IV
SOMEBODY’S WATCHING

“I never be a live-in.”

“No, no, you’ll still sleep in your attic. It’s only day nursing I’m talking—”

“I prefer factory.”

Blanche gnaws her lip and carries P’tit into the bedroom without another word. She examines his puny armpits. At least all the patient sponging with ice water has cleared up the rash. She’s going to stay in here until the young woman’s finished the dishes and tidied up, because if Blanche starts a fight and Gudrun walks out, there’ll be no one even to carry the chamber pots down to the drain in the hall.

The long Monday drags by. All P’tit seems fond of is his wretched doorknob. But he’ll accept other things if Blanche puts them to his rash-rimmed mouth: bottles of milk, meat broth, bread pap out of a duck-shaped feeding boat. And of course his sugar tit, the little cloth bag of honeycomb (recommended by an American grocer) that she’s tied to his sheet. P’tit lies there in his padded trunk, mouthing the sweetness. His spatulate limbs swim in a spasmodic way that Blanche finds not at all human.

He sicks half his meals up, but Blanche grits her teeth and reminds herself that that must be because his stomach isn’t used to ample feeding or because something’s gone down the wrong way, making him cough till he convulses. His diapers overflow with brown liquid, and the stinking pile is rising. No one’s hauled it to the laundry above Hop Yik’s because Blanche forgot to ask Gudrun before the girl marched off to the shirt factory.

Blanche stares at P’tit. Harm has been done. She’s convinced that Madame knew exactly what she was doing when she sent P’tit to Folsom Street at barely a month old. What was the plan, for him to snuff it, natural-like, and be no further trouble to the Lively Flea? It’s astonishing that P’tit has survived his first year on earth. No wonder he’s … well, damaged goods. “Though doing well, considering,” Blanche says out loud, with hollow cheer.

For answer, P’tit farts, sailor-style, and braces his swollen stomach with a look that—she’s already learned to recognize—signals a violent squirting. “Don’t leak on the sofa,” she pleads, rushing to pick him up in time.

He can see her, at least. Blanche is sure of that much now. His hearing, she’s not so certain about. The tiny hollows of his ears seem gummed up with wax, but when she tried to dig it out with the tiny spoon from the salt dish this morning, he started wheezing with distress. Her guess is that he can hear but he’s doing his best to ignore her. When Blanche roars at him, he startles and cries, and she feels awful. He’s come to tolerate her carrying him about the apartment—in fact, seems to rather prefer it to being left in his trunk—but can’t bear anything in the nature of a caress. The few times his father’s picked him up, P’tit’s puked on his cravat or all over the ring—black onyx set in gold, with a scarab motif—that Blanche bought Arthur the first time she earned a hundred dollars in a single night.

She passes the hours yawning and wondering what—if anything—is going on behind that bulging forehead. P’tit’s face remains closed, except when it pinches up in agitation. He hasn’t had much to smile about, she supposes. But the bad times are over, doesn’t he realize that? Or at least the worst times. He’s home now, with Maman, in the best apartment in the building. He could make some effort …

By evening, the heat of the day has thickened like a smell. P’tit finally falls into a snuffling doze in her locked arms.

A tap at the door. Has Arthur gotten so cockeyed he’s dropped his keys somewhere? Blanche hoists the sleeping child and walks over to open it.

Jenny Bonnet, the pool of purple around her eye faded to greenish yellow, the swelling gone down. It was only two days ago when the thug walloped her chez Durand, Blanche calculates. That was in Blanche’s old life, before she brought P’tit home.

Jenny’s loose suit is flecked with mud, and there’s a sack over her shoulder. “Hi,” she says, with a grin. “Hungry?”

Blanche’s first impulse is to slam the door in the woman’s face.

But she’s desperate for some lively company. Someone who sees her as something other than a vehicle or a bottle filler; someone who doesn’t wail at the sight of her face. And the fact is, if Jenny hadn’t asked Blanche those nosy questions then P’tit would still be in that dark room at Doctress Hoffman’s. And Blanche, for all her crabbed mood, can’t wish that. So she steps back.

Jenny strolls into the salon. “That your little fellow visiting?”

“We’ve …” Taken him back? No, that sounds as if Blanche and Arthur gave him away almost a year ago. “He’s staying here. That eye’s on the mend,” she remarks, to change the subject.

“I heal like all get-out,” boasts Jenny. “How’s the leg?”

Blanche half laughs. Her thigh, bruised from the collision with Jenny’s high-wheeler. “I haven’t had time to notice.”

Jenny’s taking off her jacket and waistcoat, quite at home.

“Bet you’re glad to shed a few of those stifling layers,” says Blanche.

“Says you, trudging around in a bustle even when there’s no one but a baby to see you!”

Blanche grins, granting the point. “Any news of the world?”

Blanche laughs too, picturing it; how awful for the girl.

“You know next door’s boarded up?” says Jenny, jerking her head that way.

Her face stiffens with alarm. “Number eight thirteen? The boardinghouse?”

“Must be scores of poor saps in there. Six weeks of risking fines or lockup if they so much as step outside. And when it’s Chinatown, the health inspectors rush to conclusions. I heard of one boy on Bush Street they dragged off to the hospital with a bad case of pimples.”

A laugh escapes Blanche, startlingly deep. It makes P’tit leap as if he’s been touched by Madame Electra at a fair. “Chut,” she whispers, rocking him back to sleep.

“This epidemic’s given the authorities an excuse for playing the heavy with undesirables,” remarks Jenny, setting her Colt on her folded jacket. “Cursing’s banned now, did you hear? So’s having the DTs, flying kites …”

“Kites? Surely not.”

“Hey. Trust a jailbird to know the law to the letter.” She holds out her hands. “Give us a look, then.”

A look at what? Then Blanche realizes she means P’tit. “Bring that lamp,” she says, leading the way into the bedroom.

Blanche lays him down on his back in his trunk, an inch at a time.

He sleeps on, spread-eagled on his grubby sheet in the pool of light. Nothing innocent about his severe little face.

“Pretty homely,” Blanche whispers so the visitor won’t think she’s blinded by maternal feeling.

Jenny doesn’t contradict her.

“A year old, you said? Looks half that,” murmurs Jenny.

P’tit’s bowed legs curve inward; his feet have found each other.

“Well, he can move all his limbs, anyhow.”

“He’s deformed.” Blanche says it out loud to hear how it sounds.

Again, Jenny doesn’t say no. “Rickets.”

Blanche doesn’t know this English word. “What’s—”

A shrug. “That’s what it’s called when they look like that.”

A jolt of relief, powerful as whiskey in her veins. “Then there are other babies who look like this?”

“The ones who don’t get enough,” Jenny clarifies.

“Enough what?”

“Whatever they need. Don’t know what it is, just how it looks when they go without it.”

And what makes Jenny an expert on babies? Blanche wonders with sudden fury. “His stomach was always round, on visits,” she protests.

Jenny grimaces. “That’s just wind.” She’s bending over P’tit now, fingering his broad ankles and wrists.

“Don’t disturb him,” snaps Blanche.

“Just checking for lines.”

Lines? Doesn’t everyone have lines at wrist and ankle, creases at every point where the limbs need to bend?

“Weals, you know, if they’ve tied them to the beds.”

“He can barely sit up, they wouldn’t have—” Tears, with no warning; Blanche clamps her hand over her eyes to stop them. Why now? Why hasn’t she been crying for her sickly, unsmiling baby all these past months?

That’s such cold comfort, Blanche almost laughs. Her son’s bones are misshapen, his muscles wasted away to nothing from lying jammed in a corner in that stifling chamber on Folsom Street. He’s stunted. And though Blanche can think of several people to blame, her own name is at the top of the list.

“He’ll mend,” says Jenny. “Corkscrew?”

“What?”

“I need your corkscrew,” she says, pulling a bottle out of her satchel.

“You said he’ll mend,” cries Blanche, grabbing her by the sleeve. “How do you—”

“I’m only guessing,” says Jenny.

Blanche wants to punch her in the eye.

“Most things do.”

“Do what?” demands Blanche.

“Mend.”

She stares at Jenny.

“Sooner or later. One way or another. Now can I open this sherry?”

Blanche takes a long breath.

At the deal table, they sip from their glasses.

She should eat something while the baby’s asleep, she tells herself. Is there any of that cassoulet that Arthur brought back last night? She wonders whether she can stomach it cold and save herself the bother of heating it up over the spirit lamp.

“You mean to keep him here for good now, your P’tit?” Jenny asks.

Blanche nods. “We’ll hire a nursemaid. We’ll be a proper family at last,” she says, to convince herself.

“A proper family. Oh, that’s a guarantee of happiness right there,” says Jenny, sardonic.

“Gone to the devil, mostly! Are yours still in Paris?”

“They don’t even know about the baby,” admits Blanche. “But yours, are—”

A wail goes up from the bedroom. Jaw tight, Blanche trudges in. P’tit’s scraping at where his hair meets his neck. He freezes at the sight of her. Stares as if he’s never seen anything stranger. Then his eyes slide off to a corner of the room, chasing shadows.

Like it or not, I’m all you’ve got. The accidental rhyme jangles in Blanche’s head. She scoops him up efficiently, turning his face from hers as she walks back to the salon. His diaper’s still dry, at least. “Hold him a minute?” Without waiting for an answer, she dumps him in Jenny’s arms and goes to the lavatory.

Just to splash her eyes with water from the jug. Just to rest her head against the door. The truth is, Blanche would like to stay shut in here for a week. If someone would take P’tit off her hands for only an hour, even, carry him out of hearing range so she could get some sleep … but Jenny’s not that kind of woman.

When Blanche finally comes out, however, Jenny’s lit the stove and is sautéing garlic in a casserole dish. The smell is glorious. She’s got P’tit propped against the wall with cushions and she’s trilling what sounds like a Creole song in his direction, accompanied by loud finger clicks and exaggerated faces. “‘Chapeau sur côté, Musieu Bainjo—’” She mimes the dandy’s rakishly tilted hat. “‘La canne à la main, Musieu Bainjo—’” The twirling cane. “‘Botte qui fait crin crin, Musieu Bainjo—’” The squeaky new boots. Her voice surprises Blanche again with its lightness. “Enjoys his music, don’t he?” Jenny remarks, breaking off the song.

Does he? Blanche nods, as if of course she’s noticed that. But P’tit’s gaze still seems blank to her. The fact is, it hasn’t occurred to her to sing to the baby in the day and a half she’s had him here.

