Port Hazard (8 page)

BELLA UNION MELODEON

NIGHTLY

A CONSTANTLY VARIED ENTERTAINMENT

Replete with FUN and FROLIC

Abounding in SONG and DANCE

Unique for GRACE and BEAUTY

And Perfect in Its Object of Affording

LAUGHTER FOR MILLIONS!

A Host of the Best

DRAMATIC, TERPSICHOREAN AND MUSICAL

TALENT WILL APPEAR

Emphatically the

MELODEON OF THE PEOPLE

Unapproachable and Beyond Competition.

 

The dodger was printed on the kind of paper that could not have associated with The Honorable D. W. Wheelock's personal stationery. Its coarse fibers were tinted an unappetizing shade of apricot and the edges of the dull black letterpress characters had bled, making them muzzy and hard to read. The character who had thrust it into my hand was of a piece with the stock: short and round, buttoned into a loud checkered vest, a morning coat two sizes too small, and loose trousers belted just under his armpits, with yellow gaiters on his black brogans and a deer-stalker cap. He patrolled the boardwalk in front of the theater, accosting passersby with a nasal bray touting the wonders to be found inside and shoving the sheets into their midsections; forced to defend themselves, they grabbed at their bellies and wound up holding a dodger. No one got past him without one while Beecher and I were watching, and the traffic was heavy.

The Bella Union was three stories of frame construction—painted, not whitewashed—on the northeast corner of Portsmouth Square at the foot of Telegraph Hill, with shutters on the windows designed to repel invaders and vigilantes. Its name was painted in neat block letters across the false front, and the structure itself appeared as solid as a bank or a county courthouse. Natives referred to it as “The Ancient,” which in a city that burned over every few seasons applied to anything more than ten years old. Neither fire nor scandal nor the cicada-like cycle of Community Cleansing could eradicate it. It kept coming back like a nest of yellow jackets.

We entered a cavernous saloon, whose gaming tables and long bar were already crowded at late morning, drinking under a glittering canopy of upended flutes, snifters, and cordials and waiting their turns at faro,
vingt-et-un,
and a seven-foot-tall Wheel of Fortune, the biggest I'd seen outside Virginia City. The place was a dazzle of gaslight and highly polished surfaces, which made a gaudy setting for the dingy sailors' jerseys, miners' overalls, and dusty town coats that filled it. The bouncer, whose hair slickum and tailored coat did no more than necessary to disguise the fact he was a pugilist, gave us no expression at all from behind his blisters of scar tissue when we asked where Mr. Wheelock might be found until I gave him my name. Someone had prepared him. He ducked his head and directed us to a stairwell half hidden behind a box containing a mechanical man who told fortunes.

On the way past the box, Beecher glared at the painted figure inside. It looked like Judge Blackthorne in a turban. “Reckon he's real?”

“Cost you a nickel to find out,” I said.

“I didn't come here to get robbed.”

“Try to blend in anyway.”

The walls of the stairwell had been freshly painted; not a rare thing to find in a combustible city, but scarce enough in slap-bang Barbary. A floral carpet covered the steps, through which we could feel the buzz of brass from the band tuning up in the theater behind the saloon. That was The Ancient's bread and butter: the little stage where buffoons recited jokes from
Captain Billy's Whiz-Bang
and pretty
danseuses
in tights and short ruffled skirts performed cartwheels to
Parisien
cabaret tunes penned in New York tenement houses, and the curtained booths where breathy Southern belles with granite eyes inveigled inebriated customers to buy champagne and claret. Where the transaction went from there was strictly between the belles and the customers and the little man in the immaculate black cutaway who collected the take at the end of the evening. You could leave your money at the tables all over town, but when it came to staggering home with your pockets hanging out and an idiotic smile pasted to your face, the Bella Union was the spot—along with the Verandah, the El Dorado, the Empire, the Mazourka, the Arcade, the Fontine House, the Alhambra, and the Rendezvous. There was an unending supply of gulls and of sharpers to pluck them.

Beecher, climbing the stairs behind me, must have read my thoughts. “You been here before?”

“Couple of hundred times, from here to St. Louis.”

“Me, too. Through the back door.”

The stairwell opened onto a corridor with more floral carpeting, ending in a door marked
PRIVATE
. My knock was answered immediately by a young beanpole in a morning coat and high starched collar, balding in front. Gold-rimmed spectacles pinched his nose, with a ribbon attaching them to his lapel. A pair of watery blue eyes went from my face to Beecher's, registered annoyance there, and returned to me. “Yes?”

“Page Murdock and Edward Anderson Beecher to see Daniel Webster Wheelock.”

“Nero.”

I was wondering what response to make to this when a man approached the beanpole from behind. He was two inches taller, which made him six inches taller than I was, and his shoulders stuck out several inches on both sides of the other man. He was blacker than Beecher and better dressed than any of us, in a rose-colored Prince Albert cut to his frame and a ruffled white shirt. His face had the thick bone development of a born fighter, but no scars. That made him either very good or very discouraging to a potential opponent.

