‘Remember five years ago your father promised to lend me this character if I ever needed someone’s leg broken or eye poked out?’
‘I remember.’
‘That still good, all-ee-same like father like son?’
Chin considered gravely for a moment, then gave a very Occidental shrug. ‘Sure, why not, he’s getting fat and lazy anyway.’
‘How about all of them?’ said Hammett.
Chin cocked an eyebrow. ‘Leaving me naked before mine enemies?’
‘Maybe that’s the idea.’
Chin laughed out loud and clapped his hands in delight. ‘Only you could come up with a remark like that, Dash!’ He leaned forward in his chair. ‘You hear the one about the Chinaman asked this fellow, “You telle me where railleroad depot?” And the guy says, “What’s the matter, John, you lost?” And the Chinaman says, “No! Me here, dam’ depot lost!”’ Before Hammett could make appropriate noises, he demanded, ‘What are you doing, starting a war?’
‘Something like that.’
‘Other Chinamen?’
‘Wops.’
‘Good!’ Chin laughed out loud again. ‘Too many wops around anyway.’ He shifted his gaze to the giant Qwong. ‘I got through four years at Cal without him around, I guess I can… besides, he’s always been in love with you, this’ll give him a chance to work off his Freudian repressions.’
Hammett walked home from Chinatown through the fog. Everything was moving. Tomorrow, Molly Farr. He’d open her up and find out what — if anything — she could tell him about Vic’s death. He would also ask her Chinese maid about the fat woman over by Bolinas Lagoon.
The fog that lay above the city cut the tops off the hills, and made the taller buildings seem to disappear five stories above the street.
God damn he loved this city! There wasn’t another like it anywhere, and he’d been in a lot of them since he’d answered that blind box ad in the Baltimore paper back in the summer of ’12. He’d gotten bored chalking up stock market transactions from the Poe and Davies ticker tape; because he was big for his eighteen years, he’d been able to lie his way into the job as a Pinkerton operative.
Eight years of manhunting — interrupted by the Ambulance Corps and the government lunger hospitals in Tacoma and San Diego. Christ, the towns he’d been in as a Pink! Pasco and Seattle and Spokane; Stockton and Vallejo; Butte, Denver, Cleveland, Dallas; Gilt-Edge, Montana, and Lewiston, Idaho; El Paso, Jacksonville, Detroit, Boston; Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Louisville, Kentucky, and the Big Apple itself, New York City. Finally, San Francisco. The City That Knows How.
At the south end of the Stockton tunnel he looked up to his right above the top of a billboard. Yeah. Just there were the tops of the railing posts through which he had Miles Archer pitch after being shot in The Maltese Falcon.
Hammett looked up at the concrete parapet where Bush Street bridged the tunnel. He’d lived for half a year at the mouth of the alley just across Bush — 20 Monroe Street — and when he’d needed a secluded, dramatic spot for Archer to die, dead-end Burritt Street had just naturally come to mind.
He was suddenly in a hurry to get home. The Falcon would have to wait for revision until this whole mess was finished, but not so The Dain Curse. He’d thought of a way to characterize Minnie Hershey’s boyfriend, Rhino Tingley. Let Rhino count out his eleven hundred and seventy dollars, braggingly, bill by bill, in front of the Op’s cynical and Minnie’s terrified eyes. Hell, he’d created Rhino’s name by mating a British slang word for money with the name of a little street off Silver Avenue; so why not let his character be created by the act of counting money?
Hell, yes. He liked that.
19
On Christmas Eve, 1910, a quarter of a million people — the greatest crowd in San Francisco’s history — had gathered around Lotta’s Fountain to hear an impromptu concert by famed opera soprano Luisa Tetrazzini. Today, as the streetcar went rattling by the ugly, ornate, cast-iron monument at Kearny, Geary, and Market, the intersection was Sunday-deserted.
Goodie did not notice the lack of people. She was too elated to notice much of anything.
‘Oh, Sam, I’m so excited!’
‘Maybe they’ll meet us at the door with a shotgun.’
She mocked a pout. ‘You mean I’m just window dressing again?’
‘You’ve got a devious mind, girl.’
Goodie leaned back against the shiny leather and looked out at the cable car making the turn up Sacramento. Beside the wedge-shaped corner building were steep steel stairs leading up to the pedestrian crosswalk that bridged The Embarcadero to the Ferry Building
‘I don’t care,’ she said, ‘George P. Biltmore!’
The afternoon before, Goodie had spent a dollar and her lunch hour at Le Maximilian Coiffeurs to have her blond ringlets water-waved by Georgia. After work, another five dollars and ninety-eight cents had gone on the stylish ‘tomboy’ dress she now wore: a light-green velour blouse with dark-green silk kerchief and swagger tie, and a plaid cashmere skirt and waistband.
Two weeks’ lunch money, and then some, but she was going over to Mill Valley for tea with the George F. Biltmores! Wait until she wrote her mother about that!
The car made the loop around the fenced grass oblong directly in front of the grand arched central entrance of the Ferry Building. A couple of bums dozed in the noontime sun.
Hammett bought two round-trip tickets to Mill Valley, and they joined the waiting-room throng beyond the gleaming gilt metal grillwork.
Going up the creaking wooden gangway to the sidewheeler Eureka, with the salt air keen in their nostrils, Goodie clung to Hammett’s arm.
‘I’ve never ridden this before.’
‘It must have been a long swim from Crockett.’
‘You know what I mean. This ferry. To Sausalito.’
The mooring lines clumped solidly on deck as they were heaved clear of their bollards; the boxy white boat shuddered as its enclosed paddle wheels began churning. White water foamed as it slid from its high-sided timber slip and made its way past Goat Island and Alcatraz for the thirty-two-minute trip to Marin County.
‘I know,’ said Hammett in a sympathetic voice.
‘You know what?’
‘You’re hungry.’
From the restaurant in the upper deck’s enclosed cabin, Goodie got a bowl of Exposition clam chowder and a roast beef sandwich with mashed potatoes and gravy. Hammett had coffee and pungled up the required fifty cents.
‘It’s an expensive wench,’ he said sadly.
They chose places on one of the curved wooden benches; life jackets were stacked under them in case of disaster. Through salt-rimed windows they could hear the sea gulls demanding scraps from the passengers on the open cabin deck below.
‘What’s he like?’ demanded Goodie, licking a dollop of mustard from the corner of her mouth.
‘Who?’
‘Biltmore. All that money, all that power…’
In perfect imitation of her tone, Hammett went on, ‘That frail wife, that healthy mistress-’
‘Oh, Sam, does he?’ Her eyes sparkled with excitement. ‘A mistress?’
‘Named Gerty. She won’t be there today, although they say he takes her up to their summer place in Napa
