The Gilded Age Part 17

The collision is cleared, the injured horse unhitched and led away, and traffic slowly moves forward.

"We need to get out of here, Miss Malone," Zhu commands.

"Jar me," Jessie moans, her pulse pounding in her throat. "What did I just hear?"

"Don't worry about it. That's just Muse."

"Your muse, did you say?"

"Yeah, exactly. My. . . .my guardian angel."

Jessie gasps. An Amazon with a guardian angel is living right under her own roof? She must consult with Madame De Ca.s.sin at once! "Mother of G.o.d," she mutters and crosses herself, a gesture she has neither made nor meant in over thirty years. She means it now.

Zhu hooks a hand over her shoulder. "Jessie, please! Get off Market Street. Go now!"

The Queen of the Underworld knows how to move fast. "Hah!" she cries to the geldings, turns a sharp left at Montgomery, trots up Post. She reaches into the glove box, pulls out the vial of smelling salts, tosses the vial over her shoulder to Zhu. "Give him a good whiff. That'll bring him right around."

Daniel mutters, "Father." His voice is slurred and furious. "Cared more about your gold than her, d.a.m.n you. d.a.m.n you!"

"Ssh," Zhu murmurs. "We'll talk about it later. You've got to sober up, Daniel. Pull yourself together." Her voice is that of a sweetheart, pleading.

Jessie arches her eyebrow. Sure and there's no mistaking that throb in a woman's voice, that trill of pa.s.sion, of unreasonable devotion. A sweetheart! Have they been carrying on right under her nose? She don't much like that notion. Zhu is her servant. She has no right to fraternize with the boarders. She has no right to do anything save what Jessie permits or directs her to do. What if they argue and Daniel, with his business and his cash-flow restored, winds up leaving? No, she'll have a word with Zhu.

Besides, a love affair between them rubs Jessie the wrong way. If it ain't true courts.h.i.+p leading to marriage, a man should pay for it. That's Jessie's rule. She is not at all pleased that Daniel has not availed himself of her girls' charms. His aloofness is an insult. No, he's the kind of man who prefers to play with hearts, taking advantage of waifs and strays the likes of Zhu Wong who was ruined by love before. It's a d.a.m.n shame. Daniel, in Jessie's estimation, is less moral than her johns. Family or sport, that's the only choice a man ought to make. And if it's sport, darlin', he must pay.

Zhu hands back the smelling salts. "He's too far gone for that. You would not believe the booze he's poured down his throat in the past few hours."

"Oh, indeed I would, missy," Jessie says, pulling the rockaway over to a curb and reining in the geldings. "Mr. Watkins is the adventurous type. Likes to try every hooch in every joint, that's his game. He really ought to stick to champagne. Champagne is good for the ticker. Look at me, solid as a rock. A steady diet of champagne, that's what I say."

"No more G.o.dd.a.m.n champagne," Daniel mutters.

"Come on, then," Jessie says, heaving herself down from the driver's seat and hitching the geldings to a post. "Haul him out." She's gotten more drunken men up on their feet after a carouse than she can shake a stick at. "Let's walk him around. Maybe he'll chuck it up. He'll feel much better then."

"Wait, I've got something else," Zhu says. "Under the Tenets, I'm not supposed to share our technology with you people, but hey I'm already a criminal, so what the h.e.l.l." She searches her pockets.

What can she mean? A criminal for impersonating a man or a criminal for something else? From her tone of voice, Jessie believes she means something else and watches her curiously, struck again at her oddness. Like a little man she is, though in fact Zhu is taller than a lot of men Jessie knows. Why does she seem so mannish? Perhaps it's her wiry strength, yet with the quick feminine grace of a cat. Feminine? What does feminine mean? Odd as Zhu is, Jessie finds her intriguing in a way that her own girls with their lace and their lushness and their simpering ways cannot match. Jessie isn't sure what Zhu is. Like something out of that nutty novel, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine. Some fantastic person out of a fantastic world, familiar yet vastly strange.

Zhu takes out a vial of liver pills. Or at least it looks a vial of liver pills to Jessie, pressing her hand to her side with a little groan. Zhu taps one out and breaks the pill over Daniel's face. What on earth? A mist spreads, like when you step on an old puffball mushroom in the woods, dispersing fairy powder with your toe. The mist floats gently over Daniel's face, his slack mouth.

Now he bolts up like a man dosed with strychnine, his cheeks blazing red. His eyes gleam like a wild creature's, the snarl of his drunkenness lingering. A spasm twists his face, a face that Jessie has grown a bit too fond of. Some deep, nameless anxiety wells in her as she watches him burst into this unnatural wakefulness.

She feels that strange disquiet, too, watching Zhu with him, coaxing him, comforting him. Seeing them in the backseat together, knowing that Zhu loves him before she herself may know it, fills Jessie with fear. She can smell it beneath her patchouli, a sharp stink of fear. This woman and this man plunge toward some catastrophe they cannot see.

