Joe Gores - Hammett

Chin Kim Guy bounced to his feet behind the table, hand extended. ‘Hammett!’ he exclaimed. ‘Long time no see. Hear the one about the minister and the little boy he caught swearing? He says, “Little boy, when you talk like that the chills run up and down my spine.” And the boy says, “If you’d heard my ma when she caught her tit in the wringer, you’d of froze to death.”’ He burst into high-pitched laughter and waved Hammett to a chair across the table. ‘Rest the dogs.’

Hammett sat.

The dapper Chinese was dressed in a gray Glenurquhart plaid and a knitted silk tie with a fancy crocheted weave. He looked like a Chinese pimp, not the king of an illegal gambling empire stretching from San Francisco to the Chinese colonies in Stockton and Sacramento. As long as Hammett had known him he’d been telling terrible jokes and laughing uncontrollably at them.

Now he uttered a short burst of Cantonese at another of the giant bodyguards, who was leaning against the back wall. The man quickly disappeared through an unframed door at his elbow.

‘Did your father get the magazine I sent him a few years ago?’

Chin laughed. He had very white buckteeth and wore his black hair parted in the middle and combed tightly to his skull. His utterly black eyes glittered with amusement under delicate brows.

‘I read the story to him, he got a hell of a wallop out of Chang Li Ching. He didn’t know he impressed you as such a bloodthirsty character. You knew he’s Kam Sam Hock now?’

‘I’d heard he’d gone home from the Golden Mountain,’ Hammett admitted.

The Golden Mountain was what the old-generation Chinese still called San Francisco. One who had been to the Golden Mountain and had returned home to China, wealthy and respected, for his declining years, was known as a Kam Sam Hock. Only Chin Kim Guy’s generation had begun to consider America as home.

The bodyguard returned with a delicate china pot and two small handleless bowls set on doughnutlike saucers. The tea was pale amber, clear as spring water, and steaming hot. With it was a dish of four small round sesame seed cakes baked to a pale brown. Hammett nibbled at one and sipped tea.

Chin’s laughter bubbled up again; it was said he laughed the same way when his binders hacked an enemy to pieces.

‘You hear the one about old Nate? Rebecca is downstairs in the front room with Abie, see, and Nate hears some strange sound coming from down there, so he goes to the head of the stairs and he calls, “Becky, are you and Abie fighting?” And Rebecca says, “No, daddy, we’re screwing.” And old Nate says, “That’s nice, children, don’t fight.”’

His gales of laughter trailed away in chuckles.

‘Anyway, Hammett, you want to see the Honorable Pater you’re out of luck-’

‘Came to see you,’ said Hammett.

He jerked a thumb over his shoulder without looking around; he knew the massive bald-headed Qwong would be directly behind his chair with a snickersnee, the swordlike Chinese knife that could take out a man’s throat with a single slash, strapped hilt-downward to his left forearm beneath the flowing jacket sleeve.

‘Remember five years ago your father promised to lend me this character if I ever needed someone’s leg broken or eye poked out?’

‘I remember.’

‘That still good, all-ee-same like father like son?’

Chin considered gravely for a moment, then gave a very Occidental shrug. ‘Sure, why not, he’s getting fat and lazy anyway.’

‘How about all of them?’ said Hammett.

Chin cocked an eyebrow. ‘Leaving me naked before mine enemies?’

‘Maybe that’s the idea.’

Chin laughed out loud and clapped his hands in delight. ‘Only you could come up with a remark like that, Dash!’ He leaned forward in his chair. ‘You hear the one about the Chinaman asked this fellow, “You telle me where railleroad depot?” And the guy says, “What’s the matter, John, you lost?” And the Chinaman says, “No! Me here, dam’ depot lost!”’ Before Hammett could make appropriate noises, he demanded, ‘What are you doing, starting a war?’

‘Something like that.’

‘Other Chinamen?’

‘Wops.’

‘Good!’ Chin laughed out loud again. ‘Too many wops around anyway.’ He shifted his gaze to the giant Qwong. ‘I got through four years at Cal without him around, I guess I can… besides, he’s always been in love with you, this’ll give him a chance to work off his Freudian repressions.’

Hammett walked home from Chinatown through the fog. Everything was moving. Tomorrow, Molly Farr. He’d open her up and find out what — if anything — she could tell him about Vic’s death. He would also ask her Chinese maid about the fat woman over by Bolinas Lagoon.

The fog that lay above the city cut the tops off the hills, and made the taller buildings seem to disappear five stories above the street.

God damn he loved this city! There wasn’t another like it anywhere, and he’d been in a lot of them since he’d answered that blind box ad in the Baltimore paper back in the summer of ’12. He’d gotten bored chalking up stock market transactions from the Poe and Davies ticker tape; because he was big for his eighteen years, he’d been able to lie his way into the job as a Pinkerton operative.

Eight years of manhunting — interrupted by the Ambulance Corps and the government lunger hospitals in Tacoma and San Diego. Christ, the towns he’d been in as a Pink! Pasco and Seattle and Spokane; Stockton and Vallejo; Butte, Denver, Cleveland, Dallas; Gilt-Edge, Montana, and Lewiston, Idaho; El Paso, Jacksonville, Detroit, Boston; Rocky Mount, North Carolina, Louisville, Kentucky, and the Big Apple itself, New York City. Finally, San Francisco. The City That Knows How.

At the south end of the Stockton tunnel he looked up to his right above the top of a billboard. Yeah. Just there were the tops of the railing posts through which he had Miles Archer pitch after being shot in The Maltese Falcon.

Hammett looked up at the concrete parapet where Bush Street bridged the tunnel. He’d lived for half a year at the mouth of the alley just across Bush — 20 Monroe Street — and when he’d needed a secluded, dramatic spot for Archer to die, dead-end Burritt Street had just naturally come to mind.

He was suddenly in a hurry to get home. The Falcon would have to wait for revision until this whole mess was finished, but not so The Dain Curse. He’d thought of a way to characterize Minnie Hershey’s boyfriend, Rhino Tingley. Let Rhino count out his eleven hundred and seventy dollars, braggingly, bill by bill, in front of the Op’s cynical and Minnie’s terrified eyes. Hell, he’d created Rhino’s name by mating a British slang word for money with the name of a little street off Silver Avenue; so why not let his character be created by the act of counting money?

Hell, yes. He liked that.

On Christmas Eve, 1910, a quarter of a million people — the greatest crowd in San Francisco’s history — had gathered around Lotta’s Fountain to hear an impromptu concert by famed opera soprano Luisa Tetrazzini. Today, as the streetcar went rattling by the ugly, ornate, cast-iron monument at Kearny, Geary, and Market, the intersection was Sunday-deserted.

Goodie did not notice the lack of people. She was too elated to notice much of anything.

‘Oh, Sam, I’m so excited!’

‘Maybe they’ll meet us at the door with a shotgun.’

She mocked a pout. ‘You mean I’m just window dressing again?’

‘You’ve got a devious mind, girl.’

Goodie leaned back against the shiny leather and looked out at the cable car making the turn up Sacramento. Beside the wedge-shaped corner building were steep steel stairs leading up to the pedestrian crosswalk that bridged The Embarcadero to the Ferry Building