Ace Atkins - Devil’s garden

Five minutes later, Sam was behind the cab in his machine and trailing across the southern part of Golden Gate Park and then dipping down into the Castro, thinking she was headed back downtown but instead watching the cab slow in front of a theater. She got out, paid the cabbie, bought a ticket at the window, and slipped inside. Sam parked and followed.

The picture had already started and Sam had to adjust his eyes in the darkness. The theater was a fantasy palace filled with gilded Oriental and Moroccan designs, the latter being appropriate since the moving images were of sheiks and the desert and far-off places with camels. The ceiling was a night sky, complete with moving clouds and winking stars. The screen was fifty feet high, bordered by balconies and plush red curtains. The effect made you feel as if you were at an outdoor play.

Sam took a seat in a side row where he had a good view of Alice Blake’s profile while she ate popcorn and stared, openmouthed, at the moving images. A man sat in front of a great organ, as if he were playing liturgy instead of accompaning a woman outside a sheik’s tent, nervous but accepting the invitation to come inside. The flap to the tent was held open and Alice stopped eating. Her big brown eyes remained wide at the sight of the woman removing her pith helmet and belt and the sheik’s servants doing the same for him. Caston, the French valet in service of the sheik since his school days, closing the curtain.

Why have you brought me here?

The sheik, with a great smile, saying, Are you not woman enough to know?

Sam turned to the others staring at the huge screen, watching the man Valentino strut in his tent, standing twenty feet tall in the darkness, hands on his hips, robes flowing behind him. Sam leaned back into his seat. The women in the seats around him breathing so loud that it sounded like one great gasp of a chorus. The sheik pointed to his big bed and the woman tried to run. He caught her in his arms and made his eyes real big. The bigger he made his eyes, the more the women in the crowd gasped.

Sam lit a cigarette and settled in.

Alice Blake resumed with her popcorn.

I am not accustomed to having my order disobeyed.

And I’m not accustomed to obeying orders.

You will learn! said the sheik, banishing her from his tent.

It was almost as if you could put your hands up in front of you and touch them or perhaps walk into the screen and be a part of it all. The light of the screen brought a white sheen to the faces of the women, some holding a single red rose.

After a while, Sam fell asleep. When he came to, the picture still rolling and organ pumping, he looked over to Alice Blake and she was gone.

He left the darkness and pushed open into the light, the new world seeming almost unreal against the desert, and looked for the girl, twice checking her seat and the washroom, then walked out into the Castro. A half hour later, he returned to his machine to ride back to the Sunset District and sit on the house. He bought a loaf of bread and more cigarettes and a Photoplay magazine to read up on this woman he’d seen in The Sheik because somehow the woman seemed like someone he now knew.

When he moved up the landing to the vacant house, he heard a shift and found someone already sitting on the apple crate. The Prohibition agent from the Old Poodle Dog looked over at him, dropping his field glasses by her side, and pulled on a cigarette. She looked at Sam but didn’t smile. The street-light shone off the white blond hair peeking out from under a silk turban.

She turned, cocking a dark brow at him. “Sit down. I won’t bite.”

MAUDE DIDN’T SEE Al Semnacher, didn’t know he was following her, until he plopped down next to her on the cable car just before it started its jerky ride up Powell Street, past the St. Francis and Union Square and slowly up Nob Hill. Maude had to do a double take to make sure it was Al because the dumb son of a bitch didn’t say anything, just stared at the people climbing the hill as they glided by in the car, and even casually waved to an old Chinese woman selling persimmons from a corner. Maude shook her head and checked her watch, already ten minutes late.

In the narrow slit in the street, Maude could see the tension of the cable hoisting them all up the hill, the straining of tons of metal and flesh being brought to the top.

“I’m ready to negotiate,” he said.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I saw your picture in the paper. Cute, really. You with the Vigilant Committee and Harry Carey.”

“It was Broncho Billy.”

The cable car stopped and three different newsboys from the Examiner, The Call, and Chronicle climbed on like little monkeys scrambling down the row and hawking the latest news of Fatty. The boy from the Examiner shouted an exclusive: “Nurse Says Fatty Dragged Girl into Hotel Room.”

Maude paid the boy a nickel and looked at the ugly face of that woman who had attended to Virginia at Wakefield. She read the first few lines and shook her head.

“I told the police about the ice and about Fatty threatening to throw Virginia out the window,” Al whispered.

“He wanted to throw me out the window.”

Two old women down the long wooden bench were craning forward to look at Maude Delmont. She pulled her black hat down deeper into her eyes and gave Al Semnacher a sharp one in the ribs.

“I want a piece,” he said.

“A piece of what? I just slipped out of the St. Francis with my bags.”

“You mean your purse.”

“My things.”

“I got you the girl just like you asked for.”

“And you stole her underwear and bolted. Why on earth would I trust you?”

“I didn’t sign on for this,” Al said, whispering. The cable car jerked and strained to the top of Nob Hill, cresting for a moment, the old women getting off at the Fairmont, and then the brake was slowly let go by the conductor onto a turn heading west, and then the car cut hard, flowing down the hill and catching a straightaway on Hyde.

“Then get off.”

“You signed a deal in blood,” Al said.

“I never signed a deal.”

“I want half of what you’re getting or next week I’ll walk right into that police court and tell them everything I know.”

“That you were Virginia’s pimp?”

“She was an angel.”

“Are you getting a conscience on me?”

“I loved her.”

“You didn’t even know her, you dumb yegg.”

“I’ll find you tomorrow.”

“It’s your stop, Al.”

Al leaned in, his musky, sweaty scent of talcum powder and cologne making Maude sick. “You tell your people I’m a part of this.”

“Good-bye, Al.”

Al stood, pulled the cable car’s cord, and stepped down, tipping his hat at a little girl in a sailor suit who took his spot beside Maude.

“Good day,” Al said, grinning with his sharp little teeth, “Mrs. Delmont.”

“WHY DOES A dry AGENT care about the Arbuckle party?” Sam asked.

“Besides making us look good in the papers?”

“Besides that.”

“Arbuckle broke the Volstead,” the girl said.

“A few bottles of gin seems beneath you people.”

“We’re more interested in where he got it.”

Sam nodded and smoked a bit as he stood in the window turret. The girl agent sat on the apple crate, legs crossed, turban perfectly cocked on her head. Light from the blinds fingered out on the wooden floor.

She lit a cigarette, too, and stood and walked to the window, using his field glasses to look down at Alice Blake’s place. “How was the movie?”

“Slept through most of it.”

“What was it about?”

“This sheik kidnaps this English socialite. He wants her, but she doesn’t want him. Then she runs away. Some bandits steal her and the sheik comes to the rescue.”