It was his gaze that gave him away. As they wandered across my person, seeing a grey-haired man in expensive London clothes to suit the accent, his pale blue eyes took on a knowing cast. I was not surprised to see him lean back a trifle more, tucking one arm behind the back of the chair so his coat fell slightly away from the clean, innocent whiteness of his shirt, of which one button did not quite match the others. He gave me the sort of smile I had seen before, one no doubt intended to be sultry.
I laughed aloud; his carefully composed smile wavered, his eye-brows tipped into a scowl.
‘My dear young man,’ I said, ‘when I offered to buy you a drink, it was merely for the purpose of conversation, nothing more. If you are looking for companionship, I would suggest you approach that male person in the unfortunate cap sitting along the back wall. His collars might not be clean, but he is clearly interested in making your acquaintance.’
My companion hesitated, glanced over his shoulder at the unprepossessing gentleman in question, and settled again with a dismissive shake to his shoulders. ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘I’ll have a drink.’
He ordered a cocktail of the sort that had been invented by a bored and sadistic barkeep the week before, and while we waited I ran a small wager with myself as to its colour and the shape of glass it would come inside. I won on colour--a sickly lavender tint--but the glass was an ordinary water-glass rather than one of those broad plates better suited to olives or salted nuts than liquid. He held his drink up to me by way of toast, took a sip without wincing, then by way of thanks thrust his hand out at me and said, ‘Martin Ledbetter.’
I gave him a name and my hand, and when we had settled the matter of identities, I sampled my local California claret-type, which to my relief did not actually scour off the membranes of my palate. I then bent to examine the small bowl of assorted oddments that had arrived with the drinks.
‘Are these intended to be eaten?’ I asked my companion.
‘If you’ve got a hard stomach and good teeth, they probably won’t kill you,’ he replied. I nudged the bowl across the table for him, and he happily scooped up a handful and began snapping off the shells of what I decided were either large pistachios or wizened peanuts, depositing them onto the floor to mix with the sawdust, shells, and assorted waste. ‘So, what brings you to our fair city, Mr Sigerson?’
‘My wife’s family live here,’ I replied, which statement had as much truth in it as the names we had given each other. ‘She’s off for a few days on business, so I thought I’d take a look at the other side of San Francisco.’
‘The seamy tour, eh?’ he said, wagging his nicely shaped eye-brows in a raffish commentary on the whims of the old and rich.
‘More by way of comparison. I have spent a great deal of my life in places such as this, for the most part in London. I was curious to see if this new town had any variations to play on the old themes.’
His eyes again ran down my trousers, paused on the shoes made for me by a man in Piccadilly, went to the immaculate silk of the tie I wore, before he blurted out, ‘Why would someone like you spend time in places like this?’
‘And what is someone like me?’ I wondered aloud.
His gaze went from the ebony cuff-links I had been given in Japan to the heavy gold watch-chain across my waistcoat, and he shook his head in thought. ‘You’re not beat-up enough to be a lifelong drunk or an addict, and you walked right past the girls near the door, so you’re not looking for them. Or for me. Are you some kind of do-gooder? A church reformer or something?’
‘I have absolutely no desire to reform any of these good people,’ I assured him.
‘Then why come here?’
I held up my wine to the dim light leaking from the bar, noting the evidence of sugar added to the fermentation, then told him, ‘You might say I come here in a professional capacity.’
I could see him pick over my statement, saw his eyes narrow for a brief instant as he considered the possibility that my profession might be within the bounds of law enforcement, then go on to more likely roles. Eventually he cocked his head at me, appraisingly, no doubt recalling the ease with which I had intercepted his intrusive fingers. ‘Con-man? Dance-hall owner? No, I’ve got it you’re a professional gambler--a cardsharp!’
‘I have been known to play the Great Game, but lesser forms such as baccarat and poker have never interested me. As to the other possibilities, well, shall we say merely that I try not to limit myself?’
