Last Year

  “No,” Baumgartner said curtly.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Not absolutely sure. I’m introduced to people on a daily basis, for all kinds of reasons, and I don’t always remember names. But nothing rings a bell. Honestly, this is starting to feel like an interrogation.”

  “Are you aware of any contraband circulating among the staff in your department?”

  “Contraband?”

  “Drugs,” Elizabeth said.

  She had chosen a moment when Baumgartner was once more reflexively rubbing her nose. Now her hand fluttered under the table like a startled bird. “What are you suggesting?”

  “Are illicit drugs, such as cocaine, circulating in the entertainment division in Tower One?”

  “Certainly not! I mean, as far as I know.”

  Elizabeth penciled something into her notebook. “Okay. Thank you, Ms. Baumgartner. We may need to speak to you again, but that’s all for now. In the meantime, if you think of anything that might be pertinent, please contact me. Anything you choose to say will be held in the strictest confidence.” She lowered her voice and added, “We’re not interested in punishing anyone. Management is aware of how hard you work on behalf of the City. We just need to be aware of what’s coming through the Mirror, and we’d be grateful for any help you can give us.”

  A threat and a promise in one package, Jesse thought. Neatly done. He followed Elizabeth out of the room, leaving Baumgartner dumbfounded and twitching. In the privacy of the staff elevator he said, “So what does Baumgartner have to do with guns?”

  “Barton thinks the weapons came through the Mirror along with a shipment of theatrical gear. It’s reasonable to assume illegal drugs might be coming in by the same route. Baumgartner’s coke habit isn’t the secret she thinks it is, and it gives us leverage.”

  “Coke?”

  “Coke, yeah, you know: cocaine. When she powders her nose, she literally powders her nose. You understand?”

  “Why would anyone bring cocaine from the twenty-first century?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When she could just send someone to the druggist in Futurity Station. Coca wine, coca tooth drops, powdered cocaine—”

  “Holy fuck,” Elizabeth said.

  * * *

  Wednesday night was Netflix Night in the Tower One Staff Common Room. Elizabeth might be there, and that was a temptation, but Jesse had attended the event last week and hadn’t felt especially welcome, so he took advantage of the free time to cross over to Tower Two and visit the commissary. He was hoping to run across Doris Vanderkamp, preferably not in the presence of her new beau.

  Doris was unpredictable, but on slow weeknights she typically lingered in the commissary waiting for company to drift by. And true to form, here she was, working her way through a bucket of fried chicken and dropping crumbs onto the pages of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. “Interesting story?”

  Doris glanced up, her dark hair bouncing like a nest of coiled springs. “You.” She sniffed and returned her attention to the paper. “Seems like the Spaniards caught up with Boss Tweed.”

  “May I sit?”

  “Don’t know why you’d want to. Everyone says you go around with that big-shouldered Tower One woman nowadays.”

  He settled into a chair. “And you go around with Mick Finagle.”

  “Are you jealous, Jesse Cullum?”

  “Of course I’m jealous. Any man would be.”

  “Liar.” But she gave him a grudging half smile.

  “Have you seen him lately?”

  “Who, Boss Tweed?”

  “Mick.”

  “How would that be any business of yours?”

  “None, except that I need to talk to him.”

  Doris closed the newspaper and pushed it aside. “What do you need to talk to Mick about?”

  “About that head cold you can’t seem to get rid of.”

  “Are you drunk?”

  “You know me, Doris. I’m the original teetotaler. I don’t drink hard spirits. I also avoid Vin Mariani and Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup. But back in San Francisco—”

  “In your earlier life. Which you’re always so careful not to talk about.”

  “Back in San Francisco I knew folks who went to Chinatown from time to time. What they learn there is that a pipe can be a good deal easier to pick up than it is to put down. And I’ve seen what happens when such people don’t get what they need. Sweats, shakes, the runny nose. They try to make it up with laudanum or patent medicines, or they boil poppy heads for tea.”

  “Nice friends you have. No wonder you don’t mention them more often.”

