Black Drop Page 2
“That’s what Lucinda told me last summer,” Sage said, referring to Lucinda Collins, parlor house madam and his former lover. “And, from what I’ve seen the last two days, that house appears to have a ready supply of young boys given the number of customers going in and out.”
Mae Clemens nodded. “Well, if that’s what Lucinda told you, then it must be true.” Left unsaid was Mae Clemens’ oft-stated opinion that Sage had made a big mistake when he let inaction cost him the woman’s affection.
“Anyway,” Sage said with emphasis, hoping to derail that particular train of thought, “I recognized a few of the men but I don’t know what to do with the information. I can’t go public with it, or even be associated with it, because it would jeopardize our work for St. Alban. Not to mention I might get sued for defamation–right now, it’d be just my word against theirs.” The other two nodded glumly.
“And, one other wrinkle. There might be someone else watching the same house. I thought I saw him. He was standing, with a pair of binoculars, at the second floor window of the house sitting next to the park.”
“I not see that,” Fong said, his tone slightly self-chiding.
Fong liked to think he saw and heard everything. Generally, his confidence was justified. Sage waved away the other man’s concern, saying, “No way you could have, given the angle. But I am thinking he probably noticed me and will be very careful to stay out of sight whenever I am around. So, I was thinking that you, Mr. Fong, might work your magic and find out where he comes from and who he is.”
* * *
Shortly after Mozart’s noontime dinner hour the next day, Sage strode through The Daily Journal’s door. Reporters with ink-stained fingers furiously clacked the keys on their type writing machines. Not one of them raised his eyes when Sage ambled past, heading to the publisher’s office at the back corner of the large room.
Ben Johnston, however, looked up sharply when the door dried in his hands. opened but not before Sage saw the publisher with his head buried in his hands
“Something the matter, Ben?” Sage’s question wasn’t an idle one. He’d invested a significant amount f his Klondike gold into funding Portland’s newest newspaper. Next to Johnston, he was the newspaper’s largest investor. And, for good reason. Until Johnston arrived on the scene, city news was filtered through the pages of the establishment’s conservative rag, The Portland Gazette.
Johnston’s smile was little more than a rueful lip twist. “If you consider the threat of losing five percent of our advertising a problem, then something could be the matter.”
“You write an editorial one of the advertisers didn’t like?”
“Nope, if only it were that simple. This,” here Johnston tapped a letter on the desk, “is a letter from the Women’s Christian Temperance Union. The lovely ladies are making threats.”
Sage laughed. “I’ve been telling you that the whiskey still you’ve got operating down in the Journal’s basement was going to get you into trouble,” he chided.
Johnston didn’t smile. “Hah! If I had a whiskey still down among the presses, it would be an easy fix No, the good ladies of the WCTU are demanding that I refuse all advertisements for patent medicines that contain opiates. If I don’t comply, they promise they’ll launch a protest picket outside the Journal’s front door.”
That was sobering. The Journal, like all newspapers, did a brisk and significant business in patent medicine advertisements. “How many of them contain opiates?” he asked.
“There’s the question. They don’t print the contents on the bottle so how the heck am I to know?”
“Sounds like a fine query to make of the good ladies,” Sage suggested.
Johnston’s face brightened. “Why, so it does.” He pulled a clean sheet of paper toward him and took up his pen–Sage’s presence completely forgotten.
Sage cleared his throat. When Johnston looked up, Sage said. “Before you craft your letter to the ladies, Ben, could you take a moment to answer a question for me?
“Ha, ha. Forgot myself, John. I suppose you didn’t come here to solve my problem.” Johnston was unaware that some called the restaurateur, John S. Adair, “Sage.” Only Sage’s mother, Fong, parlor house madam Lucinda Collins, and a few close associates in the labor movement knew him as “Sage.” It was the diminutive of his middle name, “Sagacity.” Ironically, the original Sagacity had gone to his early death as the advisor to a defeated Irish chieftain.
