Gangway! (7 page)

    "Mission Street where?"

    She looked at him as they crossed an intersection. "What do you mean where? Right down there." She pointed down the hill behind them.

    "You mean you were born in San Francisco?"

    "Of course."

    He did some rapid arithmetic. Well, it was possible after all. The gold had been discovered in 1848; they must have started building this excuse for a city right after that. That was twenty-six years ago.

    "It isn't there any more," she said.

    He was beginning to puff from the climb. "What isn't?"

    "The place where I was born. It burned down in the fire of fifty-four."

    Which narrowed things down to a six-year span. So she wasn't younger than twenty, and she wasn't older than twenty-six. Gabe began to feel fiendishly clever.

    But she shattered this feeling. "I'm twenty-four, if that's what you're trying to figure out."

    "Did I ask?" he demanded. "Did I?"

    "How old are you?"

    "What difference does that make?"

    "Well, I just asked. You don't have to throw a fit." She stopped so abruptly that he banged into her. He looked up at a bulky five-story building. Vangie said, "Let's try this one."

    Gabe headed for the porticoed door, but Vangie dragged him back by the sleeve. "Not that way. Come on."

    Around the side of the building. Past dark windows and a rubbish pile. Finally she turned and pulled open a door that Gabe wouldn't have seen in the dark alley.

    A dimly lit corridor. Kitchen smells, the sound of rattling utensils in a dishpan. Vangie led him stealthily past the kitchen door and up a rickety flight of backstairs, keeping her weight on the inner edge of the treads and motioning to Gabe to do the same.

    She preceded him up the stairs and stopped at a door on the landing. "I'll check first," she whispered. "They may have rented it to somebody else."

    He waited, holding the stairway door ajar and watching her tiptoe down the carpeted hall to a door. She slipped the key into the lock. He heard the faint click of the latch and then Vangie disappeared inside.

    Almost instantly she flew out into the corridor, followed by an irate shriek. She rushed back down the corridor and fled past him. Gabe pulled the stairway door shut.

    He didn't catch up until they had reached the alley. Vangie gave him an embittered look. "You wouldn't believe what that woman was wearing to bed. All right, the next one's just a block over. Come on."

    Gabe stood at the head of the backstairs, very winded and very tired. He hoped desperately that this one would be all right because it was at the top of a six-story hotel and he just didn't have the strength to go on climbing hills and stairs for the rest of the night.

    But there was a scream and his face fell.

    Then he recognized the voice. It was Vangie screaming this time.

    Gabe rushed across the corridor and collided with Vangie as she came pell-mell out of the room, skirts flying and followed by a long-armed miner in long Johns.

    The miner was leering at the fleeing girl and didn't seem to see Gabe. There was only a split second while the miner roared past him, but Gabe used it to whip the knuckle duster out of his pocket and apply it to the rear of the miner's head.

    He fell down and began to curl up like a strip of frying bacon.

    Gabe took Vangie's arm and hustled her down the stairs. On the street she stopped to get her breath; she tipped her head back to look at him. "My goodness. You're faster than the telegraph."

    "Well, you know back East in New York, where…"

    "Where men are men. Yes, I know."

    "Yeah. Well. Your luck seems to be about as good as mine. Maybe we ought to go pay the twenty-five cents to see Ittzy."

    "Well there's still one hotel left. This way."

    He followed her to the curb and they set foot in the street, about to cross it. But a sudden clamor of bells clanged nearby.

    The street instantly cleared of people. Vangie dashed for the nearest doorway while Gabe, still in the middle of the street, looked around, baffled. The bells were getting louder.

    "Gabe!" Vangie yelled, from the protection of the doorway. "Run for it!"

    He was about to, even though he still didn't know why, when another voice from another direction called in accents of surprise and joy, "Why, Gabe! How are you? It's been years!"

    Vangie shouted, "Gabe… come on!"

    He looked back and forth in confusion. The bells jangled and clanged. Vangie stood in her doorway with one hand extended, beseeching him. From the other way-across the street-a willowy young man, rather overdressed, came strolling forward out of the fog with smile and hand both outstretched.

