Silver Page 13

  Everything was clearly lit up by the bright orangey streetlamps; the man on the corner selling ices from a stall; the gathering clusters of pretty whores. The waggoneer had been right, for Broadway was much quieter now, except for the occasional grinding rattle of a horse-drawn bus, or the echoing thunder of thrown-out packing-cases. A boy in a tall silk hat was setting up a stand in a matter-of-fact way to sell indecent magazines: pornography was a thriving trade in New York, especially books with lewd engravings. And a street musician not far away had already started to play sentimental Austrian tunes on his accordion.

  Henry leaned out of his window for so long, tired and fascinated, that he almost lost track of time. But when he heard a clock chiming eight, he put down the window again, and tied up his necktie, and decided to go down to the hotel restaurant for dinner. He was alone now. He had lost Doris. But he promised himself that he wouldn’t be alone for long. Before he opened the door of his room, he said to himself ‘Doris,’ just once, and closed his eyes, and tried to think of her. Then he stepped out into the green-carpeted corridor, where a man in evening dress was laughing so much that he had to lean against the wall to support himself, and another man was saying, ‘—they were all McDowell’s girls, by God!’

  The two laughing men waited with suppressed giggles and snorts until Henry had gone past, and then burst out again. ‘He said she was ready for it, and all she could say was, “Let loose my corset first, whatever you do!”’

  Henry ate a pork chop in the dining-rooms, and drank a half-bottle of California wine. Then, after coffee, he went for a long walk along Broadway, looking into all of the shop-windows, smiling at the ‘peripatetic whoreocracy’, some of whom were stunningly pretty, and very young, but declining them all; and at last picking up a copy of the New York Herald, and (rather guiltily) a magazine called Venus Miscellany, which he folded inside his newspaper as he re-entered the lobby of the Collamore Hotel, and climbed the stairs to his room.

  He was too tired to read, however, no matter how titillating the articles. He drew back the comforter on his bed, and crawled naked between the sheets. He promised himself that he would wake up later, and brush his teeth. But within two or three minutes he was sleeping, snoring softly; and he didn’t even wake up when the chambermaid came in, a young Irish girl with ringlets like curly apple-peelings, and stared at him sleeping for two or three minutes before drawing the comforter over him, and touching his forehead with her fingertips in the sign of the cross, and commending his soul to happy slumber.

  He was wakened by noise: a tremendous avalanche of wooden packing-cases being unloaded on to the sidewalk outside his room. He opened his eyes and saw the edge of his brown-varnished bedside table, and his pocket-watch with the lid still raised, and his pants, crumpled across the back of his chair. He sat up, scruffy-haired, and looked around the room; and it was only then that he realized where he was, and what had happened. It was Saturday morning in New York, the day after Doris’ funeral, and he was on his way to California.

  He eased himself out of bed, and rubbed his face with his hands. Then he tugged his flannel robe out of his suitcase, and gathered up his towel, and walked barefooted along the corridor to the bathroom; where he sat and soaked in the high-sided tub for almost twenty minutes, watching the condensation form on the polished copper pipework.

  He had planned to travel by railroad to Omaha, in Nebraska Territory, which was as far as the railroad went; then to join an overland party to San Francisco. He could have reached California by sea, crossing the isthmus of Panama, but a school-friend of his, Bertram Willis, had tried to travel out to California that way two years ago, and had died in Panama City of yellow fever. Besides, the 30-day voyage cost well over $300; and Henry’s resources amounted to $210 flat; less $20 which he had loaned to Alby Monihan.

  It was one of the extraordinary incongruities of America in these days before the Civil War that a man could ride by luxury Pullman car to Chicago, feeding himself on roast duck and French champagne; and yet no matter how rich he was, could find no way to cross the plains of Nebraska and Wyoming, and scale the Rockies and the Sierra Nevada to make his way to California, except by emigrant waggon-train, drawn by horses or oxen, with no better refreshment than bread, and salted pork, and water.

  Henry breakfasted on corned-beef hash and poached egg; and then went to the hotel’s writing-room, and wrote Fenchurch a long letter describing Doris’ funeral, and his journey to Troy, and how Alby Monihan had tricked him out of a meal. Then he went for a long walk around Wall Street and Battery Park; and eventually had lunch at Pearson’s Restaurant on Dey Street, sitting shoulder to shoulder with two clerks from a silk and necktie warehouse, with the sun beating in through the fly-speckled window, and smoke curling up in the air like incense in some forbidden temple.

