The Palace was anything but nice, though perhaps a great deal nicer than dozens of other dives, dance-halls, and deadfalls Boon and I had visited over the years. Unlike most of what I’d ever seen in Arkansas or Texas, the Palace’s main operating area was below ground, in the cellar. Coupled with Boon’s agonizing story of her youth in the bagnio, I was coming to understand that much of San Francisco’s underworld was, in fact, under the world.
The ceiling was low and the room large, with a long mahogany bar running along one side, a platform upon which a trio of musicians played on the other, and a space cleared out in the middle for dancing. Pretty waiter girls cavorted about, as naked as the law would allow, serving drinks and sitting on the laps of sailors, pimps, and not a few very young boys in slouch hats with knives and brass knuckles on their persons. We descended by way of a narrow stairwell, and I saw as soon as my eyes adjusted to the dim light that there was a mirroring stairwell across the broad space. One of the waiter girls was leading a piss-drunk Chileno by the hand up those stairs, which was all the explanation I needed as to its purpose.
We met no resistance on the street, at the Palace’s door, when we arrived at dusk. I could hear the piano and fiddle from below, contrasting obnoxiously with a dozen other groggeries, hooch dens, concert saloons, melodeons, and flat-out whorehouses that crowded Stockton Street and its numerous alleyway tentacles. At the front of the tumbledown building under which the Palace operated, a man with an unruly nest of dark, curly hair in an oversized frock coat and purple trousers stepped between us and the door and reached a hand into his coat.
We have had it, I thought. This was for God damn sure a Pinkerton agent, and we were recognized on the spot.
“Damn,” I said, and I crouched to pull the knife from my boot.
But Boon stayed my hand.
“Go no further, friend,” said the man, and he thrust a dodger at me. “The Palace has everything you could ever want, just through that door. Fun and frolic, song and dance, fine pisco punch, and the prettiest girls in the Barbary Coast.”
I took the dodger without much thinking about it and, turning my eyes down to the paper in my hand, read:
SPICY! SPORTY!
THE THRILL OF THE BARBARY COAST!
YOU ARE INVITED TO VISIT
THE PALACE
UNIQUE OF ALL COMPETING ESTABLISHMENTS
INCOMPARABLE AND BEYOND RIVALRY
COME AND SEE
BEAUTIFUL GIRLS – PLAIN TALK – CHARMING FORMS
OR REGRET IT ALL YOUR LIFE!
“Ain’t restricted, partner,” the hawker said. “You can even bring your China girl in there with you.”
I said, “Oh,” or something to that effect, and the man turned his leering gaze on Boon.
“You likey, China girl? Likey drink and dance?”
He pantomimed both activities, raising an invisible glass to his lips as he shook his hips and waggled his eyebrows. This time around, it was me who stayed her hand, as I was sure Boon needed a gentle nudge to remind her that now was not the time to start a fracas.
Instead, she said, “Sure, partner. Me likey just fine.”
The hawker tilted his head, looking for all the world like a confused hound dog, and we pushed past him to the door, into the vestibule, and down the stairs to the Palace proper.
The only other Oriental person I could spy down there was a slight man with a long queue trailing down his back, industriously sweeping up stamped-out cigars and cigarettes between songs. Pimchan was nowhere to be seen.
“Get yourself a drink,” Boon whispered to me. “Wouldn’t do not to. And remember, I belong to you.”
I must have made a face, because she frowned at me and shook her head.
“You know what I mean, Splettstoesser.”
“I surely do, Angchuan,” I said.
She brought her hands together at her stomach, hidden in her sleeves, and dropped her head as she trailed me to the bar. Proud and tough as she was, I reckoned it must have pained her to play the role. As for me, I was just glad to be getting a little firewater in my belly.
Recalling the hawker on the street, I asked the bartender about pisco punch.
“Tastes like lemonade,” he said, “but kicks you in the ass like a bronco.”
“That right,” I said.
Boon cleared her throat.
“Ain’t for casual tipplers,” cautioned the bartender.
“Not me, friend,” I said with a wink. “I’m a lifelong dyed-in-the-wool drunk. Set me up.”
He did, with a shrug and a smile. And I was damned if it didn’t taste like lemonade, only better on account of that promised kick. For the first time since our arrival, I was starting to like San Francisco, at least a small bit. I made a sound in my throat to indicate my satisfaction with the libation.
“Remember why we’re here,” Boon said.
“We’re here,” I said. “But your mama ain’t.”
“My eyes work fine.”
“Reckon Willocks lied?”
“We’ll see.”
I knocked back the rest of the punch and set the glass on the bar. The bartender said, “Another?”
“Just beer,” I said.
He looked gravely disappointed, but waddled to a barrel, pulled the bung, and poured me a draft. I drank it happily, but I’d have preferred another punch.
“If I only had some tobacco, I’d be happy as a pig in shit.”
“This ain’t a vacation, Edward.”
“What’s the next move?”
“We wait a spell. Just keep your eyes and ears open.”
“Eyes and ears,” I agreed, and I killed the beer, too.
