Ragtime Cowboys (18 page)

“Hope the eel gave him a flattering description,” Hammett said aloud.

The conductor announced a ten-minute stop in Placerville. Hammett got off, entered the station, bought
The Racing Form
at the newsstand, waited for the man in the telephone booth to come out, and called Beauty Ranch. Becky London answered.

“Oh, it's you,” she said.

“Don't get so excited. I thought you went home to Mama.”

“Are you always this obnoxious, or am I special?”

“Is your stepmother there?”

“She's out riding. You can report to me. She filled me in on what you're about. I'm not in favor of it.”

“You're good, you're really good. I think it's the way you talk way back in your nose when you disapprove.” He gave her a short version of the case to date, including his current mission.

Her tone changed. “But what is Mr. Siringo doing?”

“Not over the wire, but I'm holding up my end. The man who probably shot at Butterfield's on this train.”

“You saw him?”

“I saw the cat's-paw he paid to check on me after I dropped out of sight a few minutes. He was too cagy to do it himself. He's watching me now that I got off.”

“So you can see him. I heard—”

“You heard right. But I can feel what I can't see. Whatever you think of Charmian, she doesn't hire a gardener when she needs a tooth pulled.”

“I think she's wonderful, but I wouldn't admit it to my mother or my sister. They're professional martyrs since Daddy left.”

“They won't hear it from me, angel.”

“I wasn't asking you not to tell them! And don't call me angel!”

“Okay, sweetheart. You'll tell her what I told you? It's tough sitting around waiting.”

“I'll tell her. And if you call me anything, call me Miss London.”

The whistle blasted twice.

“That's my curtain line. I'll be in touch. Tell your stepmother if she receives word from a Peter Collins to get in touch with Siringo right away.”

“Who's Peter Collins?”

“He's me.” He paused. “He is I. I'm working on my grammar. It pays to keep your weapons cleaned and oiled. Clanahan's got a long reach. He probably knows people at Ma Bell and Western Union. No sense making it easy for him.”

“Mr. Hammett, are you in danger?”

He suppressed a cough, grinned at the telephone box. “Don't worry, I'm used to it. But don't forget what I said. Oh, and angel—”

“Yes?”

He laughed his snarky laugh, said good-bye, hooked the receiver, and got back on board.

*   *   *

“Carson City, next stop!”

Hammett, who'd been dozing, tipped his hat back from his face. The conductor with the bad feet was just passing. “How soon?”

“Fifteen minutes.” His gaze went to the sample case on the floor between facing seats. “I haven't seen your friend in a long time.”

“He got off in Placerville. I didn't notice his case was still here till after we pulled out.” He lifted it onto the opposing seat to be taken to the lost and found.

The conductor didn't take it. “He was paid through to Salt Lake City.”

“Guess he changed his mind.”

“Sixty bucks is a lot to pay for a last-minute fancy.”

“Maybe he saw a girl he knew.”

The conductor stroked his imperials, nodded. “Yep. Nobody ever broke his heart over money wasted.” He picked up the case and moved on. “Next stop, Carson City!”

Hammett thought about his satchel in the overhead rack; but there was nothing in it of value except a couple of jars of moonshine, and he could always get it back from the railroad later.

He stepped out onto the car platform to build a butt. The smoking car was too crowded at that early evening hour. He leaned a shoulder against the front of the car and watched the slipstream shred the exhaust from his cigarette, the garbage alongside the tracks that always announced the approach of civilization. A coyote looked up from what it was munching, making eye contact for a tenth of a second, its yellow gaze lingering after the animal had passed from sight.

He flicked the cigarette into the stream of air and turned back toward the car. Something moved in the corner of his eye, he heard a swish, and black-and-purple light filled his skull.

*   *   *

Ties and jagged pieces of rock—the railroad cinder bed—whizzed past, inches in front of his face, black and white, like piano keys. His left arm was stretched to the breaking point, his hand clutching the bottom of the railing designed to prevent passengers from falling off the car platform, one foot braced against the coach chassis, the other bouncing off the ties. His reflexes had come around before his brain.

