Wilde West Part 7

"Morning, Tom." Grigsby yawned. The air was cold; he felt its chill through his woolen shirt, his leather vest. Behind McKinley the houses were taking on form and color in the early morning light. There had been a time once when Grigsby had actually enjoyed this part of the day.

"Grady tole me to come talk to you," McKinley said. "He said you wanted to know if sumpin happens to a hooker." He looked off warily to his right.

Grigsby was suddenly wide awake. "What happened?"

"Molly Woods." He looked off warily to his left. "You know her? She got cut up sumpin awful, Grady says. They already sent for Greaves."

"Molly Woods? Lives down by the river?"

"Yes sir. You hurry, you can get there before he does."

Grigsby nodded. "I owe you, Tom."

McKinley shook his head. "Jesus, Marshal, how'd you know?"

"Hunch."

"Grady says he never saw anything like it. He says there was pieces of her all over the place, like-"

"All right, Tom. I'll be going now."

McKinley remembered himself, looked furtively down the street again. "Greaves asks you, it wasn't me what tole you. Right?"

"Absolutely. I'm obliged, Tom. You get on back now."

As McKinley bustled off, obviously relieved to be leaving, Grigsby closed the door. He lifted his gunbelt off the coatrack, slung it around his hips, buckled it closed. Reflexively, out of years of habit, he adjusted the big Colt in its holster, slid it out a few inches, let it fall back, loose and ready.

He slipped his sheepskin jacket from the rack, wrestled it on.

Brenda wandered into the parlor. Grigsby had completely forgotten that she was in the house.

"Who was it, Bob?" she asked him. She drew the front of the robe more tightly around her heavy b.r.e.a.s.t.s.

"Business," he told her.

"You're leavin' now?"

"Yep," he said, hooking the last of the leather loops over the topmost staghorn b.u.t.ton.

She nodded. "'M I gonna see you later?"

He frowned. "You already asked me, Brenda. I don't know. I got a lot of work."

"Sure," she said. "Sure, Bob. I understand." She shrugged. "Well," she said. "You know where I live." She smiled a small smile, somehow sad and hopeful at the same time.

Grigsby put on his hat. Sooner or later he had to end this thing with Brenda, once and for all. For her sake. "Right," he said. "See you."

It took Grigsby five minutes to reach the livery stable, another five to saddle up the big roan.

The shantytown along the North Platte was a part of Denver that the men of the Chamber of Commerce never mentioned in those advertis.e.m.e.nts they took out in the eastern newspapers. Most of the eastern travelers pa.s.sing through town never saw it, never knew that it existed. The locals knew, but except for those who lived in it, and who had no choice, none of them ever came here.

It was a neighborhood for people who had no choice-people who had run through all their choices, or tossed them all away, or people who had never had much of a choice to begin with. Italians recruited by the railroads, paid a starvation wage for a while, and then laid off. Negroes escaping the South and discovering, years after the War, a new kind of slavery. Swedes and Norwegians and their families who came looking for work and for clean mountain air, and who found typhoid, cholera, and pneumonia. And the women: widows, abandoned wives, unwanted daughters, farm girls who had once been pregnant and desperate and who now, after years of abuse, weren't girls any more and didn't have the energy to be desperate.

Gathered here, huddled in ramshackle shanties of tarpaper and sc.r.a.pwood, they were the refuse tossed aside by the city as it grew fat and sleek on the money from the mines and the ranches, the smelters and the stockyards.

Grigsby hated the place. Here the light never grew brighter than the bleakness of dusk: day and night a blanket of smelter smoke obscured the sky. Soot lay everywhere, clung to everything; in winter the snow was the color of ashes. In summer the winds brought the grime and the dust billowing up off the rutted roadbeds in choking black clouds; in spring and fall the same roads became narrow swamps of black glutinous muck.

The last rain had been a week ago, but the hooves of Grigsby's horse made dull sucking sounds as the animal plodded down Curlew Street. Trash littered the mud: tin cans, whiskey bottles, sc.r.a.ps of paper, a dead cat. Thin, whey-faced children, bundled up against the cold in tattered rags, watched him from the sidewalks with big dark eyes that were as shiny, and as blank, as marbles. The adults-some of them trudging slowly past, some stiffly leaning, arms folded, against the greasy wooden walls-had eyes that were blanker still.

Three Denver policemen stood huddled together on the sidewalk outside Molly Woods's small frame shack, the blue of their uniforms looking black in the murky light. They were silent, their hands buried in the pockets of their coats, their breath puffs of white in the chill, still air. None of them looked at the others.

A small knot of shantytown locals, four or five battered-looking men, two battered-looking women, everyone dressed in shades of gray, stood off to the left, watching and waiting.

Grigsby reined in the roan, swung himself down, felt the mud squirm beneath his boots. His right leg wobbled slightly-the hip was acting up again, pain knifing from the pelvis down the thigh bone. Pretty soon his riding days would be over. It would be buckboards for him then, and then the rocker on the front steps, and then the coffin.