Blanche tries not to think about the other weeklies in their dark room, the ones it wasn’t her business to rescue. The ones whose parents no doubt have their reasons, reasons that seem good enough to them. And, oh Christ, the paid-ups … the ones she never actually saw but whose images torment her anyway. Now Blanche remembers what she dreamed last night in one of the little stretches of sleep P’tit let her have: that she was back in that house on Folsom holding a pillow and running from crib to crib, pressing it down on each face, leaning hard, snuffing out these abominable half-lives.

Her stomach rumbles, bringing her back to the present. She breathes in the warm aroma of the garlic. “What’s going into that?”

“Frog legs, of course, fricasseed with sherry.” Jenny stirs with a sure hand. She pulls a blotchy creature—five inches long—out of her sack. It strokes the air convulsively. “Ever met a California red-leg?”

“Not close up and moving,” says Blanche, making a face. “Why aren’t its legs red?”

“Reddish, wouldn’t you say?” Jenny holds the frog closer to Blanche, who squirms away. “Redder than other frogs’, anyhow.”

With its dark mask, the red-leg has the look of a bandit. Prominent ridges rise from hips to eyes. “They’re horribly like us,” Blanche remarks. “Fingers, toes …”

“Ten toes, but only eight fingers,” Jenny points out. “He’s a handsome fellow, don’t you think?”

Blanche giggles. “How do you know it’s a he?”

“Slightly thicker arms and thumbs …”

Jenny works on, skinning and bisecting, throwing each pale pair of legs into the bubbling pot. “They can jump twenty times their length, did you know that? But their best trick is turning from tadpole to frog. Last summer I lay by a pond all day and watched one.” Her eyes are alight. “In the morning she was a little algae-sucking wriggler. I saw her grow legs, bulging eyes, a long sticky tongue to catch prey and a big jaw to swallow it, a pair of throat sacs she could inflate like rubber balloons …”

Jagged sobs from P’tit, who’s slumped sideways, off his cushions; his face is now pressed to the skirting board. Blanche sighs and picks him up. Too much to ask for, to have a bite to eat in peace, or a conversation.

“By sunset,” says Jenny, “she was unrecognizable. A brand-new creature.”

Blanche hums an old circus tune, swaying from side to side.

P’tit does seem to enjoy that, or at least not object to it.

Jenny echoes the melody. “What’s that?”

“Just the waltz they always played for the trapeze act.” She swings P’tit, exaggerating her knee dips like some cracked old diva.

Jenny shakes the pan of frogs. “Do you miss your old life?”

Blanche looks up, forcing her eyes away from that nasty rash on P’tit’s hairline. Need Jenny ask? How could Blanche not miss the liberty she’s had all these months while P’tit’s been on Folsom Street? She’s paying for that freedom now, like a debt to some backstreet moneylender.

“Oh.” A long moment, while Blanche considers this different question. “I rather miss the horses.”

Jenny nods. “What was your favorite act?”

“Ah, that would have to be the Courier of Saint Petersburg.” Blanche smiles, reminiscing. “I rode in straddling two cantering horses—one wearing the flag of Russia, one the Union Jack. Then another horse came up behind with the Prussian flag and ran between the two I was standing on …”

“As you spread your legs a little further for the edification of the house?” sniggers Jenny.

“I gathered up the reins off its back,” says Blanche, miming it, “and next came one representing Holland, then Belgium … then finally—to patriotic cheers—France!”

“What did you wear to compete with your six dandified horses?”

“A jockey costume. Till takings were down,” Blanche remembers, “and our Monsieur Loyal put me in fleshings and a tiny skirt.”

“So … from bareback dancing to the brand of legwork you do at the House of Mirrors,” Jenny comments, “that doesn’t sound like very much of a leap. You’re still working with animals.”

It takes Blanche a moment to get it: the red-faced men in their velvet chairs, hunched over their swelling cigares … She hoots, and P’tit starts to cry. Doesn’t the little con mean to let her enjoy herself ever again? “On the whole, I prefer the stage to the ring,” she tells Jenny.

“I would have thought horses a sight more likable than, uh, other beasts.”

“Granted. But I don’t have a Monsieur Loyal telling me what to do anymore,” explains Blanche, “what to wear, when to practice …”

“That old tale? I don’t know, but I wouldn’t put anything past her,” says Blanche darkly. “Anyhow, I’m done with that bitch. It was she who arranged—” Her throat locks, and she finds she can’t finish the sentence. She bounces P’tit a little in her lap.

Jenny nods.

She’s quick, this one, thinks Blanche; she doesn’t need everything spelled out.

“What’ll you do now?” Jenny wants to know.

Blanche wipes her sweaty lip. She really hasn’t had time to make any plans yet. She musters a show of confidence. “The less I’m seen around town, the more the michetons will be willing to stump up when I do make myself available.”

“What the newspapers call the scarcity effect.”

“You’re quite a reader, ain’t you?”

“Ah, you figured me for an illiterate swamp-dweller?”

“No, I—” Blanche doesn’t know this woman well enough yet to be sure when she’s joking.

Jenny grins, tipping their meal onto two plates.

Blanche takes a chair, perches P’tit awkwardly on her lap.

Jenny blows hard on a pair of legs and leans over to offer it to the baby.

Who surprises Blanche by closing his hand over it, as if it’s some kind of toy.

“You mean to choke him?”

“He’s a Frenchman,” says Jenny. “Got to start eating real chow sometime.”

P’tit has touched the legs to his mouth, and he’s nuzzling them with wary enthusiasm.

“Was it at your circus that you learned to dance?” asks Jenny.

But Jenny’s eyes have slid to P’tit. He’s dropped his bone, and a huge piece of glistening flesh protrudes from his mouth.

“Putain!” Blanche makes a grab for it, wrenches the slippery thigh from between his gums.

He lets out a cough of protest.

Jenny’s helpless with laughter.

Blanche is not qualified to be left in charge of this child. He might be safer back on Folsom Street, she thinks with a shudder.

They’re sampling a bottle of honey-yellow Sauternes now. “So if you’re not going back to Madame Johanna, is your fancy man going to rustle up michetons for you?” Jenny asks.

“Never,” says Blanche sharply. “Arthur’s my lover.”

“Loafer, isn’t that how it’s spelled?” asks Jenny with a lopsided grin. “I guess that’s how French macs differ from Yankee pimps: they prefer not to lift a finger for their pay. And what about the young ape?”

“Ernest? What about him?”

“Well, is he your man too, or just your man’s man?”

Blanche doesn’t like either phrase or the bluntness of the question. “He has his own petite amie, Madeleine.”

“Macs always seem to trot around town in matched pairs,” observes Jenny. She mimes a preening horse in harness so precisely that Blanche giggles. “Guess they need pals to talk to, for whiling away the idle hours.”

“Though Arthur and Ernest do have business affairs,” Blanche puts in.

A tilt of Jenny’s eyebrows. “You mean laying out your cash on one kind of bet or another?”

The scrabble of a key in the door. “Speak of the devils,” says Blanche as she gets up.

The men reek of sweet, pungent smoke. “Ah, hello again, Frog Girl,” says Arthur to Jenny. “Very cozy,” he sums up, sweeping his cane around the room as a conductor might his baton.

Blanche stiffens. If he hasn’t got the wit to realize the kind of day she’s been having, left alone with the baby—

He crosses to plant a kiss on Blanche’s cheekbone and another on P’tit’s fist. “What do you make of my son and heir these days?” he asks Ernest. As if daring him to point out the obvious.

Ernest, taking P’tit in from sparse scalp to stubby toes, keeps his own counsel. He addresses Jenny instead. “Still in pants, I see. You wouldn’t look half bad in a dress.”

Is he flirting with her? Blanche wonders.

“Oh, I used to have a whole trunkful,” Jenny assures him with a grin, “but they just didn’t seem to fit.”

“Any dinner left, chérie?” Arthur asks Blanche.

“Désolée,” she apologizes, “nothing but bones.”

“We’ll go down to the chophouse at the corner in a while,” he tells Ernest, filling two glasses with the Sauternes.

“Any luck tonight, mon amour?” Blanche asks him in an undertone, bouncing P’tit on her lap.

He pulls a few coins out of his jacket and tosses them in the air. “Ernest reckons the dealer’s box was gaffed.”

“I mean, any luck finding a nursemaid!”

“Ah, yes. No.” He sighs. “Girls in this city, it turns out they’d rather grind away at any degrading shop work so long as they can boast of keeping their independence. Every one of them too good to go into service!”

Blanche would have appreciated knowing how many Arthur asked before coming to this conclusion; where he looked, how hard he tried before lying down on a couch to smoke opium. But she can feel her voice screwed tighter in her throat already, and Arthur won’t stand for her getting shrill, particularly when they have company.

Arthur opens another bottle of wine but spits out the first mouthful.

“Corked?” asks Blanche.

“No, just Californian,” he says, squinting at the label. “La vie est trop courte pour boire du mauvais vin.” He quotes the proverb grandly as he shoves the window up to empty the wine into the street.

From the darkness below comes a shout that could be protest or jubilation, it’s hard to tell.

“You could have left it for Gudrun,” Blanche rebukes him mildly.

“Why isn’t her life too short to drink bad wine?” wonders Jenny.

“Swedes don’t know any better,” says Ernest, pulling the cork from a dusty bottle of whiskey he’s found at the back of a cupboard.

“Frog races?” Arthur lets out a cough of laughter.

“It’s the San Franciscan way,” says Ernest through a yawn.

“It’s nature’s way,” Arthur corrects him. “What’s life but one big gamble? Born with good cards or bad, you still go bust in the end.”

“No, but this place in particular—when miners throw up a town pretty much overnight,” Ernest argues, “every clod of dirt’s a lottery to them.”

“The foutu miners may have got here first, in ‘49,” Arthur growls, “but it was we who really made something of the place.”

“Here we go,” murmurs Blanche to Jenny.

“So they squeezed us out of their filthy camps with their Foreign Miners’ Tax,” he goes on, pronouncing it scathingly. “Did we give a rat’s ass?”

“I thought you folks arrived only last year?” asks Jenny in an undertone.

“He’s speaking for all Frenchmen,” Blanche tells her, mouth twisting with amusement at the image of her lover hoisting a pickax.

Arthur’s declaiming as loudly as some street-corner agitator now. “We turned a stinking town into a real city of bachelors. Quick as the Anglos scrabbled gold out of the streams, we raked it into our restaurants, casinos, bordels …” He squeezes Ernest’s shoulder. “To our glorious race, masters of the arts of pleasure!” They lift their glasses. “And to San Francisco, La Ville Sans Honte,” Arthur roars, “beautifully shameless, best spot in the world to fuck money out of nothing!”

