6

“What do you make of it?” Hammett asked.

The young man had come along a few yards behind Feeney, as Siringo knew he would; trailing him after he didn’t show up in the toilet, trailing Hammett. They remained inside the deep doorway.

“It don’t signify. I ain’t been in town since before it shook itself to pieces. This fellow Clanahan don’t know me from Mrs. Bloomer.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“You ought to wear knickers or something so I don’t forget you’re still wet behind the ears. What’s his interest in me is the point I’m making.”

“Well, we’ll get what we can when Feeney backtracks.” Hammett glanced up at the building, one of the newer ones designed without gimcracks to fall on pedestrians’ heads when the ground got restless. “I’ve got an idea. Keep him busy till I get back.” He opened the door and went inside.

Siringo knew better than to waste time asking himself questions. He stayed in the doorway, smoking, until the thin man in the white suit came hurrying back the way he’d come, swiveling his head from side to side looking for his quarry. Siringo stepped out in front of him suddenly. Feeney had to backpedal to avoid collision.

The old detective asked him for a match.

Feeney’s face flushed a deeper shade of yellow. He patted his pockets, then saw the smoke rising from the other’s pipe.

“Well, what do you know?” Siringo stared at the bowl. “That last one caught finally.”

The other made a sickly smile and started to step around him. He countered that with a step to the right.

“Didn’t I see you on the train?”

“Must’ve been somebody else, old-timer. I ain’t been out of Frisco all year.”

“I don’t think so. I never forget a face.”

“Look, you made a mistake.” He tried to circle around him again.

This time Siringo flattened a palm against the man’s chest. He could feel his ribs through two layers of cloth. “We bumped into each other in the club car. I missed my wallet right after.”

Feeney swept the hand away, reaching under his coat on the follow-through. He brought out a Colt Army semiautomatic that bent his wrist under its weight.

“Say that again and you’ll be chewing lead.”

“The smaller the fry, the bigger the talk,” said Hammett, coming up behind him. “Come back to my dump and help me patch up my dialogue.”

The man jumped, started to turn the big pistol his way. Siringo drew the little Forehand & Wadsworth from under his belt and thrust it into Feeney’s stomach, where it nearly met his backbone. He cocked it in the same motion.

Feeney hesitated just long enough for Hammett to reach over his shoulder, grasp the .45, and twist it out of his skeletal grip.

“Like snatching a quarter from a blind newsie,” he said.

“I’ll get you guys,” Feeney said. “You won’t always be twins.”

“That ain’t bad.” Siringo grinned at Hammett. “Can I have it, or do you want it?”

“Help yourself. I’m still working on that chewing-lead line. It needs a little something. Nice belly gun. I never spotted it.”

“I got a little more belly than I used to. Where’d you drop from?”

“Wrong direction. After the quake they rebuilt the neighborhood on top of a series of connecting cellars where the hopheads used to chase the dragon in old Chinatown. Some of the floors are original, trapdoors and all.” He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder, toward a Christian Science reading room on the corner. “I may have turned a couple of readers into Methodists when I came up through the floor.”

“I like them cellars. Used ’em yet?”

“In a story? Not yet. Dibs.”

“It’s yours anyway. I clerked in a store once and that was as close as I ever want to get to being buried alive.”

“When you girls are through gabbing I got a bus to catch.”

Hammett was still holding Feeney’s weapon. He shifted his grip to the barrel and tapped him behind the ear with the butt. Siringo caught him as he fell.

“Now we get to lug him all the way back to your place,” he said.

“I got bored. Feeney’s the original Johnny One-Note. We’ll go to your hotel; it’s closer. Just a second.” The young man stuck the .45 under his belt, took out his flask, opened it, hesitated. “The St. Francis has room service, right?”

Siringo saw where he was heading. “No need to worry. I never travel dry.”

“Swell.” Hammett removed the unconscious man’s Panama and dumped what was left in the flask over his head, soaking his white coat dark. He moaned a little but didn’t come around. Hammett stuck his hat back on him and took him by one arm. Siringo took the other.

On the way to the St. Francis they passed another couple. The woman, wearing a cloche hat and a dead fox around her neck, waved a gloved hand in front of her nose. “I thought Prohibition was going to put an end to all that.”

The man, built square in a striped suit and gray homburg, changed positions with her, placing himself between her and the two men carrying their reeking companion. “I’ll write a letter to the Examiner tomorrow.”

The clerk in the paneled and potted-palmed lobby halted in the midst of sorting mail to watch the pair bearing a limp stranger toward the elevator.

