“Vera, my friend—may I call you my friend?”
Again I nodded.
“How old are you, dear?”
“Sixteen.”
“In how many birthdays will you be sixteen?”
“I’m fifteen.”
“All right, then.” Sugarman slapped his knee with a glove. “Now let’s get a few things straight, shall we? First, look at me.”
I did.
He smiled kindly. “I’ll ask you to listen to what an old man has to say. Then you can decide. All right? You see, not everyone on this block is asleep when persons come to call at the odd hour of midnight.” Sugarman inhaled sharply. “There, the worst-kept secret is out.”
“You mean, everyone knows?”
“Surely not. Maybe only Sugarman here.” He removed his glasses, blew the ash from them, and put them back on his nose. “Most nights I read until one, two o’clock in the morning—I find it the perfect hour for thinking. No one to disturb you. Sometimes I even walk the square at that hour. I walk and say, Sugarman: you are a free man and this is a great country. Like so, I take a little walk and think my thoughts.” He made a stirring motion with his finger. “Am I the only one awake at that late hour? I cannot say. What I do know, or know a bit, is that I have made it my life’s work to try to understand the human animal. I am a doctor of psychiatry. Do you understand what that is?”
I shook my head.
“It is the study of the mind and where it connects here and here—to the soul and the heart.”
Seeing the confusion on my face, he went on. “All I know for certain, Vera of fifteen, is that at midnight there are at least two houses on this block not yet asleep.” He held up two fingers. “Sugarman’s. And this house belonging to a woman with one name, Rose. In Sugarman’s house, we have an old man who cannot sleep for hearing the voices of his dead boys. And the house next door? Here, the lamps are lit once, twice, three times a year for the arrival of a special guest. What a surprise that we should finally meet, eh? What other secrets live inside these houses? If someone told me a week ago that this world could be unmade in less than a minute, would I have believed them? Can anyone tell you or me that ghosts and special guests do not belong on our block except when they do?
“Now, Vera, let us say a few things quickly. First, I do not speak of these things to make you… ashamed. I see in your manner you are a person of pride. What I witness on my nighttime perambulations, I do not speak of with others. I witness, yes; I wonder, yes. Sugarman broods, he ponders, he mourns. But I don’t gossip, ever, not even to my wife. You have my word on that. Mrs. Sugarman believes the world is a certain way; let’s leave her to those pretty notions, eh? What happens in the house next door is that house’s business.
“But—” Sugarman hastened to add. His voice shook with emotion. “Vera, my friend, it is a shanda bargain your people have made of you, and I, for one, despise it.”
Yes, made of me, was what he said.
Sugarman sighed. He put his hand on my shoulder. “So, my dear girl, let us be friends and talk without pretense. We’ll do what we can, all right?”
I nodded.
“So, not a word from her… people?”
“Not a word.”
“None of her girls, except for that Italian bit with her baby, come by looking for a handout?”
“No, sir.”
“Well, they may yet. For now I’m guessing there are three possibilities of what’s become of Miss Rose.” And once more Sugarman counted on his fingers. “First, well, we won’t consider the worst, eh? Number two, she’s among the wounded. Three, she took passage on the last ferry to Oakland. All right. Let us go through—”
“She isn’t dead,” I declared. I knew this, despite what Genthe had said, that every structure within ten, twenty blocks of The Rose had collapsed or burned. Rose would have gotten herself out. Hank would have carried her on his back if need be. What I couldn’t grasp was, had she taken one of the last ferries to Oakland? Or was she badly injured? I confessed my worries to Sugarman.
He listened, nodding solemnly. “Yet we cannot have a young girl walking the streets looking for a rose, eh? And how far would you get? The Palace Hotel is in shambles, and the streets beyond the palace, the saloons and dance halls, gone.”
Genthe had said as much. Spider Kelly’s, the Hippodrome, the Poodle Dog, the Bear—the cheap joints and the high-end pleasure halls—all ashes.
“It’s a farkakt world,” Sugarman declared. He had a hundred phrases, Sugarman did, to say things were good or shit.
“If she left the city—”
“She’s here.” I didn’t know till I said it. But saying it, I was certain. She was here.
Sugarman sighed but did not object.
“Well, then, it looks like the hospitals by the piers and in the Presidio are where we go looking. Thousands wounded. Finding her would be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. But you already know that. Tonight, get some rest and we’ll knock our heads together in the morning.”
We’d walked in a perfect circle round the square, back to the house. To where Lifang and her grandfather were asleep under the tarp. Tan was in back, cooking over the fireplace in the garden.
“Buried the horse in back, did they?” Sugarman asked.
I nodded.
“That was a grim piece of work. Good on Tan. And good on him that he thought to put up this kitchen. Tonight, we were grateful to have it. But what of tomorrow, and the day after and the one after that?” Sugarman sighed, the weariness deep in him. “All right, then, Vera Johnson, can I count on you to stay put for the night? It’s not safe,” he warned. “It won’t be safe for a