When the toasts are done, Arthur offers cigarillos all around, but only Ernest takes one. “‘Genuine Californian, Untouched by Oriental Labor,’” he reads off the label.

“I do, chéri, because you tell me every time.”

Jenny’s filling a little clay pipe. “Now, this is the real deal.”

P’tit, in Blanche’s lap, starts to cough, so Blanche waves the smoke away. “Speaking of Oriental labor, aren’t Chinese men said to make first-rate nursemaids?”

“There I draw the line. Me no likee coolie curling up in one of our cupboards.” Arthur yawns as he stretches out on the sofa.

Blanche gives him a hard look. After they’ve lived in this neighborhood for a year and a half, how can he come out with that nonsense?

P’tit splutters and starts to cry. Blanche stubs her cigarette out in a saucer and stands, swaying him a little.

“It’s not good to fuss over them at the first peep,” remarks Ernest.

“Mm. You should always wait five minutes, my mother used to say,” says Arthur.

She waltzes P’tit from side to side, trying to keep her temper. “‘Mais il est bien court,’” she croons, “‘le temps des cerises …’” It’s very short, cherry time.

Arthur groans. “Something jollier, would you mind?”

“It’s all code for the Commune, you know,” Ernest remarks to Jenny, from the floor.

Blanche bites her lip. She shouldn’t have sung that one and got him started.

“You reckon?” asks Jenny.

“Well, the cherries stand for bullet holes … ‘Cerises d’amour au robes pareilles,’“ Ernest belts out in a passable baritone, “‘tombant sous la feuille en gouttes de sang …’ Drops of blood!—what else could it mean?”

It’s hard to hear him above the baby’s shrieks. Could P’tit be tired again? Hungry? Must Blanche scrub another bottle and hope the milk in the icebox hasn’t gone off?

Blanche, remembering the Commune—the piles of splayed bodies in the Luxembourg Gardens—says nothing.

“We were in it up to our necks,” says Arthur.

“What, did you serve in the Guard?” Jenny, sitting up now, lets out a whistle.

“That wasn’t the only way to be a revolutionary,” snaps Ernest.

“Ernest was only a boy then,” says Arthur, patting his friend’s knee.

“We couldn’t abandon the circus,” Ernest puts in gruffly, “but we played our part …”

“We workers pushed the cannon all the way up Montmartre,” Arthur reminisces.

Blanche holds in her snort. We workers!

“Now, that must have been some class of excitement,” marvels Jenny.

“Liberty or death! Those were the days. We turned Paris into a little republic under the red flag—for two months, anyhow,” says Arthur.

Blanche marches P’tit into the bedroom, trying to shut out the sound of Arthur going on as if he’d manned the barricades during those last battles instead of just getting into his tights and spangles as usual.

Her eyes catch on the lithograph on the wall, so familiar to her that she rarely notices it anymore. The naked girl sitting at ease on the grass beside her man, her lovely foot extended so casually between the legs of his friend in the tasseled hat, who doesn’t seem to notice … That used to be Blanche, she thinks, startled. The one everyone wanted. And now look at her, lugging a baby like some ground-down servant out of an old Dutch painting.

“Did Gudrun bring the laundry back?” asks Arthur, putting his head around the door.

“Bordel! I haven’t a single presentable shirt to go out in.”

“I can run down to fetch you some noodles—” Blanche’s spirits lift at the thought of even five minutes away from the baby.

Arthur shakes his head. “I need to see an Australian at the docks about a rather splendid opportunity.”

Blanche purses her lips. Rather splendid: that’s the chamber pot emptied of money again. “Your shirt looks fine.”

He lets out a little grunt of impatience, searching his trunk.

Blanche recalls a minstrel number a Belgian blonde does in top hat, tails, and blackface at the House of Mirrors. “‘When I go out to promenade,’” she croons with only a touch of satire, bouncing P’tit in time with the verse,

Not so much as a smile from Arthur. “A new collar, at least.” He brandishes one. “This is clean but the points need crisping up …”

She walks past him, arms full of his thrashing son, into the salon, where Ernest is teaching Jenny the last verse of the tragic ballad about the Commune.

Jenny watches as Arthur lays out the fresh collar on the table and uses tongs to set the iron into the stove’s embers. “Don’t those things poke you in the throat?” she asks.

“That’s the whole idea,” he murmurs, eyes on his work.

“The whole point,” puns Ernest from the sofa. “Two stilettos to the jugular saying, Head high, monsieur.”

“That never occurred to me,” admits Jenny.

She laughs at that. Then addresses the baby in Blanche’s lap, intoning with mock gravity:

“I like that one,” says Blanche. “‘Trouble and dirt.’”

“Hits the nail on the head, don’t it?” says Jenny.

“We should hire a proper live-in help,” says Blanche to Arthur, suddenly decisive. “Some really capable woman to keep house and mind the baby too. She could sleep in the second bedroom with P’tit—if you were to stay at Madeleine’s,” she adds, turning to Ernest.

“Is that how you speak to our oldest friend?” asks Arthur, his tone chilly as he makes the iron hiss along the linen.

Blanche’s pulse thumps. “I didn’t mean—”

“No, no,” says Ernest with a tight chuckle, “I see which way the wind’s blowing.”

“I misspoke,” she hurries to tell them both, “I—”

“Haven’t you been listening to a word I’ve said?” demands Arthur, setting down the iron with a clink. “Nobody wants to live in with a blasted infant, especially not in Chinatown in the middle of an epidemic.”

Blanche can’t keep her lips pressed together. “Perhaps if you spent more of your time actually looking for someone to take care of your blasted infant and less of it lolling around in a pipe dream—”

His jaw hardens. “Well, perhaps if you’d given the matter a moment’s thought before you galloped back here with him yesterday—”

Blanche turns on her. But it’s Arthur Jenny’s addressing.

“What do you mean?” he snaps.

“Just curious. I’d imagine there’s folks who’d want a baby, no questions asked. White, male, more or less in working order …”

“Are you suggesting I sell my son?” asks Arthur in a tone of steel.

Blanche’s hands are gripping each other so hard her long nails are digging into her skin.

Jenny shrugs. “Keep him or don’t, is what I say. Fish or cut bait, but don’t gripe.”

Blanche is trying to remember the glow she felt earlier in the evening, the conviction that she and Jenny were destined to be friends. Now she’s thinking: Why did I let this provocateur in the door again?

They’re all staring at Jenny, who remarks, “A Chinese fellow once told me that back in his village, there’s always a bucket ready.”

“What kind of bucket?” demands Arthur.

“Filled with water, you know? For inconvenient babies.”

The picture catches Blanche off guard, fills her with horror: P’tit, seen through water. The wavering image of that small face. “Stop,” she pleads with Jenny.

The woman’s eyes rest on her coolly. Then float back to Arthur. “You think you can’t do it, he told me, but you’d be surprised.”

No, Blanche insists to herself, no. I’d never—

“Listen, you stunted mule,” Arthur roars, “try having a child before you open your foutu mouth on the subject.”

“Time you left, Frog Girl,” growls Ernest, very much the gorilla as he lurches to his feet.

Blanche puts her head around the bedroom door, silently, in case Arthur’s sleeping. He’s been laid low for the last three days. When he complained his back was bad again, and his head too, Blanche thought at first he was just suffering the effects of too much liquor or brooding over what Jenny’d said about P’tit—but then it turned into a scorching flu.

Blanche has been camped on the sofa beside the baby’s trunk so P’tit won’t disturb his father. Frankly, she’s sick of waiting hand and foot on this tiny, unsmiling stranger. She wouldn’t drown him in a bucket, but she can’t say much more than that. Guilt hangs on her like a lead apron. There are moments, tying a diaper or transferring P’tit from one arm to the other, when Blanche begins to feel competent at this kind of drudgery, but that doesn’t help; it only sharpens the feeling of estrangement from herself.

Ernest is at Madeleine’s, ostensibly taking refuge from the baby’s caterwauling, but really demonstrating how wounded his feelings were by Blanche’s suggestion that P’tit and a nursemaid should have the second bedroom. (She might just as well have held her tongue, because she hasn’t been able to hire anyone, despite hauling P’tit up and down all the grubbier streets of the Mission in search of hungry Irish girls, lying—with her best poker face—that there’ve been no smallpox cases within blocks of their apartment.)

Jenny hasn’t shown up again, which is a mercy. Was she trying to shame Arthur into taking some fatherly responsibility the other night? Blanche wonders. Or can Jenny just not resist the pleasure of picking a fight?

“How are you this afternoon, chéri?” she murmurs, seeing Arthur’s lashes flicker.

He leans up on one elbow and feels his forehead experimentally. “Quite restored.”

The apartment is as silent as some forest pool now P’tit’s finally dropped off. “Today I really must go out for a shave,” Arthur mentions, scratching the dark stubble that furs his cheeks.

So odd to catch him less than chic, unready for the world. “Some coffee first?”

His tongue explores his gums. “My mouth’s a little tender.”

“Breakfast?” offers Blanche.

Arthur’s eyes crinkle at the corners as they rest on her. “I can think of one or two things that might tempt me …”

Blanche comes closer. He takes hold of the edge of her nightgown and slides it up her legs. The touch of his thumbnail is all it takes to liquefy her.

A whimper goes up from the salon. She stiffens.

“Oh, give him a chance to settle,” murmurs Arthur, hands circling her thighs.

She lets him go on because it’s been days and days; the two of them haven’t had a chance to lay hands on each other since Sunday. This is more like it. The old Blanche, the ever-new Blanche, Blanche la Danseuse, seen and desired, stroked and seized and parted. Arthur pulls her onto his lap so fast that she loses her balance.

The wail repeats, still weak but penetrating, like a gull wheeling outside the window.

A crash in the salon. Blanche is off the bed with a single shove.

An exasperated groan from Arthur.

Blanche finds P’tit skewed on the floorboards between his trunk and the sofa. She wipes his wet purple face, shushes him, checks his head for new bumps.

Arthur calls from the bedroom. “What the hell—”

“Ça va,” she calls back quickly. Well, she hopes P’tit’s all right. He’s as sweaty as a pig, and she prays he hasn’t picked up his father’s fever. “Well done,” she whispers in one small ear. Climbing out of his trunk, that’s something new he’s learned: a sign of progress, surely? “A clever trick,” she murmurs, “but we won’t show Papa yet.”

P’tit’s calmer now, slobbering on his doorknob. The other hand creeps back to his hairline to scratch. A tuft of hair comes out in his fingers.

“Stop that,” says Blanche, too sharply.

He lets out another sob.

She wipes the hair out of his hand and soothes him with a little waltz.

