Hammett (Crime Masterworks) (16 page)

Hammett sat down on the steps and lit a cigarette. He
finished it and started a second. Mist wet his face. The bolt ritual began again. He ground the butt against the pale brick wall, dropped the shredded remains at his feet, and was waiting in moody patience, hands in overcoat pockets, when the door opened again.

‘You come,’ said a different voice from the darkness.

A dim unshaded lightbulb at the far end of the twenty-foot hallway showed that his grossly heavy Chinese guide was as tall as he, and wore Occidental clothing. He stopped at a door halfway down the hall and called out in Cantonese. The door was unlocked. They went through into a passage like the one they had just left, only at right angles to it.

Near the far end of this hall they paused before another door, different from the others. Its seasoned oak panels were thickly studded with the square heads of iron carriage bolts.

This door had a buzzer, which the binder pushed in a quick uneven rhythm; no voice could have carried through the two-inch hardwood thickness. Noise and lights and tobacco smoke came out at them – underlaid with incense and the faint sweetish reek of opium. The voices, high-pitched and singsong and excited, all male, mingled with the clack of buttons. Which meant fan-tan, not a
pai gow
parlor or a
do far
lottery.

Blocking Hammett’s way was another Oriental, dressed in loose baggy trousers of a coarse material, wearing slippers and a wide-sleeved buttonless jacket cinched at the waist with a two-inch sewn cloth belt. Between the parted edges of the jacket were the shifting planes of his immense hairless chest. He was six-six and two hundred and fifty pounds, none of them fat. His head too was hairless. His features were more Mongol than Chinese.

He stepped back a pace, crossed his arms into the wide sleeves, and bowed deeply from the waist. ‘We are honored, Prince of Men.’

‘You been demoted, Qwong?’ asked Hammett cheerfully.

‘Demoted, oh King of Pursuers?’

‘Chin has you on the door.’

He bowed again. ‘Merely awaiting your August Self.’ He made a graceful gesture. ‘My Master is impatient for the unutterable joy of your presence.’

Hammett bowed himself. ‘Lead on, O Giant of China.’

‘That’s terrible,’ said Qwong Lin Get.

Hammett’s earlier guide manipulated the heavy swiveled bar on the door back into the cleats that held it in a locked position. The lean detective followed Qwong down the square low-ceilinged basement room. It was crowded with a couple of hundred male Chinese, massed around a dozen four-by-ten fan-tan tables. The din of voices flowed and ebbed as the buttons were drawn down.

Qwong indicated the tables with an almost contemptuous sweep of one steel-muscled arm.

‘What your friend
Mau Yee
would give to know of this!’

‘You think he doesn’t?’

The enormous homosexual bodyguard caressed Hammett with his eyes. ‘I know that you would not tell him.’

Hammett nodded wordlessly. He wouldn’t have to. It was from Manion that he had gotten the current location of Chin Kim Guy’s fan-tan parlor.

He stayed a moment to watch the play.

The table was covered with a mat, in the exact center of which was diagrammed a twelve-inch square divided into quarters. Each corner bore the Chinese character for a number from one to four.

Across from Hammett was the dealer, an Oriental ancient in skullcap and silk jacket. Fastened to the table in front of him was a leather bag filled with small black and white buttons.

‘My Master awaits his Peerless Friend.’

‘Sure,’ said Hammett.

The venerable dealer dipped into the sack with a colorful lacquer bowl, brought it out full of buttons, and turned it upside down on the table under the avid eyes of the players. As Hammett moved off, he had begun drawing buttons, four at a time, out from under the bowl with a hooked bamboo stick. By
placing money on a numbered quarter of the diagram, the players were betting whether one, two, three, or four buttons would be left under the bowl for the final drawdown.

At the rear of the room was a partition of antique Japanese screens, which had been among Guy Kim’s most valued possessions. They had partitioned the players from the dealers in one of his
do far
parlors. Now they were his son’s.

Inside the carefully guarded little chamber was a hardwood table bearing piles of crumpled bills, a black-beaded abacus, and nothing else.

Chin Kim Guy bounced to his feet behind the table, hand extended. ‘Hammett!’ he exclaimed. ‘Long time no see. Hear the one about the minister and the little boy he caught swearing? He says, “Little boy, when you talk like that the chills run up and down my spine.” And the boy says, “If you’d heard my ma when she caught her tit in the wringer, you’d of froze to death.”’ He burst into high-pitched laughter and waved Hammett to a chair across the table. ‘Rest the dogs.’

