Crooked Hearts

  After a long, interesting pause, Edward turned his face away from her slightly and said with the grave, tentative courtesy she found so endearing, “May I tell you something? It’s of a rather personal nature. I wouldn’t wish to offend you.”

  “I’m sure you couldn’t.”

  “It’s only that you have a very distinctive … bouquet. For me, it’s as fascinating as the fragrance of a fine wine. Now that I’ve savored it, I’m quite sure I’ll never forget it.”

  She was leaning back against the wall, and Edward, half a head taller, had one arm braced across the low door frame above her. She wasn’t surprised that he could smell her distinctive bouquet; she could smell his, too. Definitely bay rum. “And what would you say is its essence?” she asked lightly, but secretly beguiled.

  He put his thumb and forefinger together in a gesture that was somehow aesthetic, saintly, and sexy at the same time. “Its essence is not the same as its odor. It smells of good clean soap, scented with apricot or orange. Apricot, I think. But the essence of it … ah.”

  She waited, hardly breathing.

  “The essence of it … is grace.”

  She inhaled sharply.

  He slanted his chin toward her, listening intently; his black brows drew together. “What is it?”

  “Grace,” she breathed, on a long, unavoidable sigh. “That’s—that was my name. Before I took my vows.”

  “Was it? How extraordinary.”

  His head was so close, she could see the faint pulse beating in his neck, under his left ear. She had an urge to run her fingertip down one of the long, intriguing clefts that bracketed his mouth on either side of his delicious-looking lips. She saw her own parted lips in the reflection of his blue glasses, and the calf-eyed look on her face finally restored her senses.

  “Good night,” she croaked. Even she could hear the unexpected gruffness in the vowels.

  “Good night.” But he didn’t move, so she didn’t either. “It’s been a memorable evening. I thank you for sharing it with me.”

  “My pleasure.” She’d become fixated on the shapes his mouth made when he spoke; she didn’t realize he was holding out his hand. Until he lifted it a little, evidently thinking he’d aimed it off-center, and his fingertips grazed the underside of her left breast. She jumped.

  A bewildered look crossed his features, quickly changing to worry. By now she’d have done anything to avoid embarrassing him. Squeezing back against the wall, so he wouldn’t realize how little space he’d left between them, she got her hand up and slipped it into his. His long, strong fingers clasped hers for a second, then let go.

  “Good night,” they said again, in unison.

  It wasn’t until much later, waiting to fall asleep, that Sister Augustine thought of the pledge card for the dying orphans’ hospital. She’d forgotten to give it to him. Much less help him fill in the amount.

  2

  Everything is funny, as long as it’s happening to somebody else.

  —Will Rogers

  IT WAS ALL THE baggage piled on top of the Wells Fargo stagecoach that made Reuben decide, in the half-block between Whitey’s Why Not Saloon and the Monterey stage depot, to go blind.

  The details of the game were foggy; at that early stage all he saw was an opportunity. Why blindness? Because he’d never tried it before. When he was eight or nine, he’d faked a club foot on the corner of Fourth Street and Second Avenue for a lucrative two weeks, but he hadn’t run a distressing physical affliction since, and he figured he was overdue. Then too, he already had the props on his person, so to speak: the heavy malacca walking stick he’d taken off Bridie McCall in the stud game the night before, and the blue-tinted “readers” he used when he went gambling, for spotting phosphorescent ink on the backs of marked cards.

  And he’d been in a mellow, expansive frame of mind, the kind that encouraged innovative thinking, due to the fact that he was leaving Monterey two thousand dollars richer than when he’d arrived three days ago. True, he was still a bit shy of the forty-five hundred he owed the Croakers, but at least now they wouldn’t kill him. At least not immediately. He felt good and he wanted a challenge.

  Besides, San Francisco was a long, dusty, two-day stage ride; what else did he have to do to amuse himself? Spontaneous buncos succeeded about as often as planned ones, he’d found. And if there was one thing in the wicked world Reuben Jones trusted, it was his own instincts.

  But the lure had turned out to be a bust: the boxes and bags on top of the stage held Chinese art museum pieces, not the personal effects of some rich pigeon he could pluck somehow by faking a handicap. And the art objects might well be “priceless,” as Mr. Sweeney claimed, but one of the things Reuben prided himself on was that he was no thief. He was a confidence artist.