I nearly laughed out loud at the sudden bloom of respect in his pale eyes. Young men are ever gullible to the siren call of romance, and the romance of crime has the sweetest voice of all. ‘Tell me, Mr Ledbetter, have you any pressing engagements for the rest of the evening? I find myself in need of a guide to the city’s underworld, and you seem well placed for the position. A paid position,’ I added.
‘How much?’ he responded.
‘Not as much as you’d have got had you managed to lift my note-case, but more than you would get were you to depend on the generosity of the man in the cloth cap.’
We negotiated for a time, agreed on a sum, and after I had paid him half, he rose and led me out onto the street.
It was a curious evening, the first I had spent among the demimonde in some years, and although I found it much as I had left it, decades before and half a world away, it was every bit as sad, as tawdry, and as entrancing as it had ever been, from the ladies tapping at the upstairs windows to attract custom to the curiously appealing foodstuffs each establishment presented to keep its patrons on the premises--although in this town, the free food tended to be spiced meats wrapped in Mexican flatbreads or diminutive ham sandwiches rather than the Scotch eggs and kidney pies of my native land.
Ledbetter, understandably enough, began with the higher end of the spectrum, those establishments where the gin came in a distillery’s bottles and the singers could hit a reasonable percentage of the notes. However, once he had figured out that I was not easily shocked, he rose to the challenge, and led me to half a dozen holes that I would never have discovered on my own. As his pièce de résistance, in the wee hours of the morning he pulled me into a narrow doorway in a part of town north of Market Street. A window slid open, an eye gazed out, the window slid shut, and the door opened: one breath, and I was transported to the days of my youth.
‘An opium den, by Jove,’ I exclaimed, and laughed aloud at his expression. Looking back, I suspect that the accumulation of odd spirits I had consumed had begun to affect me, but it had been in truth a far more entertaining evening than I could have anticipated.
When we were back out on the street some time later, I said something of the sort as I paid my guide the remainder of his evening’s hire. ‘I have to thank you, young man, for a most enlightening tour. It has assured me that the human imagination, while somewhat stuck in its old grooves, is not completely moribund.’
He accepted his money with an owlish blink, watched me slip the note-case back into my pocket, and said, ‘I can’t let you walk back to your hotel by yourself. What if you’re robbed?’
‘That is very kind of you,’ I told him, politely not deigning to point out that attempted robbery was precisely what had brought us together. Too, considering his condition, I thought it not unlikely that he would be the one to wake in some dark alley with a bleeding head and empty pockets. ‘But I shall be fine.’
Still, nothing would do but that he walk me out of the dark areas where the taxis do not ply, by which time we were nearly at my hotel. He accompanied me to the steps, looking considerably more sober for the effort, and shook my hand.
‘Mr Sigerson, any time you want a tour, just say the word.’
‘What about tonight?’ I asked. Midnight had gone, long before.
‘Again?’
‘Something slightly different, perhaps. Shall we say nine o’clock, here at the hotel? At the same rates, of course. Yes? Very well, see you tonight.’
I do not know which man watched me pass through the door
s of the hotel with more amazement on his face, the night doorman, or young Mr Ledbetter.
The following evening I took an early dinner and dressed in a manner even more formal than I had the previous evening. My silk hat gleamed, my immaculate suit (not evening wear, which I deemed would create too much of a distraction) did not; I gave my ebony stick a polish with a face-flannel and tucked my prized emerald stick-pin into the folds of my silk tie. Thus besplendoured, I waited in the park across the street from the hotel. When the young man came striding up the western side of Powell Street, I gave a sharp whistle, and he crossed over to join me.
He stopped in front of me and eyed the gold chain across my front. ‘Don’t you want to dress down just a little?’
‘So that I look less like a toff, you mean?’
‘I don’t know what a toff is, but you look like a man just asking to be robbed.’