    "Well, I'll be damned," Gabe said. "Francis Calhoun."

    Francis Calhoun approached, smiling, saying something else that was lost in the racket of the bells. From the other side, Vangie came rushing back out to yank Gabe to safety. And all at once something came around the corner, big, loud and fast. It tore hell for leather in their direction.

    A fire engine. The biggest, fastest, reddest horse-drawn fire engine in the entire world-bell clanging, white horses raging, wheels clattering, the whole mess hurtling their way like a falling roof. Gabe stood there in the middle of the street, Francis Calhoun on one side of him and Vangie on the other, and like an avalanche at Grand Canyon the fire engine roared on by.

    The wind of its passage all but knocked Gabe to the ground. He yelled something, but even he himself couldn't hear what it was. Then the thing was past and careening on down the hill, gathering its noise around itself like coattails.

    Gabe blinked. He looked around in the dust cloud the thing had left in its wake, and damn if Vangie wasn't still there. Damn if Francis Calhoun wasn't still there. Gabe looked down at himself; damn if he wasn't still there.

    "Oh, my goodness," Vangie said faintly.

    Francis, dusty but unruffled, continued to wear his welcoming smile as he said, "How are you, old cock?"

    Gabe looked down the street. A few blocks below, the fire engine roared around a corner, swaying far over, not quite capsizing, righting itself, and swooping on out of sight and gradually out of hearing. Past that corner, straight on down all the way to the waterfront, the street was as empty as Tenth Avenue after a shot has been fired. "Now, what " he said, then swallowed and tried again. "Just what in hell was that?"

    "Fire engine," Francis said, wrinkling his nose in distaste. "That garish color," he said.

    Gabe turned to Vangie for a fuller explanation. "What was it?"

    A pale Vangie clutched her throat. "The closest I've ever been to being posthumous," she said.

    Gabe said, "We've got fire engines back in New York, too, but not like that."

    Vangie said, "Gabe, this city's burned down twice so far. You can say what you want about San Francisco, but the people here aren't stupid. We do get the point after a while, so now we've got ourselves the finest, fastest, most modern fire engines in any city in the whole world."

    "Clang, clang," Francis said disapprovingly. "You wouldn't believe how they carry on."

    Vangie peered curiously past Gabe at Francis. "I don't think I…"

    "Nor have I," Francis said. "Do introduce us, Gabe."

    "Yeah," Gabe said reluctantly. "Uh, Vangie Kemp, this here is Francis Calhoun. I, uh, used to know him back in New York."

    "One of my dearest friends," Francis said. "Was that Angie or Vangie, dear?"

    "E-van-ge-line," Vangie said, smiling with her teeth.

    Gabe looked all around, making a point of not meeting Francis' eye. "Well," he said, "it looks safe now. I guess we can all move on, huh?"

    Francis was saying, "Dear Gabe and I grew up together. Didn't we, Gabe?"

    "Yeah, that's right," Gabe said. He was ready to depart from there, call the conversation quits, and have nothing more to do with Francis Calhoun forever. It was true they'd grown up in the same neighborhood, but they hadn't exactly been together. Having little interest in beating up the weak and defenseless just for the fun of it-as opposed to doing so for profit-Gabe had been one of the very few children in the neighborhood who hadn't gone out of his way to make Francis Calhoun's youth memorable. If Francis now looked back on that inactivity and remembered it as a deep and abiding friendship that was his own business, but Gabe wanted no part of it.

    But Vangie was saying, through that rather odd, toothy set smile, "Well, any friend of Gabe's is a friend of mine."

    "My feeling exactly," Francis said. His own smile didn't seem to have any teeth in it at all; his lips curved limply, like a couple of anchovies on a plate.

    "I guess that must be an Eastern suit," Vangie said, aiming her smile at his loud clawhammer coat.