  Still, he couldn’t say he regretted going blind. Not while he could gaze across the rocking stagecoach and speculate on the interesting question of which thigh Sister Augustine had her little .22 strapped to this morning.

  It tickled him to think that that was one of the few things he didn’t know about her, relatively speaking— relative to what Sweeney and the cowboy knew about her, anyway. Reuben knew, for instance, that she was at least five years younger than she looked in her nun’s outfit; having seen her without it, he didn’t figure her for a day over twenty-two or -three. He knew she had a veritable fountain of long, curly hair the color of old gold piled up under her wimple, or whatever that veil thing was called. He knew her coarse black stockings hid the prettiest legs he’d seen on any female except for Charing Cross, the filly who’d won the triple stake at Breezeway last year. And he knew what else was under her bulky, shapeless bag of a black habit: slim, womanly hips, a minute waist he could probably get his hands around, and breasts—big palmfuls at odds with the smallness of the rest of her, proud and perky as a couple of high-nosed thoroughbreds in the winner’s circle. He even knew what beat behind the luscious breasts: a larcenous heart.

  But this morning he much preferred to reflect on Sister’s outside, not her inside. She had a dimple on the cheek of her right buttock, he recalled fondly, a perfect round dent, like the imprint of a playful finger. The muscles in her mile-long thighs came and went in an extremely stimulating way when she leaned forward, and her pert little behind flexed like … like …

  His agreeably lascivious thoughts tapered off. She was staring at him. No—she was staring at his hands. That wasn’t good. Because he’d taken off his eyeglasses and was absentmindedly polishing the smudged lenses with his handkerchief. The look on her angel’s face—sharp and arrested, the pretty blue eyes narrowing in speculation—told him the significance hadn’t escaped her.

  He dropped his chin and made his hands go limp; a weary, twisted smile flickered at his lips. “Look what I’m doing,” he murmured, as if to himself.

  “What?” asked the little curator, who hadn’t noticed anything.

  “The uselessness of this habit—cleaning my spectacles. Catching myself at this would’ve been enough to cast me down in former days, when I was so close to—well.” He stopped, too discreet to mention those sordid struggles with self-destruction. “Thank God I’m past that now, that … dreadful time. Sometimes I’m even able to laugh at myself.” He laughed now, bitterly, as a demonstration, and put his glasses back on. Behind them, he rolled a hidden glance toward Sister Gus. Her face had gone soft with pity; there might even be a tear in her eye. He turned his head to gaze, apparently without seeing, at the Sierra snow peaks gliding by on the far horizon.

  Last night, just for a minute, he’d thought of suggesting a partnership to Sister Gus. His better judgment had scotched the idea before it could grow, but he could feel it germinating again now at the corner of his mind. He’d worked with a woman once, years ago; Hazel Mayne, she’d called herself. Before it was over, she’d stolen everything he owned, including his clothes. Never again.

  Too bad, in a way, because he liked Gus’s style. He didn’t hold it against her that she hadn’t se
en through his disguise; he was an expert, after all, a master, and far better sharps than she had been taken in by his flimflams. He thought of the way she’d led him around his room last night, counting off the steps to the window and the wash stand. And just now she’d almost wept because she thought he was despondent. That’s what he liked about her: the combination of bunco artist and bleeding heart. You didn’t find that very often, especially in a woman.

  The cowboy, whose name was Blalock and who seemed to have a drinking problem, nudged him in the ribs, startling him. “Snort?” he offered, waving a pint bottle under Reuben’s nose.

  “No, thank you,” he declined fastidiously. Edward Cordoba’s tastes were more refined, and in this case so were Reuben’s. In fact, he’d been thinking of celebrating his windfall in Monterey when he got home by opening the 1880 Haut-Brion Graves. He might even share it with Mrs. Finney, his landlady, who would definitely feel like celebrating when she got her hands on the back rent he owed her. He smiled in mild anticipation, letting his eyes wander across the soothing spectacle of broad hills covered with blackberry vines and wild clematis, an old adobe ruin crumbling into black clay, clumps of poppy and lupine dotting the open spaces in a grove of low-branching oaks. The first gunshots seemed to go off in his ear, so loud and unexpected that his head smacked the ceiling when he jumped.