He tied the reins to a sagging wooden rail and, holding himself deliberately upright, walking through the pain, climbed up onto the sidewalk.

The three policemen nodded; they all knew him.

"Gerry," he said, nodding first to the oldest, Sergeant Hanrahan. Then, to the others, "Zack. Carl."

The sergeant spoke for all three: "Bob. How'd you hear?"

"Little bird told me. Greaves get here yet?"

Hanrahan shook his head. His round face was red, but not from the cold. It was always red. "Hill's a long way off," he said. Capitol Hill, where Greaves lived, was Denver's most expensive residential district. "'Specially this early of a mornin'."

Grigsby jerked his head toward Molly Woods's shack. "Bad?"

Hanrahan took in a deep breath, blew it out between pursed lips, shook his head. "Jesus, Bob. He was crazy, whoever did it. Ye can't even tell who she was. What she was. Ye knew her, did ye?"

"To talk to."

The sergeant shook his head. "Makes it worse."

Grigsby glanced at the other policemen. Zack Tolliver was all right-slow, no genius, but honest and dependable. And he hated Greaves. Carl Hacker was one of Greaves's pets, a bootlicker and a liar. But he was gutless. Without Greaves around, he was no threat and no problem. Grigsby looked back at Hanrahan. "I'm going in."

Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Hacker turn to the sergeant.

Hanrahan's face was expressionless. "Now why is that, Bob?"

"Somethin' I'm working on."

Hanrahan shrugged. "City business, Bob. No federal jurisdiction, don't ye know. Greaves won't care for it."

Grigsby smiled. "Guess I just don't give a s.h.i.t, Gerry."

Hanrahan looked at him for a moment, finally nodded. "Guess ye don't." He pulled a small tin flask from his pocket, held it out. "Better have yourself a taste first. Ye'll be needin' the help of it."

Grigsby accepted the flask and unscrewed its cap. He drank some of the whiskey-Irish, and good-then screwed the cap back and handed the flask over to Hanrahan. "Thanks. I won't touch anything in there."

Hanrahan returned the flask to his pocket. "I know that, Bob."

Grigsby nodded again, then turned to the door of Molly Woods's shack. The doork.n.o.b was cold. He twisted it, pushed open the door, and stepped inside.

THAT WEDNESDAY MORNING, WHEN Oscar awoke, he wished that he were dead.

His mouth was dry and grainy, his forehead felt heavy and hairy and sloped and hideously ridged at the eyebrows, like an orangutang's.

With the window shade down, the curtains drawn together, the room was dim and funereal. Which suited him perfectly.

Another night with Elizabeth McCourt Doe like last night, and probably he would be dead.

She and Tabor had come to the dressing room after the lecture. She had looked-impossibly-even more ravishing and radiant than he remembered her, and Oscar had marveled that the cramped little room could contain, without bursting, two souls so extraordinary as his and hers.

He had marveled, too, when he discovered that his own ebullient good nature extended even to Horace Tabor. Tonight the silver baron seemed so amiable, so childlike and uncomplicated, so exuberant about the lecture (which surely suggested a sliver or two of sound taste buried beneath that awful American vulgarity), that only a boor could have disliked the man. A bit on the uncomplicated side, certainly. But that was nature, not nurture; and none of us can choose our parents. And if he were perhaps a tad preoccupied with the world of commerce, he was also honest, forthright, and totally without malice. Not a bad sort at all. Salt of the earth, actually.

What a wonderful world it was, brimful with people who were either fascinating or genial; or with people who, like himself (and Elizabeth McCourt Doe, of course), were both. The best of all possible worlds it was. Poor Pangloss was right.

And the best thing of all in this best of all possible worlds was the secret love he shared with Elizabeth McCourt Doe. And precisely because it was secret, isolate, it would remain forever pure.

When she shook his hand in farewell, she pressed into it a folded square of paper. He pocketed the paper by reaching into his jacket pocket for his cigarette case, as smoothly as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life.

After they left, and while Henry, behind him, cleaned away the dressing table, he removed the paper and opened it.

Tonight at one-thirty. The north corner of Lincoln and Washington Streets.

Inside Oscar's tweed trousers, Freddy Phallus stirred expectantly.

He had supped with von Hesse and the Countess-selecting from the limited menu a rather dismal ragout (one more bloodsoaked steak and he would begin to howl like a wolf) and he had been brilliant. The Countess had laughed merrily as she tossed her shiny blond curls, and even von Hesse had interrupted his methodical chewing and permitted himself a crisp Teutonic smile or two. After the German left the table to use the washroom, Mathilde had leaned toward Oscar and put her delicate hand along his arm.

"Oscair," she smiled, "you are a veritable devil. You must tell me. Who is she?"

He hid his surprise behind a frown, "Whatever do you mean?"

She smiled again. "You know very well what I mean. La Femme. Only a woman could have produced this remarkable change. You are positively enthusiastic. I find it charming, of course, but also entirely intriguing."

"My dear Countess," he said, looking levelly into her eyes, "if I act any differently tonight, this is only because the evening lecture went so well. There is no woman, I a.s.sure you." He smiled ruefully; a nice touch, he thought. "Would that it were so."

