the Englishman’s right hand was always kept free and never more than a few inches from the pocket holding the gun.
Hammett gave a sudden laugh, his haggard face lighting up unexpectedly. “Mr Holmes, something tells me that you only trust a truce when it’s fifty pages long and freshly written in the other guy’s blood.”
Holmes gave a small smile. “Superior strength is indeed a desirable component of negotiation.”
“Fine then, let’s negotiate away—you with your gun, me on my home ground.”
“Am I to understand that your version of my ‘second fundamental question’ indicates a certain lack of trust in the very people who hired you?”
“Now why would you say that?”
“Had you been wholeheartedly committed to the cause of your employer, I suspect that you would have made a play for the weapon, either on the way here or with the bar-keep to back you up. Not that you would have succeeded, mind you, and in the process of demonstrating that fact someone might have been hurt, so I do commend your decision. However, I assert that your willingness to go along with abduction is somewhat unusual, considering the Pinkertons’ reputation for professional behaviour.”
Hammett scowled. “The Pinkertons are in it for the money, that’s true. And they don’t always look too closely at where their clients’ cash comes from. It’s one of the disagreements I’ve had with them over the years. Why I only work for them from time to time, nowadays.”
Holmes squinted through the smoke at the younger man, thinking over the man’s words. “If I hear you aright, you are telling
me that you prefer to act in cases that suit your moral stance, and that this particular case you are on is making you suspect that your employers are not on the side of the angels.”
“Yeah, well, a man’s got to live with the person in the mirror.”
Especially, thought Holmes, when the man’s own mortality stood so clearly outlined at his shoulder.
“Your doubts therefore explain why you came with me so willingly. To see if my side, as it were, suited your ethics more comfortably.”
“I thought I’d listen to what you had to say.”
Which suggested the possibility, Holmes reflected, that the man had not only willingly permitted himself to be taken in the alley, but might even have set it up with precisely that end in view. He raised a mental eyebrow, reappraising the thin man before him: It had been a long time since he’d come across that combination of intelligence and fearlessness.
Russell had it, and half a dozen others he’d known through the years.
One of whom had been Professor Moriarty.
“So, do I get to ask a question now?” Hammett said.
“You may ask.”
“Yeah, I know, and you might not answer. But that would be the end of a beautiful friendship, wouldn’t it?”
Again the faint glint of amusement from the grey eyes. “Your question being, Why didn’t I shoot you in the face when we met in the alley?”
“That’s as good a place to start as any.”
“I suppose one might say, better a known enemy than an unseen potential.”
Hammett blinked. “You have a lot of ‘unseen potentials’ around?”
“One, at least. Unless that was you who took a shot at my wife the other evening?”
The thin man’s jaw dropped as his features went slack for a moment, an expression of shock that only the most subtle of actors could produce at will; Holmes did not think this man an actor. “Your wife? I didn’t know—Wait a minute. Is that the girl you were following tonight?”
“In the dark green frock, yes. Although I don’t know that she has been a ‘girl’ in all the years I’ve known her.”
“And someone took a shot at her?”
“Wednesday night, about six o’clock, in Pacific Heights.”
“At the house?”
“So you know where her house is?”
Instead of answering, Hammett sat for a minute drumming the finger-tips of his right hand on the table while he studied the man across from him, weighing the fancy accent and clothes against the man’s undeniable competence and the vein of toughness Hammett could feel in him. Toughness was a quality that Hammett respected.
“Why’d you take those two business cards from my wallet?” he asked suddenly.
Holmes reached into his pocket and laid the scraps of pasteboard on the table, pushing them slightly apart with a long finger. “Because they’re yours. The others are fakes.” He looked into Hammett’s eyes, and smiled. “You’re an investigator, of some kind. The Pinkerton’s card was real because no sane investigator would disguise himself as an investigator. Of the others, all of them provided you with a front for asking questions—insurance, municipal water company, local newspaper, voting registry—except for the jeweller’s. Therefore, that is real, too.”
“Yeah,” Hammett told him. “I write ad copy for them, sometimes. Pays the rent.”
He looked at the cards for a moment, then his right hand clenched into a fist and beat gently once on the table-top, the gesture of a judge’s gavel, before the fingers spread out to brace his weight as he rose.
“Come on, I need to show you what I got.”
Holmes did not hesitate: Russell would simply have to look after herself. Outside the bar, Hammett threw up a hand to hail a passing taxi, giving an address on Eddy Street. Hammett knew the driver by name, and during the brief ride the two residents tossed around speculations concerning “the Babe’s” homers this season (Babe, Holmes eventually decided, being the name of a sports figure and neither an affectionate term for a female nor a mythic blue ox; from his earlier time living in Chicago he knew that “homer” referred not to a Greek philosopher but a baseball play—the home run); Harry Wills’s chances against Dempsey in the September fight that had just been announced (Wills and Dempsey apparently being professional boxers, not street thugs); the ludicrous conversation the driver had overheard recently between two passengers concerning the bridging of the Golden Gate, which both he and Hammett agreed would provide a huge opportunity for graft and never so much as a jungle foot-bridge to show for it; and the ever more lamentable state of the city’s traffic. Holmes contributed nothing but sat absorbing local vocabulary with his ears while his eyes studied the passing streets. He also noted Hammett’s careful survey of his surroundings before he climbed out of the cab, as well as the fact that the house number he had given the driver was down the street from the one they eventually entered.
