The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion (11 page)

The Major asked if he'd assaulted her. She looked at him piteously.

“He knocked me to the ground, cut my lip, and blacked my eye.”

“You know very well what I meant.”

“No, Evelyn. I'm still the same unsullied girl you married.”

“You were living with a fire-eater when we met.”

“Don't think I don't miss that.”

The Major balled his fists. “That fellow should be behind bars.”

“So should we,” said Johnny. “Did he say anything?”

“He said, ‘Teats! Jesus Christ!' Either my disguise is better than I'd hoped or I'm not as comely as I once was.”

“Is that all he said?” April asked.

“ ‘Hand over the swag.' ”

Johnny's watch ticked loudly in the profound silence.

Lizzie smiled sourly, gasped, and touched her lip. “
Annabelle and the Pirate
. It brought down the house at the Metropolitan in Detroit in fifty-eight. They held us over ten days.”

“Twelve,” murmured the Major.

Johnny glared at him. “Just what did you say in the Overland office?”

“I don't remember.”

“If you say anything at all, you say, ‘Reach for the sky.' We rehearsed it.”

“It's hackneyed.”

“It's intended to be. Swag! By God! You might as well have appeared in full costume and handed the fellow a programme. You might have autographed it.”

“What's the point in directing him now?” April said. “This is terrible, Johnny, terrible. If the manager told this—this bandit what the Major said, he's told everyone. We're found out.”

“Quite likely.” He walked over to the table and lifted one of the sheets Cornelius had written on, read for a moment. “This is good. I'm sorry we won't be able to use it this season.”

“It needs work in any case. My French is rusty.”

A whistle blew, drawn thin by distance. Lizzie pawed at her attendants and got up to help put the bicycle in its trunk. Cornelius found his wrench.

“We have a few minutes,” Johnny said. “Major, the lantern.”

A railroad lantern with a red lens was produced. Johnny lit it from the table lamp. “So much more convenient than waiting at the station,” he said. “Ladies and gentlemen, it's been a successful tour. We're long past due for a holiday.”

The Major blew out his moustaches. “There are no holidays in the theater. Except Sundays, of course. Lizzie and I haven't had Christmas off since the Coliseum burned down in Baltimore.”

“I'm declaring one. I'd intended to, anyway, after Boise. We're carrying too much gold and paper to distribute among ourselves and in the strongbox and claim it as box office receipts much longer. The time has come to place it in a bank in Denver. Since we've demonstrated that none of us can be trusted to do it alone, we shall all go. I see no reason why we shouldn't spend some of it while we're there and entertain ourselves for a change.”

April buttoned her traveling cloak. “Does this mean the end of the Prairie Rose?”

“Just for a season, while we cede the headlines to a more conventional breed of blackguard and brigand.” He put on his soft black hat and smoothed the brim. “And then—”

“The show must go on,” said the Major.

Johnny smiled. “If only you remembered all your lines as accurately.”

We glide down Pike's Peak, bluer than the ocean beneath its white coronet, into a hurdy-gurdy metropolis of macadam and brick, teeming with surreys, streetcars, beer wagons, top hats, and spinning parasols, “O Susannah!” fiddling on the soundtrack, white letters with square serifs on the scrim: DENVER. Crowding in for a tight shot of the scripted legend on a sign, swinging crazily from chains attached to a porch roof trimmed in gingerbread, we remove our hats, pat down our hair, and prepare to enter the Wood Palace. We step back a moment to allow a burly party in shirtsleeves and handlebars to hurl a drunken saddle tramp out through the swinging doors, then join the customers inside.

The main room, two stories high and hung with a chandelier that doubles as a trapeze, features green baize gaming tables, a mahogany bar as long as the
Mayflower
and more cunningly carved, a stage, and a high ballustraded hallway with stairs cantilevering up to it; nymphs and satyrs randy about in oil on canvas at the top, bordered by bronze cherubim. All the tables are in use and none
of the six bartenders is idle. The usual chubby quartette gallops in sparkling leotards onstage; if we strain our ears, we may detect the anachronistic notes of a can-can. This is an entertainment after all, and not a historical tale.

