“Closed,” he calls, at the jingle of the bell, but he looks up to see her shutting the door on this side of it, so very small in a long tan coat, her wooly scruff of greyed hair loose, uncovered, leaning on the curled handle of an orthopædic cane, and slung from a shoulder a big brown scaley purse. “Young man,” she says, her voice incongruously large, and deep, “could you tell me if Gordon is available?”
“We’re closed, ma’am,” he says, there by the work table. “Just hadn’t managed to lock up yet.”
“Let him know H.D. is here.”
“I’m afraid he isn’t. I’ll let him know you were by.”
“He hasn’t been, for a couple weeks now, has he.” She’s looking about at all the shoes mounded to one side, lined up the other. “What was your name, young man?”
“Christian Beaumont, ma’am.”
“Well, I am Ms. H.D. Brown, of the Albina Community Bank. You are familiar with the work of the Albina Community Bank?” He shrugs noncommittally, head down, making his way from the counter between the shoes toward her, past her, to the door. “I have found it, from time to time,” she’s saying, “to be of some benefit to consult with Gordon when something untoward occurs. I must say, today, it would seem the most unusual and unsettling occurrence is that I come to find my old and good friend isn’t here, in this shop he’s kept for I couldn’t tell you how long.”
He’s turning about the sign against the glass from CLOSED to OPEN, he’s reaching for the handle of the door, “I’ll be sure to tell him you’re looking for him.” The bell jingles as he swings it wide, but she’s rooted to her cleared patch of floor, leaned on that sturdy cane. “How about yourself, young man?” she says. “Noticed any unusual occurrences, these last few days?”
Christian looks about, the discarded shoes mounded to one side behind her, the ranks of mismatched pairs to the other, and all the boxes back there, behind the counter, “No, ma’am,” he says, but then, “except maybe,” and he looks to her, “a couple-dozen folks nobody knew had been lost in the Vanport flood washed up in a hotel lobby in Old Town? But aside from that,” and he shrugs.
“Vanport,” she says.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“You said Vanport.”
“The Vanport flood, yes ma’am. That was the sort of thing you’d, ah, consult, with Gordon, about?” He waits, patiently, his hand on the handle of the opened door, for quite a long moment before she says, “If that is supposed to be some sort of joke at my expense, it’s in terrible poor taste.”
He says nothing.
“I may not show my years,” she says, “but I was there. A little girl, but I was there. A terrifying day.” She lets go one hand from the cane to adjust the strap of that scaley purse, hauling it up to settle it back on her shoulder, an effort that threatens to topple her. “And a terribly strange thing to joke about,” she says, leaned once more on the handle of her cane.
“The Reverend Asa Lee,” he says. She frowns, how unexpected. “One of them that washed up. Though how a reverend gets misplaced, so nobody knew he went missing, that I couldn’t tell you.” Still frowning, she’s slowly started to shake her head. “How about Cora Bunch,” he says.
The shake of her head’s arrested. She looks up to him, that frown slipped away bit by bit to reveal a look of wonder, of uncertainty, of disbelief, of fear. “An older girl,” she says, her voice gone small. “Couple of blocks down from us. I never, I never thought – is she, has she come back?”
“I’ve seen her,” says Christian. “I saw her. A different night, though. Somewhere else. Not with them. I don’t know. But I saw her.”
“Well,” says H.D. “Ain’t this a hell of a thing.”
A movie’s playing over a rumpled curtain of a screen, hung high there in a corner of the bar, three stained-glass Gothic arches in undulating black and white as the camera follows a young woman down balustraded steps at an angle before them, dark coat and beret, valise in hand, pausing on a landing to listen to something that can’t be heard, there’s no sound, but whatever it is, she smiles, and continues on her way. Beneath that improvised screen a banquette, he’s sat there by one of the small tables before it, his rumpled linen suit, his green shirt dark in this light, on the table a long-stemmed coupe of something more golden than amber, topped with foamy white and a curl of lemon.
“Fancy.”
