Gangway! (4 page)

    "Let's just say," he suggested, "that I'm not quite as gullible as some of these acorn-crackers you're used to around here."

    She would have had a comment on that, but he'd hardly got the statement out before he was into another relapse. Evangeline left him in disgust and took a turn around the deck. When she returned he was still draped over the rail with one eye on the big toughs who stood in a circle around the stack of gold boxes.

    He looked like a consumptive with the wadded handkerchief pressed against his mouth, but she knew that wasn't it. She'd never seen such a persistent case of seasickness before.

    It was a terrible thing. She patted his shoulder. "I'm sorry. Really."

    He looked at her balefully, but when the relapse ended he straightened up and said, "It's supposed to be funny."

    "I don't think it's funny."

    "You don't, do you," he said. He was looking at her in a different way now.

    "Well it must be very painful. I mean I don't see anything to laugh about."

    "That's real sweet of you, Vangie."

    "You'll feel better when we get to dry land."

    "Yeah."

    Liking him, feeling a strange sort of comradeship, a kind of rapport, she said, "You still haven't told me your name."

    "Uh," he said. He looked pale, but alert. "It's, uh, John Lexington."

    So much for rapport. "What do people mostly call you?" she asked. "Mister Avenue?"

    It was his turn to display injured innocence. "What's that supposed to mean?"

    "I maybe never was in New York City," she said, "but I've heard of it. And I've heard of Lexington Avenue."

    "Well, it's a name," he said. "They called it after somebody, didn't they?"

    "Not after you. Come on, now, I told you my real name."

    "E-van-ge-line Kemp," he said slowly, working the name over like a tough steak. "Yeah, you probably did."

    "I did."

    "Mine's Gabe," he said.

    "Gabe what?"

    "Beauchamps."

    "Bo-champs?"

    "Right."

    "What's the Gabe stand for?"

    "Gabe," he said. "Excuse me."

    She watched him go into another relapse, sagging over the rail once more like a mattress hanging out a window to air. She studied him with a mixture of sympathy and awe. "Don't you ever empty?"

    "Uuuurrrrg."

    

    

    Gabe watched the water go by. How could there be so much water in the world?

    "There it is," the girl said.

    He went on peering droop-lidded at the water. Whatever it was, he didn't see it. "Where?"

    "Not down there. Over there. San Francisco!" She made it sound like a fanfare of cornets.

    He lifted his head-it weighed a ton-and saw one of the world's biggest small towns. "Oh, that's fine," he said. "That's just dandy."

    "We've got tall buildings and everything," she said, on the defensive again.

    "You do not. You have short buildings on tall hills. There's a difference."

    "We've even got a cable car."

    "A what?"

    "Never mind. You'll see."

    If he lived that long. He collapsed over the rail, wishing he were dead.

    But he still had one eye on that gold shipment to the Mint.

    The riverboat docked, not without much wrenching and heaving. At long last, clutching Vangie's arm Gabe tottered ashore.

    "There now," she said. "Isn't it better to be on dry land?"

    Dry land. He lifted one foot and studied his shoe with disapproval. "In New York," he said, "we think of mud as something we like to get rid of."

    It made her angry again. "You should just have stayed in New York," she told him.

    Gabe looked around. "I know I should have."

    It was bleak to look at. From Chicago west the climate had at least been sunny. Sunny all the way to Sacramento and even sunny on the riverboat. But here the clouds seemed to be attached to the tops of the hills. Everything was grey and dreary. It matched Gabe's mood. Fifty-five cents in his pocket and nobody waiting to meet him except some "associate" of Twill's. You could bet there wouldn't be any help forthcoming from that quarter.

    The passengers had gathered their luggage and there was a stream of people moving past Gabe and the girl and on in toward town. Hansoms and victorias were drawn up to meet the more important arrivals. The waterfront streets were jammed with a traffic of pedestrians, horses and wagons. Narrow streets, he noted with approval. Almost narrow enough to qualify as city streets. At least they weren't like those half-mile-wide flats of rutted dust that passed for streets in the towns he'd passed through the past five days.

    It was about six o'clock and the sun would be up for another two or three hours, which didn't matter much because the clouds blotted it out completely, obscuring the tops of the hills and sending wispy tendrils down toward the Bay. Gaslights and oil lamps were lit everywhere along the streets. It was freezing goddam cold for August.

    Horse-drawn trolleys clanged past along the waterfront and there was a swaggering mass to the crowd that shifted like heavy liquid through the alleys, streets and piers. Forty or fifty ships were lined up along the Bay shore, smokestacks and masts making a forest along the docks; there was a great deal of racket. It wasn't busy enough or loud enough to make him feel at home, but at least it wasn't quite as bad as what he'd been braced to find here.

    He began to look at faces. He had no way of knowing who Twill's associate was but, if it was somebody Twill knew well enough to trust, it might just be somebody recognizable. Not that Gabe expected to recognize him as an individual, but he might spot the type. You didn't see many Hell's Kitchen mugs around here.

    But there were too many faces flowing past. None of them drew his attention. Was Twill's man somewhere in the crowd, just watching? There was no reason to expect the man to make himself known. Then again there was no reason not to. The guy might very well come up to Gabe and drop a few words of warning.

    But nobody did.

    Vangie was starting off. "Well? You coming?"

    "Just a minute." He turned and looked back down the pier toward the riverboat. He hated the riverboat so that wasn't what he was looking at; if he never saw the New World again it would be far too soon.

    What he was interested in was the gold. The big guys were unloading it from the deck. There was a wagon drawn up by the freight gangplank and he could read its sign from here: UNITED STATES MINT. Half a dozen horseback guards. The big guys were bringing the stuff down a box at a time, the same way they'd done the reverse in Sacramento. As the pile on deck diminished and the pile in the wagon grew, the number of big guys with each pile shifted accordingly. In the end almost all the big guys were on the dock, standing in a circle around the wagon, shoulder to shoulder, rifles ready for the Battle of Gettysburg.