  A hooded rider flashed past the window on horseback. Reuben pitched forward, meaning to flatten himself to the stagecoach floor for safety, but Sister’s bony shoulder caught him a sharp one on the chin and she got there first. He sprawled on top of her, and flung his arms around her black-robed bottom, which was still perched on the edge of her seat. Beside them, Blalock spewed curses and Sweeney whimpered, “Oh, oh, oh,” like an old lady discovering a copulating couple in a church pew.

  More gunshots. The coach swerved; Reuben and the nun careened leftward, ramming their companions. The driver called out, “Whoa!” and with a neck-snapping jerk the coach halted, then rocked gently on its springs. Nobody moved.

  A man’s harsh voice ordered Willis, the driver, to get down with his hands in the air. There were scuffling sounds overhead, followed by a heavy thump on the ground as Willis obeyed. And then a smacking sound, a pained cry, and another thump, not as loud. Reuben didn’t like the way things were going.

  Somebody yanked open the door on his side. “Get down! All down, now!” A short, stocky man with a grain sack over his head waved a .38 in Reuben’s face. He got down.

  Sister Gus followed, then Sweeney. Blalock was last, and he had a mulish look on his coarse, whisker-stubbled face. “Go to blazes,” he growled, hunched in the doorway, and Reuben’s respect for him rose a notch. But it plummeted when Blalock flexed his knees and sprang at the man with the .38, who pulled the trigger and plugged him in the shoulder. Blalock collapsed in the dirt.

  Somebody screamed, and Reuben turned to the nun to console her. She looked pale but composed, and he realized Sweeney was the screamer. Let him console himself.

  He counted three bandits, two on the ground and one still on his horse, all wearing sacks with eyeholes and all holding pistols. “Move,” said the one with the .38, the short, squat one who resembled a fireplug. He waved his gun sideways, away from the stagecoach and toward a shallow gully flanking the road.

  Sister Gus took Reuben’s hand and squeezed it around her forearm; he looked at her in perplexity, then remembered. “Stay with me, Edward,” she said in a voice that quivered only a little, and began to lead him in the direction Fireplug was indicating. Behind them, one of the other robbers climbed up on top of the stage and began to throw bags and boxes down to his cohort. When Sweeney saw that, he started whimpering again.

  “Money, all your money, give now. Give!”

  Fireplug started with Sister Gus, who was clutching her leather pocketbook to her bosom like a suckling infant. When she shook her head, he brought his gun up until the barrel touched the tip of her nose. Her fingers loosened on the case; she handed it over, whispering a few words that didn’t sound to Reuben like the Hail Mary.

  “Now you.”

  Sweeney was already reaching for his purse; he shoved it at the bandit like a bomb that might go off any second.

  “You!”

  Reuben glared at the pint-sized robber. He had eight or nine inches on him, he reckoned, and maybe twenty pounds. What he lacked was a weapon. He hadn’t forgotten that Blalock lay bleeding, possibly to death, about forty feet away. And something about the glitter of bright black eyes behind the feed sack cast doubts in his mind on Fireplug’s emotional stability. Moving very slowly, he drew his wallet out of his breast pocket. So long to nineteen hundred dollars, he mourned, and to his immediate prospects of staying healthy in San Francisco.

  “Aiya!”

  Fireplug whirled, the wallet dangling from his fingers. The tallest bandit was bearing down on them, stiff-legged with indignation, waving his gun in the air. , And what a gun: a twelve-inch knife-revolver with a bayonet mounted under the barrel. Reuben, who had an aversion to knives, felt sweat bead on his forehead.

  It was a relief to see that the wielder of the vicious gun, who seemed to be the leader of the group, was madder at Fireplug than he was at his captives. What was the jerky language he was cussing at him in, Chinese? He seemed to be finding fault with Fireplug for having robbed them. Reuben felt a kinship with him on that account, and hope soared when the leader grabbed all the booty Fireplug had just stolen—but flew away when he shoved everything inside his own loose black shirt instead of giving it back. He barked some guttural order, and Fireplug, crestfallen, trudged back to the stagecoach and began helping the third robber riffle the contents of Mr. Sweeney’s carefully packaged antiquities.