So, as “John Adair,” Sage told Johnston about the house with the red door. Johnston’s nose wrinkled and his lips twisted in extreme distaste but this reaction didn’t affect his answer. “I know these things go on, of course. But, I haven’t heard of it happening in Portland. Still, I’ve only been here a year. Problem is, this isn’t something I can put in print until there’s been an arrest. The risk of being sued is too great–you know they all will either flat deny it or they’ll come up with some excuse about why they were seen walking through that door.”
* * *
The next day, as he squatted once again beneath the cedar boughs, Sage had to admit that Johnston’s refusal to publish the story was not unexpected. Ultimately, the publisher said he was willing to publish it but only if he could name the source of his information. Yet, there was no way Sage could have his own name associated with such public revelations. And, without the backing of Sage’s credibility as an upstanding businessman, it would be foolhardy for Johnston to print it.
The breeze picked up and Sage shivered. Minutes later, overhead limbs creaked and snapped as a gunmetal gray cloud roiled up the valley pushing a curtain of spring hail. The ice pellets pelted tree boughs and ground, pummeling the newly opened crocuses. Their drooping stems made him recall that day last summer when he’d sat in this exact same place, watching the boys who lived in that house across the street. Sitting on those stairs, their shoulders drooped like the crocuses now being beaten down by hail.
He looked at that door. Today’s severe weather failed to slow the foot traffic n those stairs. Seven this afternoon, one a repeat from the first day. Sage snarled low in his throat, torn between wanting to throttle the house’s manager, Lynch, and craving a cigarette. For about the fiftieth time he snicked a covert glance at the second story window next door. Nothing was visible. The dark room hid whatever might lurk behind that glass. A person standing to either side of that window frame would be nearly impossible to see.
* * *
Mozart’s supper hour was relatively busy, yet Sage per-formed his hosting duties absentmindedly. Mozart’s genteel dining room, with its satiny, mahogany wainscoting, newly painted pale green plaster, snowy damask tablecloths, sparkling cutlery and lively, well-dressed patrons, did nothing to banish gloomy thoughts about that red door. Behind his ready banter and pasted-on smile, emotion churned. He was going to fulfill his promise to old man Compton. Lynch’s business would be destroyed. Somehow he had to do it in a way that would not jeopardize their future missions for St. Alban. Maybe that meant acting through someone else. But, who?
Midway through supper, worry over Fong’s prolonged absence shoved aside all the other worries. The plan had been for Fong to hide between those two houses until Sage left. Then Fong was to follow the man who was using the binoculars to watch Lynch’s house. And certainly, there was a man with binoculars. Sage had glimpsed him again. In the late afternoon, the sinking sun’s slanted rays pierced the window, briefly illuminating a male figure. Sage had given the signal. And, shortly thereafter, he’d abandoned the cedar’s sheltering branches, leaving the mysterious watcher to Fong. But that had been hours ago and still no Fong. By the end of the supper hour, Sage alternated between telling himself that Fong was fine just delayed, and thinking the worst.
THREE
Dispatch: May 5, 1903, President’s train arrives in Sante Fe, New Mexico.
“We need to show in civic life the same spirit that you showed in . . . in battle; what you cared to know about as to the man on your right and the one
on the left, was not the way in which he worshiped his Maker; not his social standing or wealth; . . . What you wanted to know was whether he would do his duty like a man . . . it is the same thing in civil life now.” —T.R.
Sage locked the door behind the last customer and headed toward the third floor, taking the steps two at a time. Fong had been absent way too long.
He was bent over tying his boot lacings when Fong slipped through the door.
“You’ve had me worried, my friend,” Sage said, grinning. “Instead of stretching out over there,” he nodded in the direction of his four-poster bed, “I was shoving my very tired feet into these heavy work boots.”
“Not my idea,” Fong assured him, taking a seat next to the stove and rubbing his hands in its rising heat. He gratefully accepted the whiskey shot Sage poured. “The man stayed inside house for over one hour after you leave. When he leave, I follow. Not too hard, he never look behind. But he not go to another house. Instead, he go to a saloon. Of course, I stay outside. In the cold.”