He drew up the loose leg, smelling the stench of scorched leather, then feeling the beginnings of a bad friction burn where the toe of the shoe had burned through. His head was filled with dirty cotton. Thinking was an act of physical exertion.

He realized he had another hand. He held it up in front of his eyes for a moment, making sure. Then he reached for the railing and with the assistance of his patient other hand, pulled against the wind of the speeding train, at the same time making a bicycling motion with his hot foot to find purchase on the platform. Pedaling empty air.

It was no good. A train cruised at forty miles per hour; a man was good for four at most, with both feet on solid ground and his brain working normally. The wind tore at his face, squeezing water from his eyes and pulling his flesh away from the skull. His hands had no feeling. If they held any grip at all it was news to him. A downward lurch told him it was slipping.

It wouldn't be like it had been for the toilet salesman. They weren't on a curve, and the engineer was making speed on the flataway, making up for two minutes lost somewhere along the way. A man could recover from a broken leg, shattered ribs, even a pelvis held together with wire and pins. A severed spinal cord was another thing, a fractured neck; the luck there was instant death. The alternative was someone turning him over from time to time to avoid bedsores, bathing him and wiping his ass, and waiting.

Jose would do all that, including the waiting. She would jump at it: no more empty bottles in the trash, no unfamiliar scents on his shirts, no more pacing the floor at night waiting for the phone to ring, the request to bail him out of yet another jerkwater can; just sheets to change, chamber pots that needed emptying. She was a nurse. His nurse, as it had been at the start, before it had turned into something else.

His nurse.

Not his wife, and certainly not his lover.

Until she wasn't any of those things.

How long?

He poised himself, using his last stores of strength to brace his hands and feet against the car. If he jumped high enough, far enough, landed hard enough, the rest was harps and trumpets, or more likely flames and accordion music. A man could live with those.

He flattened his palms against the resistance and took a deep breath.

A whistle blew. Westinghouse brakes hissed. The wind in his face grew less fierce. The train was slowing down for the station.

Hammett twisted his fingers around the railing, pressed a heel against the bottom of the platform, and hauled himself up hand over hand onto solid steel. Something slipped out of his pocket and rattled along the rail: the drummer's derringer.

“Carson City!” The conductor's voice, bawling above the slowing drive rods, the whoosh of excess steam. “Watch your step!”

He coughed—deep, hollow coughs, like mortars bursting behind a hill.

Then he wept.

 

22

The beefy man in the straw hat hung up the phone and stuck out a hand for Siringo to take. Having shaken hands with people in politics before, “Charlie O'Casey” shoved his deep into the big paw to spare his fingers, but it was still two minutes before circulation returned.

“I don't know Pincus, but he knows what a Tammany man should, and he says you're a hustler. We'll find out soon enough.” He scribbled an address on his pad, tore off the sheet, and held it out. “Ask for Handy Muldoon. Tell him Ahearn sent you. He'll figure out something for you to do.”

“I was hoping for a job with Clanahan.”

“He's Paddy's all-around. You can't get closer than that. Why do you think they call him Handy?”

*   *   *

The address on the sheet belonged to a crazy-quilt house on Front Street, with porches and gables protruding in all directions, the oldest building in the block.
SAILORS REST
was the legend on a wooden sign shaped like a gull in flight pegged into the front yard: Frisco made allowances for the illiterate. The sailors resting in rockers on the front porch sat without rocking and only the occasional puff of smoke from their short-barreled pipes to show they were breathing. Siringo walked past them without interrupting their contemplation of the bay.

He went inside without using the bellpull, and nearly collided with a boy in knickerbockers running toward the door with an envelope in one hand. Siringo caught him by the shoulders and asked where he could find Handy Muldoon. The boy pointed toward the back of the house, ducked out of his grip, and ran outside.

