Ambrose Bierce - San Francisco Noir 2 - The Classics

July 8, 1966: In a bar called Blanco’s on Kearny Street, three men were stabbed by a single butcher knife, two fatally; the surviving man walked away after warning the crowd to keep their silence.

Union Square

Greta watched the front door of the bakery on Geary Street, choosing her moment. When it came, it was brought by a middle-aged woman who wore a business suit and running shoes.

The woman stopped at the window, eyed the tempting display of cakes, cookies, and breads, then moved toward the door. Greta slipped up behind the woman, a pace back from the leather briefcase that swung from her left hand. The woman pushed open the door, her entry ringing the bell above the door.

The bakery clerk was a gangly young man wearing a silly white paper hat perched on his brown hair. He looked up from his post behind the counter and smiled at the woman. He didn’t see Greta.

Fine. That’s what she had in mind. Now that she was inside, Greta hovered near the door, keeping one eye on the grown-ups and the other eye on the bakery’s wares. Picking a target was tough. The goods were piled alluringly on counters and shelves and stand-alone displays. Finally she spotted her best shot, bags of day-old cookies mounded high in a basket at the edge of a low table, just a few steps from the door that led out to the busy sidewalk.

The bakery clerk’s head was down. He was busy boxing up a cake for a customer, a big man with a fat belly. Looked like he got plenty to eat, Greta told herself as she edged closer to the basket. Unlike some people she could name.

The customer Greta had followed into the bakery stood on the other side of the table, examining the loaves of dayold bread stacked there as she waited her turn at the counter. She hummed to herself and tapped one finger on the edge of the basket that held the cookies. Greta kept her head down, her blue eyes constantly shifting as she observed the bakery’s occupants. The woman moved closer. Greta thought she smelled good, like flowers, but she didn’t smell as good as the combined perfume of what came out of the bakery’s ovens.

Handing the clerk a twenty, the big man put a proprietary hand on top of the box containing his cake. While the clerk looked down at the drawer of the cash register, Greta snaked her hand toward the cookies. She grabbed two bags, whirled, and made for the door.

“Hey, little girl,” the woman in running shoes said, sounding surprised and shocked as she moved to stop this theft in progress. The little girl shoved the woman hard, knocking her into the table, and kept going, darting past a trio of teenagers who’d just opened the bakery door wide, giving Greta an open shot to freedom.

Once she was out on the sidewalk, she dodged to the right and ran up Geary Street, against the tide of pedestrians heading down toward Market Street, where BART and the San Francisco Municipal Railway would take them home. Intent on their own destinations, they took no notice of the skinny little girl in baggy blue jeans and a red sweatshirt, her dirty blond hair spilling to her shoulders.

Hank was waiting for her in Union Square, on the side close to the entrance to the Saint Francis Hotel and the cable cars that clanged up and down Powell Street. At his feet was a brown nylon bag with a zipper and a shoulder strap. It contained everything they owned — clothes, a couple of beat-up stuffed animals, and a picture of Mom.

“You get something?” he asked eagerly, brown eyes too big in his pinched face. He looked far more streetwise than a five-year-old boy should.

“Yeah. Cookies. Two bags. Looks like one of ’em is chocolate chip and the other is maybe oatmeal raisin. Did you get anything?”

“Pizza,” he said triumphantly, displaying a dented cardboard box. “With pepperoni. Some guy was sitting on that bench over there eating it, and he didn’t eat it all. He was gonna throw it in the trash. But he saw me watching him, so he gave it to me. Look, there’s two whole pieces left.”

“All right!” They high-fived it.

Then they hunkered down on the bench to eat their booty. People hurrying through the square paid no mind to the two children, any more than they did to the pigeons congregating around the statue of Victory atop the column in the center of the square. As she ate, Greta watched shoppers laden with bags scurry from store to store. Hank focused on the food with the single-minded appetite of a little boy who never gets enough to eat.

The store windows in Macy’s and Saks were full of glittering decorations, red, green, gold, and silver, signaling the approaching holiday season, and there was a big lighted Christmas tree in the square. But the passage of time meant little to Greta. She only knew that the days were shorter than they had been. The sunshine, what little there was of it, had turned thin and weak. Nights were longer and it was harder for her and her brother to stay warm. Today the wind had turned cold. From what little she could see of the late afternoon sky, it was dark gray.

It was going to rain, she was sure of it. She didn’t know what they’d do if it rained. They’d been sleeping in doorways and alleys all over the downtown area, constantly moving so the cops wouldn’t find them during their periodic sweeps to rid the streets of human litter.

If it rains we’ll have to go inside somewhere, Greta told herself. But it wasn’t safe to go down inside the BART station to spend the night. The BART cops would catch them. And there were too many weirdos down there already. Mom had always told Greta to take care of her little brother and to stay away from the weirdos.

She was doing the best she could, but she didn’t know how long she could keep it up. She was careful to limit their range to the Union Square area, north of Market Street. That’s where the nice stores, restaurants, and hotels were. Greta felt safer where the people were better-dressed. Sometimes those people gave them money, or food, like Hank’s pizza benefactor. South of Market and the Tenderloin were different, full of run-down buildings and scary people who would take their stuff, even during the day, though it was more dangerous after dark.

Greta couldn’t remember when Mom left. A few weeks, a month, two months, it didn’t matter. After a few days, the hours all ran together, like a stream of dirty water chasing debris down the sewer grate. She only remembered that it didn’t used to be like this.

Once she’d had a father, though lately it was hard to recall what he’d looked like. They’d lived in a nice apartment, two bedrooms so Greta had a room of her own. She had a baby doll and a crib her dad had made for her, pretty dresses. She remembered all of this. Or maybe she thought she remembered, because Mom had told her.

She knew that one day her father hadn’t come home. Although it was a long time ago, she remembered that day and the days afterward quite clearly. Mom crying, people bringing food to the apartment. They talked about God’s will and a car crash. Greta didn’t understand how or why God could have fixed it so that her father never came home, but no one bothered to explain it to her. She only knew that Mom missed him something terrible.

That was about the time Greta started kindergarten. Mom had a job working a cash register at some store, but it didn’t pay much. Not enough to make ends meet, Mom told Greta. At the time Greta wasn’t sure what that meant, but now the ends didn’t meet at all, she knew. That was when she and Mom went to live with Grandma.

Greta didn’t much like Grandma. The old woman seemed as ancient as a dinosaur, and not even half as cuddly as the stuffed stegosaurus her mom had given her. Grandma coughed a lot and smelled bad, puffing on foul-smelling cigarettes even if she did have some sickness with a long name. She had a sharp tongue on her, too, one she used to peel layers off Greta’s mom, until Mom didn’t have much spirit left.