Fong’s words carried the weight of an unspoken comment. They both knew that he’d had to stand outside in the cold because white men did not tolerate Orientals in their drinking establishments, unless, of course, those Orientals were washing dishes or standing over a cook stove.
“Sorry,” Sage said, pausing to give the apology heft before continuing, “What did he look like?”
“He wore good business suit. Tall as you, only his hair is sand-colored. Smooth face, no mustache, round with square chin. Maybe your age.” Fong sipped the amber liquid, closing his eyes when it hit his throat. He generally avoided spirits.
So the clean-shaven mystery man was six foot and around 32 years of age. Not a working man. A description fitting hundreds. They’d need more information than that to learn who he was. Before Sage could ask another question, though, Fong again took up his narrative.
“I wait two hours for him to come out. When he reach street, his feet tangle up stepping off curb. I grab his arm to stop him from falling. He said, ‘Thank you.’ After he looked into my face.”
A considering “hmm” softly vibrated Sage’s cranium. Politeness was not how intoxicated white men normally reacted when touched by a Chinese man.
Fong paused, sipped and, for a minute, stared at nothing, apparently seeing the scene once again. “His eyes not right. Drunk yes, but something more too. Desperate, I think.” Sadness softened the Chinese man’s tone reminding Sage once again, what a very big man Fong really was. Not in size, maybe, but in his capacity for compassion.
Neither man spoke. Sage gazed around the room thinking, not for the first time, about how its carefully staged prosperous appearance–polished furniture, flocked wallpaper and cheery rug–revealed nothing about who he really was. Same with Fong. His room survey was interrupted by the rasp of Fong clearing his throat. “He did not go home. Instead, he enter new office building on west side of commercial district. I wait outside until I see light come on behind window on top floor in southeast corner of building. After that, I leave.”
“If we’re lucky, that will be where his office is. What building was it?”
That question made Fong smile. “It is same building, same floor, as Mr. Philander Gray,” Fong said, naming the only lawyer in town that Sage trusted.
* * *
Gray wasn’t in his office early the next morning, so Sage returned to help with Mozart’s noontime dinner hour. An exuberant party of prosperous businessmen had taken over four tables pushed together. Their empty wine bottles meant more trips to the outside dustbin. Likely, that would be his job. The waiters would be busy enough making the room spotless for the supper hour. Meanwhile, the group’s collective guffaws sounded more often and louder as the hour advanced.
Once the noon hour business trickled down to departures,
Sage strode over to where his mother, Mae Clemens, was stacking plates on one of the walnut sideboards flanking the kitchen’s swinging doors. “What’s with the group in the corner?” he asked, nodding toward the men who’d begun standing up to take their leave.
“Those are our local Republican bigwigs,” she told him. “They’ve just learned that the president will visit Portland at the end of May. Apparently he’s coming for a parade and dedication up at City Park. Part of that exposition hoody-do they’re cooking up.”
Well, that certainly explained their high spirits. An event like that would be welcome news indeed for the city’s Republicans. They’d won most of the open seats in the recent election except that of governor. But, they weren’t happy about the outcome of the popular vote on direct democracy. The idea of sharing their power with the “rabble,” through the mechanisms of initiative and referendum, had them predicting civic disaster at every turn.
Portland’s Republicans also had to be nervous about the new Republican president. Theodore Roosevelt showed signs of turning maverick as a Texas range calf. His popularity was growing every time he lashed out against the big corporations. The common people were cheering him while the rich were gnashing their teeth.
What if McKinley’s assassination had installed a leader into the presidency, someone who refused to serve corporate interests? The local Republicans doubtless had mixed emotions. So far at least, they could say that Roosevelt hadn’t attacked big business as much as did the top democratic contender, William Jennings Bryan. Most likely the locals would suppress their reservations and go all out to take advantage of the political momentum Roosevelt’s visit was sure to bring.
