Karen Memory (2 page)

When I got up behind Crispin, it was all silence outside except the patting of the rain dripping down into the well and splashing in the puddles. Not even any more crying, though we all stood with our ears straining. Crispin pulled open the door and Miss Francina went striding out into that burning cold in her negligee and marabou slippers like she owned the night and the rest of us was just paying rent on it. I skin-flinched, just from nerves, but it was all right because I’d had the sense to keep my finger off the shotgun trigger.

And then Miss Francina said, “Sweet child Christ!” in that breathy voice of hers and Crispin was through the door with his truncheon, the bald center of his pate shining in the red lantern light. I heard him curse, too, but it sounded worried rather than angry or fearful, so I let the shotgun muzzle droop and walked up to the doorway just in time to grab the arm of a pretty little Indian girl—Eastern Indian, not American Indian—who was half-naked and in hysterics. Her clothes had never been good, or warm enough for the night, though somewhere she’d gotten some lace-up boots and a man’s coat too big for her, and now they was wet through and shredded. All she had on else was a ripped-up shift all stained across the bosom, and I could tell she weren’t wearing nothing under it.

She was turned around, tugging something—another girl’s arm, poking out frontward between Crispin and Miss Francina where they were half-dragging her. She had a fine hand, which was all I could see of her, and the rain dripped pink off her sallow fingers. Once they got both girls inside in the light, Effie lunged forward and slammed the door. I handed her the shotgun and went to see to the girls.

“Here, Karen,” Crispin said in his big slow-molasses voice. “You take this little one. Bring her after. I’ll get Miss Merry here upstairs to the sickroom.”

Miss Francina stepped back and I could see that the girl between them was somebody I knowed, at least by reputation. Not a girl, really. A woman, a Chinese woman.

“Aw, shit,” Effie said. Not only can she shoot, but Effie’s not real well-spoken. “That’s Merry Lee.”

Merry Lee, which was as close as most American tongues could get to her real name, I guess, was half-conscious and half-fighting, batting at Crispin’s hands while he swung her up into his arms. Miss Francina stuck her own hands in there to try to hold her still, where they looked very white against all the red on Merry Lee’s face and arms.

Effie said, “She’s gun shot. I guess all that running around busting out Chinatown crib whores finally done caught up with her. You know’d it was sooner or later going to.”

“You hush about things you know nothing about,” Miss Francina said, so Effie drew back, chastened like, and said, “I didn’t mean nothing by it.”

“Go and watch the door, Effie,” Miss Francina said. Effie hefted that shotgun and did, not sulking at all. Effie talks without thinking sometimes, but she’s a good girl. Madame Damnable don’t tolerate them what ain’t.

The girl in my arms was as cold skinned as she was slick with rain, and all she wanted was to twist loose of me. She pulled away once and threw herself at Crispin, but Miss Francina caught her and gave her back, and honest, she was mostly too light and skinny to put up a good fight once I had a grip on her. I tried to talk to her, tell her she was safe and we were going to take care of her and Merry Lee both. I could hear her teeth chatter when I got close. I didn’t think then she understood a word of it, but I found out later her English was better’n mine, so I think it was mostly that she couldn’t hardly of been more upset. But something got through to her, because after a minute of twisting her wrists and getting blood all over my good pink flannel she stood still, shivering and dripping, her long face sad as a wet filly’s. She let me bundle her up the stairs after Crispin and Merry Lee while Miss Francina went to fetch Miss Lizzie.

We followed them down the long rose-painted hall to the sickroom door. Crispin wanted to take Merry Lee in without the Indian girl, but the girl weren’t having none of it. She leaned against my arms and keened through the doorway, and finally Crispin just looked at me helplessly and said, “Karen honey, you better bring that child in here before she cries down the roof.”

She was better inside, sitting in a chair beside the bed with wool blankets wrapped around her, though it were another fight to get her to cut loose of that soaking old coat. She leaned forward—again I thought
filly,
starved and leaning on her plow collar—while Crispin checked over Merry Lee for where she was hurt worst. Effie was right about her being gun shot, too—she had a graze through her long black hair showing bone, and that was where most of the blood was from, but there was a bullet in her back, too, and Crispin couldn’t tell from looking if it had gone through to a lung. It weren’t in the spine, he said, or she wouldn’t of been walking.