There was another beer after that, and then another. Nothing much happened. Men came and went, and when they went it was usually by way of the back stairs with a sporting girl on his arm. At one point, one of the pretty waiter girls dropped out cold from too much punch, and she too was carried up the back stairs. Nobody said a thing about it, but Boon looked fit to be tied, red in the face. She couldn’t do anything about it. Not if she wanted things to go the way she wanted them to go. I felt for her.
An hour or so slipped by in this way before I moved to signal the barman and Boon put her hand on my arm.
“Go with one of the girls,” she said.
“Come again?”
“Don’t bull me like you ain’t done it a hundred times before,” she said. “Only this time it’s business, not pleasure.”
“I’m going to need more instruction than that,” I said.
“Sometimes I wish I was a man so I could just take care of things my own self,” Boon groused. I shrugged. “Listen, sit down and one of those girls will sit with you. It’s what they are here to do. Flirt, play nice, but tell her you’re partial to Oriental girls. Ask if there’s any around, and you’ll pay her to set you up. You came in with me so it’s a cinch she’ll believe it.”
I nodded, not understanding at all. Boon sighed.
“One of three things will happen. She’ll tell you there ain’t any—and I doubt there are, because it’s pretty clearly a white dive. Or there is, and she’ll direct you to her, in which case you’re to go with her and try to find out about Pimchan.”
“And the third?”
“She’ll just tell you about my mother.”
“If I get me a dose from this,” I said, “you are paying for my doctoring.”
“Then keep your pecker in your trousers,” she said.
“Seems counterintuitive.”
“Get to it.”
“And you?” I glanced around the dim, smoky room, full of more than a few unsettling characters.
“I can take care of myself,” Boon said.
I said, “Yes, you sure as shit can.”
She curtsied, her hands still hidden in her sleeves, and slinked away to a corner table, where she sat like she was floating down. I licked my fingers, straightened my eyebrows and mustache, and moseyed over to a table a little closer to the action. The musicians had started up again by then, the red-nosed melodeon player working the bellows like they were his own lungs and he was afraid of suffocating, and a girl in a near-transparent blouse trounced down on my lap before I knew she was there.
“Couple of us got a wager going,” she said. “Some says you’re a john and some says you’re a mack, on account of the China girl.”
“That so,” I said.
“Course I told ’em no reason he can’t be both.”
“Sure.”
“Never heard of a mack didn’t like to sample what he’s selling, matter of fact.”
“Makes good sense.”
“So what wets your whistle, Johnny Mack?”
“Bet you can guess,” I said.
The waiter girl arched her back like a cat and cast her eyes to Boon, who remained demurely perched at her table.
“You’re one of them got yellow fever,” she said.
“Not even a touch of the ague,” I countered.
She tittered. It seemed practiced.
“I mean you like to fuck yellow women,” she said. “This sure is the town for it, only not the right house.”
“No China girls here, then,” I said, acting crestfallen.
“You kidding? We’d have the Tongs and the Six Companies so far up our cabooses we’d get burned to the ground before you could turn around and spit.”
“Sounds serious.”
“It’s all a game, Johnny Mack,” she said, “and games got rules.”
“Reckon they do.”
Again, she emitted one of her patented fake titters, shaking her torso as she did so to make her titties bounce and wiggle beneath the sheer blouse. She kept her eyes on me, wide and a little wet, the whole time. It made for a disquieting effect, which I did not think was the intended outcome. The music stopped and started again, down tempo with the red-nosed gent on the melodeon warbling some sad Irish lament which was in that country’s native tongue—or else the man was just too drunk to make sense. While he sang and the pretty waiter girl tittered and jiggled, I turned my head just enough to catch sight of Boon, who was no longer assuming a slouched and submissive position.
She appeared alarmed, and she motioned with her head toward the bar. I pivoted my head a little more to see the two men emerging from the stairwell. They might have been brothers, because they were near-identical in their oiled mustaches, matching square-crowned hats, black cravats, and striped waistcoats. Both men had long frock coats draped over them, but only one was making an obvious attempt to hide the long gun he had underneath his.
At the very least they’d had the forethought to take off their badges, the Pinkerton dumbshits. They still weren’t fooling anybody. The whole populace of the Palace—me, Boon, the waiter girls, the musicians, the bartender, and every rough and rowdy in the place—stiffened up and quieted down at their arrival. Looked like Willocks had told the truth about this much, anyway. Question was: were we found out?
The girl on my lap said, “Best place to hide out is in a room upstairs, if it’s you they want.”
“What makes you think that?” I said.
“You’re here, Johnny Mack. You see any straight fellers here?”
She had a valid point, but it didn’t much help my unease. And when the two Pinks spotted Boon and shared a word between themselves, my unease began its quick transformation into panic.
“Come to think of it,” I said, “maybe you ought to go on up to your room on your own.”
“Ball about to go up?”
“Matter of fact, it might.”
“Good luck, Johnny Mack,” the pretty waiter girl said, and with that she went out like a bird.
The Pinks started their measured pace to the back corner, where Boon sat. She stood up. I went for my knife.
Then the ball went up.