  In the afternoon, he booked his ticket to Council Bluffs, $79.25; and then spent an hour in Lord & Taylor, particularly in the hardware department, and then walked back to the Collamore Hotel and lay on his bed and dozed until teatime, while the sun moved slowly across the wall. His train for Chicago left at nine that night, and he went down to the desk and paid for his stay, and asked that the bellboy should come up to his room at eight, to collect his trunks.

  He read some of the articles in Venus Miscellany, but he was not in a mood for erotica, and what had seemed tempting the night before today seemed flat and lewd. ‘I was as ready as if I had never spent, and we swam in a mutual emission almost immediately, both of us being so overcome by our feelings that we almost swooned in delight; the throbbing and contracting of the folds of her vagina on my enraptured prick awoke me to renewed efforts, and we were rapidly progressing towards another spend, when she checked me....’ He threw the paper in the wastebasket; then changed his mind, and packed it into his trunk instead. There might be a lonely time between here and California when he felt the need of it.

  At a quarter to seven, he left the Collamore and hailed a cab to take him to the Fifth Avenue Hotel. A sprinkling of rain damped down the streets; and he could hear thunder in the distance, over on the shores of New Jersey. A sudden breeze got up, whirling waste-paper and grit through the sunlit evening, and the cab-horse whinnied and blew through its nostrils.

  The Fifth Avenue was far grander than the Collamore, and far newer. It was the first hotel in New York to have electric elevators; and most of those who arrived in the foyer from the upper floors bore on their faces the smug delight of those who had travelled by exotic means. Henry crossed the carpeted foyer with his hands in his pockets, and went up to the stairs to the gentlemen’s bar, which was dark and mirrored, and heavy with the stratified layers of cigar smoke.

  There was no sign of Alby. He looked at the gilded clock above the bar, which now read seven precisely, and decided to give his acquaintance five minutes’ grace, but no more. He ordered a whiskey, and sat and drank it faster than he had meant to, and wished he had a newspaper to read, and that he wasn’t there at all; and more than anything else that he had declined to lend Alby his precious $20. He looked at himself in the mirror behind the bar, framed by engravings of vine-leaves and the necks of three dozen different spirit-bottles, and he thought to himself: you hayseed. You swore to yourself that you weren’t going to get caught, and you did. Your very first day. That’s the last you’re ever going to see of those $20; forget the $5 interest.

  At ten past seven, he beckoned the barkeep, a portly young man with a bushy moustache, and said, ‘I’m supposed to be meeting a friend of mine.’

  ‘Oh, yes?’ The barkeep regarded him suspiciously. There was rather too much of that about lately; too many clandestine meetings in men’s bath-houses and men’s bars; particularly Pfaff’s, at 647 Broadway, north of Bleecker Street. The barkeep was under special instructions not to let that kind of thing start up here, in the Fifth Avenue Hotel. It was so degrading and disgusting that it wasn’t even mentioned in the newspapers, except by reference to ‘disgraceful acts, nightly practised on the Battery’.


  ‘My friend’s name is Alby Monihan,’ said Henry. ‘Has he been here at all, left his name?’

  The barkeep stared at him with bulging eyes. ‘Alby Monihan?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  The barkeep nodded. ‘Those gentlemen over there know something about Alby Monihan. Ask them, they’ll tell you.’

  Henry turned and frowned through the layers of cigar smoke. Five well-built men in black broadcloth coats were sitting around a table drinking whiskey and talking to each other as if they were doing business. They were all leaning back, which showed that there was no affection between them. They were here because it paid them to be here. Henry went over and stood beside them for a moment, and then noisily cleared his throat.

  ‘Got a cough, friend?’ one of them asked, a bald man with a heavy beard and wire-rimmed spectacles.

  Henry said, ‘I understand you may know a friend of mine: Alby Monihan. That’s what the barkeep told me.’

  The five men looked at each other, one by one. There was a congested silence. Then the bald man with the heavy beard raised a hand without even looking at Henry and beckoned him nearer.

