VII
BANG AWAY

Another bang; straw puffs at the very corner of the bale. “Dang it!”

Blanche is charmed by the childish euphemism that the twelve-year-old mumbles as if it’s a serious cuss.

“Accuracy’s a sight harder with a handgun,” Jenny comforts him. “Care to show Miss Blanche what you can do with your old varmint gun instead? I once saw this boy hit a can at thirty yards,” she tells Blanche.

Blanche widens her eyes. “I don’t believe it.”

John Jr. blushes as red as he might if Blanche rubbed up against him. She didn’t mean to flirt, exactly; it’s just her stock-in-trade.

“Go get it,” Jenny tells the boy.

“Dadda sold the varmint gun, a month back,” he mutters, squinting at the target as he lifts the revolver again. This time, the bale thuds and sends up a cough of dust.

“Now that’s the ticket,” murmurs Blanche.

John Jr. doesn’t look at her, but he’s flushed to the tips of his ears, and she can’t help enjoying this little exercise of her powers.

Jeremiah’s whining about it being his turn.

“I’ll hold it with you,” says his sister Kate.

“No.”

“Otherwise you’ll shoot your foot off, you know you will.”

“All by self!”

Blanche thinks of P’tit. Of all the dangers he could be getting into wherever he may be.

The squabbling brings Ellen McNamara out and breaks up the lesson. With a few martyred sighs—“Breakfast’s cleared away hours ago”—she agrees to toast a couple pieces of bread while Blanche is dressing.

“There’s a creek up on Sweeney Ridge where I always catch a sackful,” says Jenny, nodding toward the hills to the south. “Care to come along?”

Blanche hesitates, looks down at her polka-dot skirt. She doesn’t want to be stuck at the Eight Mile House on her own all day, but …

“Don’t let all your froufrou prevent you. John Jr. can lend you a pair of overalls.”

“Not on your life.”

But Blanche goes back to the bedroom and removes her bustle, at least, and swaps her white mules for a pair of flattish boots. She borrows the boy’s golden-brown pony. Offers to rent her, that is, but John Jr. stammers something about any friend of Jenny’s being a friend of his. Blanche rewards him with her silkiest smile.

“Saddle slipping on you?” Jenny asks when they’ve been riding a few minutes.

“I feel as if I’m wallowing in a basket,” complains Blanche.

“Ah, you must have ridden English-style at your circus.”

“French-style,” Blanche corrects her.

“Well, better learn to ride Western or this poor palomino’s going to flick you off into the nearest gulch,” says Jenny. “Leave her mouth alone, for starters.”

“Then how’s she going to know who’s boss?”

“Let her have life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, I say, so long as she gets you up the hill.”

Blanche rolls her eyes but transfers both reins to her left hand and leaves them slack, like Jenny does. And John’s pony does seem to know what she’s doing; she must have been up this way before.

They skirt around dairy farms, going past a mountain that Jenny says is named San Bruno. “So how about a few tricks, now the pony’s used to you?”

“Go on, I’ve never known a genuine equestrienne.”

“A genuine putain, these days.”

Jenny gives her a look so fierce that Blanche yanks on the bridle without meaning to, making the palomino shake her creamy head furiously. “What?” Blanche demands. “Why be squeamish about the word?”

“You’re more than that,” Jenny insists. “Don’t let those sons of bitches reduce you to that.”

Blanche is startled.

“The way you dance, the goddamn artistry of it—there’s not a one can touch you.”

Blanche decides to be droll. “They can afterward, if they pay extra,” she mutters.

Jenny ignores that.

They ride on for a minute. Something’s puzzling Blanche. “You’ve never seen me dance.”

“Ain’t I, though?”

Blanche stares at her. “At the House of Mirrors?” It’s never occurred to her to scan the faces under the top hats and bowlers or wonder if all the audience is male. And why would it matter, exactly? she asks herself in some confusion. Hard to explain the prickling feeling it gives her to know Jenny was among the watchers one time. Jenny, slouched on one of the Grand Saloon’s red velvet chairs with her hat tipped over her eyes, unnoticed, because everyone was ogling the little festooned stage where Blanche la Danseuse was giving it her all. “What took you there?”

Jenny shrugs. “What takes me anywhere?”

“Good?” Jenny shakes her head.

Blanche looks down, hot-cheeked.

Quoting Blanche’s own phrase back at her, Jenny says, “You’re the goddamn crème de la crème.”

