Captain Isaiah Pusey became San Francisco chief of police in 1891.
I continued to write occasional pieces for the Chronicle, on events, scandals; profiles and expositions for tourists and newcomers to the City; on Emperor Norton, on Sarah Althea Hill, Judge Terry and Senator Sharon, on King Kalakaua and Queen Liliuokalani, Lucky Baldwin, William Ralston, the Big Four, Boss Buckley and Boss Ruef. My extended piece on the Chinese slave girls was published by Bret Harte in the Atlantic Monthly. It caused a stir, and my journalistic fortunes were much enhanced.
I published some work that gave pain to the Democratic bosses of the City, the Republican bosses of the state, and the Southern Pacific Railroad. If I was by no means as brilliant as Bierce, I was not as cynical either. Later I published several books and collections on San Francisco history.
I think my father eventually became as proud of me as if I had been a fire chief. He continued to distribute boodle in the legislature on behalf of Railroad issues. We met for supper about once a month at one of the better San Francisco restaurants, the Gent paying for the repast even after I became well able to do so. The Former-Spade messages to Bierce were never mentioned, my father’s single act of disloyalty to his employers.
Some years after her marriage, I met Mrs. Sloat on Geary Street. Amelia was with another handsome young lady, both of them dressed to the nines with elegant hats and tight bodices with low necklines that revealed flesh as smooth as chamois, both of them laden with packages of purchases. They were up from Woodside for the day.
The friend went to the City of Paris while Amelia and I had tea. Her gloved hands fluttered. Once she touched my hand. She smiled and laughed like the Amelia I remembered. She seemed happy. Her husband was a dear man, she said. She loved him very much. She called him “Marshy.”
“I think I have made my husband happy,” she said.
“How could you not?” I said.
She gazed at me with her eyebrows rising up her forehead and her brown eyes filling with tears.
Looking down, she said, “Marshy is ill. It is doubtful that he can live for two more years, Doctor Byng tells me. He is very brave. I will be a very wealthy woman, Tom.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
“Have you read any good books lately?” she asked, changing the subject.
I said I had not had much time to read, lately.
“I have been rereading Jane Austen. She is very fine.”
“I guess so,” I said. I thought about the social elite at Amelia’s wedding. I said I didn’t much like Jane Austen.
“All the characters think about is money,” I said.
Amelia looked as though I had slapped her. She rose, daubing at her eyes. “You have not yet learned irony,” she said. She gathered up her packages, awkward in her haste.
“I’m so sorry,” I whispered. “Please forgive me!” But I didn’t know if she had heard me, for she was gone with a swish of her brown velvet skirt past the table.
I sat alone with my eyes stinging as though they had been dipped in acid.
I remembered Bierce saying that perseverance in one’s principles might be praiseworthy, but obduracy in perseverance was stupidity.
I called on Senator Jennings in his room at the Grand Hotel during a court recess. An Irish maid with a face like a side of bacon let me in and went to see if the senator was sleeping. She ushered me into sickroom stink, Jennings braced sitting in a big bed with a half dozen medicine bottles on the table beside the bed. His face was gray as blotting paper.
“I remember you, you’re Bierce’s boy Friday,” he said. He did not sound hostile. “I know your daddy. Is Clete still working for the SP?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Working for the Railroad,” he almost sang, as though he could make a song of it. “The Railroad dollar did exasperate those that wasn’t getting it. What’s that nasty son-of-a-bitch Bierce doing now?”
“He’s living in Sunol, writing ghost stories about the War.”
“Tell him I don’t hold no grudges,” he said. “We’re going to beat it this time. Bos’s just that much smarter than they are.
“I’ll live to see it,” he went on. His lips fluttered when he spoke, as though there were no muscles in them. “Sworn I’d live to see it. We’ll beat that one, but there’s another I’m not going to beat.”
I said I was sorry to see him laid up.
“See that glass of water there? Would you measure exactly twelve drops from the brown bottle into it? Otherwise I’m going to be yowling like a catamount with a cactus up his ass in about two minutes.”
I measured in the laudanum, and he swigged the water down with an explosive “Ahhhh!”
“Tell Bierce it was McNair that had Gorton cold-cocked,” he went on. “Al was one cadging, complaining, nasty piece of work. It was Nat McNair.”
“I’ll tell him,” I said and asked if he minded talking about George Payne.
“Don’t mind talking about it if you ain’t going to print it.”
“I won’t print anything you don’t want me to.”
“Promises made,” he explained. “Guess who’s paying Bos Curtis.”
I said I expected it was Lady Caroline Stearns.
He nodded once, grinning, and wiped his damp lips with the sleeve of his nightshirt.
“The woman you hate.”
“Son,” he said, “when the crabs are chewing on your innards, and old man Death is standing by with his scythe pointed at you, you don’t have time for hating. I am pleased to say I am over it. It is like shedding off your shoulder a hundred-pound sack of shit. Anyway I’d be hanged by the neck by now if it wasn’t for Bos Curtis and that lady paying him. Elza’s still sticking by his guns; that was her agreement with Bierce. But Bos is a kind of favor a man don’t have any right to expect.”
I said Bierce had figured that Mrs. Hamon had made the mistake of telling him, Senator Jennings, that she was going to see Bierce with certain information, and he had met her to dissuade her from it, which encounter had ended in Morton Street.
Jennings didn’t want to talk about that.
“That is all I hear about in the courtroom, son. George Payne now, that is interesting.”
He closed his eyes, his eyelids fluttering like moths. His lips twitched. “You know, I took that German fella’s painting of High-grade Carrie out of my office in Sacramento and I had it brought down to that saloon me and another chap had on Battery Street. This young fella’d come and sit at the bar half a day staring at it.
“I don’t know when I figured out he was Carrie’s son, my son. I still don’t know how it works about twins. It was maybe my jism and the Englishman’s swapping around inside her, and the fancy twin was his and the crazy one mine.
“He knew that painting was his mother, too. He’d bartend for me Saturday nights. It was a queer sort of coincidence. He was kind of gentle, you’d never consider he was thinking about cutting doves’ guts out. There was something wrong with his peter, I guess. So whores’d made fun of him, that he didn’t forget.”
“Morton Street whores,” I said.
“I told him about the Society of Spades, and how Eddie Macomber and me’d been choused by his mother and McNair, and Al Gorton. I was still hot under the collar—I don’t deny that. But I never told him he was my son.
“Bierce was wrong about me pushing him to slash those whores, and going after Carrie. But there was maybe somebody else pushing on him, maybe the Missus Payne he’d been farmed out to, who was some kind of invalid. He knew plenty about Carrie and his brother and things in London. Isaiah Pusey’d told me about his brother in some whore-muckery over there.