“I am Roland Quinn, Mr. Wheelock's personal secretary,” the beanpole said. “He made no mention of a Mr. Beecher.”

“He made no mention of a Mr. Quinn, but here we all are.”

He touched the nosepiece of his spectacles. “Nero is Mr. Wheelock's personal bodyguard. He will look after your weapons.”

“Nero?” Beecher wore his thin smile.

“My father taught himself to read from Gibbon.” The big man's voice was a silky rumble.

I unholstered the Deane-Adams and spun it butt out.

“Not out here.” Quinn glanced irritatedly past my shoulder, then stepped aside, holding the door. Nero moved the other direction with a gliding maneuver, as if he were mounted on oiled casters.

We stepped inside and gave him our revolvers. His hickory-colored eyes swept us from head to toe and returned to our hats. We removed them and gave him a look inside the crowns. He nodded, laid our pistols next to some others on the shelf of a massive rack with an oval mirror set in its center, then took our hats and hung them on pegs beside a couple of straw skimmers, several bowlers, and a silk topper. His gliding gait took him from there to a door at the back of the room, where he turned his back to it and became part of the architecture, hands at his sides with his thumbs parallel with the seams of his trousers.

Quinn shut the door and tipped a hand toward a row of shield-back chairs facing a Chippendale writing table.

“Mr. Wheelock is running late this morning. He'll be available presently.”

It was a reception room, scattered with chairs and setees and decorated with grim-looking landscapes in heavy gilded frames. Several of the seats were occupied, by as wide a variety of humanity as could be found anywhere outside a train station: gents in morning coats and sidewhiskers, Hoodlums in their trademark motley, a decomposing old salt in his sodden woolens, tying and untying knots in a length of tar-stained hemp with his duffel at his feet, two painted tarts in laddered stockings, and a handsome woman just on the shady side of forty, seated knees together in a modest floor-length dress of costly manufacture with her reticule in her lap and her hair pinned up flawlessly under a becoming hat. What her story might be kept me occupied for much of the long wait.

A Regulator wall clock knocked out the time between chimes, patiently and in spite of one of the sidewhiskered gents, who kept dragging out his pocket winder and confirming the hour. After twenty minutes, he got up, collected his topper and stick from the rack, and pranced out, blowing out his moustaches and muttering something about how folk from the wrong side of the tracks needed taking down a peg. Quinn, seated at the writing table, went on scribbling with a horsehair pen and never glanced up. One of the tarts waited until the door shut, then said something in a low voice to her companion, who cut loose with a short nasal bray and resumed contemplating the tin ceiling. Two Hoodlums came in to take his place. When, five minutes later, the gent returned, he found all the seats taken, and resigned himself to stand next to the hat rack. No other defections were attempted during the time Beecher and I were there.

A third Hoodlum, decked out in a long navy coat with gold frogs over tan trousers, came in and shook hands with one of the pair who'd preceded him. This one wore high-peaked shoulders like Tom Tulip, with a dirty white scarf wound around his neck that only brought out the pits in his pasty complexion. I eavesdropped on their conversation, and wrote down what I remembered of it later on the greasy square of paper that came wrapped around the smoked herring I had for supper. I still have the sheet, in case anyone wants to study the exchange and translate it for later generations:

I don't know if I got it down exactly as I heard it, and I'm certain—“dead game,” as Pox and Freddie would say—that the spelling's wrong (assuming it was a written language at all), but it isn't likely it would read like Fields and Webber if I'd managed to record it verbatim. Most of the other people in the room took no pains to conceal the fact they were listening in, but those who understood what they heard probably wouldn't have betrayed anything incriminating to the authorities. There in Daniel Webster Wheelock's reception room was the one place in San Francisco where the criminal code was superfluous. They could have plotted to kidnap the president in plain English and not a word of it would have gone as far as the ground floor. As for me, for all I knew the two were debating the fishing off the Jones Street pier.

It's a dead language now in any case, buried along with the Bella Union and the Slop Chest and the Devil's Acre and old Chinatown beneath the rubble of the '06 quake and the city they erected on top of it; the current heirs to their underworld territory speak a dreary patois made up of sweepings from moving-picture title cards and cheap novels. In a little while, the last person who ever pattered the flash with a fly cull will be as dead as Barbary. I doubt the city fathers will dedicate a statue to any of them.

There was more to the conversation, but I didn't hear it. The door at the back of the room opened again and a man in a wrinkled suit came out, mopping his red face with a lawn handkerchief. He was either an unsuccessful drummer or the mayor. Quinn peered past him, nodded at someone inside, and looked at me over the tops of his spectacles.

Beecher and I rose and went in, nearly colliding with the impatient fellow in the morning coat, who had started forward from his position beside the hat rack when the secretary nodded. He stopped abruptly, checked at last by a graceful movement from Nero, and pulled at his sidewhiskers.

“Mr. Wheelock will see you next, Congressman,” Quinn said as the door closed behind us.