  “Now, I’m not suggesting you’re one of those sorry souls. The Doris I know would never fall to that level. But your symptoms tell a story. What would I find, I wonder, if I searched your dormitory room? A bottle of laudanum, maybe, lurking at the back of a cupboard?”

  “What you would find would be my shoe, planted in your fundament.” But her belligerence was forced. “Jesse, what’s this all about? Speak plainly; I’m not good at puzzles.”

  “We both know things come into the City from time to time. Things the City people don’t approve of. Some of the restaurant girls and show people have habits worse than yours, Doris, and if some nervous dancer needs a dose of paregoric I don’t see any earthly reason why she shouldn’t have it—though the City people are prudish that way. But when it gets too obvious to overlook, when it leaks from Tower Two to Tower One? Bad things start to happen. Rooms get searched. People get fired.”

  “What’s all this got to do with me?”

  “It has to do with Mick. I don’t suppose Mick’s the only one doing business with the druggist in Futurity Station. But he’s one of them. Don’t deny it—his name is already on a list. And knowing Mick, he’s not doing anyone any favors. Mick’s not much more than a glorified teamster, but he has the mind of a businessman. An eye for profit and the quid pro quo. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Which tends to make other people—innocent people—people like you, Doris—a party to his affairs. And those same people risk getting drowned, if Mick’s boat sinks.”

  “His boat’s sinking, is it?”

  “He doesn’t make you pay for those little bottles of Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, does he?”

  “You bastard—you have been in my cupboard!”

  “You and I were intimate friends, Doris. An intimate friend notices things.”

  “Like I noticed you crying like a baby in your sleep?”

  “I think Mick brings you your paregoric, and in exchange you do him some kind of favor. Maybe something as trivial as carrying a package from one place to another. His pass card won’t let him into the guest floors, but yours will. Suppose someone gave you a little something upstairs, and Mick told you to hand it off to Isaac Connaught, the coach driver. Has anything like that ever happened?”

  Doris had utterly forgotten Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. She bared her teeth in an expression that would not have looked out of place on a Bengal tiger. “I will have your guts for garters if you get me fired from the City!”

  The part about carrying packages had been little more than a guess, though it was rumored that Doris had had a brief dalliance with Connaught before she started her affair with Jesse. “I want to prevent you from being fired, if it’s at all possible. That’s why I’m here. Yes, Mick’s boat is sinking, and you need to get clear of it as quick as possible. I can help you.”

  “Maybe his boat is sinking because some great huge lummox torpedoed it.”

  “I work for the City like everyone else. I’m doing my job. If you want to keep on doing yours, you ought to cooperate.”

  “You can’t fire me!”

  “I can’t, but the people who can fire you will be looking at you very closely, very soon. Let me tell them you’re being cooperative.”

  “Whatever that means!”

  “It means we should have a frank conversation. For instance,
about those packages you delivered to Connaught. What was in them, Doris?”

  For a long moment he was sure she was going to slap him. Then she rolled her eyes and sighed. “I don’t know. They’re always wrapped. Pasteboard boxes in brown paper, to look like something I might carry in or out of a guest’s room.”

  “All right. These packages, are they heavy?”

  “Some heavier than others.”

  “How often do you pick them up?”

  “Once a week, the same day the guests leave.”

  “Always from the same room?”

  “No. Mick tells me which room. Always one that’s just been vacated. When I make up the bed I look underneath. If there’s a package I carry it down to the stables and hand it off to Connaught. Honestly, that’s all.” Her anger had drained away. “I guess it’s enough to get me fired.”

  “Not if you’re willing to tell the story twice.”

  “Tell it to who?”

  “A security boss called Barton in Tower One.”

  Her eyes widened. “I can’t cross over to Tower One!”

  “I’ll escort you.”

  “What do you mean—now?”

  “The sooner the better.”

  She cast a long glance at the newspaper, as if she wanted to hide under it, then pushed away from the table. “If we’re being so damned honest with each other … what’ll happen to Mick? Because I don’t want anyone to think I gave him up just to save my skin.”

  “No one will think that.” He took her arm before she could call him a liar yet again. “Come on, Doris. Don’t be afraid. You always said you wanted to see the other tower.”

