“Cops ain’t gonna help you none.” He spits. But he shoulders a case and follows her down the alley. He deposits her purchases on the floor of the hall, one by one, sweat and anger rolling off his skin.
She watches him, tapping her toe. She reaches into her feedbag purse for the mollie knife, closes her fingers over the smooth little shaft. The mollie knife is mostly intended for mending and healing, but she can hurt him with it if she has to. Hurt him bad. She can also aim the side of her hand against his windpipe and really hurt him bad. And to think she was going to tip him. She says instead, “Get out.”
All over the glimpse of her pink silk stocking.
* * *
Zhu steps into the kitchen of the Parisian Mansion.
“How you, miss?” Chong, Jessie’s chef at the Mansion, abandons his huge cast-iron pot boiling with wide flat ribbons of lasagne noodles and comes to inspect her delivery. A wiry, shrunken fellow with a graying queue that reaches to the backs of his knees when he unwinds it from around his head, Chong’s usual expression is dour. Now he positively scowls. “Miss Malone want me cook Eye-talian. I no cook Eye-talian. French my special!”
“I know, Chong. But you know Miss Malone. Once she gets something in her head.”
Chong’s scowl deepens. Even Zhu, Miss Malone’s right-hand girl, can’t save him. He scurries back to his pot, cursing softly. Chong is one of the finest French chefs in San Francisco, hired away from Marchand’s. Jessie covers her overhead at the Mansion with the girls, but she makes her real profit from the food and drink. The Mansion has a culinary reputation, along with its other reputation. Chong’s specialty is terrapin in heavy cream, sweet butter, and sherry cooked in its own shell with a certain spice Chong will not reveal. Jessie traditionally serves Chong’s terrapin at 4:00 A.M., along with sentimental songs on the calliope, after the gentlemen are well soused and sexed.
“Five dollars for a tiny dish of turtle meat?” Zhu asked, scandalized when she first observed this ritual. “Never mind that this species of turtle will be endangered in less than a century and will never be seen on menus again.”
“In danger,” Jessie said. “In danger of what?”
“That must be a thousand percent markup.”
“Jar me, missy,” Jessie said, furrowing her brow. “We gotta make a profit.”
Now Zhu inspects the large immaculate kitchen. Chong’s sideboard is stacked with zucchini and yellow squash, Roma tomatoes, sacks of every kind of dried noodle known to North Beach, casks of olive oil, salmon and crabs dripping with bay water, a saddle of veal, a side of beef, fat garlic bulbs, bunches of scallions, bouquets of oregano and basil fresh from the farms in Cow Hollow, wheels of Parmesan cheese. Chong can cook anything, French or otherwise. He’d be a celebrity chef in Zhu’s Now.
She goes to the parlor, dreading what she’ll see. She hears tinny chords from the calliope, but everything else is still and deserted. Not much business this time of day. Stale tobacco smoke clogs the room. She wrinkles her nose at the stink of spilled booze mingled with the animal scent of sweat and semen. The spittoons are spattered and slick, the ashtrays overflowing.
Another busy night, apparently, and no one has freshened the place up. This is definitely not acceptable. Zhu storms down the hall to the bedroom where the parlor maid sleeps. The biz is the biz, as Jessie says. Zhu raps sharply on the door. “Myrtle.” Silence. “Myrtle?”
She tries the door, swings it open. A rustle of bedclothes, soft laughter. Myrtle is a black woman who trained for service at the Palace Hotel, but she’s much younger and wilder than Mariah. Zhu peers in. Myrtle is trying to hide another body on the bed beside her. Zhu doesn’t want to know and doesn’t much care.
“You’d better attend to the parlor before Miss Malone shows up,” Zhu says. “She’ll tan your hide.”
She doesn’t wait for Myrtle’s answer and returns to the parlor, fuming. Red velvet curtains are drawn over the windows, shielding all but a sliver of sunshine. The lamp with the scarlet shade is turned down low. The city has forbidden red lights over the doors of sporting houses, so Jessie—and every other madam in town—has resorted to placing the table lamp with its scarlet shade by the window and tossing lacy undergarments over the telegraph wires outside. The parlor has a tired, overused