    He turned back to Vangie at last and asked half absent-mindedly, "Where is this Mint anyway?"

    She pointed up the nearest hill. "Up there."

    It was at the very top, shrouded in the mist that hung from the underbellies of the clouds. But up there along the incredibly steep cobblestoned street, past many blocks of stores and saloons and houses and hotels, he had a vague grey picture of a huge forbidding fortress, a structure of stone-block and iron gates and castle turrets like the Manhattan Armory.

    He must have grunted because Vangie said, "What about it?"

    "Just interested."

    "You wouldn't be thinking about trying to steal one of those gold shipments, would you?"

    "I wouldn't dream of that."

    "That's good. Just take another look at those toughs and their rifles."

    It wasn't hard to take another look at them. It would have been harder not to, since the gold wagon and its escort were at that moment rumbling right past them. Mounts had been brought for the big guys, and they were twice as big on horseback as they had been before. One of them-the guy Gabe had talked to in Sacramento-gave Gabe a quick cold glance as he rode by. The mud flew, the wagon rattled and the hoofs thundered. The wagon this time was drawn by at least twenty teams, and it was easy to see why: If that high hill had been any steeper it would have been a cliff.

    Vangie had been watching him while he'd been watching the gold, and now she said, "And don't think about trying to break into the Mint."

    "Mmm?"

    "It can't be done."

    "You mean nobody's done it."

    "I mean it can't be done." She turned. "Come on, will you?

    "Where?"

    "My belly feels like my throat's been cut. And as for you-you've just got to be hungry after all the food you left in the Sacramento River."

    "Now that you mention it…"

    They moved into a narrow street, getting jostled. Something like grey smoke began to drift down off the rooftops, obscuring their view of things. "What's going on? Something on fire?"

    "Shh!" Vangie clapped a finger to Gabe's mouth. "Don't say fire around here. Ever. Unless you mean it."

    "But that stuff…"

    "That's just the fog coming in."

    It was coming in mighty fast. He could hardly see the end of the street, only a block away. "This happen often?"

    Defensively she said, "From time to time."

    "What's that mean?"

    "Well," she said reluctantly, "maybe once or twice a day."

    "A day?"

    "We don't mind it."

    "Every day?"

    "You get used to it."

    "All year round?"

    She said desperately, "We like the fog."

    "All right then, tell me this. Does it ever get any warmer around here?"

    "Once in a while. From time to time."

    "You mean once or twice a day?"

    "Well, maybe once or twice a year." She added quickly, "But it never gets much colder than this either."

    "I don't see how it hardly could." He shook his head. "And you call this a city."

    Just the same at least there was life teeming around them. The narrow street was overflowing with toughs, brassy girls and drunken sailors. Among the buildings Gabe could see, two out of three were Melodeons and Saloons. The rest were whorehouses, opium dens, Cheap John clothing stores, shipchandlers and the kind of boarding houses where you kept your boots on when you went to bed to make sure nobody stole them. It was a neighborhood not altogether unlike Hell's Kitchen; even if it was a pretty limp imitation, it did show some promise.

    You didn't even have to guess at what the shadier emporiums were. They all had frank signs.
Ye Olde Whore Shoppe
.
Ye Blinde Pigge
. They didn't leave a whole lot to the imagination. Or maybe they did: It was doubtful most of the passersby could read.

    Vangie was leading him around another corner, and Gabe was damned if she wasn't leading him right back down to the docks. "Now what?"

    "I've just got something to take care of, over on the next pier."

    "Take care of what?" But he trailed along onto the pier, and he saw through the descending mist a variety of gaudily painted signs announcing that ships left this spot for such destinations as Alaska, San Pedro, Panama, and New York.

    An ocean going paddlewheel steam packet was tied up at the berth. For a panic-stricken moment Gabe was terrified that Vangie was going to lead him straight on board the damn thing. But she stopped just inside the pier entrance and leaned down to lift the lid of a wooden box. Evidently it had been nailed into place on the boarding.

    The box was a cube about a foot in every dimension. There was a slot in its lid, like a ticket-taker's box, and on a stake above the box was a prettily lettered sign:

    

    
DID YOU FORGET

    
TO LEAVE YOUR HOTEL KEY

    
AT THE DESK?

    
LEAVE IT HERE!

    
A Service of the San Francisco Hotel Assoc
.

    

    From her enormous shoulderbag Vangie took a small key. It unlocked the padlock on the key box. She lifted the lid and removed the three keys that reposed in the box. Each key was attached to a wooden tag bearing the name of a hotel and a room number.

    She closed the box and locked it, putting the three wood-tagged keys into her bag. "Okay, we can go now."

    Gabe walked back up the street with her. "The San Francisco Hotel Association," he said. "You're the San Francisco Hotel Association."

    "Well, you know lodgings are terribly expensive."

    "Uh-huh. And your parents live in San Francisco, and someone stole all your money, and you were stranded up the river, and you'd never ever picked anybody's pocket before, ever."

    Vangie shrugged evasively and went on up the street with a cheerful grin. Her body swung alertly and the huge pocketbook flew from her little shoulder.

    She was damned pretty. Gabe found himself thinking it might be fun to show her around New York. She'd probably fit right in back there, which was something he hadn't expected from any Westerner.

    She paused to look back at him. "You coming?"

    "Oh, yes," he said. "I'm coming."

    He caught up with her and this time they walked directly into the city. They passed a Melodeon on a corner. Someone had splashed a huge X of red paint across its lurid poster of cancan dancers, and hung on the door a wooden shingle with CLOSED painted on it in the same vivid red paint.