“I’m glad it’s you, Mr. Hammett,” he said. “Management has a strict policy about guests rolling drunks.”

“Don’t count on that, Floyd. I’m one rejection slip away from picking pockets.”

“Should I send up coffee?”

“Pitcher of water,” Hammett said.

“A big one,” said Siringo.

“Glasses?”

Hammett said, “Just two. And ice.”

The elevator operator, trussed in a uniform two sizes too small, with dundreary whiskers and a little round hat like a Maxwell House coffee tin perched on his crown, glared from his milking stool at the unconscious man. “He gets sick, I won’t clean it up.”

“Sure you will, Sol,” Hammett said. “You’ll do anything they tell you to stay out of San Quentin. You’re forgetting who got you this job.”

“How can a man do that, when you keep reminding him?” Sol jerked the lever and the car started up with a jolt Siringo felt in his bad molar.

“Is there anyone in this town you don’t know?” he asked Hammett in the hallway on his floor. The toes of Feeney’s shoes made tracks in the nap on the carpet as they dragged him along.

“Only the respectable ones. They’re no use to me.”

The room had a steel radiator that shuddered when the furnace kicked in, scraping the chill off spring in San Francisco. The particles of rust and dirt rattling in the pipes sounded exactly like an old Pinkerton clearing his throat.

Which reminded him. His valise was still on the bed. He handed Hammett a Mason jar from inside.

“What is it, blasting oil?” The clear contents distorted his features like a magnifying lens when he held it up to the light.

“It’s the barrel aging adds color. My friend in Barstow’s clients won’t wait that long.”

Hammett unscrewed the top, sniffed, shrugged, took a sip. He shook himself. “I was right the first time. You could blow a safe with a jigger of this stuff.”

“That Canadian blend spoilt you.” Siringo took back the jar and helped himself. “What do we do with this?” He kicked an ankle belonging to the man they’d dumped in the room’s only chair, upholstered in green tufted leather. It made his suit look all the worse for lack of pressing. His hat had slid down over his eyes and he was breathing evenly.

“We’ll let him rest a while. He’s an angel when he sleeps.”

Just then Feeney’s mouth dumped open, exposing teeth like yellow tumbledown tombstones and taking in air with a rattling snort.

A bellman came to the door, carrying a tray with two glasses, a brass ice bucket, and a pitcher that belonged with a washbowl. Hammett gave him a quarter and poured moonshine into the glasses, adding water and cubes to cut the bark off it.

“Tell me about this Clanahan.” Siringo stretched out on the bed with his glass.

Hammett leaned in a corner, pushing his hat to the back of his head and holding his glass. He looked down at it dubiously, like a diver judging his chances.

“He came in on the boat, like all the rest of us. A little later than most, and they say he left a wife and three kids behind in Limerick. Sometimes it’s five, but it’s always just the one wife. As if that weren’t reason enough to leave, they say he got into some trouble with the authorities. He couldn’t come through Ellis Island with that on his back, so he shoveled coal in a tramp steamer all the way through Panama and swam ashore off Santa Barbara to avoid Immigration. A few years ago he bought citizenship, which comes dear, but it was worth it to him not to get deported. There’s a rope waiting for him in Ireland, not to mention an angry woman saddled with three kids. Maybe five.”

“I’d take my chances with the rope.”

“Who wouldn’t? There’s no appeal from a butcher knife. He’s got himself a place on Nob Hill that looks and smells like a museum. Before that he did business in a packing-case parlor on a wharf, peddling whores. After a little it got to be the place where the money men and the board of supervisors rubbed shoulders, and that’s where he got his toe in.

“They tried him out first as a messenger boy, carrying cash in a little black satchel between Ed Doheny and Sacramento, then had him knocking on doors, trading free coal for votes. I told you about his big break when Washington changed hands. Now Clanahan’s the one sends out the messengers. Our boy Feeney, for one.”

“Who’s Doheny?”

“Pan-American Oil.”

“Never heard of it.”

“You would if you owned an automobile. Doheny invented the drive-in filling station. Before that, you needed gas, you had to buy it by the jar in a drugstore. Now he’s got them all over the country. And you’re likely to hear more about it soon. Pan-American’s merging with Mammoth Oil. Harry Sinclair?”

Siringo drank, frowned, shook his head.

“Well, it seems even the rich aren’t rich enough to have everything they want. They’re pooling their resources to buy leases on oil fields here in California—which is where Clanahan comes in, smack-dab in the middle—and in Wyoming.”

“Where in Wyoming? I know every inch of that place.”

“This one’s after your time, I think. Place called Teapot Dome.”