Blanche angles her face away to hide her smile.

They’re moving up onto Sweeney Ridge now. Every blue curve turns to scrubby brown, seen up close.

Jenny’s different on this ride, Blanche notices: peaceful as she sways in the saddle, quiet for long stretches. It’s a side of her friend Blanche has never had the opportunity to glimpse before. As if Jenny has a prickly city self who gets into slanging matches in bars and a country self who’s at rest, somehow. Blanche couldn’t stomach living in the middle of nowhere, but she can see that something in the air here makes Jenny breathe easier.

It’s getting steep. Jenny jumps down and hitches the rented hack to a lightning-cracked thorn tree. “Bring you back some water in a while, all right?” she murmurs in his pointed ear.

“Don’t tell me we’ve got to walk now?”

“Just a little farther.”

The heat’s a rug hanging in Blanche’s face, and with each loud breath, she pushes it away.

Jenny heads off along a humid stretch of fern-lined trail.

“Looks as if it’s been raining up here,” Blanche hazards.

Jenny shakes her head. “Fog drip. That’s what the plants live on.”

“And you?”

“Nearly as high,” she admits with a chuckle.

Blanche has to stop talking as they close in on the summit. When they finally come to a halt, she heaves the scorching air out of her lungs. Her left calf’s cramping. They stand looking down the parched slopes. Ocean on two sides, as if the women are balancing on the spine of some colossal whale with scarred flanks. “The land looks scraped bare.”

Jenny nods. “When I had a flock down there in San Mateo, you could still stumble across the odd redwood, three hundred feet high. Not anymore.”

“What made you leave off herding?”

She makes a face. “Got to feeling too shackled.”

Blanche laughs breathlessly at that.

“You try sticking with fifteen hundred sheep for months on end,” Jenny protests. “I’d rather be footloose.” She turns, suddenly businesslike, and points to a little creek some distance away, edged with saplings. “Now, here we go, this is prime frog territory.”

“Why don’t I hear any croaking?” asks Blanche as they walk toward the water.

“They’re probably tuckered out from the heat,” says Jenny. “Besides, some kinds make more of a whistle or a chirp.”

“The red-legs you’re hunting, what do they say?”

“Depends what they mean.”

“What do you mean, what they mean?” asks Blanche.

“Well, they don’t make their music just to pass the time,” says Jenny, grinning. “Got to want something to sing about it, no?”

Blanche supposes so.

Blanche laughs. “You speak frog!”

“Well, I’ve been known to try,” says Jenny, rueful, “but they don’t seem to understand my accent. I do like to come up here after a winter rainstorm to listen to the chorus. Like some crazy orchestra.”

“What’s the chorus?” asks Blanche.

“A bunch of frogs.”

“A family, you mean?”

Jenny shakes her head. “Just the males. Frogs aren’t what you’d call family-minded. When the males are keen to breed, they’d deafen you.” She lets out a series of short grunts, then a final growl: “Uh-uh-uh-uh-uh-grrrr.”

Blanche giggles, reminded of an expressionless banker who never thrusts more than a dozen times before he collapses across her body.

Jenny grins, reading her mind.

“So what do you call a bunch of female frogs?”

“No such thing.” From her satchel, Jenny pulls out a burlap bag, and creeps up to the bank of the creek. “Now let’s hush, or they’ll hear us coming.”

She dips to wet her bag. Then stands wide-legged in the rushes, keeping her eyes on the water.

“Ain’t you got a net even?”

Jenny puts her finger to her lips, stern all of a sudden. “An old Frenchman taught me the knack,” she murmurs under her breath. She stoops, graceful, fingering apart the dense cattails. Her brown cupped hands plunge—

A small splash. She shakes off a handful of slime.

“Did you just miss one?” whispers Blanche.

“Getting a touch late in the season now,” mutters Jenny with a hint of melancholy.

Blanche is soon bored. The stink of water hanging on the humid air; frogs themselves might not smell, but their creeks sure do. She slaps her ear to dislodge a mosquito. Wonders about snakes. Her whole body’s slick with sweat.

Jenny dips and comes up holding one lashing, squirming leg. “Good-size hopper, must be five inches.” She tosses it into her burlap sack and folds the top over. “Care to hold the bag for me?”

“You must be kidding.”

Jenny gets into the rhythm of it now, pincering frogs by the waist one by one. Sometimes she strokes their little stomachs.

“You cuddling them now?” Blanche scoffs under her breath.