By the time she returns to the bedroom, holding P’tit, Arthur’s pulling on his long silk socks and tucking his drawers into them. “Don’t bother with coffee, I’ll stop at a café,” he says, not looking up.

“Very well,” she replies, equally crisp, jiggling P’tit in her arms. It seems she’s always to blame. Because she impulsively rushed P’tit away from Folsom Street four days ago? Or because she gave birth to him in the first place?

Arthur scratches his face, and then one sole. “It’s tonight you dance, yeah?”

Arthur’s eyes have narrowed. “Watch your mouth.” He’s tightening his waistband, adjusting the buckle at the small of his back.

Is some of Jenny’s cockiness rubbing off on her? Blanche wonders. Or is it just high time Blanche started standing up for herself?

The man’s still hard for her; she can see that through the fine cloth of his narrow trousers. Despite her irritation, she throbs to finish what they started. If it weren’t for P’tit on her hip, she’d push Arthur backward onto the bed and pull those trousers open again. Teach me to mind my manners, she’d tell him. Cram yourself into me, ram me, split me in two.

He pulls one sock off, rubs the bottom of his foot violently. “Come over here, would you?”

“Oh, Arthur, it’s not a convenient time,” she begins, cross at the thought of starting all over again and getting interrupted before she comes off. “Once he’s asleep—”

“Just tell me what I’m looking at, if it’s not too inconvenient.”

She steps closer. Stares at the red marks clustering on Arthur’s yellowish sole. Almost laughs, because it’s incongruous: pimples on the flat of a foot. Or perhaps just a heat rash, like the one P’tit had when she brought him home. Her mind is circling, considering possibilities. All the things this spray of red on Arthur’s foot—and his face, she can see it there too, now she’s looking, the angry pattern rising through the stubble—all the things this kind of marking could mean …

“No.” Arthur says it with authority. Draws himself up, the magnificent artiste Blanche fell in love with almost a decade ago.

“Come to Chinatown? Are you mad, woman?” asks the doctor.

Blanche swallows a sob. She’s left Arthur alone at the apartment, speechless, swigging brandy to ease his panic. Her lungs hurt from hurrying up and down hills with P’tit in her sweaty arms like some badly folded blanket. The first three doctors she approached shied away from her as soon as she mentioned her man had a rash on soles and face. The third charged her a whole dollar for a bottle of something labeled Anti-Smallpox Specific, though she suspects it’s just sugared whiskey. This fourth fellow, an Irishman in a tiny room above an outfitter’s halfway up Nob Hill, is buttoned up to the throat, a rubber handkerchief pinned over his face, so all she can see are the wary, rabbity eyes. “Please,” she tries again. “Just to take a look—”

“I’ve seen what it looks like,” he says gruffly. “And it won’t get any prettier.”

“But can’t you—”

“He’ll need opium for the pain. Are you vaccinated?”

“We both got the scratch, years and years ago,” she protests.

“I’m sick to the back teeth of telling folks that the effect wears off.” The eyes above the creamy rubber tighten with irritation.

Blanche stares at him. So ever since the smallpox came to town, she and Arthur and Ernest have been swanning round believing they were protected when they were only ignorant?

“I’ll do you and the baby now, at least,” says the doctor with a sigh.

She’s too abashed to say no, though she flinches at the lancet he pulls out of his case.

“You mean it won’t keep us safe?”

“Nobody’s safe, woman. Especially not a mite of a thing like this,” he comments, tying a bandage around P’tit’s spindly arm, “so keep the pair of you away from bad cases.”

This is the first genuine doctor’s office she’s been in on this side of the Atlantic; he’s got a certificate on the wall. She should ask, while she’s here. “Rickets.” Blanche makes herself pronounce the memorized word. “Is that what it would be called, Doctor, when a baby looks like this?”

The eyes above the mask flick between P’tit and Blanche’s peach silk skirt with what she recognizes as contempt. “That’s one word for it.”

Sunday morning, a tap at the door. Blanche lays P’tit down on the rug with his doorknob and rushes to intercept Gudrun. Measles, that’s what Blanche told all her lodgers yesterday when she went round to collect their rents. That seemed better than saying nothing. “Best not come in today either,” she tells the Swede now, as lightly as she can manage. “Arthur’s still rather unwell and can’t bear noise.”

A faint but ragged cry from the bedroom. Blanche wipes sweat out of her eyes. With all those sores in his mouth, Arthur can barely form a word. Ernest is with him, she reminds herself.

“Not measles,” says Gudrun, taking a step back on the landing.

The sore on Blanche’s upper arm is throbbing, and P’tit’s is swollen too. Their new vaccinations must have been from a bad batch. But does that mean they were fake, from some tube of slime a swindler sold the Irish doctor, or the opposite, that they were too virulent, in which case they should at least keep the disease at bay? That’s what’s distracting Blanche as she stares down Gudrun. “If you could boil up these sheets for me in your room,” she presses on.

Their eyes lock hard.

“It’s not allowed to hide,” mumbles the Swede.

Is Gudrun threatening to report them to the board of health? Blanche sways closer and speaks softly. “Do you want this whole building quarantined, really? I suppose you imagine they’ll let the rest of you flee before they board us up? Huh! Have you enough food on your shelf for six weeks?”

Tears of terror in the seamstress’s milky-blue eyes. “Monsieur should go hospital.”

“Don’t you read the papers? Nobody’s coming out of hospitals alive.” Blanche loses control of her voice. “They’re slipping in each other’s merde or lashed to beds and left screaming for water in the dark.”

Gudrun shakes.

“All I’m asking is for you to keep your mouth shut. And boil laundry for us upstairs, morning and evening,” Blanche adds, pressing her advantage. “I’ll pay you good money. You’ll be perfectly safe if the water’s nearly scalding,” she improvises. A sting of conscience—but Blanche can’t manage without the girl’s help, she reminds herself, and nobody’s safe, anyhow. “Just add a cup of this—” She runs to fetch the enormous bottle of carbolic on the table, and pours a jugful for Gudrun. Then goes to fetch the basket full of stained sheets.

Food. That’s something to do. What’ll she get? A stew, a hash, a pie? It doesn’t matter. Milk! Milk for P’tit, how could she have forgotten? But she can’t go out till P’tit wakes up, because then she can take him with her so he doesn’t bother the men.

This might be P’tit’s only nap today, so Blanche mustn’t waste this time. What can she do with it?

A creak of the bedroom door. Ernest, emerging with the covered dish he’s using as a bedpan. The hot smell clouds the air. Blanche doesn’t want him to catch her idle, so she busies herself over by the icebox filling another bottle of cold broth to have ready for P’tit. She glances at Ernest sideways to check his color: no sign of fever in the unshaven, concave cheeks. (She made him rush off to get a fresh scratch as soon as she told him the news about Arthur on Thursday.)

When he’s emptied the dish into the covered bucket, he adds carbolic to the water in the basin and rinses the dish, then scours his reddened hands. All this without looking in Blanche’s direction.

“Does Arthur want me?” she asks. Too high, like some vain girl.

“His blisters are swelling up,” he says, not dignifying her question with an answer.

Christ. After a minute, Blanche asks, “Do you need—shall I get more ice? More laudanum?”

“He can’t keep it down,” says Ernest, as if she should have known that. “I’m trying morphine.”

Has this man slept at all? The words burst from Blanche. “You know I’d be helping you nurse him if it weren’t for the baby—”

Blanche bites down on her lip so hard that her eyes water. That’s exactly why she must keep P’tit out of harm’s way now, why she has to go to such cruel lengths to stay out of range of Arthur’s infectious touch and breath. She owes the tiny boy that much, surely. “If I were to catch it, so would P’tit,” she wails.

A snort. “For all we know, it’s him who brought it.”

Blanche’s hands contract into fists. “What bull is this?”

“Do you deny he’s had a fever?”

“Only since his scratch!”

“The creature’s been all coughs, vomits, and itches since you carried him in the door,” snarls Ernest. “Too much of a goddamn coincidence, I say, that Arthur took to his bed not two days later …”

A vast rage fills Blanche. The City’s one great hotbed of contagion, and this connard blames P’tit?

Ernest grabs a bottle of wine and some folded cloths from the drawer. Pulls a thin, dripping slab of ice out of the insulated box and wraps it in cheesecloth. “Arthur knows why you won’t go near him. You want to save your own satané skin.”

For a second she doesn’t understand.

“Terrified of getting scarred, jeopardizing the porcelain perfection that is Blanche la Danseuse!”

“It’s not about my skin, you son of a bitch.”

Ernest puts his prominent jaw very close to her, now, and she smells his sweat. “Answer me this. Are you his woman or aren’t you?”

I am, Blanche wants to say. Always.

He steps back. “If it’s really the baby you’re so scared for, why not send him away?” he asks with a sneer. “He’d be safer anywhere else.”

“Send him where, back to Folsom Street?”

“If he—if I dump my son in one of those places again, he won’t make it.”

Hissed through his teeth: “And what makes you so sure his father’s going to make it?”

Arthur’s moaning something in the bedroom. And? Could that be what he’s saying? And what?

Ernest claps his hands by her ear, making her jump. “He’s calling your name, putain.”

Blanche, that’s the sound. Blanche, through lips too lesioned to articulate.

She throws a glance at P’tit, still snuffling in shallow sleep on the floor of the salon. Then hurries as far as the door. If she goes into the bedroom but holds her breath—if she doesn’t touch anything—

Ernest pushes in past her.

Blanche pulls out a handkerchief and presses it over her nose as she follows him, foot by foot, into the stinking room. “Chéri?” Muffled by the cloth that she hopes will somehow shield her.

The bare windows let in a merciless light. The man on the bed, wearing nothing but sweat-darkened drawers, is unrecognizable. Hair pushes through the scarlet pustules on his face and neck: a mask of burning wood. Dimpled red pearls, densest on his feet and hands and all across what used to be his lovely face. No, they’re a swarm of bloated ants up his legs and arms, converging on the plains of his chest and belly.

Ernest, his face blank as any stoic’s, starts to cover Arthur with cloths dipped in ice water. He lifts one of his friend’s feet—so the swollen sole won’t chafe against the sheet, she supposes. The muscular legs are bowed froggishly now. Ernest wets a rag with carbolic solution and very slowly wipes the seeping pustules on the foot. Even from the doorway, she can see the opalescent slime. He bunches the rag up, tosses it into a bucket, and begins again.

A strange droning comes from his throat for an answer. It goes higher. Descant variations on a tune of pain.

“Time for another morphine suppository,” Ernest mutters under his breath.

It’s clear to Blanche now that this is not just the camaraderie of two members of an old double act who keep each other company on the streets of San Francisco. Nothing could make someone do what Ernest is doing except love.