  ‘Did you say Alby Monihan?’ he said, at last.

  Henry nodded.

  ‘A friend of yours?’ the bald man asked.

  ‘Well, near enough; you see, we were coming down from Troy yesterday, and—’

  The bald man grasped Henry’s wrist, as tight as a metal vice, and said, ‘Sit down. Come on, sit down. Wilbur, bring him a chair.’

  The man next to him borrowed a chair from the table across the aisle, and wedged it under Henry’s backside just as the bald man forced Henry down to his knees.

  ‘What’s this all about?’ asked Henry, tightly.

  ‘Oh, you really want to know?’ the bald man retorted. ‘You, a friend of Alby Monihan, and you really want to know?’

  Henry said, ‘Let go of my wrist.’

  ‘Who says?’

  ‘I say,’ said Henry. ‘Let go of my wrist or I’ll break your jaw.’

  ‘Well, now,’ nodded the bald man, looking around at his companions. ‘These are the kind of friends that Alby can boast. “Let go of my wrist or I’ll break your jaw.” What do you think this gentleman would have said if I’d have shook his hand? “Stop shaking my hand or I’ll twist your neck”? This is class for you, ain’t it? What do you say to that?’

  The other men chuckled; some of them raised their glasses.

  ‘Let me tell you something, my friend,’ the bald man told Henry, leaning forward in his chair with unwanted intimacy. ‘Your friend Alby Monihan has effected his usual trick on my young cousin here; you see this young gentleman with the wispy moustache? That’s my cousin Quincy. Only his second time, here in New York, and never played cards before, not with professional sharps, like your good friend Alby Monihan. But all the same he wins a game, and Alby Monihan has to concede defeat.’

  ‘I don’t know Alby well,’ Henry said, quickly. ‘In fact, I don’t even know him at all.’

  ‘I licked him, though,’ said the young gentleman with the wispy moustache named Quincy.

  ‘Well, good for you,’ said Henry. He was already resigned to losing his $20.

  ‘Oh, good for him, hey?’ asked the bald-headed man. ‘That’s what you think. Well, let me tell you. Alby Monihan didn’t have no money, not in cash, not in gold; so he persuaded young Quincy here to take in lieu of two hundred dollars this so-called mining claim, and assay. Quincy, give it here, let’s show this friend of Alby Monihan what we’re talking about.’

  Quincy, with an inevitability that made Henry close his eyes in resignation, produced with a flourish the claim certificate for the Little Pittsburgh mine, and the assay from W. de Kuyper, and laid them on the table.

  The bald-headed man watched Henry for a long while, and sniffed, and then said smugly, ‘What we need to know is, are these claims worth the paper they’re printed on? Quincy may have been fool enough to take them, in lieu of his two-hundred-dollar debt, but are they worth the paper they’re printed on? Because if they’re not, we want to know.’

  Henry glanced around the table; at the beef-fed, wide-jawed faces. At the level, uncompromising eyes. Whatever he said, he knew what the answer was going to be. They were honest men, taking their due. And there was nothing more dangerous than that. Righteous anger is the very worst kind.

  ‘I licked him, though,’ Quincy repeated.

  ‘Oh, don’t you whine, Quincy,’ the bald-headed man snapped at him.

  Henry picked up the claim, and the assay. ‘Mines in Colorado,’ he said, flatly, and then put them down again.

  ‘That’s right,’ nodded the bald-headed man. His fists on top of the polished oak table looked like twin partridges, dark, bony and plucked, full of sinew and muscle. Minutes ticked by; the whiskey glasses were empty.

  ‘What do you propose then?’ asked Henry.

  ‘Propose?’ asked the bald-headed man. ‘Well, first of all, I propose that you tell us where your friend Alby happens to be hid; so that we can return these worthless papers to him, and tell him just what we think about mines in Colorado, as payment for poker debts, or for anything else.’

  ‘Well, that’s difficult,’ said Henry. ‘The fact of the matter is, he owes me money, too; and I don’t know where he could be, apart from here.’

  ‘You expect me to believe that?’ asked the bald-headed man. ‘That’s the biggest excuse since the California Compromise.’

  ‘Ah, you’re Southerners,’ said Henry.

