The open field at Market and Fourth was brightly lit by lanterns and torchlights, and dotted with tents and wagons. Music filled the air from many sources, each competing with the other; barkers shouted, and a group of Negro minstrels sang “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.” Sabina stood at the field’s perimeter, surveying the medicine show.
From the wagons men hawked well-known remedies: Tiger Balm, Snake Dust, aconite, Pain Begone, Miracle Wort. Others offered services on the spot: painless dentistry, spinal realignment, Chinese herbs brewed to the taste, head massages. Sabina, who had attended the medicine show with John after moving to San Francisco-a must, he’d said, for new residents-recognized several of the participants: Pawnee Bill, the Great Ferndon, Doctor Jekyll, Herman the Healer, Rodney Strong-heart.
The din rose as a shill for Dr. Wallmann’s Nerve and Brain Salts stood in his red coach-six black horses stamping and snorting-to extol the product. Sabina smiled; John had frequently posed as a drummer for Dr. Wallmann’s, and said the salts were nothing more than table salt mixed with borax.
Someone nearby shouted: “The show is on!” A top-hatted magician and his sultry, robed assistant emerged from a striped tent; another show-Indians in dancing regalia-began to compete, the thump of tom-toms drowning out a banjo player. The entertainment quickly ended when the selling began.
Sabina continued to scan the scene before her. The crowd was mostly men; the few women she judged to be of the lower classes by their worn clothing and roughened faces and hands. Not a lady-fancy or fine-in the lot. And no one with a picture hat and unusual pin. However, the woman she sought could have changed her clothing as she herself had. Sabina moved into the crowd.
A snake charmer’s flute caught her attention, and she watched the pathetic defanged creature rise haltingly from its shabby basket. She turned away, spied under the wide brim of a battered straw hat. The woman had dark eyes and gray hair-not the person she was looking for.
On a platform at the back of a wagon, a dancer was performing, draped in filmy veils. Unfortunately the veils slipped and fell to the ground, revealing her scarlet long johns. A man with an ostrich-featherbedecked hat began expounding upon the virtues of Sydney’s Cough Syrup, only to fall into a fit of coughing. Sabina glanced at the face under the brim of an old-fashioned bonnet and saw the woman was elder ly.
Wide-brimmed hat with bedraggled feathers: a badly scarred young woman whose plight made Sabina flinch. Toque-draped in fading tulle: red hair, and freckles. Another bonnet: white hair and fine wrinkles.
As Sabina was approaching a model of France’s infamous guillotine, a cry rang out. She soon saw that the ostrich feathers of the spokesman for Sydney’s Cough Syrup had caught fire from one of the torches. A nearby man rushed to throw the hat to the ground and stomp the flames out.
A freak show was starting. The barker urged Sabina to enter the tent and view the dwarf and deformed baby in a bottle. She declined-not at all respectfully.
Extravagant hat with many layers of feathers and a stuffed bird’s head protruding at the front: long blonde hair. Temperance speakers, exhibiting jars containing diseased kidneys. No, thank you.
Another bird hat. What was the fascination with wearing dead avian creatures on one’s head? The woman beneath the brim looked not much healthier than the bird that had died to grace her headpiece.
A barker tried to entice Sabina into a wax display of a hanging. No to that, also.
Worn blue velvet wide-brimmed hat, secured by…a Charles Horner hatpin, blue glass overlaid with a gold pattern. Ah! The woman moved through the crowd, head swiveling from side to side.
Sabina waited until the her quarry was several yards ahead of her, then followed.
The woman pretended interest in a miraculous electrified belt filled with cayenne pepper whose purveyor claimed would cure any debilitation. She stopped to listen to the Negro minstrels and clapped appreciatively when their music ended. Considered a temperance pamphlet, but shook her head. Accepted a flyer from the seller of White’s Female Complaint Cure.
All the time, as Sabina covertly watched her, the pickpocket’s head continued to move from side to side-looking for someone in distress. Someone who she could rob.
Sabina seldom had difficulty controlling her temper. True, it rose swiftly, but just as swiftly it turned from hot outrage to cold resolve. She, too, began looking for someone in distress. Someone who she could save from the woman’s thievery.
Before long, she saw him, nearly ten yards away, humped over, leaning on a cane, walking haltingly. She poised to move in, but the woman, who obviously had seen him, too, surprised her by turning the other way.
Another old man, limping, forehead shiny with perspiration in spite of the chill temperature.
The woman passed him by.
Had Sabina been wrong about the pickpocket’s method? No, this dip was clever. She was waiting for the ideal victim.
More wandering. More pretending interest in the shows and wares. No indication that the pickpocket had spied her.
In front of the bright red coach belonging to the purveyor of Dr. Wallmann’s Nerve and Brain Salts, the woman stopped. She spoke to the vendor, examined the bottle, then shook her head. A crowd had pressed in behind her. She stretched her arms up behind her head, then dropped them, and angled through the people.
And in that moment Sabina knew her method.
She pushed forward into the crowd, keeping her eyes on the blue velvet picture hat. It moved diagonally, toward the Chinese herbalist’s wagon. Now, after 10:00 p.m., most of the women had departed, their places taken by Cocktail Route travelers on a postprandial stroll, after which many would visit the establishments of the wicked Barbary Coast. The woman in the blue hat would be there, too, plying her trade upon the unsuspecting-unless Sabina could stop her.
The blue hat now brushed against the shoulder of a tall, blond man clad in an elegant broadloom suit. The perfect victim.
Sabina weaved her way through men who had stopped to hear Rodney Strongheart sing in a loud baritone about how his elixir would keep one’s heart beating forever. A few gave her disapproving glances-she should not be here at this hour, and she certainly shouldn’t be elbowing them aside.
Sabina continued to use her elbows.
Now she was beside the woman. She reached for her arm and missed it just as the man in broadloom groaned and clutched his side. Sabina saw the dip’s right hand move to his inner pocket; she was quick, and the man’s purse was soon in her grasp.
But not soon enough to make her escape.
Sabina grasped the woman’s right hand, which held the purse, and pinned the dip’s arm behind her back. The pickpocket struggled, and Sabina pulled the arm higher until she cried out, and then was still.
The victim had recovered from his pain. He stared at Sabina, then at the thief. Sabina reached down and wrested the blue-and-gold Charles Horner hatpin from the woman’s hand.
“And that,” John Quincannon said, “was the last of the Carville Ghost.” He looked pleased with himself, sitting at his desk, smiling and stroking his freebooter’s beard-a feature that made him appear rakish and dangerous. He fancied himself the world’s finest detective and he always preened a bit when he brought an investigation to a successful conclusion. “And,” he added, “I have collected the fee. A not inconsiderable twenty-five hundred dollars. I would say that justifies dinner for two at Marchand’s and perhaps…”
Sabina interrupted his description of his evening’s plans for them. “I, too, have collected a handsome fee. From Charles Ackerman.”
“Ah, you solved the pickpocketing case.”
“Yes.” She proceeded to tell him about it, finishing: “I thought the woman…Sarah Wilds…was preying upon infirm men, perhaps men in gastric distress. It turned out she was stealing from perfectly healthy men, stabbing them in the side with her needle-thin hatpin to distract them while she picked their pockets.”