Crystal clung to him like a little child as they went down the worn timber gangway to the pier, her head lolling like a puppet’s against his arm. The pompom on her cap came just to his shoulder.
‘Are the mobsters on to you?’ asked Hammett. ‘I have to know.’
A look of terror entered her eyes. She pulled her childishly small fingers from his hand.
‘Molly said something about trouble back east.’
‘Molly? But Molly is hidden where even I do not know-’
‘I found her.’
They walked a block over to Polk, where an early Number 19 streetcar waited to start its run. One of the beefy Italian conductors collected their fares and went away. The other manipulated the controls to send the heavy car up the Polk Street incline with a rush of power.
Crystal said, her eyes suddenly enormously yearning, ‘Can I go and stay with Molly?’
‘I found her,’ Hammett repeated.
‘Oh.’ Her voice was very small. ‘You are right. If they find me again, they will kill me.’
‘The fat sow and her dim-witted kid?’ Hammett shook his head. ‘They’re still running.’
‘The ones they were holding me for.’
They left the car at Sutter Street. Hammett found it pleasant walking hand-in-hand with this girl. Her abrupt gaiety was infectious: He found himself swinging his arm in wide arcs with hers.
‘Where is this place you are taking me?’
‘A hotel.’ Then seeing her expression of alarm, he added, ‘Forget it. You’re too skinny.’
She giggled. ‘You’re no one to talk.’
‘I may be thin, but I’m aww-ful wiry. We turn here.’
They entered a basement doorway flush with the sidewalk and went down steps to a narrow concrete corridor the length of the building, which led them across enclosed backyards. They went through a door in a sidewall, down more concrete steps, and across a basement floor. Another door put them in the enclosed courtyard behind a three-story building.
‘Up we go, sweetheart.’
Hammett used a key in the fire door. Very narrow wooden stairs took them winding upward. He used the key again at the first landing, which put them on the building’s second floor. Halfway along the hall that paralleled Post Street, Hammett rang the buzzer under a wooden OFFICE sign. The upper half of the Dutch door swung wide. A tousled white thatch was thrust out so snapping black eyes could regard them.
‘Got a desperate fugitive for you to hide out, Pop,’ said Hammett.
26
The room was small but meticulously clean, with a steel-framed bungalow bed and a steam radiator. Above the bed was a framed print of ‘Spring Song,’ with the little girl sitting on the bench watching a bluebird sing at the edge of a copse of birch trees. Across from it was a dresser set at an angle between the two windows. The single straight-backed chair was childishly decorated with painted vines and garish flowers.
Crystal entered the room like a cat, daintily sticking her head into the closet and around the frame of the bathroom door. Also like a cat, she made the room her own, bouncing on the bed as a child might do to test its springiness. They had come up a very narrow uncarpeted stairway from the rear of the hotel’s top floor, to this single small separate room built right on the tar-and-gravel roof of the hotel.
‘I could sleep for a week,’ she said.
‘Ain’t much to do but sleep, here,’ said Pop from the doorway.
‘Pinkerton’s used to put surprise witnesses up here until it was time to testify,’ Hammett explained. Pop said he would bring milk and doughnuts up from the Eagle Market, and Hammett added, ‘Coffee, too.’
Crystal gestured after the old man. ‘Shouldn’t you… I mean, he’s pretty decrepit…’
‘This lets him feel he’s handling the situation.’ Hammett drew the garish chair closer to the bed and sat down. ‘And gives us time for a little talk.’
‘I… don’t understand.’ Her eyes slid away from his.
‘Fat mama and the idiot boy didn’t put the snatch on you at high noon on Market Street.’
The girl was looking down at her hands. Her voice was very small. ‘No, of course not. But…’
‘Remember Vic Atkinson?’
‘The man with the ten-year-old dog?’ She jerked her head and gave an involuntary nervous giggle.
‘Vic’s dead. Murdered.’
‘Oh! I’m sorry.’ Her eyes went back to her hands, which clasped and unclasped themselves in her lap. ‘I… I didn’t know.’
‘Everybody keeps talking about a threat from the mob back east. You, the cops, Molly. Vic’s murder could have been a mob killing, it had the earmarks. Or it could have just been made to look that way. I’m pretty sure where he died — in the back room of Dom Pronzini’s speakeasy.’ The name had no apparent effect on her. ‘If I knew why, I’d probably know who.’ He added thoughtfully, ‘The mob might be trying to get a toehold in the city through Pronzini…’
The girl said nothing.
‘What did you see in the newspaper that made you start running?’
The girl’s dark almond eyes flashed up briefly at him, then back down to the hands busy in her lap again. She said nothing
‘I need some answers, sister. Was it because of a newspaper article identifying a dead man as Egan Tokzek? The brother of the fat bitch up in Marin?’
The fingers of one hand picked at the other. Her eyes watched. She spoke to her hands, her voice soft and hesitant. ‘If you are to understand, you must know something that happened four years ago, when I was only eleven…’
‘You answered an ad for a domestic and were grabbed by the fat woman and her brother and shipped to a brothel back east,’ said Hammett in a brutally impatient voice. ‘I know all of that. What about-’
‘But how can you…’ Her eyes were wide and shocked. ‘Nobody..’
‘Tokzek did time for white slavery ten-twelve years ago. He and his sister specialized in Chinese girls then. Why would they have changed by the time you came along?’
The girl’s head remained bowed. Hammett leaned forward to raise her face. Tears were welling from her eyes, but she made no attempt to look away.
‘I am so ashamed.’
Hammett took his hand away. ‘It happened.’ He’d learned years before that a matter-of-fact approach worked better than sympathy when witnesses were on the edge of collapse. ‘Talking about it won’t make it happen again.’
‘I… know. All right.’ She knuckled her eyes in a little-girl gesture. ‘First I went to an office in Chinatown, the address listed in the ad. The fat woman was there. She interviewed me and sent me to an address on McAllister Street. It was my first trolley ride, I was terrified. Tokzek was there. He kept me in the attic for three days, putting things into the food so I was always… always foggy…’
Keeping his voice neutral, Hammett asked, ‘Who broke you in? Tokzek?’
She nodded.
‘He beat you? Maul you around?’
‘No. Just… just…’ She overcame the rising note of hysteria in her voice and spoke coldly and clearly. ‘Just taught me how to be a whore.’
‘And then they sent you back east.’
‘In a compartment on the train with a man whose job it was to transport me.’ Her voice, her gestures, even her eyes had taken on a bitter, smoky edge. ‘Part of his pay was using me on the trip. I was put in the Harlem Inn in Stickney.’
Hammett stood up, lit a cigarette, and sucked acrid smoke into his lungs. Crystal went on in her hard whore’s voice, looking straight ahead as if seeing through the wall of the room.
‘We used to parade for the johns. I had to wear high-heeled shoes and gingham baby rompers with a big bow in the back. It was two dollars for five minutes. The landlady was called Auntie Adelaide. She used to sit in the hall at the foot of the stairs. When you went upstairs with a john, she’d give you a towel and a metal tag with a number on it. The john would give her two dollars.’