“What can I—”

“See to the brat,” barks Ernest.

Only then does she realize that P’tit’s wailing in the other room.

Side to side, forward and back, Blanche shuffles across the apartment on the first day of September, humming in P’tit’s minute ear.

For a week and a half Arthur’s seemed on the verge of death, yet the days stumble on. Blanche still eats, moves, even sleeps on and off, and babies always need looking after, especially this one, whose unfathomable eyes gaze on the world expecting the worst. You’re here now, she wants to tell P’tit with a little shake. Here’s Blanche, a woman who’s willing to pick him up when he cries in the middle of the night. His mother. (The word still doesn’t trip off her tongue.) A woman who’s been neglecting her beloved as he lies ill, all for this disconsolate baby’s sake. So why does P’tit still have the air of a parcel forgotten at a train station? She hums on. Scraps of opera, gutter choruses, sea chanteys, rhymes from the crowded little schoolroom on the Ile Saint-Louis that Blanche didn’t know she remembered, any old piety or filth that might distract him: the whole repertoire of her quarter century.

Even hotter today. How can that be? Has the whole climate of the Bay been knocked off balance somehow?

Her lodgers mutter together on the landings. They won’t forgive Blanche for the measles story. She’d better not knock on their doors for their rents tomorrow. Blanche has no idea whether it was Gudrun or someone else who reported Arthur’s case to the board of health; all she knows is that last time she went downstairs to the faucet and stepped out onto Sacramento to take a breath, there was a gaudy yellow flag hanging over the front door. But why haven’t the inspectors turned up at the apartment door with all their fumigation apparatus demanding that Arthur be handed over? Perhaps the hospitals are all full. Blanche doesn’t know because she hasn’t bought a paper in days.

It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters but Arthur and P’tit. Arthur because he’s so ill; P’tit because she mustn’t let him get ill. Her man and her child. How can Blanche weigh them against each other, and why should she have to?

P’tit’s had enough of his bottle now, and he’s slobbering over his doorknob. (She washes it when his grip loosens, in sleep, but she still hates the sight of the thing.) He must be teething, Blanche supposes. But then again, maybe teething’s just what you call it when a child is cantankerous.

The silence in the salon jars her nerves. Perhaps she’ll go in and say a word, at least, to Arthur, while Ernest’s busy.

Blanche plants P’tit beside the sofa. He can sit up these days. That’s something, she thinks glumly.

She turns the door handle. Every day she thinks Arthur can’t get any worse. She never knew the body could endure such changes. Today his hands are embroidered with huge rubies each half an inch across, globes so thick on his right lid that he can’t open his eye. Blanche presses her handkerchief over her mouth and nose not because she thinks it’ll keep out the invisible germs but to shut out the sweet, rotten stench. She gags, and it’s not just the smell, it’s the thought of the unbearable pressure Arthur must be suffering as each globe bloats and leaks. Is her lover going to burst apart in the end, dynamited from inside his own skin?

“It’s Blanche,” she says, though it comes out so husky she’s not sure Arthur can hear her. Her eyes prickle with tears. Perhaps he’s past hearing, so far away in his opiate nightmare that nothing reaches him from this shore. Besides, is there any truth left in that claim, It’s Blanche? Is this still her, or is it some shoddy copy of the lively petite amie who followed him all the way to America? She is different these days, she knows that. Was it meeting Jenny Bonnet that began the metamorphosis? Or taking P’tit away from Folsom Street? Or has this different, older, somehow harder Blanche been hidden inside her all along?

She stands very still, watching for the slight rise and fall of Arthur’s breath.

A hard rat-a-tat: the front door. She bolts out to the salon.

Ernest, tugging an obstinate shard out of the icebox, is ignoring it.

After a moment, Blanche decides he’s right. Too risky to answer the door, especially at this time of the evening.

“Hou-hou!” A muffled call through the door.

Blanche unlocks it one-handed to find Jenny, her smile a little softened with drink. Blanche hasn’t seen her for the best part of two weeks. The tanned face looks as if it’s never been battered, and her suit’s even been laundered. She steps in jauntily, not waiting to be asked.

Blanche is suddenly aware of the danger for the visitor. “Didn’t you notice the yellow flag?”

“I tore that down,” mutters Ernest, still wrestling with the icebox.

She expects him to tell Jenny to get the hell out, but he reverts to silence.

“City’s so carpeted with the things, it might be Carnival,” remarks Jenny. “Who’s sick? Not the baby?”

“Arthur,” says Blanche, the name a stone in her throat.

Jenny grimaces and holds up a half-empty bottle. “Anyone fancy some rye?”

Blanche realizes that she does, very much.

Ernest comes over with two glasses to be filled. Then he carries them into the sickroom, shutting the door behind him.

“Wouldn’t have credited that dandy man for a nurse,” Jenny remarks under her breath.

“I can’t do it—I’ve got to—” Blanche’s voice fractures, and she gestures down at the baby.

Jenny nods, and drains her glass in one. “Phew, it stinks in here. Let’s get out for some air.”

There’s nothing Blanche would like more, but she has P’tit to look after.

“High time he saw something of his hometown,” says Jenny, reading her mind.

“Presentable for whom, pray tell?”

Jenny’s mocking line follows Blanche into the little lavatory, where she scrabbles in her bag for her rouge. She’s not going out without a bit of paint and a freshly pinned chignon, at least. The half-melted kohl keeps getting in her eye, so she blinks the flecks of black away.

When she emerges to choose a fluted wrapper from the trunk of clothes behind the sofa, she finds Jenny clapping for the baby. P’tit’s expression is grave, as if he’s listening for the melodic line in some almost inaudible symphony. But he is clapping along: slow, silent pats, palm to palm.

Blanche, dressed now, scoops P’tit up and follows Jenny toward the door. The strains of a melancholy violin rise from the bedroom.

“Ernest?” murmurs Jenny, eyebrows up.

“It soothes Arthur,” Blanche whispers.

“Wouldn’t soothe me, I’ll tell you that much.”

“Chut,” she shushes her, with an appalled grin.

Jenny leaves her bicycle where it’s resting in the stairwell, and they step out onto Sacramento Street. The air’s as baking hot as ever, but more breathable than in the apartment—or maybe it just seems that way because Blanche hasn’t been out in days. The gaslit sidewalks are as crowded as if it’s broad daylight.

“How long’s Arthur had it?” asks Jenny.

“Tomorrow’s the twelfth day,” says Blanche.

“The fever hasn’t come back?”

“No.”

“Still breathing easily?”

“I suppose.” Breathing’s about all Arthur can manage.

“The Chinese call them beautiful flowers.”

“The blisters,” says Jenny. “To flatter the goddess, don’t you know—so she’ll spare them and move on.”

“Which goddess?”

“The smallpox goddess.”

“They’ve got a goddess of goddamn smallpox?” asks Blanche.

Suddenly they’re both giggling like children.

Blanche sobers fast. “The thing is, I heard from an iceman—and Ernest read it, somewhere too,” she adds, “that if a smallpox case is going to make it, you’ll know on the twelfth day, because the blisters start scabbing over.”

“When,” says Jenny.

“What?” asks Blanche, confused.

“No need for ifs. When they scab over.”

Blanche gnaws her lip and tastes blood. “You haven’t seen Arthur.”

“Still, I say your fancy man’s going to come through.” Jenny spins a stick and catches it on the back of her hand. “He’s getting good care.”

“Not from me.” Guilt webbing in her throat.

“You’re keeping his son safe. He’ll understand.”

Blanche wishes she believed that.

“How about his eyes, are they white?”

“Brown,” answers Blanche, startled.

“The whites of them,” Jenny clarifies.

Blanche is too ashamed to admit that she hasn’t been close enough to Arthur to check his eyeballs.

“Most folks are surviving this, I heard, eyesight and all,” says Jenny. “Sometimes barely a mark on them.”

“I don’t care if Arthur ends up with a few marks,” Blanche snaps.

A pungent reek makes her glance sideways down the next alley. After a stall where two men in long aprons are gutting fish, there’s a run of narrow buildings with those sliding door panels that display the blank faces of mui jai, Chinese girls standing ready for hire. “I wonder what they charge,” says Blanche with professional curiosity.

“Don’t you know the rhyme? Two bittee lookee, four bittee feelee, six bittee doee.”

“Really?” Six bits; that’s only seventy-five cents. “You wouldn’t get a white girl or a Mexican for less than a dollar,” says Blanche a little disapprovingly.

“Of course, the mui jai don’t see a cent of that. So much for the abolition of slavery,” adds Jenny, sardonic.

They’re heading east, without discussion, as if a glimpse of the Bay promises an evening breeze, though they should know better, thinks Blanche. A Chilean in a poncho walks right into her as if he doesn’t see her, almost knocking P’tit out of her arms. The baby doesn’t make a sound. He seems stunned by the colors and cries of the passing multitude. This is said to be the foreignest city in America; almost none of these people were born here. Back in Paris, Blanche remembers, there are so many protocols, so many ways to behave comme il faut, “as things are done,” because that’s how things have always been done. But San Francisco’s a roulette wheel, spinning its citizens and depositing them at random. Blanche has been driven around by cabbies who’ve claimed to be gentlemen temporarily down on their luck, and she’s spent well-paid nights with michetons who’ve boasted that they began as coal miners.

No ears, curiously, just little nubs; it must be that you need only the holes to hear with. “I never saw anyone earless in Paris. I wonder why so many Americans are born that way,” remarks Blanche, jerking her thumb at him. “Something in the diet here?”

Jenny cackles.

“What?”

“That’s how they dealt with thieves back in the Rush. Miners hadn’t got time to spare for jurifying. Just lopped the guilty party’s ears off”—with a nod in the direction of the old musician—“and went back to panning.”

A year and a half here, Blanche thinks, disconcerted, and there’s so much she still doesn’t know about this country. The chorus fades behind them:

“This way,” says Jenny, suddenly ducking down Battery Street.

“Why?” asks Blanche, but she follows.

“Specials.” Jenny glances over her shoulder to check that the pair of private guards is going the other way.

“Well, as a point of law, they’re the only ones with the power to arrest me,” mutters Jenny, “but Specials like to impress their employers and earn tips by rounding up riffraff and handing them over to the patrol.”

Her gray coat, waistcoat, pants, soft hat—they seem so ordinary to Blanche now, it’s hard to remember that Jenny’s wearing them constitutes a crime. “And it’s all worth the candle?”

“Come on,” Jenny groans, “don’t tell me you wouldn’t put up a fight if someone tried to make you swap your tight frills for a grain sack …” She tugs at Blanche’s mauve wrapper.