‘As good a definition as any. I find contrast offers a soupçon of spice to one’s social encounters. And besides, had I not looked like a man asking to be robbed, you and I might never have met.’
I was amused to see the lad blush, amused and encouraged: A pickpocket who could feel shame was by no means lost. I set my top-hat at an angle and declared, ‘Mr Ledbetter, I am in your hands.’
The previous evening, I had visited half a dozen establishments in his company, and only the opium den had qualified for the term ‘dive’. This evening, my guide appeared determined to complete my experience of the city’s night-life.
At the third such place of business--dark, dismal, and so dispirited, the owners had not even bothered to maintain the electric bells behind the bar to warn of a raid, I poured my glass of so-called whisky onto the matted sawdust underfoot and said, ‘These sorts of places are, I agree, worthy of note, but I fear my liver will not survive too many more of them. What about the Blue Tiger?’
‘You know about the Blue Tiger?’ he enquired in surprise.
‘It came up in a conversation the other day.’ In fact, I had sat surveillance across the street from its door for several hours; however, it was also true that the place did later enter into the conversation with the subject of that surveillance.
‘Okay, it’s your nickel.’
We took a taxi, and joined a brief queue of private cars and taxis disgorging their brightly dressed Young Things at the door. There we received our first hitch: The doorman knew my companion, and blocked our entrance with a mighty scowl and an impressive set of shoulders.
‘Marty, I told you not to come back here,’ he growled.
‘Oh, Henry, don’t be wet. I’m on my best behaviour tonight--this is my friend, Mr Sigerson. He’ll keep an eye on me.’
‘We had complaints, last time.’
‘Unsubstantiated,’ the lad retorted, although he gave me an apologetic smile.
The retired pugilist looked me over dubiously, no doubt caught on the possible meanings of ‘friend’. Obediently, I told him in my plummiest of voices, ‘I assure you, Mr Ledbetter will behave himself.’
The man nodded reluctantly, but leant forward to shake one massive finger in my guide’s face. ‘We have one lady say her handbag’s gone missing, you’re out--and with a set of bruises you won’t forget easy.’
‘Ooh, Mr Toughie,’ Ledbetter purred, and slipped past the doorman into the club beyond.
The Blue Tiger was a dance hall, but it had a balcony that circled three-quarters of the floor. It was there we took our seats, with--such was the ‘membership fee’ I had paid on entering--a clear view of the stage. At the moment, the raised space was as bare of players as the dance floor was of couples, but the disarray of chairs and instruments indicated a mere break in the music.
A waiter appeared at my elbow, and I glanced at the surrounding tables. The customary drink here, unless one wished a named cocktail, appeared to be champagne; I ordered a bottle. It was priced at only five or six times what I would have paid for the same beverage in Europe, and it arrived in a not too badly tarnished silver bucket with a pair of admirably clean glasses.
My young companion waved the waiter away and set to removing the cork. He did so expertly, directing the upwelling foam into a glass before it could be lost. He raised his glass to me in a wordless toast, a habit that was either his own or that of his American generation. Before I could enquire, the band spilt back onto the stage, six comely Negro ladies, and resumed their instruments.
Their music was not at all bad--not to my taste, of course, but the notes were accurate and the syncopation precise. A hundred gaily dressed young people bobbed and spun out on the floor, and the temperature and humidity climbed. It was as well, I reflected, that the female dancers were as lightly clad as they were, all open backs and exposed arms. The young men, on the other hand, succumbing to the dictates of wool and linen, had faces as shiny as their hair. Ledbetter’s foot tapped under the table, but when I assured him that I would not feel abandoned were he to go out onto the dance floor, he merely shook his head and refilled our glasses.
Perhaps he feared that, once among the crowd, he might find it difficult to keep his promise to the doorman. This hesitation could have been another vestige of ethics, or merely the knowledge that I could too easily abandon him unpaid.
A likeable young rogue, Mr Martin Ledbetter.