Hammett sat.

The dapper Chinese was dressed in a gray Glenurquhart plaid and a knitted silk tie with a fancy crocheted weave. He looked like a Chinese pimp, not the king of an illegal gambling empire stretching from San Francisco to the Chinese colonies in Stockton and Sacramento. As long as Hammett had known him he’d been telling terrible jokes and laughing uncontrollably at them.

Now he uttered a short burst of Cantonese at another of the giant bodyguards, who was leaning against the back wall. The man quickly disappeared through an unframed door at his elbow.

‘Did your father get the magazine I sent him a few years ago?’

Chin laughed. He had very white buckteeth and wore his black hair parted in the middle and combed tightly to his skull. His utterly black eyes glittered with amusement under delicate brows.

‘I read the story to him, he got a hell of a wallop out of Chang Li Ching. He didn’t know he impressed you as
such a bloodthirsty character. You knew he’s
Kam Sam Hock
now?’

‘I’d heard he’d gone home from the Golden Mountain,’ Hammett admitted.

The Golden Mountain was what the old-generation Chinese still called San Francisco. One who had been to the Golden Mountain and had returned home to China, wealthy and respected, for his declining years, was known as a
Kam Sam Hock
. Only Chin Kim Guy’s generation had begun to consider America as home.

The bodyguard returned with a delicate china pot and two small handleless bowls set on doughnutlike saucers. The tea was pale amber, clear as spring water, and steaming hot. With it was a dish of four small round sesame seed cakes baked to a pale brown. Hammett nibbled at one and sipped tea.

Chin’s laughter bubbled up again; it was said he laughed the same way when his binders hacked an enemy to pieces.

‘You hear the one about old Nate? Rebecca is downstairs in the front room with Abie, see, and Nate hears some strange sound coming from down there, so he goes to the head of the stairs and he calls, “Becky, are you and Abie fighting?” And Rebecca says, “No, daddy, we’re screwing.” And old Nate says, “That’s nice, children, don’t fight.”’

His gales of laughter trailed away in chuckles.

‘Anyway, Hammett, you want to see the Honorable Pater you’re out of luck—’

‘Came to see you,’ said Hammett.

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder without looking around; he knew the massive bald-headed Qwong would be directly behind his chair with a
snickersnee
, the swordlike Chinese knife that could take out a man’s throat with a single slash, strapped hilt-downward to his left forearm beneath the flowing jacket sleeve.

‘Remember five years ago your father promised to lend me this character if I ever needed someone’s leg broken or eye poked out?’

‘I remember.’

‘That still good, all-ee-same like father like son?’

Chin considered gravely for a moment, then gave a very Occidental shrug. ‘Sure, why not, he’s getting fat and lazy anyway.’

‘How about all of them?’ said Hammett.

Chin cocked an eyebrow. ‘Leaving me naked before mine enemies?’

‘Maybe that’s the idea.’

Chin laughed out loud and clapped his hands in delight. ‘Only you could come up with a remark like that, Dash!’ He leaned forward in his chair. ‘You hear the one about the Chinaman asked this fellow, “You telle me where railleroad depot?” And the guy says, “What’s the matter, John, you lost?” And the Chinaman says, “No! Me here, dam’ depot lost!”’ Before Hammett could make appropriate noises, he demanded, ‘What are you doing, starting a war?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Other Chinamen?’

‘Wops.’

‘Good!’ Chin laughed out loud again. ‘Too many wops around anyway.’ He shifted his gaze to the giant Qwong. ‘I got through four years at Cal without him around, I guess I can . . . besides, he’s always been in love with you, this’ll give him a chance to work off his Freudian repressions.’

Hammett walked home from Chinatown through the fog. Everything was moving. Tomorrow, Molly Farr. He’d open her up and find out what – if anything – she could tell him about Vic’s death. He would also ask her Chinese maid about the fat woman over by Bolinas Lagoon.

The fog that lay above the city cut the tops off the hills, and made the taller buildings seem to disappear five stories above the street.

God
damn
he loved this city! There wasn’t another like it anywhere, and he’d been in a lot of them since he’d answered
that blind box ad in the Baltimore paper back in the summer of ’12. He’d gotten bored chalking up stock market transactions from the Poe and Davies ticker tape; because he was big for his eighteen years, he’d been able to lie his way into the job as a Pinkerton operative.