But why? And how? And what?

"What in h.e.l.l did you just do to me?" Daniel pushes Zhu's hands away. "Witches, that's what you are, the both of you. The madam and the mistress. Harpies!"

"Watch your trap, Mr. Watkins," Jessie says.

"Women! You're all the same. You want me for your slave, your lapdog, your pet pony. I'll have none of it. Prince Albert is right. The procreative process is merely a necessary evil for the civilized man. What you do, Miss Malone, is pander to the lowest animal instinct of which man is capable. It is beneath me, madam."

"Oh, you'll come around one day, Mr. Watkins. Your little gentleman friend won't respect your tired old morality. He'll want his due soon enough."

"You know nothing, madam, of my morality or my c.o.c.k. That's the one decent thing Roch.e.l.le did for me, besides dancing the cancan and not dosing me with the pox. She made my destiny clear."

Zhu studies him in her peculiar way, as if her very eyes are taking photographs. "And what is your destiny, Daniel?'

"To be your master, and you my slave," he says, sweat trickling down his face. He shoves her off the seat. "Go on, slave. Kneel before me. Wors.h.i.+p me."

Jessie is sure Zhu will jump out of the rockaway and flee as nimbly as she jumped in, but she does no such thing. She kneels before him on the rockaway's floor, her face dazed, her shoulders shuddering as if some evil thing possesses her.

"d.a.m.n it, missy, he's jagged," Jessie cries and reaches for the horsewhip. Can she threaten him or is he beyond threats? She's never seen a man in such a state! Pie-eyed and wobbly, yet dangerously alert. White-knuckled with the violence alcohol unleashes in men, yet quick with the capability of sobriety. "What did you do to him? What was that mist?"

"It was just a neurobic. A stimulant from my Now. Didn't help him much, though, did it?" she murmurs gazing up at him, as if she could move him by her will alone.

You cannot move men by your will alone! Jessie wants to shout. She suddenly recalls that he packs a derringer. And a Congress knife.

"What can I do for you, Daniel? What would you have me do?" She lays her cheek on his knee.

He starts as if she has slapped him, and the ugly spell is broken, his eyes slick with contrition though his mouth is still hard. He rubs his forehead, squeezes his eyes shut, and growls to Jessie, "Give me your flask, madam."

"No, no, he's had enough," Zhu protests, but Jessie gladly hands over the flask of rum. Better to have the man drunk again than to encourage this dreadful mood.

He gulps the liquor, grimaces.

Jessie is aware that she's trembling. As if the three of them have leapt over some hurdle, barely clearing some invisible edge.

"I want sport," he says petulantly like a bad little boy. "I want to see some sport fitting for a man."

"We should go home," Zhu says. "You promised me we would after your last drink. Haven't we seen enough violence for one night?"

"Sure and perhaps our Mr. Watkins is still excited after your run-in on Eddy Street. Sure and he wants more."

Zhu turns to her, disgusted and outraged. "Don't encourage him!"

Daniel tips the flask again, rum restoring his smile. "You're completely right, Miss Malone. I want more." He gallantly helps Zhu back onto the seat beside him and solicitously smooths her tunic. "Don't be cross with me, my angel, but truly I'm not tired. Indeed, I'm rather bored with this evening. Miss Malone, I've heard that some gentlemen hold jousting tourneys at night. Quite the devil's work. Is it far?"

"They joust," Jessie says, "at the top of Telegraph Hill."

Daniel grins. "By G.o.d, then, let's see some real blood tonight."

They clatter north up Kearny, the uneasy street where Chinatown meets the Barbary Coast, past the shooting galleries and fan-tan parlors, opium dens in bas.e.m.e.nts beneath laundries and produce markets, the Chinese brothels catering to white men, the cribs where the Chinese men go. Past the bustling intersection of Broadway and Dupont.

Jessie turns into the Latin Quarter where Italian and French, Portuguese and Spanish, Mexican and Peruvian crowd chaotically together. The rich in row houses or pink stucco villas angling up the steep slopes of Telegraph Hill, the poor in shacks along the waterfront where the bagnios offer Mexican girls who net the fishermen's trade.

Tonight the quarter spills onto the streets and narrow alleys in celebration of Columbus Day. Red wine and oregano scent the air. Everything is open late, the markets and shops, fish and vegetable stalls, noodle and sausage factories, cheese makers and wine presses, bakeries and pensions.

In the backseat of the rockaway, Daniel sits bolt upright, silent now, smoking cigarette after cigarette, and flicking half-smoked b.u.t.ts onto the street. Zhu perches on the far side of the seat, keeping her distance. She carefully tucks strands of hair into her queue or under her fedora, and straightens her trousers. The tinted spectacles hide her eyes. What a masquerade! Jessie clucks her tongue as Zhu composes her face, transforming herself into a pale, shadowy person of indeterminate gender.