They pass an enormous organ on a cart: hundreds of pipes, and sinister-looking automata dancing on top to “The Ride of the Valkyries.” The grinder cranks on with his right arm, which Blanche notices is nearly twice the size of his left, and with barely a pause the tune changes jarringly to the Habanera from Carmen.

Then they’re going up a hill so steep she can’t talk and carry P’tit at the same time. She should be turning back soon. What if Arthur needs something? “I’m bushed,” she says at the top, panting, as she transfers P’tit to her other arm.

“Already? I like to stroll from Fisherman’s Wharf to the Mission and right over to the Panhandle, just to see what’s new,” says Jenny. “The City’s always growing like blazes, doubling every decade.”

Blanche finds the thought unsettling. “Sounds like some ugly fungus.”

“That’s the fun of it. Take the loveliest spot on earth,” says Jenny, arms out to encompass hill after hill, the Bay, the Pacific, “and scatter a litter of sooty old shacks all over it … It’s a striking contrast for the eye, wouldn’t you say? Then, for novelty, give the whole place the DTs.”

“You thought that little shimmy was bad?” Jenny crows. “Should have been here for the big one eight years back, when the City fell down around our ears. I’d been out on a bender, so I was half convinced I was seeing things. Cracks in walls opening and shutting like mouths … a four-story frontage dropped right off while I was watching.”

Blanche winces.

“Fires, too, every couple years. When our ship came in, in ‘51, the whole place was up in flames. Streets charring, fir planks curling up like snakes …”

“You make it sound like the time of your life,” Blanche objects.

Jenny dances from foot to foot. “Don’t everyone crave a little zest to make one day different from the last?”

“Not that much zest,” says Blanche. Thinking: I liked my days the way they were, before everything changed. After a minute, she asks, “Have you ever roamed farther afield?”

“Not too far yet,” admits Jenny with a touch of sheepishness. “Been to Sacramento once, though it was knee-deep in water at the time.”

“That would suit a swamp-wader like you,” jokes Blanche, letting P’tit slide down to her hip.

“‘Course, now that it’s the terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad, I hear Sacramento’s getting aspirations. They’re bringing Chinese in to build up the levees, filling in the old streets, moving everybody up to the second floor.”

“You’re pulling my leg.”

Sometimes Jenny’s non sequiturs make Blanche’s head spin. Is this some kind of cruel joke about Arthur’s face?

“The kid, I mean.”

“Oh.” When she looks closer, she sees the display is headed Infant Carte de Visites and Cabinet Cards. Discomfited, Blanche looks down at P’tit.

“The picture beside your bed’s not much of a likeness anymore.”

“Maybe when he’s … grown a little,” says Blanche. The photographs behind the glass show fat, bland babies in embroidered gowns. Maybe once P’tit’s got some more hair to cover that protruding forehead, and a tooth or two, when he’s no longer so red and scaly …

“He’s bigger and stronger already,” says Jenny as they walk on. “You’re just too close up to notice.”

“He can’t do much more than flap around like a fish on dry land,” Blanche complains. “Sometimes I think he’ll never learn to crawl, even. I’ll be hauling him around like some millstone for the rest of my days.”

“Why’d you name him P’tit? Because he’s undersized?”

She shakes her head. “For his father—he’s really P’tit Arthur.” Saying Arthur’s name hurts her throat. Those bloodred blisters. “I was christened Adèle myself,” she adds. Only the small sensation—a coin dropping—alerts her to the fact that this is the first time she’s mentioned it to anyone in America. “Blanche was my circus name.”

“When did you switch?”

“On the ship.”

“Because America’s one big circus?”

That makes Blanche laugh.

“He smiled,” cries Jenny, pointing.

Up ahead, the busy thoroughfare of Market Street slashes diagonally toward the docks. Blanche turns back west on Bush Street.

Jenny follows her, asking, “Why didn’t Arthur and Ernest change to their circus names too?”

“Maybe because it might be hard to get much respect down at the Exchange,” says Blanche, “going by Castor and Pollux.”

Jenny sniggers at that.

“They took the names from the pair of elephants at the Paris Zoo. Who got butchered when we were under siege by the Prussians,” Blanche adds regretfully.

Ernest insisted they should at least taste the original Castor and Pollux, as what he called a mark of respect, so he stood in line for hours and paid an appalling price for a slice. He and Arthur agreed that it was tough and oily, but Blanche wasn’t able to bring herself even to taste it, despite her hunger. Dog, cat, rat. That winter, Paris restaurants vied with one another to see who could serve them up in the most delectable sauces, defying the invaders.

“If you were all such toasts of the town back at your Cirque d’Hiver, what made you give it up and come over here?”

Machine-Kneaded Bread, Blanche reads on a card in a storefront, Guaranteed Free of Dangerous Perspiration. “It was time for a change.”

“Meaning, none of my business?”

“Arthur fell,” says Blanche with difficulty. “His back—”

“Ah,” says Jenny.

It was only a month after Blanche told Arthur she was pregnant. She was lacing herself tight to hide it from Monsieur Loyal and praying he’d take her back on after the confinement. “The crowd usually swoon for the flier because they think it’s all his doing,” says Blanche, “that he’s somersaulting through the air, and the lanky fellow dangling upside down like a bat is just there for the flier to grab on to, see?”

“But the truth is, it’s the catcher who times it all and makes the catch. His flier just has to trust him and fly.”

“So what went wrong?”

“Arthur …” Blanche sighs. “Maybe he lost his nerve, I don’t know. But it looked to me as if he snatched at Ernest’s wrists and then slipped through his fingers.” The plummet to the ground, the terrible sound.

“So it wasn’t Ernest’s fault that his old pal cracked his spine.”

“Try convincing Ernest of that,” says Blanche with a snort. Is that why Ernest is risking his own life to nurse Arthur now? she wonders. In Ernest’s mind, does he owe Arthur a lifetime of protection—by some kind of unwritten contract—for having once let him fall?

They’re going past the open door of a fan-tan joint where copper coins are heaped high and Chinese men shout their bets through the thick fog of smoke.

Jenny brushes a bill-papered wall with her fingertips. “Saw this astounding dog act one time,” she remarks. “There was a rope hanging from the top of the tent, and the little fellow jumped higher than his head and grabbed it between his teeth—”

“A terrier?” Blanche wants to know.

A nod. “He bit down and wouldn’t let go, swung all over the place, better than any of the acrobats. Holding on with his teeth!”

“Dogs, horses, they’re born to please,” Blanche tells her. “Now, house cats—I don’t know why folks keep trying to come up with cat acts. You can bribe or beat a cat all day, and it’s still going to sneak off through a slit in the curtain as soon as your back is turned.”

Jenny’s not listening, because she’s studying a broadside pasted to a telegraph pole.

“‘Private Lessons for Young Ladies,’” Jenny reads aloud from the bottom of the page. “I’ll bet,” she adds with a snigger.

“‘Send Them to Dancing School and Save Many a Doctor’s Bill,’” Blanche reads over her shoulder. “Health is a smart angle. But the quack’s not as à la mode as he thinks. I wouldn’t be caught dead dancing the redowa anymore.”

“You know all these fiddly steps?” Jenny asks.

Blanche smiles. “As well as you know your fiddly frogs.”

P’tit starts to wail for no reason, as if an invisible assailant has punched him. Bordel! There’s brown trickling down his leg. Blanche holds him at arm’s length.

“He’s crying for you,” Jenny comments.

“I’m right here,” Blanche snaps.

“No, I mean, for you—putting on a show for your benefit. I suppose crying’s all the music a baby knows.”

“Some music.” She groans.

Jenny holds out her hands.

“He’s all shitty.”

“That don’t bother me. I’ve seen it all before.”

She deposits P’tit in Jenny’s arms, expecting him to shriek, but he only stares at Jenny.

Blanche pulls out a handkerchief and scrubs her hands. “Where have you seen it all before?” This comes out too accusatory. “Have you younger sisters or brothers?”

“I was a shepherd for a while,” says Jenny.

Blanche laughs under her breath. A female shepherd. Of course.

He’s rapt.

“Is that the one where she’s obliged to kiss him in the end?” Blanche breaks in.

Jenny shakes her head. “Not this princess. Froggie asks for a kiss, yeah, but she says he must be kidding,” she tells P’tit. “She picks him up and flings him against the wall.”

Like the way Blanche has seen Chinese fishermen whack squid against walls to soften them, down at the docks? “Does that kill him?”

“No sirree. Froggie falls down, and up jumps a prince.”

But Blanche is still brooding over the version her grandmother told her. The clammy embrace, the moist tickle on the lip. “How could being kissed and being smacked against a wall work the same?”

“Shock, I guess,” says Jenny. “Shakes off his sham skin, leaves him wearing his real one.”

And Blanche—just for a moment—has a vision as if from high overhead: Herself at the height of rage throwing P’tit against a wall. His scaly, misshapen body cracking in two when it hits, and her son standing up in a smooth and princely form.

She knows these are terrible thoughts, but they’re not really hers, she tells herself, they’re just the hallucinations of fatigue. She feels Jenny’s eyes on her and looks away in case the frog-catcher can catch thoughts too.

It’s an old soldier on the ground, bursting into song. No, not on the ground. He’s legless, Blanche sees, and what’s left of him is wedged into a child’s pushcart.

The fellow’s not so old either, Blanche sees when she looks closer. The War between the States is only a decade back, after all. His voice is richer than some she’s heard on the stage; this fellow was wasted on soldiering. He keeps up the maudlin lament that shouldn’t move her the way it does.

She takes P’tit back from Jenny without a word, presses him against her collarbone.

Jenny sketches a salute and drops a coin into the soldier’s tin cup.

Somebody’s watching over Arthur, somebody’s waiting to see if he’ll make it, but it’s not Blanche. What if she goes back to the apartment tonight and Arthur’s lying utterly still in the bed that used to be theirs? She can’t bear for his pain to go on but she can’t wish it all to be over. He’s not even thirty-two. And what would become of Blanche then? She can’t imagine her life in San Francisco without Arthur. It drifts apart, in her mind, like shreds of fog.

They turn north up Dupont. Jenny flourishes her hand at a restaurant, the Poodle Dog. “Famous for its cuisses de grenouille à la poulette, courtesy of yours truly.”

Also famous for its third-floor assignation rooms, Blanche remembers, in one of which she spent a tiring night with a miner with black-rimmed nails who left her a bag of gold dust the weight of a plum.

Chinatown, lacking gaslights, marks its territory with red paper lamps, and the glowing globes remind Blanche that this stroll is nearly over. She dreads the thought of home.