When the band broke for another brief intermission, I signalled for a second bottle of the wine and then said to the lad, ‘Tell me about yourself, Mr Ledbetter.’
‘Why?’ he replied, his voice short.
‘I suppose I could point out that conversation is what I am employing you for, in my search for understanding of the American way of life. Or I could say that I am interested in how a personable and clearly intelligent young man comes to find picking pockets more lucrative than, say, working in an office. However, let us merely say that a break in the music is intended to provide an interlude for conversation, and it would be churlish of us to pass the opportunity by.’
He stood up abruptly, and said, ‘A break is also intended to provide the chance to whiz. Which I am going to do.’
He made his deliberate way between the tables, hands slightly outstretched as counterbalance to the wine in his blood. The music started again and he was not back, but by the second dance, he reappeared up the stairway.
He sat down, fortified himself with half the contents of the glass, and said abruptly, ‘I was born here in 1901, never knew my father, my mother was killed in the Earthquake, and the aunt who raised me died when I was sixteen. I make a living how I can, and nobody gets hurt but me.’ He made the toast gesture again, polished off the contents of his glass, and reached for the bottle, defiantly allowing it to slosh over the side.
Looking only at the hard-working jazz band, I told him, ‘You were born in 1903 or four, and spent your early years in Minnesota. Your father may well be dead, but someone put you through school, some male friend or relative who was two inches taller and forty pounds heavier than you, who had a certain amount of money about ten years ago, and who died within perhaps the last two years.’
I did not need to look at his face to see the look of confusion and alarm there: I had seen that expression often enough, and as I usually did, I relented with an explanation.
‘You can’t be more than twenty now. To a trained ear, your voice provides clear evidence of where you were when you first learnt to speak. You have been to school, although not university. And the clothing you wear was expensive ten years ago, but tailored to a larger man, who died and left his wardrobe to you.’ I finally looked at him, to explain, ‘You are wearing a complete change of clothing from what you had on last night, yet both sets of suit, shirt, and shoes have the same ill fit. And the amount of wear evidenced by the shirt collars would take about two years to accumulate, given an original two-week supply. If you stole the clothes rather than inherited them, you would surely have replenished your supply of shirts over the years.’
The young man’s jaw worked, his pale eyes went icy; for an instant, I exp
ected him to dash the contents of his glass in my face and storm out, never to cross my path again.
Instead, he controlled himself. He set his glass carefully on the table and leant forward until his face was inches from mine. ‘I’ll show you around; I’ll play your games; I won’t talk about who I am.’
‘Very well,’ I answered equably. ‘Then tell me about these gentlemen on the stage.’
The boy’s face remained taut for a minute, then slowly relaxed into a grin. ‘You caught that, did you?’
‘That all the ladies are men wearing frocks and make-up? Certainly.’
‘You must’ve heard about them before. That’s why you wanted to come here.’
‘I will admit, I heard something of the sort. But I would have known in any case. It’s hardly a new act, you know. London had trans-vestites of both varieties long before Victoria was on the throne. The Romans in Londinium probably watched a similar performance.’
He had no answer for that, although as he sat watching the stage, I knew that a part of his mind was taken up with the idea that former generations had flavours of sin that were not so very different. Such an idea invariably takes the young by surprise.
The song ended, the overhead light changed subtly, and Ledbetter sat forward in his chair. I watched curiously as the entire cabaret held its drinks and came to attention. The lights dipped to nothing, there was a sound of machinery and motion, and a minute later the lights rose again, glittering off the polished bars of a golden bird-cage a good ten feet tall. It swung gently a few feet from the boards, then descended, and as it lowered the lights gradually revealed a person seated on the cage’s swinging perch. The moment she became visible, the audience erupted with applause, hooting and whistling their appreciation. The woman’s pretty head remained inclined in modest recognition; when the cage touched ground, its door fell open, and she stepped out into the fanfare, head still looking at the ground.