“In your earlier life. Which you’re always so careful not to talk about.”
“Back in San Francisco I knew folks who went to Chinatown from time to time. What they learn there is that a pipe can be a good deal easier to pick up than it is to put down. And I’ve seen what happens when such people don’t get what they need. Sweats, shakes, the runny nose. They try to make it up with laudanum or patent medicines, or they boil poppy heads for tea.”
“Nice friends you have. No wonder you don’t mention them more often.”
“Now, I’m not suggesting you’re one of those sorry souls. The Doris I know would never fall to that level. But your symptoms tell a story. What would I find, I wonder, if I searched your dormitory room? A bottle of laudanum, maybe, lurking at the back of a cupboard?”
“What you would find would be my shoe, planted in your fundament.” But her belligerence was forced. “Jesse, what’s this all about? Speak plainly; I’m not good at puzzles.”
“We both know things come into the City from time to time. Things the City people don’t approve of. Some of the restaurant girls and show people have habits worse than yours, Doris, and if some nervous dancer needs a dose of paregoric I don’t see any earthly reason why she shouldn’t have it—though the City people are prudish that way. But when it gets too obvious to overlook, when it leaks from Tower Two to Tower One? Bad things start to happen. Rooms get searched. People get fired.”
“What’s all this got to do with me?”
“It has to do with Mick. I don’t suppose Mick’s the only one doing business with the druggist in Futurity Station. But he’s one of them. Don’t deny it—his name is already on a list. And knowing Mick, he’s not doing anyone any favors. Mick’s not much more than a glorified teamster, but he has the mind of a businessman. An eye for profit and the quid pro quo. You scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours. Which tends to make other people—innocent people—people like you, Doris—a party to his affairs. And those same people risk getting drowned, if Mick’s boat sinks.”
“His boat’s sinking, is it?”
“He doesn’t make you pay for those little bottles of Bateman’s Pectoral Drops, does he?”
“You bastard—you have been in my cupboard!”
“You and I were intimate friends, Doris. An intimate friend notices things.”
“Like I noticed you crying like a baby in your sleep?”
“I think Mick brings you your paregoric, and in exchange you do him some kind of favor. Maybe something as trivial as carrying a package from one place to another. His pass card won’t let him into the guest floors, but yours will. Suppose someone gave you a little something upstairs, and Mick told you to hand it off to Isaac Connaught, the coach driver. Has anything like that ever happened?”
Doris had utterly forgotten Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper. She bared her teeth in an expression that would not have looked out of place on a Bengal tiger. “I will have your guts for garters if you get me fired from the City!”
The part about carrying packages had been little more than a guess, though it was rumored that Doris had had a brief dalliance with Connaught before she started her affair with Jesse. “I want to prevent you from being fired, if it’s at all possible. That’s why I’m here. Yes, Mick’s boat is sinking, and you need to get clear of it as quick as possible. I can help you.”
“Maybe his boat is sinking because some great huge lummox torpedoed it.”
“I work for the City like everyone else. I’m doing my job. If you want to keep on doing yours, you ought to cooperate.”
“You can’t fire me!”
“I can’t, but the people who can fire you will be looking at you very closely, very soon. Let me tell them you’re being cooperative.”
“Whatever that means!”
“It means we should have a frank conversation. For instance, about those packages you delivered to Connaught. What was in them, Doris?”
For a long moment he was sure she was going to slap him. Then she rolled her eyes and sighed. “I don’t know. They’re always wrapped. Pasteboard boxes in brown paper, to look like something I might carry in or out of a guest’s room.”
“All right. These packages, are they heavy?”
“Some heavier than others.”
“How often do you pick them up?”
“Once a week, the same day the guests leave.”
“Always from the same room?”
“No. Mick tells me which room. Always one that’s just been vacated. When I make up the bed I look underneath. If there’s a package I carry it down to the stables and hand it off to Connaught. Honestly, that’s all.” Her anger had drained away. “I guess it’s enough to get me fired.”
“Not if you’re willing to tell the story twice.”
“Tell it to who?”
“A security boss called Barton in Tower One.”
Her eyes widened. “I can’t cross over to Tower One!”
“I’ll escort you.”
“What do you mean—now?”
“The sooner the better.”
She cast a long glance at the newspaper, as if she wanted to hide under it, then pushed away from the table. “If we’re being so damned honest with each other … what’ll happen to Mick? Because I don’t want anyone to think I gave him up just to save my skin.”
“No one will think that.” He took her arm before she could call him a liar yet again. “Come on, Doris. Don’t be afraid. You always said you wanted to see the other tower.”
He left Doris with Barton, who promised she wouldn’t be fired if what she told him was honest and helpful—a promise Jesse hoped he would keep.
He was in bed by eleven o’clock, and he dreamed of Madame Chao’s house in San Francisco.
* * *
Jesse is seventeen years old. His father is drunk, but not bad drunk.
“Working drunk” is how Jesse thinks of it. The smell of whiskey hovers over his father like a sullen angel. It’s the end of a long night—within grasping distance of dawn—and Jesse’s father has been on the door of Madame Chao’s for many hours. Jesse has been serving drinks in the parlor: His aversion to alcohol makes him a reliable employee, which Madame Chao appreciates.
The parlor is empty of clients. Most of Madame Chao’s girls are upstairs, though Ming and Li are on the sofa, conducting an earnest conversation in Dupont Street patois. Jesse, collecting empty glasses, listens with half an ear as his father speaks. It is one of his father’s mumbling monologues, a tutelary speech directed at no one: The only evidence of his drunkenness is that he doesn’t care who’s listening. Tonight it’s something about whalers. “Whaleboat men are the worst.” From the point of view of a whorehouse bouncer. “Stinking of carcasses and train oil, strong as bulls from lofting their irons … coarse and ugly from months confined among men no better than themselves, arms thick as hawsers, hard on the women and harder still in a fight…”
Jesse and his father and his sister, Phoebe, share an attic room, stiflingly hot on summer nights like these. Jesse is ready to sleep but he dreads the walk upstairs, passing through layers of increasingly hotter air to lie and sweat through the restless hours until a distant noon bell wakes him. He prays for morning fog, the benediction of an ocean breeze.
The last glass has been returned to its cupboard and Ming and Li are dozing in each other’s arms when there is a knock at the door: three loud, insistent pounds. Jesse’s father rouses from his introversion and takes his station. He slides the wooden cover from the peephole and puts his eye to it. He mutters something inaudible, probably a curse. He says to Jesse, “Go fetch Madame Chao.”
Then he opens the door, and Roscoe Candy enters the whorehouse.