    "I'm glad you like it," Francis said, preening a bit. His clothes were flamboyantly cheap and somewhat the worse for wear. The worn coat was shiny here and there, but the colors were nearly blinding at this close range. Over it he wore a short cape with a bright pink lining. His dark hair was all wet down, and he gave the general appearance of a lunatic undertaker or an apprentice carnival barker. Drawing a lace-fringed handkerchief now from the cuff of his coat and dusting himself off, he said, "One does pick up so much dirt in the street, doesn't one? Did you say you were a local girl?"

    She smiled sweetly. "I didn't say. Do you spell Francis with an
i
or an
e
?"

    "Well, that does depend."

    For a reason he didn't entirely understand, these two were making Gabe very nervous. Before either of them could say anything more, he stepped between them, took Vangie's arm, and said, "Nice seeing you again, Francis. We'll have to have a drink sometime and talk over the old days."

    "An excellent suggestion," Francis said, taking Gabe's other arm. "And no time like the present. Shall we go somewhere for an aperitif?"

    

    

    Francis regarded the waiter with some mistrust. "Have you ever heard," he inquired, "of a Pink Lady?"

    "You probably want one of them hotel dives down by the waterfront," the waiter said.

    Francis sighed. Even here in the plush saloon of one of the big hilltop hotels, surrounded by city fathers in black coats and railroad men smoking cigars, one had to deal with the plebeian mind. "A Pink Lady," he explained loftily, "is a form of beverage. Ask your bartender, perhaps he has experience of it."

    "A Pink," the waiter said, "Lady." He had the beetle browed look of a man who's put up with a lot in his life and maybe isn't going to put up with much more. He eyed the trio at the table as though thinking of falling on them. Heavily he said, "Pink Ladies for everybody?"

    "Sounds as though I might like it," the girl Evangeline said. She was sitting there with her elbow on the table and her forearm straight up and pinkie crooked as though she were holding a teacup at the vicar's. Every time Francis caught her eye she gave him the same set smile.

    The waiter looked at Gabe flatly. "You, too?"

    "Whisky," Gabe growled. "In a glass." It would take more than that to improve the waiter's disposition. Wordlessly he turned and went away.

    Francis leaned back and looked around the large genteel room, its quiet muffled by money and mohair. He had brought dear old Gabe and Gabe's little urchin friend here because he felt the frank need for a little beauty around himself.

    Times had been difficult lately; in fact, they'd been terrible. Francis had come out here from New York three years ago to make a fresh start with new friends in a setting more amicably attuned to his nature than New York City's rough and tumble. Of course he'd had his ups and downs since then, of which the ups had never been extraordinarily high, but the downs had tended to be bone-crushing. And the current depression looked as though it might turn out to be the worst of them all.

    Dimly he heard the girl talking to Gabe, extolling the wonders of San Francisco: two thousand saloons and blind pigs, she was saying, or one for every seventy-six inhabitants. There were three thousand Chinese girls in the city, she said, who had been imported as bordello slaves by the vice lords of the Chinese Tongs.

    She went on in that vein. Francis hardly understood her point; it seemed in execrable taste, but what could one expect after all? The Lord knew that Francis had tried to instill an appreciation of the finer things in this wilderness encampment, but it was hard going-ever so hard.

    He leaned forward again, waited for a pause in the girl's recital of the less appetizing local statistics, and then said, "Well, Gabe old cock, it really is wonderful to see you again."

    "Yeah."

    "You've come out West to make your fortune, I bet."

    "You bet."

    "Well, I've never regretted coming out, I can tell you that." Francis smiled in easy self-deprecation and said, "Not that I've become one of your local millionaires, don't get me wrong."

    "I wouldn't do that," Gabe said.

    "But the city itself," Francis said, "is
tres jolie
. And the people… well, there are rough edges to them, of course, but deep down they're really quite a tolerant lot. Far more so than back East."

    "Yeah."

    "I have been making my living," he said, emphasizing the past tense, "as a designer. Fashion, you know."

    The girl's smile thawed a little. "Ladies' fashions?"

    "In a way," Francis told her. "Designs for the theater, you know."

    She looked more and more interested. "The theater?"