He looks up. A man’s leaned over the table, hand on the spindly chair across from him, glossy hair held back by a pink bandana, grinning as if at some joke that’s just been told. He shrugs, takes up the coupe, “I couldn’t tell you what it’s called on the menu,” he says, “but at heart, it’s a whiskey sour.” A demure sip. “Quite good.”
The man across the table looks over to the bar, out there in the center of the room, beneath a floating shelf racked with glittering bottles of liquor, “Your second most expensive Japanese whisky!” he calls, pulling out the spindly chair, “A double! Neat!” and sits himself down. “I assume our patrons are footing the bill?”
He shrugs again. “I suppose this is a business meeting.”
“And how is business?”
“I just got into town,” he says, and another sip. “You’ve been here, three weeks? Four? I should be asking you.”
“You’re the one with the connects.”
“Who will, since Sacramento, be expecting results on a more, aggressive, timetable.”
“I am already named Shootist of this court,” hisses the man across the table. “I have the confidence of their new King. I am ready to roll whenever you are.” Sitting back, in that chair.
“Shootist,” he says, eyeing the two-tone shirt of that man across from him, where it’s crimped by the leather strap of the holster tucked under an arm. “Is that why you’re walking around strapped in public?”
“If they ever could notice,” turning to look to the bar, “they’d be a little faster with the drinks.”
“Which one are you?”
“I mean, how long does it take to pour two fingers from a bottle?” Turning back, brow quirked. “What?”
“Which Joaquin? Murrieta? Carillo? Valenzuela? Ocomorenia? It’s just, there are so many stories, and so many danged Joaquins.”
“Yo soy Joaquin!” Thumping the table. “Late of the Court of Camellias! Shootist sworn to the Court of Roses! And you are Henderik Cornelius,” drawn out in a sneer, “investment advisor.”
“Eres Joaquin,” he says, “and you can read a business card. Good. They tell stories about me, too, you know. Nothing so colorful as,” he sips, again, “sneaking up behind someone, whispering my name in his ear, putting a bullet in his brainpan, but – ”
“I do not sneak.”
“Nonetheless. The one they tell about me the most often? It’s even on my Wikipedia page, well. I say, mine. It’s the family’s, but I am mentioned, and what is mentioned about me, it’s not the many millions, billions, really, I’ve made, for my clients: no. It’s that I was, once, married, to a Bond girl.”
Joaquin, frowning, sits, slowly, back.
“Oh, we were married. My third, her second, two years – well, a year and, ten months? Lovely girl. Still friendly, holiday cards, vacation tips, we’re in a group chat, and she was in a Bond film, one of the Brosnans, second, third, I can never remember. But to be a Bond girl, Joaquin, one has to have slept with Bond, and all she ever did was introduce him at a party, in Berlin, I believe. Shagging – snogging? Snogging the actor doesn’t count. You do know Bond, Joaquin? James Bond?”
Joaquin still frowns.
“So the story, as a story, isn’t, entirely, true. Its most particular point is, well, false. Yet it keeps getting told. Because, Joaquin, to say that I married a Bond girl – not slept with, though, trust me, we did, but married — one might make assumptions, based on that factoid, as to who I might know, where I might go, what I’d be able to do, when I got there; they’d bear out, more often than not. A shorthand, then. A compression: distorting, but nonetheless useful. And so, it keeps getting told. Now.” Henry drains the coupe in one long swallow, knuckles some foam from his lips. “As to what they say about – ”
“The woman I married,” says Joaquin, low and quick and guttural, “was raped by a posse of white men, settlers and miners who wanted to drive all us braceros and cheddars and chicali and chooks and chopas and fronchis out of the gold fields and out of our California!”
“That’s one of the things they say, yes, about you,” says Henry, affably enough. “But tell me, Joaquin, what they don’t say: what was she like? Your wife. Did she have sisters? Brothers? A favorite aunt? You must’ve met her parents, surely, unless she was an orphan. What was her name, Joaquin? Her favorite color? What song did she sing when she hung the laundry to dry? Did she make you wash up on the porch at the end of a long hard day, before letting you into the – ”
“Maria,” growls Joaquin.
