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?"
CHAPTER EIGHT
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."