Eight years of manhunting – interrupted by the Ambulance Corps and the government lunger hospitals in Tacoma and San Diego. Christ, the towns he’d been in as a Pink! Pasco and Seattle and Spokane; Stockton and Vallejo; Butte, Denver, Cleveland, Dallas; Gilt-Edge, Montana, and Lewiston, Idaho; El Paso, Jacksonville, Detroit, Boston; Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Louisville, Kentucky, and the Big Apple itself, New York City. Finally, San Francisco. The City That Knows How.

At the south end of the Stockton tunnel he looked up to his right above the top of a billboard. Yeah. Just there were the tops of the railing posts through which he had Miles Archer pitch after being shot in
The Maltese Falcon
.

Hammett looked up at the concrete parapet where Bush Street bridged the tunnel. He’d lived for half a year at the mouth of the alley just across Bush – 20 Monroe Street – and when he’d needed a secluded, dramatic spot for Archer to die, dead-end Burritt Street had just naturally come to mind.

He was suddenly in a hurry to get home. The
Falcon
would have to wait for revision until this whole mess was finished, but not so
The Dain Curse
. He’d thought of a way to characterize Minnie Hershey’s boyfriend, Rhino Tingley. Let Rhino count out his eleven hundred and seventy dollars, braggingly, bill by bill, in front of the Op’s cynical and Minnie’s terrified eyes. Hell, he’d created Rhino’s name by mating a British slang word for money with the name of a little street off Silver Avenue; so why not let his character be created by the act of counting money?

Hell, yes. He liked that.

O
n Christmas Eve, 1910, a quarter of a million people – the greatest crowd in San Francisco’s history – had gathered around Lotta’s Fountain to hear an impromptu concert by famed opera soprano Luisa Tetrazzini. Today, as the streetcar went rattling by the ugly, ornate, cast-iron monument at Kearny, Geary, and Market, the intersection was Sunday-deserted.

Goodie did not notice the lack of people. She was too elated to notice much of anything.

‘Oh, Sam, I’m so excited!’

‘Maybe they’ll meet us at the door with a shotgun.’

She mocked a pout. ‘You mean I’m just window dressing again?’

‘You’ve got a devious mind, girl.’

Goodie leaned back against the shiny leather and looked out at the cable car making the turn up Sacramento. Beside the wedge-shaped corner building were steep steel stairs leading up to the pedestrian crosswalk that bridged The Embarcadero to the Ferry Building

‘I don’t care,’ she said, ‘George P. Biltmore!’

The afternoon before, Goodie had spent a dollar and her lunch hour at Le Maximilian Coiffeurs to have her blond ringlets water-waved by Georgia. After work, another five dollars and ninety-eight cents had gone on the stylish ‘tomboy’ dress she now wore: a light-green velour blouse with dark-green silk kerchief and swagger tie, and a plaid cashmere skirt and waistband.

Two weeks’ lunch money, and then some, but she was going over to Mill Valley for tea with the George F. Biltmores! Wait until she wrote her mother about
that!

The car made the loop around the fenced grass oblong directly in front of the grand arched central entrance of
the Ferry Building. A couple of bums dozed in the noontime sun.

Hammett bought two round-trip tickets to Mill Valley, and they joined the waiting-room throng beyond the gleaming gilt metal grillwork.

Going up the creaking wooden gangway to the sidewheeler
Eureka
, with the salt air keen in their nostrils, Goodie clung to Hammett’s arm.

‘I’ve never ridden this before.’

‘It must have been a long swim from Crockett.’

‘You know what I mean.
This
ferry. To Sausalito.’

The mooring lines clumped solidly on deck as they were heaved clear of their bollards; the boxy white boat shuddered as its enclosed paddle wheels began churning. White water foamed as it slid from its high-sided timber slip and made its way past Goat Island and Alcatraz for the thirty-two-minute trip to Marin County.

‘I know,’ said Hammett in a sympathetic voice.

‘You know what?’

‘You’re hungry.’

From the restaurant in the upper deck’s enclosed cabin, Goodie got a bowl of Exposition clam chowder and a roast beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy. Hammett had coffee and pungled up the required fifty cents.

‘It’s an expensive wench,’ he said sadly.

They chose places on one of the curved wooden benches; life jackets were stacked under them in case of disaster. Through salt-rimed windows they could hear the sea gulls demanding scraps from the passengers on the open cabin deck below.