"Say, Rosita! Can I hitch up here for a while?" Jessie waves to the noodle-maker she knows, a nice widow whose husband-known for his appet.i.te and his cruelty-dropped dead at the Mansion last winter. Ticker up and went, b.u.t.ter still on his chin, one h.e.l.l of a bruise on Li'l Lucy's rump. "Well, he won't trouble none of us no more," Rosita had said when she came to collect his corpse. She had opened her purse. "What he owe you?"

Now Rosita seizes a gelding's bridle and leads the pair into the narrow courtyard behind her warehouse. "Ciao, bella."

"Two hours, tops," Jessie says and slips her two bits. "Take good care of my boys, and there'll be more of that later."

"Sure, sure." Rosita loves horses. Jessie trusts her.

Then she, Zhu, and Daniel stroll through the festive crowd to Greenwich Street. Tracks of the Telegraph Hill Railroad Company go up to the silvery half-moon rising in the crystalline night sky. A neat little cable car rumbles down the track and stops for a load of pa.s.sengers. They climb aboard, and the cable car groans and clanks and sways up the torturous grade, zigzagging slowly up and up and up.

At last the cable car breaches the crest and lumbers onto level ground. They disembark at the tiny s.h.i.+ngled station perched at the very edge of the precipice and walk across the dusty brown gra.s.s. Daniel is green from the ride, Jessie is feeling none too frisky herself, but Zhu's gaze is riveted on the spectacle before them.

San Franciscans call it the German Castle, this hulking medieval turreted monstrosity at the top of Telegraph Hill where Mr. Duncan C. Ross presides as king of the broadsword contest. The Bear flag flaps from the western turret and four American flags decorate the eastern tower. Feeble gaslight does little to illuminate the men milling about the grounds deeply drunk, whooping, tipping flasks, jostling one another in giddy antic.i.p.ation.

A slender little woman in a beribboned, tightly corseted dress and a wide hat with a veil drawn over her face wanders about the crowd, her gloved hand poised demurely at her throat. The helpless little thing approaches a man in the rough, ill-fitting suit of a laborer, his collar unb.u.t.toned for air, his straw boater pushed back on his sweaty forehead. She engages him in conversation, touching him hesitantly at elbow and wrist. The rough man sways on his feet, fascinated and charmed, his mouth hanging open that this frail lady would speak to him. Then she suddenly collapses into his arms. He catches her, clearing a s.p.a.ce for her in the crowd. She awakes just as suddenly, clutching him, her hands darting boldly over his body. The rough man blushes. She lurches to her feet and swiftly escapes, pus.h.i.+ng through the crowd, which grows larger and noisier as the contestants mount their horses in a paddock on the eastern slope of the hill.

"There's your little sweetheart," Jessie teases Daniel.

"Who?" Daniel peers through the gloom.

"f.a.n.n.y Spiggot, the faintin' pickpocket. Ah well, the biz is the biz, and this is a fine night for it. Miss Spiggot probably started out as a poor girl like me with no family or husband." Jessie salutes the dip. "Get what you can, darlin'. Make 'em pay."

Daniel sputters. "I'll have a word with her! Where is she?"

"Gone," Jessie says and pushes impatiently toward the field of combat illuminated by much brighter gaslights. "Look, they're starting!"

A huge muscular man canters onto the field on a husky dapple-gray stallion. He wears a Prussian helmet crowned by a gleaming spike, a blue military jacket hung with a vest of chain mail, breeches, and black leather boots. His face is obscured by a fencing mask, but Jessie spies his bushy black mustache and eyebrows, his bared teeth. To thunderous applause and cheers, he circles the field, brandis.h.i.+ng a cavalry saber.

"Ross, Ross, Ross," roars the crowd.

Mr. Duncan C. Ross promenades, cutting the air with his saber. Jessie can hear the weapon whistle through the air as he canters past. Once enlisted with the Royal Scots Greys, Ross sweats out a living in San Francisco as a professional wrestler and an instructor of swordsmans.h.i.+p. Every week in the summer and the balmy days of autumn, he takes on challengers at the German Castle.

"Twenty on Duncan b.l.o.o.d.y Ross!"

"Fifty on Ross by ten!"

Fists full of silver and gold, gamblers furiously place bets with the croupier below the western tower. The croupier sits at a rickety table, his quill pen savagely scribbling odds and point spreads on a ledger, four bruisers packing pistols standing guard around him.

Now another tremendous rider gallops onto the field on a lithe black horse. Slighter in build but no less charismatic, he wheels and rears his horse. His fencing mask cannot conceal his bright gold beard. Gold hair protrudes from the rim of the helmet fitting over his ears to his jawbone like the gear of an ancient gladiator. A vest of solid armor is strapped over his gray padded jacket and festooned with burgundy braid and gold epaulets.