Just as he was stoking up the surgery machine—it hissed and clanked like a steam engine, which was never too reassuring when you just needed a boil lanced or something—Miss Lizzie came barreling up the stairs with an armload of towels and a bottle of clear corn liquor. She must of had her arm off for sleeping, because it was bundled up with the linens, but when she strapped it over her stump and started to turn the crank to wind up the spring I knowed it was time for me to be leaving. Miss Lizzie’s narrow and sharp as one of her scalpels, and nothing shakes her: not even lockjaw, which is the scariest thing I can think of, just about, ’cepting maybe the hydrophobia. The girl weren’t going nowhere, but she didn’t look like interfering anymore—she just leaned forward moaning in her throat like a hurt kitten, both hands clenched on the blankets over the cane arms of the bedside chair.

Crispin could handle her if she did anything. And he could hold down Merry Lee if she woke up that much.

I slipped through the door while Miss Lizzie was cutting the dress off Merry Lee’s back. I’d seen her and that machine pull a bullet before, and I didn’t feel like puking.

I got downstairs just as somebody started trying to kick in the front doors.

Chapter Two

In the fuss Effie hadn’t thrown the bolt, which should be second nature, but you’d be surprised what you can forget when there’s blood and rain all over everywhere and people are handing you guns. The good thing was that I had handed her the gun and when the front doors busted in on their hinges she had the presence of mind to raise up that gun and yell at the top of her little lungs, “Stop!”

They didn’t, though. There was four of them, and they came boiling through the door like a confusion of scalded weasels, shouting and swearing. Hair dripped down over their eyes—two of ’em had lost their hats—and their boots were mud caked to the ankles. And by “mud” I mean whatever’s out in the roads, which ain’t really mud except by courtesy. They checked and drew up just inside, staring from side to side and trading glances, and from halfway up the stairs I got a real fine look at all of them. It was Peter Bantle and three of his bully boys, all of them tricked out in gold watch chains and brocade and carrying truncheons and chains along with their lanterns, and you never saw a crew more looking for a fight.

The edges of the big doors were splintered where they’d busted out the latch. So maybe they’d of broken out the bolt trying to get in even if it had been locked.

“I said fucking
stop,
” said Effie, all alone in her nightgown in the middle of the floor, that big gun on her shoulder looking like to tip her over.

Miss Francina weren’t anywhere to be seen, and I could tell from the sounds through the sickroom door that Crispin had his hands full of Merry Lee. Madame Damnable, bless her heart, was half-deaf from working in dance halls. She might of gone up to bed and even if Miss Francina had headed up to fetch her it would take her a minute to find her cane and glasses, which meant a minute in which somebody had to do something.

I didn’t think on it. I just jumped over the banister, flannel gown and quilted robe and slippers and all, exactly the way Miss Bethel was always after me about for it not being ladylike, and thumped down on the curvy striped silk divan below the staircase.

I stepped off the couch, swept my robe up like skirts, and stuck my chin out. “Peter Bantle,” I said, real loud, hoping wherever Miss Francina had got off to, that she would hear me and come running. “You wipe your damn muddy feet before you come in my parlor.”

Now I ain’t one of the smaller girls—like I said, I’m sturdy—and Peter Bantle is like his name: a banty, and a peckerwood, which is probably why he struts so much. I’m plump, too—the men like that—and I’m broad across the shoulders and hips, and when I came marching up beside Effie he had to pick his chin up to meet my eyes. He wore a silk hat over a greasy slick of hair. His cravat was pinned right up under his chin, fresh pressed, and he reeked of violets and lime. Maybe the fug was what made his eyes so squinty.

He frowned a little at the size I had on him.

The three in front of him were plenty big, however, and they didn’t look impressed by two girls in their nighties with a single pump shotgun between them. Bantle’s men had all kinds of gear hung on them I didn’t even recognize, technologics and contrivances with lenses and brass tubes and glossy black enamel. The one in the very front had a bottle-green velvet coat and a bottle-blue stovepipe hat, and the patterned waistcoat to tie it together. He had the looks to pull those bright colors off—strong features and good skin. He was the only one of the three who was anything close to the usual size for human beings, being merely strapping as opposed to monstrous. I knowed him, too—Horaz Standish, who all the girls liked despite of who he worked for.

