News that he had escorted a woman nobody knew to one of Captain Keogh’s cavalry drill picnics was quickly united to gossip that he had been seen at a gathering of anarchists in the Latin Quarter. More unfortunately, it coincided as well with the shooting death of a policeman, by “an anarchist, a Russian anarchist,” no less, with ties to forgers and, even more sensationally, white slavers. Permutations of the gossip and newspaper accounts occurred rapidly and unpredictably. They ranged from the patently ridiculous — Charles Minot was the white slaver and cop-killer — to the undeniably true: Charles Minot had attended Vera Kolessina’s self-styled “romantic and revolutionary” salon. But when he arrived at the shop the next day to take Vera once more to the Sutro Baths — just an ordinary fun-loving, life-loving young couple — and see, more professionally now, the line clear but porous, if she was ready to return to her role (which had been taken on admirably, as if almost always the case, by an understudy) she could not be found. Cool but imperious, he demanded news of her whereabouts from everybody he saw, but nobody he knew was to be found, either. He went without asking leave of the boy at the cash register — one of the Italians he had seen that first day? — who opened his mouth and raised his hand but said nothing and did not move, through the greasy red curtain, down the aisle of parts, and down the stairs into the basement. No one was there, either. He came back up and apologized to the boy for his rudeness. Then he stood outside, back against the window, scanning the street. After a few minutes, someone tapped the glass behind his head, and he turned, thinking it would be Vera’s face in the gloom he saw, as it had been the day before, but it was the Italian boy’s. He came outside and told Charles that he should not seek to find Vera. Warren Farnsworth had heard about the cavalry picnic and threatened to kill both of them if he found them together. The boy was quick to assure Charles that Warren would do no such thing, that he was a sad and passionate alcoholic but no killer, that he had had many opportunities for what everybody seemed to agree would be good murders, but had eschewed them all, flatly, without second thoughts. He would gladly break the kneecap of a scab, and facilitate acts of sabotage, but drew a very clear and porous line. Nevertheless, Vera was hiding. She did not want to see him, and had explicitly asked him to convey that wish with whatever emphasis it might require to penetrate his arrogant skull. His words, signore, his words! She was nobody’s girl and was sick to death of men in any case. What astonished Charles, when he went over it later, was how little he was moved by Vera’s rejection, how little he feared Farnsworth’s wrath. The boy asked him if he liked morphine and Charles said that he did not especially, but would get back to him.
Later he was standing next to the jitney bus of her friend Izzy Minkowski. It was empty and driverless, and he was waiting for that man to emerge from the throng. A blocky, dusty-looking man in a light suit and white fedora walked past several times. Charles tried not to notice him, but saw him often and clearly enough to think he must have suffered some kind of curse and was slowly turning to marble; the man’s eyes, not quite fully closed, gave the impression of the blindness of statues. He walked stiffly but surely, moving out of people’s ways, looking up and down the street they were on, and the one intersecting it.
Suddenly Vera was at his side, touching his arm.
“Oh, what shall we do,” she mock-wailed.
“Go back to the Presidio and bury Durwood Keogh up to his neck. Ride by and let the horse shit on him, I don’t know.”
“Bury Durwood Keogh and yes, sorry.?”
The street was loud.
“Never mind. Cavalry drill.”
“Yes, of course I know what you’re talking about, I just didn’t catch the end. Snap off his head like one of those poor chickens?”
Vera came around, faced him, looked at him with pointed noncommittality. The glance lingered and became a searching stare. Charles stared back at her as if his life depended on it, but Vera severed the connection after only a moment or two. Smoothing her hair, she spotted Minkowski muscling his way across the street. He was short and dark, square-headed with a pronounced five o’clock shadow and brilliantly oiled hair. They embraced soundlessly, pecking on both cheeks. Charles meanwhile was fighting off, or rather pretending to fight off while succumbing and finding incredible pleasure in, a plan to offer Vera huge sums of money, everything he could lay his hands on, to literally cross oceans and climb mountains for her, to even — he could not stop himself in time from this darker desire, this outright evil — kidnap her, take her to Kathmandu. or Iceland, yes Iceland, and make her a baroness of volcanoes and glaciers, because he could do that, or nearly so, he could do whatever he wanted in this ridiculous illusion of a world and what he wanted, what he wanted more than anything else he could imagine, wanted so badly he felt he was going to explode, was to be with Vera. After perhaps a minute of this mania, he began to calm down, but could not take his eyes off her lips.
“Let me ask you a question,” said Minkowski. “Are you leaving town before or after some sonofabitch gets shot in the head.”
Charles stiffened and Vera exclaimed that she was not leaving. Minkowski narrowed his eyes and nodded.
“This,” she said, “is the American you’ve heard so much about. Charles Minot, Iz Minkowski.”
Charles reached his fine aristocratic hand out a great distance to shake Minkowski’s huge dirty paw.
“Related to the grafter?” asked Minkowski. He held and shook hard and did not smile.
“Graft prosecutor,” Charles said, retrieving his hand with some effort.
“Wha’d I say?” Minkowski demanded.
“You said grafter,” explained Vera, as if her friend were about to fly off the handle.
“I did?” He seemed contrite but still would not smile.
Vera nodded and Charles smiled.
“I guess there’s no love lost between your old man and Keogh either, huh?” asked Minkowski.
“Not a great deal, no,” Charles admitted gravely, dropping the smile, at which Minkowski finally smiled and Charles sneezed, suddenly and without the faintest tickle of warning. He made a big show of it, happy to have some stage business, staggering a little with the force of it, wiping his nose with a flourish and inserting the handkerchief with exaggerated care back into his breast pocket. They walked the few steps to the little bus and Charles shook his pockets for nickels.
“Vera always rides free with me,” said Minkowski. He put his heavy hand on Charles’s arm. And squeezed. “And that goes for Vera’s friends too, see?” He looked back and forth between them, as if to ascertain what kind of friends they were — if in fact friends at all, despite everything he had heard. “Speaking of friends, how is Julie?”
“High as a kite.”
“I would be too. I would indeed be too.”
“How are things with you?” Vera asked Minkowski.
“Oh, fine, fine. Some dick tried to sign up for music lessons with Minnie Moody, you know, and another lunkhead has been trying to get a date with his sister. Moody’s sister, I mean,” laughed Minkowski. “You never know about these shitsuckers. Brother, they are comical. Can you see it? This thug trying to come off like a handsome rake, when it’s clear as the busted veins in his great fucking honker of a nose and the stinking derby on his tiny head that he’s a drunken bully, ignorant and mean like they all are.” Minkowski now sneezed but appeared not to notice. “And how about his pal the gorilla at the keyboard. Can’t you see it? ‘Chopsticks’? ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’?”