"Ah," she said. "I understand. She is married. Wonderful! Not another word, then. Only this." She leaned still closer, lowered her voice to a smoky whisper, and murmured in French, "Always continue to deny. Even if he confronts you, the brute of a husband. Even if he discovers you en flagrante, you understand me? If you never waver, even for a moment, he will begin to doubt the evidence of his own eyes. I promise you that this is true."

Oscar laughed.

Later, as he lay fully clothed atop the bed in his room, he teased and tortured himself with memories of Elizabeth McCourt Doe. Visions, pink-tipped and t.i.tian-tufted, twirled across his brain. He heard her laughter, her sighs and moans. He felt the shiver of her flesh.

And when he opened his eyes, found himself alone in the small, drab room, he experienced within an aching emptiness, a pain at once appalling and delicious. Before he met her, he had thought himself whole, entire; now he discovered that he was merely half a being, a tattered fragment of a soul, yearning wildly, desperately, for that which would complete it.

The refrain of an old Irish love song kept repeating itself back in some musty, misty corner of his mind. Do not forget, love, do not grieve, for the heart is true and it can't deceive. My heart and soul I will give to thee, so farewell my love and remember me.

Irish love songs. Nothing in the history of literature was more perfectly contrived to bring a tear to the eye, or a sneer to the lip. He was becoming pathetic. Soon he would be plucking the petals off daisies, loves me, loves me not, and walking blindly into walls.

He was mooning and swooning about like a provincial schoolboy.

He was twenty-seven years old, a grown man in full possession of all his limbs and organs (indeed yes!) and all his faculties.

But, G.o.d in heaven, the woman was like no other he had ever met.

He slipped her note from his pocket. He opened it, inhaled the dark, exhilarating, remembered scent that clung faintly to the paper.

Tonight at one-thirty. The north corner of Lincoln and Washington Streets.

(He had possessed the foresight to ask the desk clerk-with a towering nonchalance-where these particular avenues might happen to converge.) Her unparalleled grace and intelligence were obvious even in this simple missive. Not a word wasted, each doing its job in a simple, straightforward manner. The north corner: how sublimely specific. Really, how altogether admirable.

And the handwriting itself-it was as uncluttered and spare, as pure of line, as j.a.panese calligraphy.

He tugged free his pocket watch. Eleven-thirty. Two hours yet.

Where was she now? What was she doing at exactly this moment? Why was it necessary for them to wait until one-thirty? Why was his mind suddenly achurn with idiotic questions?

How wearisome this love business actually was. The endless waiting, the endless wanting, the endless futile fantasizing. No wonder that lovers were forever quaffing poison and leaping from bridges. Anything to relieve the tedium.

Would she like London?

Of course she would. A woman of instinctive cultivation, of natural, inborn refinement, how could she help but like the most cultivated and refined city (excepting Paris) in the world? And together the two of them would become its leading lights-arbiters, because paragons, of fashion. They would amaze and dazzle with their taste and flair. Their house, perhaps a small Georgian on Grosvenor Square, would become a legendary gathering place for the cognoscenti.

A few small obstacles did loom on the horizon, admittedly.

Money, for a start. Where exactly would they find the lucre to support this enlightened existence?

Two can live as cheaply as one.

Yes, so long as one of them doesn't eat.

His play. Vera. It would be produced. All he needed was the agreement of that wretched woman in New York who labored under the misapprehension that she was an actress.

First New York, great success, his name emblazoned across the marquee, Jimmie Whistler gnawing his liver in a paroxysm of envy back in London; and then the West End. Money gushing into Grosvenor Square. He could burn the stuff to light his cigarettes.

Yes. Convince her. Tonight. Convince her to leave Tabor, a decent chap certainly but clearly wrong for her. Convince her to leave Denver, come along to finish up the tour, and then sail with him for England. Together, they would burn their bridges behind them.

But what about Mother? How would she react to a daughter-in-law who was not only American, which was accidental and therefore possibly forgivable, but also penniless? Which to Mother was an indication of willful stupidity.

We'll burn that bridge when we come to it.

He smiled. He rolled over, lifted his fountain pen from the notebook lying atop the mattress, opened the book, and wrote: Burn that bridge when we come to it.

At one-thirty he had been waiting on the north corner of Lincoln and Washington Streets for three quarters of an hour. It was an empty, cold, and exceptionally inhospitable intersection. The wind moaned over the rooftops of grim brick buildings, mournfully, drearily, as though it had been reading d.i.c.kens. The air was chill. A skein of hard white stars winked overhead: so distant, so frigid, so utterly indifferent to the fate of Man that finally they had become quite irritating.

He heard the hurried clop of horses' hooves against hard-packed earth, heard the clack and rattle of a carriage. Looked up and saw the animals, two of them, suddenly appear at the corner in an insane gallop. Coal-black flanks agleam in the yellow light of the streetlamp, they dragged behind them a small black hansom that careened to the left as it reeled in its turn.