‘Good, good,’ said Hammett rapidly. ‘Sure. What I thought. I kept trying to remember her from two hundred pounds back. She was a looker, was collared on a Mann Act rap, right?’
‘In 1916, right. Pinkerton’s made the collar in a white slavery case, and Tokzek drew five years — although it’s the sister who sounds like bad medicine. He got out in twenty-one.’
‘What were they supposed to be doing?’
‘Supplying Oriental girls to Colosimo’s house in Chi-town.’
‘Wasn’t Johnny Torrio running the house then for Big Jim?’
‘Torrio. Right.’
‘And when he retired, the Scarface took over,’ muttered Hammett to himself. He raised his voice. ‘Better count me out tonight, Jimmy, on those interrogations. I’m going to be busy.’
‘You have all the fun,’ grumbled the op.
Hammett laughed and hung up and dropped another nickel and asked for DOuglas 6400. He was lucky enough to catch George Biltmore in.
‘Well. Hammett.’ He sounded slightly uneasy.
‘What can I do for you?’
‘How’s my credit after Sunday’s performance?’
Biltmore’s heavy, relieved laugh boomed out. ‘With me, A-one. But May wouldn’t be too delighted to see you again. Since she obviously can’t blame the grieving widow, she’s blaming you.’
‘Yeah, well, I brought the booze. How’s that chauffeur of yours in a brawl?’
‘Harry?’ The laughter boomed again. ‘He fought in the First Matabele War in ninety-three against the flower of Lobengula’s warriors. Lost his eye in the Battle of Imbembese.’
None of which meant too much to Hammett; he hadn’t been born until a year later. ‘Think he’d be willing to drive me somewhere tonight?’
‘Promise him action, he’ll be there.’
‘Nine thirty ferry in Sausalito,’ said Hammett. ‘He can pick me up at the slip. It wouldn’t hurt to bring a gun if he’s got one handy, although I don’t expect shooting.’
‘You don’t need another man, do you?’ There was a wistful note in Biltmore’s voice.
‘Your wife’s sore enough at me the way it is.’
24
It was the damnedest car Hammett had ever seen, a huge dark-green beast with a chest-high hood. Its owl-eyed headlamps were augmented by a searchlight mounted on a nickel stanchion on the right running board. A second set of folding windshields protected riders in the back seat.
‘What the hell is it?’ he asked Harry. The solid, compact chauffeur wore dark clothes and a soft knit cap instead of his uniform.
‘This is the new Cadillac four-passenger Sport Phaeton, sir,’ he said in his formal South African accent.
‘Make that Dash,’ said Hammett.
‘Very well, Dash. Sir.’
‘Have it your way.’
He had a hunch the South African was grinning.
The motor roared, then dropped to a throaty grumble. The car’s interior had glossy burled walnut paneling and seats of pale hand-crushed leather.
Harry said, ‘If I could know where we’re going, sir…’
‘To rescue a damsel in distress on the Bolinas Road.’
‘Sir.’
The car slid smoothly away from the curb. A few miles out of Sausalito, they swung left into the Bolinas Road at Dolan’s Corner, where their lights briefly showed them a rundown country store. They had the crushed-gravel road totally to themselves at that time of night.
‘Whom might the damsel in distress be, sir?’
‘A fifteen-year-old Chinese ex-whore named Crystal.’
Harry was silent, digesting this.
‘We’re saving her from a fate worse than death, is it, sir?’
The big car began the climb out of the valley on a road that wound and twisted back upon itself through grove after grove of close-packed eucalyptus trees and then, quite suddenly, redwoods. They kept climbing this shoulder of the mountain that lay between them and the sea. Hammett checked his strap watch.
‘We ought to be there by eleven. Time I explained the setup, Harry.’
He did so as the Cadillac cleared the redwoods and rolled across windswept grassy hilltops clumped with genista and greasewood bushes. Far behind, across the black void of the bay, Hammet could see the twinkling lights of the city through the clear air. There was no fog.
‘I don’t quite understand why you think the missing girl might be held at the farmhouse here in Bolinas.’
Hammett explained the way he had been run off on his previous visit.
‘The way a bootlegger chases off someone snooping around his barn. We know there’s a connection between the girl and the woman, we know the girl was once kidnapped into the white slavery racket and taken to Illinois. We know the Kuhn woman and her brother were arrested for white slavery back in sixteen — picking up naive Chinese girls through newspaper ads for domestics, and running them back to brothels in Burnham, Illinois. I think that all goes beyond coincidence.’
In hairpin turns the road made its descent along the face of the coastal hills toward Stinson Beach. The wind whipped and plucked at them as it poured up over the bluffs from the sea. Hammett was glad of his wool clothing and knitted cap in the open touring car.
‘But how would the Kuhn woman get her hands on Crystal at this time?’
‘On May twenty-seventh, Crystal apparently saw something in the papers that terrorized her so completely that the next afternoon she disappeared. Nobody’s seen her since. She might have come up here to hide, if she’d been told the house was now empty. Anyway, that’s what I hope we’ll find out.’
They had passed Stinson Beach, a crossroads store with a gas pump and a couple of houses, and had swung away from the coast toward the long lance of Pacific known as the Bolinas Lagoon. The Kuhn Farm was on the eastern shore of the lagoon.
‘What did she see in the papers that frightened her so?’
‘Again, I just don’t know. But I think it was an article about a man named Egan Tokzek who was killed in a running gun battle with police and had a dead Chinese girl in his car when they got him. Tokzek was the brother of Heloise Kuhn.’
Harry cut the lights and motor, and the sounds of the marshland night closed in on them. Carrunking frogs, sawing crickets, and trilling cicadas. The car motor creaked as it cooled. Harry took a gun from the pocket of his black horsehide coat and laid it on the pale leather seat. Hammett picked it up.
‘Holy Christ!’ he exclaimed, startled. ‘What kind of howitzer is this?’
‘A howdah gun, sir. Originally intended as a personal sidearm when hunting tigers from the back of an elephant. In case the beast leaped up on the elephant’s back with you-’
‘I can stick my fingers down the bore,’ said Hammett in awe.
‘Yes, sir. It fires a. 577 Snider with eighty grains of black powder. Made by Wilkinson, the London sporting goods suppliers. Beyond about two yards it’s rather less effective than throwing a rock, sir, but-’
‘Yeah. But you’d hate to have it blow its nose at you, even so.’
Hammett walked up the grass ruts shoulder to shoulder with the South African. He was damned glad the case had brought him back here. He didn’t like the depth of terror this woman and her idiot son had opened in his psyche; he wanted to scab over the wound with a second confrontation.
When the house came into sight, they hunkered down. Harry brought his lips close to Hammett’s ear.
‘If I might say so, sir, I’m damned good as a red Indian.’
Hammett watched his bulky shape melt into the night. Strain as he could, his ear could catch no crackle of leaf or rustle of grass. He waited with the placidity of long hours spent in windy doorways, tailing suspects. He yearned for a cigarette, but otherwise…
To mind, abruptly, vividly, came the time Gloomy Gus Schaefer’s jewel gang had been traced to a roadhouse near Vallejo. Hammett had been sent in to learn where the Shapiro jewels, stolen in Minneapolis, had been hidden. He’d waited in the weeds like this for an hour, then tried to climb up the side porch to the second-story window of the room where the thieves were meeting. The drainpipe gave way and dumped him in the underbrush, bruised but unhurt. Shapiro’s men had searched for half an hour before…