For whom he worked, Miss Bethel would tell me.

In fact, Horaz—that’s short for Horatio—looked a bit apologetic at me now.

Bantle his own self had a kind of gauntlet on his left hand, stiff boiled leather segmented so the rubber underneath showed through, copper coils on each segment connected by bare wires.

I’d heard about that thing. I talked to a girl once he made piss herself with it. She had burns all up her arm where he grabbed her. But I didn’t look at it, and I didn’t let him see me shudder. You get to know a lot about men in my work, and men like Peter Bantle? They’re all over seeing a woman shudder.

I don’t take to men who like to hit. If he reached out at me with that gadget, I was afraid I’d like to kill him.

He didn’t, though. He just ignored me and looked past Horaz’s shoulder at Effie, who he could get eye to eye with if he stood up straight. He sneered at her and through a curled lip said, “Where’s the Damnable bitch?”

“
Madame
is busy,” I said. Only reason I didn’t step in front of Effie was on account of she had the gun, but the urge to was that strong. “I’m Miss Memery. Me and Miss Sims here can help you. Or escort you out, if you’d rather.”

Miss Bethel would of cringed at my grammar, too. But right then I couldn’t afford to stammer over it to make it pretty.

Effie settled that gun on her shoulder a little better and lowered her eye to sight down the barrel. Bantle’s men looked unimpressed so hard I could tell they was a little nervous. One hefted his black rubber truncheon.

“You got one of my whores in here, you little chit, and that thieving outlaw Merry Lee.” Bantle’s voice was all out of proportion with the weedy little body under his oilcloth coat. Maybe he was wearing some kind of amplifier in that high flounced collar of his. “I aim to have them with me when I go. And if you’re lucky and give them over nice and easy, my boys here won’t bust up your face
or
your parlor.”

Rightly, I didn’t know what to say. It weren’t my house, after all, and Madame Damnable gives us a lot of liberty, but setting the rules of her parlor and offering sanctuary to someone else’s girls ain’t in it. But I knowed she didn’t like Peter Bantle, with his bruised-up, hungry crib whores and his saddle shoes, and since he had come crashing through the front door with three armed men and a world of insolence, I figured I had a little more scope than usual.

“You’re going to leave this parlor now,” I said. “And shut the door behind you. And Madame Damnable will send somebody around in the morning so you can settle up for the lock you busted.”

“I know they came in here,” Bantle said. “There’s Chink whore blood all over your hands and the floor here.”

Oh, I knowed the answer to that one. I’d heard Madame Damnable say it often enough. “It’s not the house’s policy to discuss anyone whom we may or may not be entertaining.”

“Mr. Bantle,” that Horaz Standish said, “if you give these ladies a little room to negotiate, you know they might be reasonable. Nobody’s at her best when her back’s up against the wall.” He turned his attention to me. “Miss Memery, was it? Of course we’ll pay for the door—”

Bantle snorted. Then the thing happened that I ain’t been able to make head nor tail of. My head went all sort of sticky fuzzy, like your mouth when you wake up, and I started feeling like maybe Bantle had a point. That
was
one of his girls upstairs, and Merry Lee
had
brought her here—or vice versa maybe—without asking. And didn’t she owe him, that girl, for paying to have her brought over from India? And there was Effie pointing a gun at him.

And that Horaz was being right reasonable about affairs, the whole thing considered.

Bantle pointed that glove at me, finger and thumb cocked like he was making a “gun.” I had another skin flinch, this time as I wondered if Bantle could
shoot
electricity out of that thing. And if it were healthy for him or anyone else for him to do so when he was dripping on the rug. His eyes sort of … glittered, with the reflections moving across them. It was like what they say Mesmeric—I think Mr. Mesmer was the fellow’s name?

“Do it,” Bantle said, and God help me if I didn’t think it seemed a fine idea.

I was just about reaching over to grab the barrel of Effie’s shotgun when the library door eased open off to my left. Through the crack I could see Beatrice’s bright eyes peeping. Bantle saw her, too, because he snarled, “Get that Negra whore out here,” and one of his stand-over men started toward her.