“The president’s visit will keep our Sergeant Hanke busy, I expect,” Sage commented aloud. More than once, the big policeman’s aid had proved invaluable. So much so, that Sage had come to think of him as a sort of distant kin.
“I’m sure he’ll be stopping in momentarily to tell us all about it,” Mae predicted, her tone lacking any rancor. Her’s was an easy prediction because Hanke himself was predictable. Having declared Mozart’s Ida Knuteson an even a better cook than his own mother, the police sergeant usually walked through the kitchen door about the time Ida started puzzling over what to do with noontime leftovers.
Minutes later, Mae smirked as they entered the kitchen. The big German was sitting at the table digging into the last slice of meat pie. Hanke’s wide face was placid as ever but his erect backbone telegraphed suppressed excitement. It took little urging before he confirmed that, yes, indeed, President Theodore Roosevelt would visit Portland and that the police chief had assigned him, Sergeant Hanke, to help develop the security arrangements. “No crazy anarchist will get a shot at T.R. like what happened to poor President McKinley,” he assured Sage.
As Hanke polished off Ida’s leftovers, Sage wondered whether the excitement over the president’s visit would hinder their efforts to shut down the house with the red door. Probably won’t make a difference, he concluded.
Certainly not to him. Sage didn’t care all that much about the president’s visit. It had no effect on his mission for St. Alban. Roosevelt was a Republican after all. He came from the monied class of New York City. The country was again being lead by yet another man born into privilege and wealth.
Like most progressives, Sage’s choice for president had been William Jennings Bryan. Instead, they’d got corporate footman McKinley and now Roosevelt. Still, in the last year, Roosevelt had taken on and defeated J.P. Morgan when the Wall Street robber baron attempted to expand his railroad trust. And, Roosevelt had threatened intervention by federal troops in aid of the Appalachian coal miners’ strike. Another defeat for Morgan since he owned the mines and wanted his henchman able to undertake any action necessary to defeat the workers. Thanks to Roosevelt, Morgan had been forced into binding arbitration. And, wonder of wonders, he’d lost.
People were starting to call Roosevelt the “Trust Buster.” Still, Sage remained skeptical. He’d seen too many politicians play to the crowd while scheming with their corporate cronies behind closed doors. Whether Roosevelt’s “square” deal was the “real” deal
remained an unanswered question.
And then there was Roosevelt’s warmongering. The corporations needed more buyers for the excess products they were wringing out of their workers. Another war would mean more blood soaking yet another country’s soil just so the big corporations could sell to those expanded markets.
Hanke pushed back his chair, stood, pulled the napkin from his collar and shrugged into his heavy wool coat. Its polished brass buttons flashed before settling down into parallel rows. Beehive helmet tucked under one arm, he shook Sage’s hand and headed out the kitchen door, only pausing to accept the paper-wrapped cookies Ida thrust into his big hand. “For later,” she told him with a pat on his arm.
* * *
Philander Gray apparently had just returned from court. A damp overcoat and hat adorned the office coat rack. He sat at his desk, directing a glowering gaze out the window, his big feet propped on an open drawer. Outside, the sky was a sullen gray blanket stretching low across the valley. But it didn’t quite reach at the edges. To the west, a strip of pure blue promised afternoon sunshine.
Though lean and hollow-cheeked as Abe Lincoln, Gray was far hardier than he looked. Maybe that was because he could tuck food away faster than a mess hall of hungry soldiers. Mozart’s food supply diminished noticeably whenever Philander Gray came calling. Yet, the lanky man never gained a pound.
The lawyer’s long lips twisted wryly when he saw who’d entered his office. “Why, howdy, John. Think there’s any hope of seeing spring this year? I had the wife crying her eyes out this morning over yesterday’s hail beating down her flowers. You know how she dotes on them.”
Indeed, Gray’s wife set great store by her garden. Mozart’s was sometimes the beneficiary of her blooms. “Well, you could remind her that if we were back East, it would be snow instead of momentary hail,” Sage replied.