“Sure is the biggest turd I’ve seen in some time,” says Jenny. “Dog?”

“Let’s hope so. That’s a week of luck.” Blanche scrapes it off her shoe using the frayed edge of the sidewalk, thinking of Arthur.

Jenny whoops with laughter. “I thought the whole point of luck is that it just happens.”

Blanche purses her lips. “Maybe you can grab it sometimes, if you see it passing.”

The hot sky’s black by the time they reach 815 Sacramento. “I’m off,” remarks Jenny in the stairwell, collecting her machine.

“Where to?”

“High-wheeling around.”

“But where’ll you sleep?”

“Ain’t tired,” Jenny assures her. “I already snoozed half the day away in Portsmouth Square.”

“A bientôt, then,” says Blanche shortly and heads up the stairs, P’tit heavy with sleep against her chest.

“Very soon. Bonne chance, and all that.”

But it’s not luck Blanche needs, it’s knowledge. Someone who understands the obscure miseries of babies. Someone who’s stumbled on a cure for smallpox. Someone who’d stay and make everything better instead of zipping off down the street whistling a tune Blanche doesn’t know.

Upstairs, the apartment is silent. She manages to change P’tit’s diaper without waking him, which is a minor miracle. Once she’s put him in his trunk, she’s weary enough to drop right down on the sofa in her street clothes. But first she makes herself go to the slightly open door of the sickroom.

“What the hell—” Her whisper comes out louder than it’s meant to.

Ernest turns on her. “Oh, now you come home?”

“What are you doing to him?”

“Stopping him from scratching.” Ernest turns back to his meticulous work of looping the cotton around Arthur’s slack wrists and attaching the strips to the metal frame. “Three scabs on his eyelid this evening, and they’re itching like the devil. If he scratches them, he could blind himself.”

Scabs?

The twelfth day.

It hits her: they’re not going to lose Arthur after all.

It’s the fifteenth of September, one day since Blanche should have died at San Miguel Station. Paying for her ham sandwich on Clay Street, for the first time since she’s come to America she doesn’t leave a tip on the counter. She stares into her pocketbook, adding up the coins. That icy Madame, with her invented expenses, has reduced Blanche to this, a fretful miser. Maybe Blanche should have gone to one of those free lunch places where all you have to pay for is your drink. Maybe she should have invited a stranger to buy her a proper meal.

Arthur could be watching her this very moment. She knows she’s an easy target, standing a couple of blocks from her own building in broad daylight, as bright as some maypole in her blue plaid and yellow stockings. She shrinks behind her parasol and chews the sandwich so fast she almost chokes.

She shouldn’t read it. What possible good will it do her to—

She gallops down to him and holds out a coin, unable to speak. Somehow afraid that this gamin will guess Blanche is part of the story behind his shrill headlines.

She finds a wall to lean against. Angles her parasol to hide her face as she fingers the front page. An engraving of a glum-looking woman in a sack suit; is that supposed to be Jenny? Unknown Assassin, says the headline. Blanche skips over the details she already knows. How bizarre to see what she lived through last night turned into an item tucked between stock prices and Crazy Horse whupping the army at Little Bighorn. Cartwright sounds as if he’s still down there in San Miguel Station. He must have composed the piece in a terrible rush for it to be printed and sold all through the City already. Could he have telegraphed his report in? Blanche glances up at the nearest pole, picturing words hissing like lightning along the thin skein of wire.

He calls Jenny the Little Frog-Catcher. Why “little,” when she was pretty tall for a woman? That has the ring of some sentimental novel. And “masquerading in men’s clothing”—that sets Blanche’s teeth on edge; was it Jenny’s fault if her pants made unobservant people jump to the wrong conclusions?

Arrested for “drunken belligerence”? Does Cartwright have a source among the patrolmen for that? “Truth be told.” He’s probably making up this moonshine himself.

Blanche leafs through the pages to track down the second half of the story, eyes flicking over hundreds of other items in tiny print. The heat wave’s killing children in record numbers. Vandals who open hydrants will be liable to prosecution. A sketch of a rather lovely striped bonnet. “City health officer calls Orientals who refuse to report smallpox cases ‘tens of thousands of treacherous snakes in our very bosom.’”

“Possibly Jenny was frail.” That word trips Blanche up; she reads it again, and anger pulses behind her eyes. Frail: a namby-pamby euphemism for selling it. Oh, so now the pallid newsman is claiming Jenny was on the town? That’s rich.

The bed, the flying glass, a diagram of the McNamaras’ four-room house with dotted lines to show the bullets angling in the front left window, going over the bent form of the “murdered girl’s companion,” right through the body of the Little Frog-Catcher, some of them even punching through the partition wall and flying past Ellen McNamara’s head.

Nothing at all about Arthur Deneve. Did Cartwright listen to a word Blanche told him this morning? The man gives Jenny’s dying words as “Adieu, I follow my sister.” What sister? Sappy hogwash!

She reads on anyhow, hungry for any details, reliable or not. “Long before she took to the batrachian trade, Jenny dazzled in juvenile parts alongside her thespian progenitors.” Blanche rereads that, puzzling over a couple of the words. Jenny, a child star following her parents—or letting them bully her—onto the stage? Blanche tries to picture her in frills and face paint, warbling and pirouetting. Actually, the image is not so incongruous. Jenny was a swaggering braggart; Blanche can easily imagine her putting on a great show of girlishness, if that was the role assigned. “On losing a third child, Madame Bonnet took to the demon drink, neglecting her first two,” she reads. That’s pretty specific; this can’t all be invented, surely? “On her consequent demise the family was quite broken up.”

Gone to the devil, wasn’t that what Jenny quipped when Blanche asked about the Bonnets?

But no, of course; Jenny would rather dig up other people’s histories than reveal the most basic information about her own. She liked to give the impression that she’d shrugged off her past with other cumbersome gear. As if she were entirely made up of transient stuff: stories, songs, and jokes. Blanche should have asked more questions and insisted on a few answers.

Altercation. Mayhem. Alibi. They turn Blanche’s stomach, all these eagerly crowding words. She squints at the smeary print, trying to find the facts. The stableman, Charles St. Clair, who came out to San Miguel Station the day before the murder and had an argument with Jenny and Blanche about the rented buggy—Cartwright describes him as being “in the clear,” because the other stablemen at Marshall’s swear he was hard at work till after nine on Thursday night. “Deneve.” Here’s Arthur’s name at last; Blanche goes back.

Blanche blinks at the words but they still don’t sink in. “Known to have left the City.” Known; who knows it? Who told Cartwright? How long after the separation? Arthur wouldn’t have just upped and left town, surely. He did threaten to when he and Blanche argued at the faro table the other night, but surely that was bluster. Would he really abandon his life here?

If it’s true that Arthur’s gone—

She drops the newspaper on the dusty sidewalk. Is it possible that Blanche has spent a week hiding from Arthur and a night and a day thinking him a murderer when he hasn’t even been in California?

Don’t be an idiot, she scolds herself. She knows he killed Jenny. It’s weakness in her to let herself hope otherwise. Why believe Cartwright on this point when his whole article is riddled with inventions? No, Blanche knows in her bones that Arthur shot Jenny by mistake, aiming for Blanche. She knows, because she’s aware she’s done some things to half deserve it. (Are you his woman or aren’t you? Ernest demanded when Arthur was on the verge of death.) She can feel Arthur’s wrath even now, its long steel muzzle aimed at her across the City.

And P’tit. That’s the real reason she’d rather not believe Arthur fired the gun. Because if the father of her child doesn’t have blood on his hands, if he’s just a furious man like other men, then perhaps P’tit is safe and sound. Slumped against the wall, Blanche presses her eyeballs so hard, she sees spots. Dead, her child is probably dead, but probably isn’t definitely, is it? Arthur could have rid himself of the nuisance of P’tit in some more temporary way, by sending him somewhere, some awful place like Doctress Hoffman’s. P’tit could well be alive. Retrievable, salvageable. Blanche might as well hold on to that, since she has nothing else.

If it’s true that they’re gone … It doesn’t matter that Blanche is broke, because she can go round to her lodgers’ doors and drum up their overdue rents as soon as she’s settled in. She won’t need to dance for that Prussian bitch tomorrow night or throw herself on the mercy of one of her michetons. All she needs is a door that locks. Despite the sweltering air, despite the tightness and weight of her costume, Blanche starts to hurry down the street.

She’s at her building in a matter of minutes. She stands craning her neck up at the blank windows, fiddling with the keys that hang from her waist, losing her nerve. A piper at one corner and a kid clacking a pair of spoons on his leg at the other. She tries to shut out the cacophony. Cartwright’s line was curiously vague: “the eastern states or his native France.” What if the macs are still occupying the apartment like scorpions in a crevice? Safer, on the whole, to turn away … except that Blanche has nowhere else to go.

In the dim stairwell, she takes a long breath. Her plan is to climb very quietly all the way to the attic and find out from Gudrun if it’s true that Arthur’s left.

On the second-floor landing, Blanche tiptoes past her own door as fast as she can, not letting the heels of her mules touch the floorboards. The whole building’s oddly quiet. Of course, it’s a Friday morning; people who weren’t shot at last night are getting on with their ordinary lives. Not a sound from the Scottish photographers’ rooms on the third. The Corfu men on the fourth must be at their pickle factory, and the fifth floor’s silent too. At Gudrun’s peeling door, Blanche hovers and then taps. Waits. Knocks again. No, the girl must be out at her sewing job.

On the landing outside her own door, she freezes, cutting off the squabble in her head. She thinks of a shotgun, freshly loaded, and she suddenly can’t remember how she convinced herself that coming home was a good idea. Just because of something she read—when everyone knows newspapers fill up with lies the way a gutter does with cabbage leaves. Didn’t Cartwright make up Jenny’s last words from scratch—simply inventing a poignant line, in his hurry—and smear her as “frail” for good measure? So why should Blanche give any credence to the rest of his verbiage?

Perhaps Ernest was here when someone from the paper came around asking questions, and it was he who claimed that Arthur—his blameless friend—left a week ago. Or perhaps the two of them told the lodgers to spread that rumor. They might have gone and come back already. Perhaps Arthur did take a train out of the City, to give himself an alibi for Thursday night, then made his way back as far as San Miguel Station. (Though how could he have known where Blanche and Jenny were? And what about the dogs, the dogs that didn’t bark until after the gunshots? Oh, Blanche’s brain is worn out from running on these crazily looped tracks.)