  He left Doris with Barton, who promised she wouldn’t be fired if what she told him was honest and helpful—a promise Jesse hoped he would keep.

  He was in bed by eleven o’clock, and he dreamed of Madame Chao’s house in San Francisco.

  * * *

  Jesse is seventeen years old. His father is drunk, but not bad drunk.

  “Working drunk” is how Jesse thinks of it. The smell of whiskey hovers over his father like a sullen angel. It’s the end of a long night—within grasping distance of dawn—and Jesse’s father has been on the door of Madame Chao’s for many hours. Jesse has been serving drinks in the parlor: His aversion to alcohol makes him a reliable employee, which Madame Chao appreciates.

  The parlor is empty of clients. Most of Madame Chao’s girls are upstairs, though Ming and Li are on the sofa, conducting an earnest conversation in Dupont Street patois. Jesse, collecting empty glasses, listens with half an ear as his father speaks. It is one of his father’s mumbling monologues, a tutelary speech directed at no one: The only evidence of his drunkenness is that he doesn’t care who’s listening. Tonight it’s something about whalers. “Whaleboat men are the worst.” From the point of view of a whorehouse bouncer. “Stinking of carcasses and train oil, strong as bulls from lofting their irons … coarse and ugly from months confined among men no better than themselves, arms thick as hawsers, hard on the women and harder still in a fight…”

  Jesse and his father and his sister, Phoebe, share an attic room, stiflingly hot on summer nights like these. Jesse is ready to sleep but he dreads the walk upstairs, passing through layers of increasingly hotter air to lie and sweat through the restless hours until a distant noon bell wakes him. He prays for morning fog, the benediction of an ocean breeze.

  The last glass has been returned to its cupboard and Ming and Li are dozing in each other’s arms when there is a knock at the door: three loud, insistent pounds. Jesse’s father rouses from his introversion and takes his station. He slides the wooden cover from the peephole and puts his eye to it. He mutters something inaudible, probably a curse. He says to Jesse, “Go fetch Madame Chao.”

  Then he opens the door, and Roscoe Candy enters the whorehouse.

  Jesse doesn’t hesitate. He’s up the stairs in an instant, rattling the door of Madame Chao’s room. A smell of burning flowers seeps around the jamb, acridly sweet and almost rancid, like a fire in a funeral parlor. Madame Chao (who encourages Jesse to call her Big Sister) has smoked her evening opium. Madame Chao has a healthy respect for the poppy and is meticulous in her habit. She won’t touch the pipe before midnight or after dawn. And even now, Jesse knows, she won’t be incapacitated. But she might be dangerously slow. He calls out, “Big Sister!” into the darkened room. The creak of bedsprings. A lazy pendulum of footsteps.

  Madame Chao’s face is an obscure history, written in parchment. She’s been running this house for more than two decades, but no one knows much about her. The squat brick house called Madame Chao’s has been here since before the rebels took Fort Sumter. It was here when the ’49ers arrived. It’s older than the Catholic church on Mission Street, Jesse’s father likes to say, and Madame Chao—well, Madame Chao is older than God. She blinks at him from the darkness: “Yes?”

  He whispers Roscoe Candy’s name. Big Sister frowns and narrows her eyes. “Evil man. All right, I’m coming.”

  She dresses quickly. Descending the stairs, she leans on Jesse’s arm. At the age of fifteen he towers over her, but she still makes him feel like a child. No one in the house questions Madame Chao’s authority. Visitors occasionally do, but they generally come to regret it.

  Roscoe Candy might be an exception. Roscoe is making himself a big man in the Tenderloin. He has all the necessary traits: a high opinion of himself, contempt for his enemies, a small army of enforcers. And—of course—money. Money from the gold fields, Jesse has heard, acquired mainly through claim-jumping and intimidation. Not enough money to impress respectable San Francisco, but enough to make a big noise in the Tenderloin. Candy is buying saloons and whorehouses from Broadway to Market.

