Joe Gores - Spade & Archer

“It isn’t.” Barber turned the other portrait toward Spade. “Our son, Charles Hendrickson Barber III.”

It was a snapshot of a well-built boy of seventeen grinning at the camera in front of the exclusive Pacific Heights School in Jackson Street. He had a shock of black hair and dark eyes that looked soulful and dreamy.

“Popular with the girls,” Spade said with assurance.

“It’s not girl trouble. He’s an excellent student and reads a lot and is impossibly romantic. He gets that from his mother. He disappeared two nights ago.”

Spade leaned forward, focused. “Phone calls? Ransom message? The police?”

“None of those. He left a note.” Barber handed Spade a folded sheet of paper from his middle desk drawer.

Dear Mother and Father:

I am enchanted with these islands. Don’t try to

find me.

Love to you both,

“Henny?”

“Family name. Short for Hendrickson.”

Spade’s frown drew deep vertical lines between his brows. “This means something to you?”

“His mother and I made the mistake of taking him on a cruise to Hawaii as a high-school graduation present and he fell in love with the South Seas. He started reading Jack London, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson...” He looked almost suspiciously at Spade. “Have you heard of any of them?”

Spade had a momentary faraway look in his eyes. “Yeah. I read a book once. I know who they are.”

“My wife tells me that the quotation is from a character in a Joseph Conrad novel, a man named Axel Heyst.”

“So,” said Spade, “Hawaii. Or Tahiti. Or maybe American Samoa — Stevenson was called Tusitala, Teller of Tales. He’s buried on a mountain called Vaea on Apia.” He was on his feet. “Henny’d have the money just to book passage, but that won’t be romantic enough for him. If no ships have sailed for Australia via those ports of call since he disappeared, he’ll probably be hanging around the docks looking to stow away.”

Barber waved a well-manicured hand. “Find him. My wife is delicate, and she’s frantic.”

“I suggested to Barber that there’s nothing so wrong with the kid trying to stow away on a freighter, getting it out of his system, instead of going straight to college.”

“Not Barber. Strictly financial,” said Sid Wise. “He wants Henny to do just what he himself did when his father retired — step into his shoes at the bank at the proper moment.”

“The boy’s mother is calling the shots, and she’s afraid that Henny might actually stow away, or might run into some real trouble if he’s hanging around the docks. She’s probably right. I did when I was his age.”

“What did your folks do about it?” asked Effie Perine.

“My ma moaned a lot. My old man was a longshoreman, what could he say? He’d done the same in his day.”

Sid Wise checked his watch. “I’ve got a client coming.”

Effie Perine moved Wise’s chair back into the outer office. When she returned Spade said, “Get an afternoon Call, angel. Leave a rundown on my desk of all the freighters and liners expected in from Australia during the next few days that will be making stops in the islands on their way back.”

“Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti?”

“Yeah. Maybe Aitutaki in the Cooks, too.”

“Maybe I’ll stow away with him,” she said almost wistfully.

“You’d stow away alone. I’m going to nab our Henny before he can clear the Golden Gate.”

Spade walked the three long blocks to his one-room efficiency in Ellis Street, changed into a denim jacket and pants, gray chambray work shirt, and heavy work shoes with five-ply leather heels. None of the clothes were new.

Paddy Hurlihey’s was a waterfront bootleg joint at Pier 23 on the Embarcadero. It smelled of stale beer, was wreathed in cigarette smoke, was crowded with loudmouthed stevedores. Spade, dressed like any other longshoreman, bellied up at the bar beside a wiry lean-faced twenty-year-old.

“Let me buy you a drink, Harry.”

“I’ll be damned. Sam Spade.” Harry’s large direct eyes, under brows turned down at the outside edges like a bloodhound’s, were too old for his chronological age. His voice had an Aussie twang. “I heard you was with Continental up in Seattle.”

Spade caught the barkeep’s eye. “Got back a month ago to set up on my own here. I know this town.”

“Towns is all the same,” said Harry morosely. “I bet it’s as bad for the workingman up there as it is down here.”

“One of the reasons I left. Too much strikebreaking.”

“See? The same. Since the old Riggers’ and Stevedores’ Union went down after the strike of nineteen the shipping companies have set up something they call the Blue Book union. It’s supposed to be independent, but we don’t got no contract no more and it’s a closed shop for guys like me who was active in the strike. I get some work over in Richmond. Tramp steamers, the Alaska Packer Line, the Japs, the Aussies — they don’t gotta go along with the company union. Ship’s there a week, a man can make fifty, sixty bucks. But ships is few and far between.”

The burly Irish bartender came down the stick. Without asking, he poured two shots from a bottle with an Antiquary label, then clamped his hand on Spade’s forearm. Spade jerked free, his hand already closing into a fist. The bartender stepped back quickly with both hands raised, palms out.

“I just need your brass check before you gents can drink.”

Harry took a round brass disc from his pocket, tossed it on the bar. “The shape-up bosses pay in these instead of cash. The number on it shows that it’s legit. Only places you can cash ’em is gin mills like this here one, the bookie joints along the waterfront, and Sly-Pork’s pool hall up the street. You gotta buy two drinks at two bits each. Then you get one on the house.”

Spade put a dollar on the bar next to Harry’s brass check and held up four thick fingers. “And two on the house.”

The bartender hesitated, poured, departed. They fired down their shots.

“You still a betting man, Harry?”

Harry nodded. “Between ships I stay alive with the whores, the fours, and the one-eyed Jacks.”

“I’ve got ten bucks says you can’t get me a lead to a seventeen-year-old kid hanging around down here until he can find a freighter to the South Seas to stow away on.”

“Maybe I oughtta stow away with him — go back home to Australia where I belong. I ain’t doin’ so hot here.”

Spade described Henny Barber, gave Harry a ten-dollar bill.

“Hell’s sake, Sam, I ain’t found out nothing for you yet.”

“You will,” said Spade. His grin made him look pleasantly satanic. “I can always find you over in Richmond if you welsh. Kid might be staying with a friend somewhere nights and hanging around the docks days, and talking about stowing away. He’s called Henny. Anything you can find out about him will help.”

Spade hooked a hip over one corner of Effie Perine’s desk while fishing papers and tobacco from his vest pocket. She looked up from the Chronicle’s shipping news.

“Harry called to say that the hen is sleeping in the henhouse but pecking around Pier 35. He’s betting ten bucks that what you want is the Oceanic Line’s San Anselmo, newly arrived from Sydney via Honolulu and due to go back to Australia after a two-day turnaround here.” She rattled her newspaper in frustration. “Who’s Harry? What’s he talking about?”

“Harry’s a longshoreman when he can get work. He helped lead the strike by the Riggers’ and Stevedores’ Union back in nineteen. Trouble was it broke the union instead of the shipping companies. He was only eighteen then, but they’ve got him down as a dangerous radical — maybe a Commie.”