She taps first, then scuttles backward and goes down five steps. If Arthur—or Ernest—opens the door, then she can start clattering downstairs before he’s caught more than a glimpse of her. Blanche still moves as deftly as a circus rider, even in heels. It’s a risk, of course, it’s a terrible risk, but—

Nobody’s answering.

Her skin is tight. She wants to flee. But she makes herself approach the door and slide her key in. Delicately, soundlessly, tickling the lock.

The door swings open slowly.

Nothing. Not a stick of furniture, even. Blanche blinks.

She walks from room to room, her feet echoing strangely. Gone, everything but the little stove, the walls, and the panes in the windows. No sign of P’tit’s things, the trunk he slept in. All her clothes, vanished. Even the table and the bed. How on earth did they get the bed out?

Struck by a thought, Blanche runs back to the salon. Only a little circle in the fireplace where the green chamber pot used to stand so pertly. How much was in there the night she left, ten dollars or so in banknotes and coin? But another few hundred, her whole goddamn nest egg, in the old boot under the bed; they must have discovered that when they were emptying the place. Blanche bets that gave them a jolly moment.

Gone, everything vaporized as if she only imagined it, all the evidence of more than a year of her life. Is this Arthur’s final, stylish joke? Suddenly drained, Blanche leans against the wall. The bare bones of the building: that’s all she has left in the world.

A tiny scratching, familiar somehow. The sound of a key in the door.

Her ground-floor lodger stands in the doorway, his face a mask of shock. “Miss Blanche—”

“Low Long.” She breathes out, so relieved she’s almost laughing. “What are you doing up here?” He’s always downstairs, overseeing the rows of cross-legged bachelors who sew his shoes.

He blinks rapidly. “Why you not New York?”

“New York?” Blanche repeats.

“With Mr. Arthur.”

Her eyes narrow. “Why should either of us be—”

“Mr. Arthur—he say you go New York and he follow.”

Why would Arthur have bothered spinning such a yarn to one of their tenants? “I don’t know anything about Mr.—him,” snaps Blanche. Then, her voice shaking despite her best efforts to control it: “I don’t suppose you’ve seen my baby?”

“I know nothing about baby.” There’s a new quality to the man’s voice that she doesn’t recognize; irritation? “You get out quick, Miss Blanche, men coming soon for bunk up.”

“Bunk up?” Bewildered.

“Here, here, here.” Her lodger is pointing all around the apartment. “Ten men sleep every room tonight.”

Pride, that’s the new tone she’s hearing. “Low Long,” Blanche says as steadily as she can, “have you lost your mind?”

He doesn’t seem to know that idiom.

“Gone loco?” She makes circles around her ear. “Was it you who took away all my furniture?”

Low Long stands a little straighter. “This mine now.”

“What is? What’s yours?”

“My building, eight fifteen Sacramento.”

She gives him a cold stare. “All you rent from me is your little shoe shop.”

“You what?”

“Good American dollar, eighteen hundred.”

Last Saturday? The very day after their battle at the gambling saloon, Arthur woke up alone in their bed and decided to sell the place out from under Blanche? She presses her lips together hard. “There’s been a mistake.”

“Many year I spend no cent, eat rice, little vegetable.” Low Long’s voice has taken on the timbre of a storyteller’s. “Now top-quality rooming house on famous Sacramento Street, heart of Little China, space for many many, one man, one bunk.”

She speaks through her teeth. “Get out of my building.”

“Not your now, Miss Blanche, sorry. Old lodgers gone, new lodgers coming. Top-quality Chinese rooming house,” he repeats confidently, like some huckster winding up his patter in the street. “You go New York, Mr. Arthur explain,” he assures her, nodding.

“Mr. Arthur tried to shoot me last night. Mr. Arthur’s gone Christ-knows-where,” she roars, “with your eighteen hundred dollars and everything I had in the world.”

For a moment, Low Long hesitates.

Blanche presses her advantage. “I’m sorry to tell you that you’ve been bilked out of your savings—swindled, you understand? He’s not my husband, and he never owned this building, so how could he sell it? It’s my name on the deed.”

Instead of frightening him, that last word makes his forehead clear. “Deed, I have deed.”

Isn’t it behind the lithograph in the—

The bedroom walls are bare, Blanche remembers. Arthur took down the print of the picnic, the black-jacketed dandies and the beautiful naked girl, and found the goddamn deed.

“He sold it to you under false pretenses, then. Hand it over,” she adds, holding out her palm in a queenly pose.

“Never mind about the furniture. Give me back my deed and I won’t fetch a patrolman.” Blanche watches him to see if the word shakes him. Are there police in the City who’d defend a Chinaman’s claim—defend it against a white woman’s, even if that woman was a female Frog “of no character”?

“I have deed,” Low Long repeats, dogged.

She examines the silk folds of his costume for any telltale bulge indicating where he might have put the document.

“Pay eighteen hundred dollar, all done official correct. My name, Low Long, on deed now.”

And suddenly the fight goes out of Blanche. All she’s lived through since last night catches up with her, and blackness swims across her eyes. She leans back, presses her hands to the wall so she won’t pass out.

“You go, Miss Blanche,” says Low Long, not ungently. “Men coming make bunk.”

She blinks to clear away the dark.

“Five minute, no more.” Low Long makes an absurd bow. She hears his steps move out of the apartment, down the stairs.

Then she lets herself slide down the wall until she’s on the floor. Her heels glide out in front of her. Limp as old cabbage. Her ankles are swollen. And her wrists. Thickened like P’tit’s, except that in her case, it’s due to the heat.

Whether Arthur’s really fled the country or is just hiding out somewhere in this teeming City where Detective Bohen will never find him … it’s over. It must be finished now, surely; their accounts settled. Eighteen hundred dollars he took for her building, together with whatever was in the pot and the boot, and what the bits of furniture would fetch, and her clothes. That hypocrite of a so-called bohemian who always claimed money wasn’t worth a rat’s ass!

But no, Arthur preached free love—meaning that he could do what he liked, and it was never him who paid. It occurs to Blanche that English doesn’t have French’s useful distinction between libre, meaning that something’s unconstrained, and gratuit, meaning that it costs nothing. Free thought, free speech, free love: the English word that Arthur was so fond of obscures the price of things. The man liked to come at life sideways, by a playful sleight of hand. A certain grace to speculation, wasn’t that his boast? And it strikes Blanche that she’s been just one of his more long-term speculations.

She stares from wall to empty wall. It’s not a spiteful message, this denuded apartment; she sees that now. Simpler than that: Arthur assumed Blanche wouldn’t be coming back from San Miguel Station. Wouldn’t need her clothes anymore once she was in the ground. Blanche is surer than ever that he was the killer, whether he pulled the trigger himself or handed the dirty job off to Ernest. This was his grand vengeance on Blanche, because she had the gall to walk away in the end—away from him, Arthur Pierre Louis Deneve, aerialist extraordinaire turned daring speculator and man-about-town, debonair beau of the sporting set. He’d loved her for almost a decade—as much as a man of his monstrous egotism could love—or seemed to, at least, but he decided on her death as simply as he might order another bottle of wine, with a snap of his fingers.

The door squeaks slightly.

“That wasn’t five minutes,” she barks.

But the face that comes around the door is not Low Long’s.

Blanche leaps to her feet so fast her heels slam like a flamenco dancer’s.

Blanche’s mind chatters to keep the terror at bay. He’s twenty-one, but with the face of a skeleton. If this man is Arthur’s shadow, it’s the distorted, serpentine shadow of the end of the day.

Ernest takes a step closer.

“Low Long!” Blanche screeches like a parakeet. Perfect, she groans internally; first she threatens to set the cops on the man, and then she calls on his gallantry for protection.

“Stop that racket,” says Ernest.

“Low Long!” No furniture to put between her and this elongated ape.

“Have you no shame, salope?”

“Shame?” She repeats the word in confusion, keeping her eyes on the impeccable curves of Ernest’s dark jacket. Could he be hiding a pistol? A stiletto, more likely. Won’t spoil the line of a suit. Why didn’t Blanche pay attention over the years when the two friends made jokes like that? What stopped her from glimpsing what they’ve always been capable of?

“Telling the papers such conneries,” he growls. “As if Arthur knows or cares what happened in some dive at the end of the railroad track!”

Blanche blinks at him. Is this really a declaration of his friend’s innocence? The last thing she was expecting. Her eyes keep searching for any hint of that stiletto. Of course, all Ernest really needs are his steely fingers around her throat.

“Probably one of those boozy hicks set off his varmint gun by tripping over it.”

She nods, to pacify him.

“It could have been anyone,” Ernest barks at her. “With a history like Bonnet’s—the fool made enemies wherever she went. She couldn’t go a block without running into a fight.”

He takes a step closer.

“Don’t hurt me,” Blanche says, softly. Despising herself, even as she knows there’s no other way to play it. Ernest is hardly going to throttle her here and now, with the building full of carpenters, she tells herself. If he meant to, he’d have done it right away, because killers don’t waste time lecturing. Which means it’s worth lowering herself to beg. “I’ll leave town, tonight,” she murmurs. “I’ll go so far away, you’ll never have to—”

“You won’t go anywhere till you’ve cleared my friend’s name, putain!”

She’s nodding automatically, head bobbing like a toy on a spring.

“You had Arthur Deneve,” Ernest marvels, leaning in very close to her. “You cold piece of veal, to turn your back on such a man at his lowest hour! To make him so sick of this city that he abandoned it—”

So that much of what the paper said is true, it occurs to her. Arthur’s really gone. Absurdly, she feels the faintest pang of loss.

“—whereupon you defamed him in print, for sheer spite, as a murderer!”

Blanche is lost for words. What can she say, what can she do, to buy herself out of this? She’d get on her hands and knees and bare herself for this raging man if she had anything to offer that he hasn’t had a dozen times before.

“So tomorrow,” he growls, “you’re going to walk into that inquest and tell the jury how wrong you were.”

“Yes,” Blanche breathes.

Ernest turns on his polished heel.

Relief floods her. She can’t believe that’s all it took: one magic word.

Here it comes. Blanche waits for the threat as for a blade parting her skin.

“—I swear you’ll never see the kid again.”

Her mouth falls open.

Ernest doesn’t notice her shock because he’s spun away. Out the door already, shoes thundering on the stairs. He’s gone.

She breathes in, so sweet it hurts her chest. Terrible hope hooks her.

P’tit!

He must be alive. How could Ernest threaten never to let Blanche see her baby again if her seeing him again is not at least a possibility? The man wasn’t being crafty and calculating, just now; she’s known Ernest long enough to read his tone, and she’s convinced that he spoke from the heart. A malevolent, jealous, septic heart, but still. This much she’d bet: P’tit’s alive, and Ernest knows where he is.