“What do you mean?” asked the potential juror, a white man in a blue suit.
“Have you seen Mr. Arbuckle’s films?”
“Yes.”
“Did you enjoy them?”
“I guess,” said the man.
Roscoe rolled his eyes.
“Can you tell the difference between the man who sits at that table and the character you saw on screen?”
“I should say so.”
“Do you believe Roscoe Arbuckle is just a funny, sloppy buffoon wandering his way into trouble but meaning no harm?”
“I only seen one picture, it was him at Coney Island, and he got hit in the head with a mallet.”
“Did you think it was funny?”
McNab walked toward the judge and held up his hand in a wait-a-minute motion. And Judge Louderback said, soft and bored, “Get on with it please, Mr. U’Ren.”
“I guess so,” the man said. “But I don’t think he’s anywhere as good as Charlie Chaplin.”
All the newspaper boys and Vigilant women had a real laugh at that, and even McNab had to smile. Roscoe reached for his hat and began to twirl. He raised his eyes up to watch McNab, who took over and walked that lawyerly walk, back and forth, pacing and thinking. Roscoe knocked out some indentions in his hat.
“I don’t know why we’re wasting your time, sir,” McNab said to the possible juror. “We have a self-constituted judge and jury already.”
Louderback looked down at McNab who looked out in the courtroom filled with newsboys and Vigilants. McNab looked back to the judge with an expression of Do I lie? He continued to walk and think, a man thrown from the proceedings trying to find which way was up. But it was all theatrical and done for show, and the gray ole dog had something to spring. Roscoe quit twirling the hat, his eyes now on McNab.
“Who is that man over there?” McNab said, pointing to Roscoe.
“Fatty Arbuckle.”
“Is he real?”
“Sir?”
“Is he real or a projection?’
“I don’t understand.”
“Answer the question,” McNab said. “Is he flesh and blood?”
“Yes, sir.”
“That will be all,” McNab said. He stood there before the judge, crossed his arms over his black suit. His craggy face and gray bristled head looking as if they were chiseled from granite. When two doors shut behind the juror, McNab turned to Judge Louderback and said in an easygoing tone, “Judge, I’d like to stop this foolishness and go ahead and make a motion to dismiss.”
“Motion denied.” Louderback didn’t even look up from his paperwork.
“Judge, it seems that the prosecution has so graciously consented to eliminate both the Golden Rule and Pontius Pilate from the proceedings.”
The newsboys snickered. The Vigilant women gasped and muttered.
U’Ren was a jackrabbit on his feet, pointing his long, crooked finger at McNab and saying, “If you think you can spit polish this once-successful motion picture star-”
“This whole thing is a frame-up, boy,” McNab said. “You put those showgirls in cold storage until they read a script you wrote.”
“He is a liar,” U’Ren said. “Judge, this is all a lot of poisonous gas for the benefit of the press.”
“Go ahead and proceed,” McNab said, standing firm. “And I’ll prove this city’s prosecutor intimidated witnesses.”
“And if you do,” U’Ren said, “I’ll resign.”
“Stop this,” Louderback said. “Bring in the next one.”
A deputy walked in a scrawny young man who held a cheap hat in his hand. His face was reddened and chapped from a poor shave. He nodded and smiled a lot, agreeable and friendly and, in some crazy way, wanting to be part of the circus. Roscoe watched him and liked him. He smiled over at the man. The man smiled back. The bastard U’Ren was still fuming over the exchange with McNab and didn’t even see it.
“Have you read much about this case?” U’Ren asked.
“Not much.”
“Has it been on your mind at all?”
“Not really. I work too much.”
“Has it been on your wife’s mind?”
“Sir, I don’t know my wife’s mind.”
And this brought another chorus of laughter from black-hatted Vigilants and newsboys alike. Roscoe clenched his jaw and looked over at Brennan, shaking his head. He was so glad he could still provide laughter for the goddamn masses.
THEY PICKED Up FREDDIE FISHBACK as soon as the gold elevator doors parted at the Palace Hotel and he wandered over to the tobacco stand to pick up a pack of Tuxedos. He was tall and well dressed, with the posture of an athlete but the rough, loping walk of a teenager, and for a moment Sam thought the man was surely drunk. Phil fell in stride beside Sam as Fishback followed Market Street, turning off immediately on Kearny and heading north. The men didn’t talk and there were enough people, even after nine, coming and going from the hotel and restaurant trade, that Fishback wouldn’t notice. Sam didn’t think the man would notice if they’d been hiking through the Salt Flats. The worst was when you had some fella window-shopping and taking in the sites, keen to new things, new people, maybe catching a glance of you in a store window.
He was taking long strides, lean and determined, and headed somewhere specific, maybe even a little late. Fishback checked his watch at least four times since leaving the Palace.
The fog was something terrible, wet clouds that hit Sam like a fist, and as he walked he cloaked his mouth with a bleached handkerchief. Fishback sped up, Sam slowed down. He felt like someone was squeezing him dry. Breaths came in sharp little spurts, ragged and small. A breath caught in his throat and wouldn’t spread. He felt light-headed, knees weak. It was a cold night, but Sam’s shirt had grown damp.
“You take him.”
“You okay?”
“I’ll try and catch up.”
Sam caught the firm edge of a brick town house. He tried to fill his bum lungs with cigarette smoke, the way pearl divers do with air before disappearing down into the depths. The smoke made him feel better, eased the breathing. He could hear the lungs, scarred and cracked, a wheezing in his throat. As he steadied himself, he could see inside the town house, where a man and a woman sat at a silver-set, linen-covered table. A negress appeared in the room, setting a large bowl of soup before a child, and the young boy clapped and clapped, his parents laughing, as the negress tucked a comically large napkin around his skinny neck and a silver spoon in his hand. The heat from the soup floated over the boy’s face like a phantom.
Sam found his feet and kept walking uphill, catching the top of Haultain’s hat as it crossed California, the men separated for seconds by a cable car. But then the cable car was gone, ringing off back down Nob Hill, and there was that big Stetson turning up on Grant and into Chinatown. Phil never looked back, kept an easy tail, and it was several blocks up Grant, all the way into the colony, that he found his partner under an Oriental lamp, a gold dragon wrapping the post, hat down in his eyes and a sly nod down the street. Sam overtook Phil now and they passed grocers with dead chickens hung by their feet and huge sacks of rice and long strands of dried peppers. Street hawkers yelled to the white men with silks; tiny yellow women called to Sam from the second and third floors of flophouses where laundry ran in tattered lines across black-holed alleys.
One woman called to Sam and threw down a key.