“That’s a terrible question to ask.” Gina Tellini’s eyes blazed for a moment. Then sudden tears put out the fire. “You don’t believe a word I’ve told you. It’s so—hard when you don’t trust me. I’m here in your city all alone and—” The rest was muffled when she buried her face in her hands.
Bowman rose from the chair, sat down beside her on the bed. “Don’t get upset, sweetheart,” he said. “One way or another, I’ll take care of things.”
She looked up at him. Lamplight sparkled on the tracks two tears had traced on her cheeks. “I’m so damned tired of always being alone,” she whispered.
“You’re not alone now,” he said. She nodded, slowly, her eyes never leaving his. He slipped his left arm around her shoulder, drew her to him. Her lips parted. They kissed fiercely. When they fell back to the mattress together, his weight pinned her against its firm resilience.
The rumble of a cable car and the clang of its bell outside the window woke Miles Bowman. The gray light of approaching dawn seeped through the thick brocaded curtains of Gina Tellini’s room.
Moving carefully, Bowman slid out from under her arm. She stirred and murmured but did not wake. Bowman dressed with practiced haste. The door clicked when he closed it. He paused outside in the hall. No sound came from within. Satisfied, he walked back to the elevator.
More automobiles were on the street now, but not too many to keep Bowman from making a U-tum on New Montgomery. He turned right onto Market Street and took it all the way to the Embarcadero.
The Ferry Building was quiet. Its siren would not wail for another two hours, not until eight o’clock. Through the thinning fog, its high clock tower loomed, brooding and sinister. Man-o’-War Row and berths for passenger liners stretched south of the Ferry Building, commercial piers for foreign lines north and west around the curve of the shore. Bowman turned left, toward them, onto the Embarcadero. Between gear changes, his right hand grubbed in his trouser pocket. He pulled out the piece of newsprint he had tom from the San Francisco News.
He parked the car and got out. His nostrils dilated. The air was thick with the smells of rotting piles and roasting coffee, mud and fish and salt water. Sea gulls mewed like flying cats. He padded along, burly as the longshoremen all around but standing out from them by virtue of jacket and collar and tie.
The News listed ships in order of the piers at which they were docked. The Daisy Miller was tied by Pier 7. Shouting dock workers loaded wooden crates onto her. Stenciled letters on the sides of the crates declared they held sewing machines. They were the right size for rifles. Bowman shrugged and walked on to Pier 15, where La Tortola was berthed.
A handful of sailors worked on deck, swabbing and painting under the watchful eye of a skinny blond man in a black-brimmed white officer’s cap and a dark blue jacket with four gold rings circling each cuff. He saw Bowman looking at him. “What do you want, you?” he called. He had a German accent, or maybe Dutch.
Bowman put hands on hips. “Who wants to know?”
“I am Captain Wellnhofer, and I have the right to ask these questions. But you—” The captain’s face had been pale. Now it was red and angry.
“Keep your shirt on, buddy,” Bowman said. He looked down at the scrap of newspaper in his hand. “This here the boat that’s supposed to get another load of fodder today?”
Captain Wellnhofer’s face got redder. “Do you not know in your own language the difference between a boat and a ship? And we have no need for fodder now. You are mistaken. Go away.”
The Admiral Byng was docked at Pier 23. Nobody aboard her admitted any need for fodder, either. Bowman grimaced and hiked on to Pier 35, which held the Golden Wind. “Halfway to Fisherman’s damn Wharf,” he muttered. The only men visible aboard her were little brown lascars in dungarees. None of them seemed to speak any English. Bowman held a couple of silver dollars in the palm of his hand. A lascar hurried to the rail with a sudden white smile. Bowman tossed him one of the coins. He asked the same question he had before. The lascar didn’t understand fodder. “Hay, straw, grain—you know what I mean,” Bowman said.
“You crazy?” the lascar said. “We got tea, we got cotton, we got copra. We take away steam engines, petrol engines. You think maybe we feed them this grain?” He spoke in his own singsong language. The other lascars laughed.
“Yeah, well, just for that, funny guy—” Bowman jammed the other silver dollar back into his trouser pocket. The lascar’s Hindustani oaths followed him as he strode down the pier toward the Embarcadero. He paused at the base of the pier to scribble a note: Expenses—Information —$2. Then he walked back along the curb of the harbor to his automobile.
He parked it in the garage across the street from his office. Lounging against the brick wall not far from the entrance was a burly middle-aged man with the cold, hard, angular features of a Roman centurion. With its wide, pointed lapels, padded shoulders, and pinstripes, his suit stood on one side or the other of the line between fashion and parody. Bowman looked him over, then started up the steps.
The lounger spoke: “You don’t want to go in there. You want to come with me.”
“Yeah? Says who?” Bowman dropped his right hand from the doorknob. It came to rest at his side, near waist level.
“Says my boss—he’s got a business proposition to put to you,” the fellow answered. He stood straighter. One of his hands rested in the front pocket of his jacket. “And says me. And says—” The hand, and whatever it held, moved a little, suggestively.
Bowman came down the steps. “All right, take me to your boss. I’ll talk business with anybody. As for you, pal, you can get stuffed.” He spoke the words lightly, negligently, as if he didn’t care whether the hard-faced man followed through on them or not.
The hard-faced man took a step toward him. “You watch your mouth, or—”
Bowman hit him in the pit of the stomach. His belly was hard as oak. Against a precisely placed blow to the solar plexus, that proved irrelevant. He doubled over with a loud, whistling grunt. His suddenly exhaled breath smelled of gin. While he gasped for air, Bowman plucked a revolver from his pocket and put it in his own. He hauled the burly man back to his feet. “I told you—take me to your boss.”
The man glared at him. Hatred smoldered in his eyes. He started to say something. Bowman shook his head and raised a warning forefinger. The burly man visibly reconsidered. “Come on,” he said, and Bowman nodded.
The seventeen-story white brick and stone Clift Hotel on Geary Street was five blocks west of the Palace. The hard-faced man said nothing more on the way there, nor through the lobby, which was decorated in the style of the Italian Renaissance. He and Bowman took the elevator to the fourteenth floor in silence. He rapped at the door to suite 1453.
Nicholas Alexandria opened it. His chrome-plated pistol was in his hand. “Ah, Mr. Bowman, so good to see you again,” he said in a tone that belied the words. His left hand rose to a sticking plaster on his cheek. The plaster did not cover all the bruise there. “Won’t you come in?”
“Don’t mind if I do,” Bowman said, and stepped past him. The suite was furnished in spare and modem style. Gina Tellini sat on a chair that looked as if it might pitch her off at any moment. She sent Bowman a quick, nervous glance, but did not speak. Nicholas Alexandria closed the door, sat on a similar chair beside her.
The couch opposite them was low and poorly padded enough to have come from ancient Greece. On it, hunched forward as if not to miss anything, sat a thin, pale, long-faced man with a lantern jaw and gold-rimmed spectacles. He wore a suit of creamy linen, a Sea Island cotton shirt, and a burgundy silk tie whose bar was adorned with a small silver coin, irregularly round, that displayed a largeeyed owl.