“Might she have been included among the Spades?”
“There was a blackball system. She had been blackballed.”
“May I ask by whom?”
She considered, her eyes slitted against the smoke. “It would have been my husband.”
“Why would it have been, madam?” Bierce said.
“Mr. Bierce, I will confess something to you. I wonder if it will even surprise you. Nat McNair was a cruel, dishonest, coldhearted, ungrateful monster who never forgave a slight or forgot to remember a favor.”
“Why did you marry him, madam?”
“I thought he would become the richest man in California.” She uttered a small laugh. “He did not quite achieve that goal, but his achievement was impressive. I earned my share of it.”
I thought she did not mean by her part in the Jack of Spades contrivances.
“Why was Will Sharon not an investor in the Jack of Spades?”
“Why does this name continue to come up in our conversation? Senator Sharon was and is a detestable man. I hope Miss Hill wins her case and takes half of his millions away from him.”
She leaned back in the chaise as though satisfied with her denunciation. Bierce inquired what her son might be blamed for.
“As I have learned, he was adopted by Mr. McNair some months after he was born. He lived in San Francisco in circumstances of increasing wealth until he was ten or eleven—when he and James Brittain’s daughter were sweethearts.”
Lady Caroline nodded, leaking smoke through her nostrils.
“Did you approve of that connection?” Bierce asked.
“Not particularly, Mr. Bierce. Not at all, in fact.”
“Her father did not approve of it because he thought them brother and sister.”
Lady Caroline sipped her port, her cigarette smoking between the fingers of her other hand. They seemed to me defensive devices, as her embroidered gown was a kind of cage of armor.
“I know of your son’s troubles in London, by the way,” Bierce said.
“He was victimized by false friends. I do not excuse him, mind you.” Even when she spoke with force there was a serenity to her words that seemed to me the product of a considerable will. She addressed herself to me:
“Mr. Redmond, I would prefer that any further confidences be revealed only to Mr. Bierce.”
“Certainly,” I said, rising. “Lady Caroline, I bring a message from Jimmy Fairleigh in Virginia City. He asked me to tell you that he will never forget you.”
The beautiful mask suddenly became an unhappy human face. Her lips parted, her eyes flared at me, lines showed in her throat.
“That sweet unfortunate boy! What is he doing, please?”
“He is a waiter at the International Hotel there.”
“And the mines are closing down. The town must be dying. I must do something for him!” she whispered, and the mask reformed itself. I bade her good night.
Marvins showed me into another sitting room downstairs and busied himself lighting lamps and bringing me another glass of port. I had difficulty sitting still, and the wine seemed an overly heavy and sweet appurtenance of aristocracy. After twenty minutes I asked Marvins to tell Bierce I was taking the air and went outside into the brisk damp, to walk along the McNair brass fence toward the top of Taylor Street hill, where a single streetlamp shed a circle of pale illumination in the fog, as though its flame burned under water.
I stopped before I reached a point where I could look down on the Brittain house and retraced my steps toward the porte cochere. I turned again just in time to see a figure detach itself from the shrubbery, straddle the fence and hurry away from me. As he passed under the streetlight he glanced back and I thought I caught a glimpse of a glint of fair beard.
When Bierce joined me I told him I had seen Beau leave the house.
“I believe it could not have been Beau you saw,” he said. “He was playing chess with Rudolph Buckle in the Billiard Room.”
“Did you see him?” I asked.
“No,” he said thoughtfully.
“But Beau was the subject of our conversation,” he went on. “You said once that Miss Brittain had spoken of his researches. He is obsessed with prostitutes. Lady Caroline is disturbed by this and fears he may get himself into trouble again as he did in London. The fact is, he is in trouble! And how can I discuss with her the probability that his obsession stems from his knowledge of his mother’s former profession? Now he is infatuated with a young Chinese woman, no doubt a prostitute.”
“She is in danger from the Slasher, then,” I said.
We started back down California Street toward the lights of Chinatown beneath us.
“There was a general obsession with Chinese prostitutes in the old days,” Bierce went on. “It is still the case! Every yokel who comes to the City must see for himself. The burning question is not What is man? or Why are we here? but Does the Chinese female possess a different arrangement of sexual apparatus than her white sister? Imagine it! Ah Toy is reputed to have made her fortune by this quest for the essential knowledge. Her price list read ‘Two bits lookee, four bits feelee, six bits doee.’ And I believe the bulk of her fortune came in the satisfaction of the lookees.” He laughed, striding along at his military gait. He seemed pleased with himself.
He announced that he wished to smoke a few pipes of opium, and he commanded me to accompany him. He needed my counsel.
We descended into Chinatown, where he seemed familiar with an odoriferous alley off Kearny Street. This was not one of the tourist opium dens. We descended four brick steps and passed along a mossy wall in a play of shadows as dense as black velvet. I could smell the opium before we got to the door of the parlor, that pervasive odor that reminds you of something you can’t quite recall. An old Chinese bowed us inside. In an outer room six men, not all Chinese, lay on wooden bunks alcoved into the wall, jackets hanging beside their heads, which rested on leather-covered bricks. Smoke massed gray against the painted ceiling. On the wall was a price list in English and Chinese, for small pipes and large. In an inner chamber was a cot with a taboret beside it, a lamp burning on the table. The old Chinaman indicated this. Bierce, in turn, pointed me to a straight chair, which I pulled over.
“Tell me everything you know, saw, heard, thought—everything,” he said. “Not just tonight. Everything. There is something I’ve missed. Just keep talking.”
I began talking.
A younger Celestial in a pink silk shirt with decorative frogs down the front appeared and, squatting, kneaded a ball of dark brown gum over a flame until it began to bubble and then plunged it into the bowl of the pipe, which Bierce inhaled. The first pipe seemed to take only moments, and the young man went through the preparations for the second. I inhaled free smoke. Bierce had removed his coat and loosened his tie. It was the first time I had seen him with his collar button undone.
“Continue!” he commanded.
I pulled from my memory everything I knew about the murders, the trip to the Washoe, the tintype of the Spades, the interview with Pusey, my conversations with Amelia and her father. But not with my father, E. O. Macomber, who had written the Former-Spade letter to Bierce.
Bierce smoked the second pipe, and a third. “Does Amelia have brothers?” he asked.
She had a brother named Richard, whom I’d glimpsed at the Firemen’s Ball and who was studying at the Sheffield School at Yale.
“And she has an uncle, who is her father’s twin, and whom Beau resembles?”
“Amelia does not think he does.”
I told Bierce about seeing Beau at the Bella Union, and catching sight in Battery Street of the painting of Lady Caroline as Lady Godiva—which Mr. Brittain had described and which was apparently Senator Jennings’s property. Bierce demanded a description of the man carrying the painting to safety, which description I was unable to supply other than that the fellow had been young.