  “What’s happening?” Reuben asked Sister Gus. She was holding his arm now.

  “Don’t move. There’s another one now and he’s got—you wouldn’t believe the gun he’s aiming at us.”

  “And the others?”

  “Two of them. They’re going through the stuff on the coach, screens and sculptures and ceramics. They look like they’re searching for something.”

  He thought so, too. They would open up a crate of paintings, toss it aside, and start on another one. Beside him, Sweeney was pale and sweating, making little squealing noises.

  “Are you all right?” Reuben asked. When she nodded, he repeated himself.

  “Yes,” she answered hastily, remembering he couldn’t see. “They won’t hurt us, I’m sure. They just want to rob us.”

  “It’s only money,” he agreed. “The Lord will provide.”

  Her top lip curled in an irreligious sneer.

  Just then Fireplug shouted out something from the stagecoach, no doubt the Chinese equivalent of “Eureka!” The leader started backing up, glancing over his shoulder. He gave another order, and the two men changed places again.

  Reuben didn’t care for the switch. Fireplug had something evil on his mind; he could see it in his eyes, and the way he gestured with his gun that the three of them should walk backward until they were behind a thicket of eucalyptus trees, out of sight of the stagecoach. Reuben got a hint of what the evil thing was when the bandit hissed, “Sit!” to him and Sweeney, jabbing Reuben in the chest with the gun for good measure, while he grabbed Sister by the neck and jerked her toward him. “Sit!” he screamed in an eerie whisper when Reuben didn’t move. “Or I shoot,” he explained helpfully, pressing the gun barrel into Reuben’s Adam’s apple. He sat.

  “Be naked,” Fireplug told Sister, She gaped at him. Reuben got a better grip on his cane, but at that moment Fireplug stuck his .38 in his belt, reached into a long side pocket, and pulled out a push dagger with a nine-inch blade. Reuben put his head between his knees.

  “I say take off clothes!”

  “Go to hell, you sawed-off little—Ow!”

  “What’s happening?” Reuben asked miserably.

  “He’s got the knife under her chin,” Sweeney whimpered. “She’s doing it, she’s unbuttonin
g her habit. Oh my God, I can’t watch.”

  “He just wants a look. He won’t do anything.” Reuben said it confidently, talking himself into it. A quick glance up made his stomach roll. The dagger had nicked her; a tiny line of blood trickled down her throat.

  “Hurry, hurry,” commanded Fireplug.

  “Keep your shirt on, you ugly bastard,” she quavered. “It took me a half hour to get into this rig.”

  “I say hurry—eeyii!” Reuben looked up to see the bandit jumping up and down on one foot, clutching his shin. “White devil, I kill you!” Springing at her, he grabbed her by her veil. It fell away in his hand and she almost pivoted out of reach, but he snatched her back before she could go two steps. He brought the knife up in her face, and Reuben froze, watching sunlight glint on the long, evil blade. The whites of her eyes glimmered as she threw a panicked, hopeless glance at him and Sweeney.

  “Do something!” Reuben yelled at the curator, who was holding his knees and rocking. Reuben couldn’t look and he couldn’t look away; a humming, grayish fog in his head censored the worst. But then—then he saw Fireplug pocket the dagger, so he could get both hands on the gaping halves of the nun’s habit and tear them apart to her waist.

  “Well, shit fire,” Reuben muttered, and leapt to his feet. Taking a mighty swing, he whacked Fireplug on the back of the head with his cane, and the robber dropped like a sack of sand. “Did I get him?” He nailed at the air a few more times, for effect. “Did I hit him?”

  A gun fired, and the whining bullet ricocheted somewhere behind them. “Get down!” cried Sister. Reuben dove, hitting the ground near Fireplug’s inert body. The nun landed next to him. He started to grab for the pistol in Fireplug’s belt, but she beat him to it. Teeth clenched, eyes squinted, Sister Mary Augustine fanned a spray of bullets out of the revolver like Wild Bill Hickok, using the bandit’s belly for cover. The tall robber advancing on them from the stagecoach dodged and fired back, then whirled and fled. Seconds later they heard the sound of horses’ hooves galloping away.