"Walsh, Walsh, Wals.h.!.+" shout the contender's partisans.

Jessie can feel the blood l.u.s.t coursing through her veins, though it's awfully barbaric. Better that men should spend their hard-earned cash on the sport of love. Still, the excitement infects her, too.

"That's Charlie Wals.h.!.+ He's my favorite!" she shouts in Zhu's ear. "Ain't he a daisy? He rode with General Sherman in Atlanta. They say he won a dozen duels by sword in Mexico."

Walsh whips out his saber. He and Ross rein in their horses at the opposite ends of the field.

"The points is dull, that's what I heard," Jessie says. "But the edges is razor-sharp."

A referee clad in a scarlet vest and top hat steps into the center of the field. "Gentlemen!" he shouts above the din of the crowd. "The rules are these! Each contestant will approach the other at full gallop and endeavor to strike his opponent's armor! A proper blow to the armor scores one point. A blow to the helmet is disregarded! Striking a man below his armor or striking his horse is penalized by minus one point. He who scores one and twenty points is the victor!" The referee raises a whistle to his lips. "Ready! Steady! Go!"

They charge! The horses gallop, hooves thundering across the gra.s.s. The contestants raise their swords. In less than an instant, they cross paths in a whirlwind of dust. A tremendous clang, as metal meets metal, and the horses gallop to opposite ends, where boys leap up and seized their lathered bridles. The crowd shouts its lungs out, and a knot of men scramble back as Ross's stallion lashes out with a hind hoof.

"Zero up!" shouts the referee.

The crowd groans. Gamblers scramble to the croupier, placing new bets.

The contestants wheel their horses.

"Ready! Steady! Go!"

Again they thunder across the turf, kicking up clods of dirt. This time, Walsh doesn't raise his saber, but holds it down on his thigh. A lump rises in Jessie's throat. What in tarnation is he doing? As he pa.s.ses Ross, he ducks away from Ross's flas.h.i.+ng saber, which Ross, taken aback at the lack of resistance, aims poorly. Walsh turns at the waist as Ross gallops past and clips him smartly across his shoulder blades.

Men cheer, others boo. When Walsh wheels at the opposite end of the field, Jessie spies blood leaking through his breeches in a bright red line.

"One point for Sergeant Wals.h.!.+ One penalty for Mr. Ross!" shouts the referee.

The tumult grows louder, and a fracas breaks out at the croupier's table. "Cheatin'! That's cheatin', he can't friggin' hit 'im from behind!" The armed guards hustle the protesting gambler away, toss him out into the crowd.

The contestants rein in their horses, whirl, and pause. A boy offers Sergeant Walsh a rag, but Walsh waves the rag away, sneering behind the fencing mask. Ah, darlin', Jessie thinks, her heart pounding in her breast. Be careful.

"Ready, steady, go!"

Jessie shouts as they charge again. "Get him! Get him! Get him, Wals.h.!.+"

Ross brandishes his saber at shoulder level, yelling, "Face me, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d!" He whacks Walsh as he gallops past, striking him full across the chest In the instant of pa.s.sing, an enraged Walsh whips his saber up and heavily down again.

Ross roars in agony, plummets off his stallion. When the dust clears, Jessie can see that his Prussian helmet is split in two. A mob descends on the fallen man.

"Did you see that?" Zhu shouts. "Did you see what he did to his helmet? His skull must be shattered!"

Jessie seizes her hand, and the two women push toward the wounded man. "Step aside!" Jessie shouts. "I know a thing or two about injuries. Clear the way. Stand aside, I say!"

Indeed she does know a thing or two about the healing arts, as any madam must if she's to stay in the biz. She's seen enough fisticuffs to fill a book.

"Die, die, die!" chants a contingency of the crowd, guffawing, spitting, slapping shoulders. Certain gamblers will win a very nice premium should Ross go to his ultimate defeat.

Another contingency, red-faced with rage, throw off their topcoats, fumble with cuff links and b.u.t.tons, roll up sleeves. "We'll not hear your taunts!" the gang yells, advancing through the shadows.

The crowd reluctantly lets Jessie and Zhu through. Jessie kneels next to Duncan Ross. A skin-and-bones fellow with tobacco-stained hands weeps as he cradles Ross's b.l.o.o.d.y head.

"'Ere, it's that scarlet woman," says another fellow standing over them both. A rat of a man, with pink eyes and a pointed face beneath his cheap bowler, he'd be a crib customer, Jessie thinks. She would never let a rat like this into the Parisian Mansion. "Don't let 'er touch 'im. She's likely to give 'im the pox."

"And who in h.e.l.l are you?" She restrains herself from spitting in the rat's eye.

"We're 'is trainers, chit," the rat says, "and you'll do well to leave 'im alone."