  ‘Yes, sir, we’re Southerners,’ replied the bald-headed man. ‘And we’re not particular to being taken for fools, just because we happen to come from South Carolina.’

  ‘I’m not trying to take you for fools,’ Henry told him. ‘I’m just as anxious to find Alby Monihan as you are.’

  The bald-headed man took off his spectacles, and stared at Henry, and said, ‘I have a proposition to make, since you asked for a proposition. I propose that we give you this deed of claim, and this assay; and that in return you pay to Quincy here the sum that Alby Monihan happens to owe him, which is two hundred dollars.’

  ‘I told you, I’m no friend of Alby Monihan,’ Henry insisted.

  ‘That’s not what you said when you came in here, looking for him.’

  ‘But he owes me money as well; I’m not settling his poker debts for him.’

  ‘You are, by Jiminy, because we say you are.’

  Henry folded his arms and faced the bald-headed man defiantly. ‘Would you like me to call the police, and tell them that you’re a gang of extortionists?’

  ‘We’d kill you first,’ said the bald-headed man. He said it with such simplicity that Henry believed him; but all the same, he wasn’t frightened of him. He pushed back the chair which they had given to him, and stood up, and said, ‘If you want money from Alby Monihan, then find Alby Monihan. That’s what I’m going to do.’

  ‘I warn you not to leave,’ said the bald-headed man. ‘These boys are witnesses. I warn you.’

  Henry grinned, and held out his hand. ‘Nice to have met you,’ he said. ‘Next time I’m in South Carolina, believe me, I’ll look you up.’

  He turned, and walked away across the bar; pushing his way past a young man with hyacinthine hair who was kicking his legs up in the air to explain to his friends how his horse had been misbehaving; and then rounding the taut white belly of a whiskery man in evening dress is if he were circumnavigating a schoolroom globe. He crossed the lobby, and stepped out on to the warm summery sidewalk of Fifth Avenue, and started looking around for a cab to take him back to the Collamore.

  He was still waiting, however, when two hands gripped his arms on either side. It was the bald-headed man and one of his larger friends, a purple-faced fellow with reddish side-whiskers and eyes that glistened yellow like clams that had been left open too long. ‘Now, we don’t wish you any harm,’ said the bald-headed man, ‘so if I were you, I wouldn’t kick up too much of a fuss.’

&n
bsp; They forced Henry around the corner of the Fifth Avenue Hotel into Twenty-fourth Street, and pushed him into a side doorway, where the purple-faced fellow seized hold of his lapels, and twisted them around tight. Two or three incurious passers-by glanced across and saw what was going on, but walked on without even looking surprised. There were too many violent robberies in New York these days for anybody to take much notice, even in areas which had once been considered to be safe, like St John’s Park and Union Square.

  The bald-headed man pressed his beard very close to Henry’s face, and said, ‘We’ll take whatever you have, sir; and you can retrieve it if you may from Alby Monihan, when you find him; and in recompense you can have this deed, and assay; and if it’s worth what Alby Monihan says it’s worth, why, you’ll be lucky; and if it isn’t, why, then you’ll have suffered no more than my cousin Quincy would have suffered.’

  The bald-headed man forced his hand into Henry’s coat pocket, and tugged out his wallet. Henry twisted furiously around, and punched the purple-faced fellow deep in his stomach; but it was so heavy and soft and sack-like, thirty accumulated years of whiskey and cornmeal mush and creamed crab, that all Henry could manage to do was to wind him; and force out a ‘huh!’ of liquor-flavoured breath. In return, the purple-faced fellow smacked Henry hard in the ear, and Henry banged his head against the architrave of the door, and cut his eyebrow.

  ‘Well, now!’ called the bald-headed man. ‘Here’s enough to pay back poor Quincy!’ He ripped all the bills our of Henry’s wallet, and stuffed them into his pocket, and then tossed the empty wallet on to the ground. ‘Here’s the deed,’ he said, ‘so that nobody can say that what we did here tonight wasn’t legal; and above-board. And here’s the assay, too.’ He thrust the documents into Henry’s waistcoat, and bowed, and said, ‘Good night to you, sir, whatever your name is. And let us trust that you and your companion will think twice before trying to skin any poor Southerners again.’