Siringo passed the model of a schooner four feet long from stem to stern and three feet high from keel to topmast in a glass case on an oaken stand, and then more ships in pictures in copper frames, interspersed with fantastically bearded men in naval officers' caps, all photographed in three-quarter view so that they appeared one-eared. Certainly some of them were one-eyed; he'd seen fewer glass eyes in a taxidermist's studio. He wondered how they'd kept their vessels from always turning in the same direction.

The room he entered after passing the last cyclops was large, and might originally have held the house's library, although if there had been shelves they'd all been torn out and the evidence plastered over and painted institutional green. A huge blackboard decorated the far wall, so close to the ceiling that a tall stepladder stood at either end for the chalkers to reach. They were unused at present, and the boards were blank: but they'd been written on so many times, the names of more recent ward heelers scrawled over those of their predecessors and smeared by erasers nobody ever bothered to clean, that Siringo thought the city's governing history could be read there by some patient scholar, although it didn't signify why anyone would take the trouble. Folding wooden chairs were sprinkled about in no particular pattern, and ten feet of yellow-oak table bisected the room square in the middle, with a dozen or more telephones standing at attention its entire length. The room was like every betting parlor he'd ever visited, except the players in this one were betting on candidates instead of horses. The inevitable presidential portraits hung between blackboards, although Lincoln was the only Republican present.

“I told Paddy it was a mistake, but he said Honest Ape ran independent the second time, so he made him an honorary Democrat.”

Siringo looked at the man who'd read his thoughts when his gaze had lingered on the sad ugly man in the painting.

Handy Muldoon—for it could be only him—stood behind the long table holding one of the candlestick phones with the earpiece tucked under his jaw. He was a tall man with an athletic, cylindrical build, in his vest and shirtsleeves with all buttons fastened and a red bow tie, the only color in his costume. He had a fine head of red hair and a chiseled face that would have been handsome enough to sell Palmolive soap except for the nose, which someone had objected to for some reason and pushed to one side. Tapes of scar tissue adhered to his eyebrows. Siringo grinned in sudden recognition, and nearly forgot his accent.

“I saw you fight Jack Johnson in '13,” he said. “Keewatin, it was. Only it wasn't Muldoon then.”

“I was Tiger Tim Conway. Anyway, that was the name on the robe someone left in a dressing room I used my first year on the circuit. It was a shame to waste it. Since I won the first six fights I wore it into the ring, I wasn't keen to change my luck.” He spat his
T
's: a New York City borough rat from the ground up. “Jack was on the lam then, for taking a white woman across state lines for immoral purposes. He was having trouble digging up opponents in Canada: Half of 'em didn't want to fight coloreds, and the other half didn't want to fight Jack Johnson. I spent six months afterwards wishing I was one of 'em. This was the least of it.” He touched a finger to his bent-over nose.

He stiffened then and cupped the receiver to his ear. “Al? Handy, in Frisco. No, I took one look at him and sent him back East on the next train. He never even got outside the station. Because I fired the lobsneak three years ago for stealing ballot boxes from the wrong ward. He was stealing 'em for them and us, too. Sure, he was Tom Coogan then, same as now; but you know goddamn well Tom Coogan is Irish for John Smith. Next time, send me a Rabinowitz. At least I'll know it ain't somebody I sacked already. No; hell, no, Al. How far back do we go? Fine. How's herself? Swell, keed. Good luck with the campaign.

“Al Smith,” he told Siringo, hanging up. “He's running again for governor.”

“Of San Francisco?”

“Hell, no, New York. You really do hail from Canada, don't you?”

“No, I was brokering a gun deal with some boys from Dublin.” Which was partially true; he'd posed as a Home Rule sympathizer and the information he'd gotten had helped send the robbers of a U.S. armory to prison. “The name's Charlie O'Casey. I'm to tell you Ahearn sent me.”

“And so you have. And who the hell is Charlie O'Casey, I'd like to know.”

He told him about Chicago.

“First Ward, is it? Who's Bathhouse John's strong right arm?”

“Mike Kenna.”

“Call him Mike, do you?”

“Nobody does. He was Hinky-Dink when I met him and always has been.”