We turn a corner, and a dirty carpet of an avenue unrolls before us. Nathan slows to avoid a collision with a drunkard. “Welcome to Collins Street, where you can get your boots dirty and your pockets clean at the same time.”
Vice dens huddle as if conspiring, the crooked teeth of an upper and lower jaw. At the end of the street, a church stands like the final molar, so you can swill and then rinse clean in two easy steps. We skirt around a group of men, black and white, throwing dice, and street sellers hawking enhancement oils and sticks of black opium.
“So, where did you grow up, Miss Kuan?”
“Just Jo is fine.”
When I don’t say more, Nathan’s eyebrows become question marks. “Who are your parents?” he tries again.
“Mr. Bell, I realize as a reporter it is in your nature to get to the bottom of things. But you will need to stick to questions of a more general nature.”
“Fair enough. Generally, who are your parents?”
I hide a smile and shake my head, trying not to breathe in the stench of stale tobacco, human sweat, and waste.
“What about questions of a highly specific nature. Like, what is your favorite word?”
“Hullaballoo,” I lie. I would never admit to Nathan that it’s actuallybesotted. “I like how it makes your mouth move around. If I guess your favorite word, will you stop moving your mouth around?”
“How could you possibly guess? There are so many words.”
“Quixotic.” After Mr. Bell read the story of Don Quixote to him, Nathan spent a whole year proclaiming everything from the way his bread crumbs stuck to his shirt to the way certain flies don’t budge even when you blow at them quixotic.
“How did you—?”
“Mouth is still moving.”
He quiets, though his face is still loud with disbelief. I should not arouse suspicion. “It was a guess. I do read theFocus, as I told you, and you overuse the word.”
He stops before a lavender Victorian. Up close, the paint is peeling, and the gray trim appears to have once been white, a color likely to cause great disappointment in a railroad city.
A leprechaun of a man with a small hill of a nose peels himself off the porch post. He leers, and the cigarette pursed in his lips droops, raining down ash. While we ascend the stairs, he swaggers down with a gait much wider than a man his size should take. “Enjoy that pretty bit of arse,” he drops in a rough brogue, and then laughs.
“Enjoy...?” The words catch up to Nathan. He wheelsaround, midstep, and begins to storm back down the stairs after the leprechaun, but I grab his arm.
The front door has opened, revealing a middle-aged woman solidly packed into a pin-striped dress. Her white skin is even paler under a thick dusting of powder. “I recognize you,” she tells Nathan in a voice that sounds as scratched as old soles. “The ladies loved you last time you came.”
Nathan tears his attention from the departing man, and with a flush blooming on his face, he clears his throat. “Good evening, Madam Delilah. May I introduce—”
“Jo Kuan. I am here to see Billy Riggs.”
The madam’s bloodshot eyes slide up my lampshade dress to my face, and then shrink. “Wait here.” She closes the door.
Bear’s tail swats at the porch.
“Come here often?” I can’t resist asking.
Nathan frowns. “I came here to investigate. Didn’t get very far.” He refocuses on the door, on which I notice two carved squares, a cleaner version of the carving on the curly oak.
“What do the dice mean?” I ask.
He rolls back on his heels and the floor protests. “That four-five combination is a Jesse James in craps.”
“The outlaw?”
Nathan nods. “He was killed by a forty-five caliber pistol. Billy thinks himself a better outlaw than Jesse.”
“Better as in more virtuous?” Despite his being a train robber and a violent murderer, some considered Jesse James a folk hero who gave his plunder to the poor.