“There,” says Henry. “Was that so hard?”
“If you ever,” but quickly, over him, “The difference is quite simple,” Henry’s saying, “I am a person, who does things, and to whom things happen, things that become stories, stories that may, elaborate? embellish? in the telling, but always end up pointed back to those very real things. You, and your ilk, on the other hand, are nothing but stories, wound from others and wrapped about, points of interest, strange attractors, done up in costumes, kitted out with,” a gesture, taking in and dismissing the man across the table, “props.”
“You ever disrespect me again, tarado, you’ll learn, I swear, my gun is no prop.”
“Neither,” says Henry, lifting something from the banquette, “is this,” setting it, thunk, on the table, a faint crinkle as he draws away the tissue paper that obscured it, a polished silver torc only as thick as a slender finger, but the width of it enough to fit neatly about a throat. “You know what that is.”
“It, is death,” says Joaquin.
“You’ll want to keep death close to hand,” says Henry, scooting himself out from behind the table, “ready to implement at a moment’s notice.” Pushes himself to his feet. Joaquin snatches his hand, “If I am caught with that,” he says.
“I’d recommend against it,” says Henry, tugging himself free. “Remember what it is they say, about fortune, and the bold.” He pats Joaquin on the shoulder, then steps out of the way of the man approaching to set down a thin paper napkin, and on the napkin a heavy-bottomed glass, puddled with golden whisky. “Anything else?” he asks, but Joaquin, hands laid flat on the table, doesn’t look up from the torc, and utters not a word.
Laughing through the doorway, tugging her giggling after, and no light switched on, fetched up instead of a sudden in a clench among all those shadowy books, and a greedy kiss, as consternation muffled becomes a gasp, a moan, returns in a word, “Wait,” and then “wait, what about,” but a hand to her cheek, fingers to her lips, those kisses slipping to chin, to the corner of her jaw, there beneath the sharply cut angle of her straight black hair, the lobe of her ear, her throat, there above the black lace choker, “what about, is she, should we, my lady,” whispers, in and among those kisses, kisses that pause so that “Ysabel,” Ysabel might say, and then kiss her mouth again, hands now on her shoulders to tug at those suspenders, work them loose and let them drop, “She isn’t here. She isn’t coming back.”
“My lady?”
“Ysabel,” says Ysabel, and with a shrug lets her filmy wrap drop to the floor. “Jo isn’t coming back. That’s what she said in her letter.” She reaches to undo what few buttons still hold that loose white shirt together, but then lets her hands slip within, take hold, pull close for another extravagant kiss.
“Jo?” she says, when she can, “Ysabel, no, I meant Marfisa,” barely so loud as a breath. “Isn’t this,” looking about, “isn’t this her place now?”
Drawing her in for one more lingering kiss. Ysabel lets go, steps back, gathers the hem of her négligée to lift it smoothly up and over her head and off to leave her darkly naked there in the shadows. “Don’t worry,” she says, quietly, but not in a whisper. “I want to try something, Petra, my lovely Petra B. Go, into the bathroom,” pointing back, over her shoulder, to the unlit doorway in the corner between the shelves, “draw us a nice, hot bath,” taking her hand, drawing her along, “and get yourself undressed.”
A door swings slowly, quietly open, into the book-stuffed bedroom. Ysabel, a shadow, leans through the shadowy darkness, a scuff, a rattle as she feels about for something on the nightstand, crinkle of plastic as she draws it up, a little bottle, a ragged white streak where its label has been peeled away. From behind a closed door behind her then the muffled gush of water, and she straightens back up into the hallway, pulling the door shut quietly after herself. The shape stretched down the length of the bed, just visible in this slantwise streetlight, under those wound-up sheets, hasn’t stirred at all.
The Seventh Victim, ©1943 RKO Radio Pictures, Inc. The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit, written by John Rollin Ridge, within the public domain.
