I found my partner by the roulette wheel observing the festivities. “There is a naked man wandering around upstairs.”
“Big loser,” Ray said, watching the wheel go around. “Arrived around noon and dropped about a thousand dollars at poker. When he fell asleep at the table, I offered him a room. Gotta keep him in the house.”
Jake shouted, “No more bets.”
“We can’t have him on the loose. Suppose he came downstairs dressed as God made him when the Mounties were here?”
“I’ll lock him in,” Ray said. “His room doesn’t have a window, so he can’t do much damage to himself if he wakes up and tries to escape.”
The roulette wheel stopped turning. Jake gathered up most of the chips and counted out a small pile for the winner. He added them to the two lonely chips that were all the man had left in front of him. The gambler picked them up. He held them in his palm, enjoying their weight, making sure everyone in the vicinity saw them. He moved as if to put one down my décolletage. I grabbed his hand in mid-air. “Touch me and you’re banned,” I said softly, giving his wrist a twist for emphasis before releasing him.
“Jesus, lady.” He dropped the chip back on the green felt table as though it had burst into flames. “Calm down.”
“Mounties hear that talk, ye’ll be off to the Fort for using vile language,” Ray warned the gambler. He spoke to me under his breath. “I’ll check on our guest upstairs.”
I walked into the dance hall as Ellie’s song came to an end, accompanied by cheers and stomping boots. Now that the audience was nicely warmed up, it was time for Irene and some of the girls who made at least a pretense of being able to act to perform scenes from Macbeth. Ellie, who was playing the Thane of Cawdor, slipped out from behind the curtain, half-tripping over the wooden sword stuck through her belt. She looked rather silly with her dress tucked into her belt to reveal a large pair of bloomers, but we had to observe propriety, and I wasn’t going to waste money on costumes. Anyway, the men didn’t mind seeing Ellie’s bloomers.
Satisfied, I stood against the back wall to watch the performance. The audience had fallen so quiet, I could hear a mouse moving in the walls.
Irene had glided out onto the stage, watered-down red paint dripping from her hands, to begin the famous attempt to wash them, when a man came to stand beside me.
“Mrs. MacGillivray,” he said. “Mr. Jannis. I thought I’d banned you from my establishment.”
“Only for one night, I believe you said.”
“I doubt that. But as long as you don’t cause trouble…”
“Oh, let me assure you, Mrs. MacGillivray, I’m here to cause trouble.”
I lifted my hand to beckon one of the men over to show Mr. Jannis the street.
“You’ll want to listen to what I have to say before you try to have me thrown out.” His voice was low and serious, his tiny eyes fixed on me. I dropped my hand, although it itched to slap the smirk off his podgy face.
“If you have something to say, sir, please say it. And then leave.”
On the stage, Irene howled her madness. She fell to her knees in a piece of overacting that would have them demanding their money back in London. But this wasn’t London, and the Klondike audience moaned in sympathy. For those who weren’t completely caught up in the drama, it was enough that the dress was made of layers of sheer fabric representing a Queen’s night-gown and that in her despair, Irene tore at the false stitches sewn nightly through the front of the bodice.
“She’s popular, your Lady Irenee,” Jannis said. “With the men, I mean. All of them thinking they have a chance if they can only spend enough money to catch her interest.”
“That’s part of the attraction: always wanting, never achieving.”
“But still achievable.”
“There are numerous other fine dance halls in Dawson. Please take your patronage to one of them.”
“You’re a smart woman, Mrs. MacGillivray,” he said. There were people all around, including men Ray employed to keep troublemakers away, but no one could hear us above the lamentation of Lady Macbeth and the encouragement of the crowd.
A line of sweat had broken out on Jannis’s upper lip and across his receding hairline. All I had to do was walk away, and his attempt at blackmail was finished. But was it blackmail? Was he saying what I thought he was?
“Very smart,” I agreed. “And very busy. If you’ll excuse me.”
“Irene Davidson is a lover of women. She has a female companion. Some men like that, or so I’ve heard. The idea of two women naked and rutting gets them excited.”
“Pardon me, Mr. Jannis, if I’m not interested in your immature fantasies. I’ll remind you that I can have you arrested for talking to me like that.”
“Most men don’t care for it. They want their favourite for themselves, and they’ll take their business elsewhere if such news were to become general knowledge.”
I looked at Tom Jannis. His suit was well cut, and the diamond stickpin thrust through his tie was bold and shiny, but the collar on his shirt was beginning to fray and had not been washed recently. The buttons on his waistcoat were mismatched, the knees of his trousers a mite shinny, and one could buy a tie like his on the waterfront for a few cents.
“The most popular dancer in Dawson and a highly respected businesswoman on one hand, and a down-andout-Yankee trying to make a buck without working for it on the other. Who will men believe? Don’t take me for a fool, Mr. Jannis. You have nothing to threaten me with. Please leave quietly, or I will have my men throw you out, with some considerable loss of dignity on your part.”
We only performed a few choice scenes from Shakespeare. It was now time for Banquo to do his haunting of the banquet bit. The already dim lighting went down a fraction.
Jannis’s face grew dark right before me, his eyes narrowed and his lips compressed into an ugly line. I moved my hands into position and settled onto the balls of my feet, expecting him to lash out.
If he’d cried, he couldn’t have surprised me more. All the bluster exited him like air escaping from a child’s balloon popped too early. “Okay,” he said, “it was a bad idea, but I’ll tell you this for nothing…”
“Wasn’t that the day, Fiona?” Graham Donohue almost elbowed Jannis out of the way. “I’ve prepared some great copy for my paper.”
Tom Jannis melted away. The last I saw of him, he was slinking out of the dance hall as Macbeth called upon MacDuff to “Lay on, and damned be he who first cries hold, enough.” The men loved seeing the women dancing around the stage in their bloomers waving wooden swords at each other.
“Pardon me, Graham,” I said, “I was in the midst of an important conversation there.”
“With that son-of-a-bitch?” Graham laughed at the idea. “Sold his watch this morning, I heard.”
“Really, Graham. You hear everything.” “The lot of a newsman, madam.” He tossed me a wink of such exaggeration, I laughed out loud. “Tell me, my dear, do you suppose the audience would care if Lady Macbeth recovered from her unfortunate death and charged onto the battlefield to save her husband, lover and liege lord at the last moment?”
“They’d love it,” I said. “But the staging would be a bit awkward considering that the same actress is playing MacDuff.”
“Find a new MacDuff. Then you can present it that way. I won’t even bill you for my creative advice.”
“I would be much too afraid that the ghost of Mr. Shakespeare would come charging across the Chilkoot Pass to avenge himself on us,” I laughed.
“Do you suppose the Mounties at the summit would allow a ghost into Canada without the required year’s supplies?” Graham pondered the idea carefully. “Ghosts don’t eat too much, I reckon, so they might make an exception in Will’s case.”
I touched his arm. “You are a dear, Graham Donohue. But you’ll have to excuse me; I should tell Ray to keep an eye out for Mr. Jannis. I don’t trust him any more than I believe that diamond in his tie is real.”