We're just in time to see that high railing collapse and a pair of battlers fall ten feet to the table beneath, demolishing it and interrupting a lively game of faro. Once again the burly fellow goes to work.

We suspect, of course, that all this is staging. The Wood Palace's real business is conducted behind the numbered doors lining that second-story hallway. From one of them, if our fortune continues (and this is the same as catching a glimpse of Victoria passing through the Buckingham gate in her coach), Nell Dugan may make an appearance before the last drunk is swept out.

Late in life, when the laws of time and nature had packed off with those physical charms that had made her a doubtful subject for serious journalism, Nell told a reporter from the
Post
that she'd come to America at fourteen with just a dollar and forty cents in her pocket. Matronly vanity gave her license to pare six years off her age, and social discretion to leave out mention of the letter of introduction she'd sewn inside the lining of her shabby coat, addressed by the mayor of Limerick to Michael McFee, president and principal stockholder of the Denver Topical Mining Company.

It was an arrangement of convenience for all three parties. The mayor's wife had become suspicious to the point of certainty, and Nell had placed in safekeeping a number of letters of an indiscreet character written to her in his hand. McFee, a confederate of the mayor's before emigrating ten years before, lived like Vanderbilt so
far as the scale of life in the Colorado Territory could support, and desired both a mistress and a taste of the companionship of old Erin; Nell chafed at the restraints placed upon her by a puritanical father and a farmer husband who stank perennially of sod. “It was like going to bed in me own grave,” she told the reporter, who recorded the remark in his notes but forebore to publish it. The mayor stood her passage to New York, McFee her train fare to Denver, where the question of her accommodations pivoted upon the impression she made. It was a gamble; but like any good gambler, she was well aware of the odds, and that they were in her favor. A photograph made at the time the article appeared in the
Post
suggests, beneath the folds of fat of a prosperous middle age, something of the stake she brought to the table at twenty. Forty years of good Irish whisky, half-dollar cheroots, and carnal calisthentics may thicken the waist and coarsen the skin, but can neither alter the impudent tilt of the nose nor dim the devil in the eye.

McFee was a gambler as well, and knew a good hand when it was dealt. He set Nell up as titular owner of a former boardinghouse on Holladay Street that had been converted first into a hotel for prospectors weary of canvas and thrice-boiled coffee, then into a saloon, and finally into a “melodeon”; a designation made popular by San Francisco, promising all the entertainments of a debauched civilization adrift in the wilderness. Opium could be consumed there, as well as liquor in the original bottles, women who did not smell like bacon fat and their last customer, keno and cards, and music by the best third-rate orchestras west of the Gaiety in Kansas City. It was a profitable enterprise, reducing the strain on McFee's pocketbook, and ran smoothly enough on its own to place Nell's charms at his disposal whenever his business
affairs got the better of his nervous system. Seen in this light, his situation makes it difficult to look upon his untimely death as a tragedy.

“The Wood Palace” was a misnomer with a legitimate pedigree. Built of brick to comply with the new city ordinance requiring all new construction to be of sturdy, noncombustible material, it occupied the site of its original namesake, which had been swept away by a flood in 1864, rebuilt, and consumed by fire in 1870. It was one of the city's more enduring institutions, respected for its tradition of survival, if not for the nature of its business.

The Panic of ‘73—brought on by greed fueled by the economic boom following the Union victory in 1865—brought thousands of investors from private Pullmans down to shank's mare, without a penny for a streetcar, while the speculators who had precipitated it found themselves forced to order champagne of a less fashionable vintage. It was in this climate that Michael McFee paused to confer with his attorney before the offices of the
Denver Times
, which had libeled him, and interrupted his consultation to greet a pedestrian who recognized him from the most recent stockholders meeting at the Denver Topical Mining Company. Following an exchange of pleasantries, the stockholder produced a pistol and shot him twice in the stomach. McFee died six weeks later, raving for ice water and oysters; his assailant, who turned out to be a former clerk fired by McFee's company, took a short drop through a trapdoor and broke his neck.