He’d have been one of the better Pinkerton operatives Holmes had seen—if he’d been a Pinkerton.
The Eddy address was an apartment house. Just inside the door, the air was thick with the smell of alcohol.
“Boot-leggers,” Hammett explained. “It’s not usually this bad, but they dropped a box last night.”
Upstairs, the Hammett residence proved to be a small, worn, scrupulously clean space with aggressively fresh air overcoming the reek of alcohol. Hammett left his coat on but dropped his grey hat onto the stand before he led his guest into the front room, closing its door quietly and crossing over to close the wide-open windows. “My wife’s a nurse,” he said. “Fresh air’s a religion to her. It’ll warm up in a minute.”
He took a half-full bottle from a cluttered table set against the wall, poured two glasses, and brought them to the chairs in the front window, picking up a limp rag-doll from one. He brushed its skirt straight and set it on the sofa, where it made a miniature third party to their discussion, then took the other chair and pulled a tobacco pouch and papers from his pocket. With the windows closed, a faint trace of ammonia did battle with the boot-legger’s accident: a child’s nappies.
Holmes took one sip of his drink, to demonstrate that the declared truce still held, then set the glass down firmly on the little side-table.
“Mr Hammett, you may at one time have been a Pinkerton operative, but you are no longer. For whom are you working?”
The man’s brown eyes flew open in surprise, and he held them open as a show of innocence. “Why do you say that?”
“Young man, you bring me here yet expect me to believe you an active operative? Do not take me for a fool. You receive an Army disability pension because of your lungs, and you have no doubt supplemented that from time to time with work for the agency, but you are a man who at times is so debilitated you cannot make it from one end of the apartment to the next without stopping to rest. At the moment you are attempting to support your wife and small daughter by writing for popular journals.”
The bone-thin fingers slowly resumed their movements, automatically taking a precise pinch of tobacco and arranging it along the centre of the paper without his looking. “You want to tell me how you know all that?”
“Eyes, man: have them, use them. The doll, a woman’s magazine on the side-table, two envelopes from the United States Army in a pigeon-hole, the Underwood on the kitchen table, and a pile of manuscript pages and copies of such literary works as Black Mask. Mr Hammett, I of all people should recognise the signs of a struggling writer.”
“The Smart Set on the side-table is mine, not my wife’s,” Hammett asserted, but weakly. “I write for them. But how could you know of my occasional . . . debility?”
“A series of chair-backs have worn marks into the wall-paper where they are occasionally arranged to allow you to walk the thirty feet from chair to bath without falling to the floor,” Holmes told him dismissively. “Satisfied?”
Hammett’s eyes fell at last to the cigarette his fingers had made. He ran a tongue along the edge, pressed it, and as he
lit a match his eyes came back to Holmes’. “You’re that Holmes, aren’t you? The detective.”
“I am, yes.”
“I always thought . . .”
“That I was a fictional character?”
“That maybe there’d been some . . . exaggerations.”
Holmes laughed aloud. “One of the inadvertent side-effects of Watson’s florid writing style coupled with Conan Doyle’s name is that Sherlock Holmes tends to be either wildly overestimated, or the other extreme, dismissed entirely as something of a joke. It used to infuriate me—Doyle’s a dangerously gullible lunatic—but apart from the blow to my ego, it’s actually remarkably convenient.”
“You don’t say,” Hammett responded, clearly taken aback at the idea of the flesh-and-blood man seated in his living-room being considered a piece of fiction. And no doubt wondering how he would feel, were someone to do the same to him.
It was all a bit dizzying.
Fortunately, Holmes had his eye on the ball. “Now, will you tell me who hired you to follow me?”
“Okay. You’re right. But it was through the Pinkertons. I used to work for them, and like I said, I still do little jobs for them from time to time, when I feel up to it. I had a bad spell recently, but the rent’s due, so when one of my old partners there called and said they needed a couple nights’ work I said sure. But after I’d got the job, I began to wonder if he hadn’t thought the job stunk and decided to palm it off on me. Here, let me show you.”
He went to the table and opened the top drawer, pulling out a thick brown file folder, which he laid on the small table and flipped open, sliding the top piece of paper over to Holmes. On it was printed:
I wish to know all possible details concerning the whereabouts and interests of Mr. S. Holmes and Miss M. Russell, staying at the St Francis Hotel. She owns a house in Pacific Heights. I shall phone you at 8:00 on the morning of Tuesday, 6 May for news.