  In the parlor, Jesse’s father stands unhappily at his post by the door. Roscoe Candy is on the sofa now, casually groping Ming. He has a hand up her silk chemise and a nasty grin on his face. He looks like a fat clown, with a striped schoolboy cap on his head and his red checked vest straining at its buttons. But he’s not a clown. He’s as tall as Jesse’s father, agile and strong despite his fat. Under his frock coat he carries a flensing knife of steel and bone ivory. He has made himself a legend with it, using it to disembowel more than one of his enemies. Men from the gold fields still call him Roscoe Gut-Cutter.

  Jesse senses that his father both despises and fears Roscoe Candy. This makes Jesse ashamed and curious. Jesse wonders how he would take down Roscoe Candy, if he ever had to do such a thing. A hand with a knife in it is dangerous, his father has taught him. The hand as much as the knife. Watch the hand. Jesse would watch Roscoe’s hand. He notes that Roscoe is right-handed: That’s the hand he’s using to squeeze Ming’s breasts.

  “Ming,” Madame Chao says, “stop bothering this man and go upstairs. Now!”

  Ming escapes, careful not to show her relief. Roscoe Candy fixes his eyes on Madame Chao. “Shoot, she weren’t bothering me.” His voice is incongruously high-pitched, like the yelp of a small dog. “I like a little yellow girl now and then. Diddeys that would fit in a teacup, that one. Sweet little thing.”

  “Not open for business,” Madame Chao says.

  “Well, that ain’t the kind of business I want to conduct just now anyway.”

  Candy and Madame Chao begin an earnest, low-pitched conversation. Jesse wants to know what it’s about, but he can’t make out the words. Madame Chao speaks soothingly but fingers the jade bracelet she wears around her left wrist: She’s nervous. Candy’s meanness simmers under his words like a kettle coming to boil.

  Jesse sneaks another glance at his father, who seems relieved that Roscoe just wants to talk. His eyelids have crept back to half-mast. His mouth moves as if he is whispering to himself. It’s this last habit that worries Jesse most. Jesse knows his father is a working drunk and that liquor has been a part of his daily life since before Jesse was born. But it seems as if liquor affects him differently these days. It takes him deeper into himself. Maybe because of his age, Jess
e thinks. His father is no longer young. Nor as fast as he once was. In body or mind.

  But his father snaps to attention when there is a noise on the stairs.

  Jesse follows his glance: Phoebe has come down from the attic room.

  Jesse’s father has been careful to insulate Phoebe from the work of the house, though she is in no way ignorant of it. Madame Chao has been cooperative, maybe because she’s fond of Jesse’s father. Phoebe knows better than to come downstairs after dark or before the first light of morning. But maybe it’s first light now. The night has certainly seemed long enough.

  Madam Chao looks up. Roscoe Candy looks up. Phoebe freezes on the stairs.

  She’s eleven years old, dressed in her plain cotton nightgown, which is torn in places. Phoebe’s mother was a pretty mulatto woman whom Jesse barely remembers, and Phoebe’s skin is the color of wheat ready for the harvest. Her hair is dark and lustrous, and her eyes are brown. She has been having her female bleeding for three months now.

  Phoebe seems startled to find a stranger in the parlor at this hour, and she turns away hastily. Jesse is horrified to see that her nightgown, long overdue for replacement, is torn from hem to thigh. Nothing Madame Chao’s girls would blink at. But Roscoe Candy lets out a long appreciative whistle. “I didn’t know you kept such girls here—I thought it was all yellow-for-the-white trade. Are you doing business I don’t know about?”

  “No business,” Madame Chao says curtly. Madame Chao speaks eloquent English but puts on the patois for customers and people she doesn’t like. “Not business girl.”

  “Everything’s business,” Roscoe says, smiling in a way that bares his teeth. His face is round, his features small. The devil’s face, Jesse thinks, as it might look if you painted it on an egg.

  “Not for sale,” Madame Chao insists.

  “Grooming her for some other customer?”

  Madame Chao has no response.

  “She’s just ripe,” Roscoe says plaintively.

  Phoebe isn’t stupid. She turns and flees upstairs. Jesse looks at his father. His father gives him a warning look.