Nell was saddened, but alert. Through a lawyer, she purchased the Wood Palace outright from McFee's estate, and continued as she had, only now with full access to the profits, which she reinvested in the business, securing its reputation as the finest establishment of its kind on Holladay, a wide-open street in a wide-open town.

Among the improvements she added was a suite of rooms in the basement, accessible only by a trapdoor hidden beneath a heavy Persian rug in the back parlor, where tenants were accommodated in absolute secrecy, at rates that rivaled those of the Astor House in Manhattan. Although none of the legendary Astor luxuries was in evidence, highwaymen could rest there in relative comfort while heavily armed men combed caves and barns the countryside over looking for them. Nell did not keep a guest book, but had she done so, the signatures of the outlaw luminaries who had taken advantage of her hospitality would have crowned the collection of any autograph hunter of sinister bent.

As a result of her double income, Nell Dugan was the wealthiest unattached woman in Denver. Her dresses were cut to her petite frame from organdy of a quality that came dear after the collapse of the cotton industry in the defeated South—deep purple was her color of choice at night, lavender during the day—and she wore peacock feathers in her thick auburn hair, her best feature, for public appearances at her establishment. She kept her creamy skin pale beneath a vast collection of parasols, and her carriage-and-pair were the envy of Denver's newly rich. She made it a point to take them out often, and to drop as much as a thousand dollars on a dubious hand at poker, her only addiction, by way of inspiring confidence in her clandestine guests; a woman of such conspicuous means was far less likely to turn them in for the reward than the storied prostitute with a heart of gold. It was a reality of frontier economics that internal organs assayed out at considerably less than twelve dollars per Troy ounce.

While the spring runoff was floating miners' tents on the eastern face of the Rockies, the entire Ace-in-the-Hole Gang stayed dry snoring and playing poker (for stakes much lower than Nell's
notorious “thousand-burners”) in the hidden rooms beneath the Wood Palace. The money Charlie Kettleman had reclaimed from Mme. Mort-Davies made the stop affordable, and the fuss the gang had created in Salt Lake City made it imperative. The Pinkertons had never stopped looking for them in response to the robbery of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific, and the wire Philip Rittenhouse had sent Allan Pinkerton after reading of the Overland fiasco in the
Deseret News
had announced their recent whereabouts to the national press. That very day, agents of the Denver branch had searched the upper and lower stories and the basement storage rooms on the other side of four feet of solid masonry.

“You should of put a round in her.” Black Jack Brixton threw in his cards.

Charlie raked in the pot. “What's the point? We got the money.”

“It would of put her fat friend in some other line of work. Next time we open an empty safe I'll shut you up in it.”

“That's my job,” Ed Kettleman said. “He ain't your brother.”

“If he was I'd dig up my mother and punch her in the mouth.”

Tom Riddle listened to the conversation with a hand cupping one ear. “You told me your mother's alive.”

“I'd shoot her and bury her first.”

Charlie said, “I never busted a cap on a woman or a child.”

“You never busted a cap on a bottle of Old Gideon,” Ed said. “You couldn't hit a three-hundred-pound Chinaman with a scattergun.”

“Amateurs got to be discouraged,” said Brixton. “You kill a man's woman, it takes the fight right out of him.”

Ed shuffled the deck. “You ought at least to put the boots to her before you let her go, or brung her back for the rest of us. I do like to shinny up a tall woman.”

“She had a face like Tom's bay mare.”

“What's that? It was dark, weren't it?”

Breed said, “We going to jabber or play cards?” He was down a hundred and fifty.

“That bay mare's a good ride,” said Tom, who'd only half heard what Ed said. “I ate the best horse I ever had in California. One time—”

“Jacks or better.” Ed dealt. “You know, there's a mint right here in town. I don't reckon them James-Youngers ever bought into a pot that big.”

Brixton said, “That's because the federals got the whole army guarding it. This bunch can't even stick up Mormons.”

“We got the money,” Charlie reiterated.

“I don't appreciate being made to look the fool. You should of at least found out who the fat man was that got there first. We could of rendered him down and ate him with onions.”