“Stops them going loco in the bag.” Jenny is almost unrecognizably calm, shin-deep in muck.

The day’s softening to dusk by the time she packs up. “Well, I’m damned if I’m going to chop-chop all the way into town tonight,” says Jenny with a great stretch.

It hadn’t occurred to Blanche—but of course, Jenny would have to go back into the City to sell what she’s caught.

“Durand’s customers are just going to have to wait a bit longer for their cuisses de grenouille.”

“But won’t the creatures die if you keep them in that sack?”

“Nah, they’ll mostly just sleep.”

“What do they eat, anyhow?” Blanche wonders.

“Anything the greedy bastards can fit in their mouths. I threw in a few worms so they’ll be less inclined to chew on each other tonight.”

“Is this where you always hunt?” Blanche asks as they walk back in the direction of the horses.

Jenny shakes her head. “I go all over. Sometimes as far down as the Seventeen Mile House. There’s a sag pond hereabouts I wouldn’t mind trying before we turn back …”

Tight-lipped, Jenny shakes her head, pointing to one of the enormous bonfires in which trunks are turning to ash. “Hey”—she stops a man walking by with an ax on his shoulder—“what’s going on here?”

“Spring Valley Water Company’s damming the pond. Putting up an earthen wall a hundred feet high,” he says with laconic pride.

“The hell you are!”

Blanche groans inwardly; Jenny can lose her temper in a heartbeat.

“Who gave you the blasted right to—”

“Whoever sold us the blasted pond, that’s who,” the workman interrupts, turning his ax in a faintly menacing way. “You want the City to choke of thirst?” He looks Blanche up and down, and it seems as if he’s more disgusted by her mud-flecked polka-dot skirt than by her friend’s denim overalls.

She finds herself blushing. “I’m beat,” she says to Jenny in a pleading undertone. “Let’s head back to San Miguel Station.”

Jenny’s two days’ dead, and Blanche is in a basement noodle house on Dupont, a few doors away from the undertaker’s, gulping down some kind of fishy stew the waiter brought her.

She can’t remember all she just said at the inquest, or even how she said it. If Blanche had put things better, a little more eloquently, moved those jurymen to tears—if she’d given one of her legendary performances—might they have ended up finding Arthur and Ernest guilty of conspiracy to commit murder, instead of merely concluding that the evidence points to their involvement?

In the meantime, she needs some substantial funds. Having blown so much of the money Lamantia gave her yesterday on this pink costume, she can’t live for long on the rest. Blanche is supposed to clear three hundred by dancing at the House of Mirrors on Saturday—that’s tonight, she realizes with a jerk. But she can’t quite imagine summoning it up, whatever knack Blanche la Danseuse once possessed for leaving hundreds of men roused and rapt.

She asked Lamantia to come and see the show, Blanche remembers now. She hasn’t said no to his offer to take her into keeping; it seems she can’t afford to say no. The question may be moot, though. By this evening the businessman might have found the time to read an afternoon paper, which will enlighten him about his little white flower. The child Blanche never mentioned; the French thugs she’s been living with; the obvious conclusion (the most alarming thing to such a man as Lamantia) that she can’t keep hold of her tongue. He might not think her a suitable candidate for a mistress anymore. This fills Blanche with a curious mixture of disappointment and relief.

Her head’s full of the detritis of the inquest: everyone’s lies, half lies, evasions, pontifications. Claims that, when Blanche tries to grasp them and knot them into a narrative that holds together, prove as slippery as pondweed.

Suddenly she can’t swallow. Nausea grips her. She lets the piece of miscellaneous shellfish in her mouth drop back discreetly into her wide ceramic spoon and pushes the dish away.

Blanche tries to remember how she became convinced as she sat on McNamara’s barrel sticky with Jenny’s blood—no, how she convinced herself—that she, Blanche, must have been the target. It seemed to make an awful sense at the time. She couldn’t believe that it was only luck that saved her, the fluke of doubling over to struggle with that knotted lace just as the killer’s finger squeezed the trigger. It was guilt, too, that made her decide she was the one those bullets were meant for; she was crushed by a feeling of responsibility for all this horror. And a strange sort of vanity, perhaps; Blanche can see that now. Everyone puts herself at the center of the story, imagines the world giddily spinning on her own axis. Blanche couldn’t believe that she was just playing a walk-on part in Jenny’s bloody drama.

But here in the noodle house it occurs to her that there’s another explanation, much simpler than the one-in-a-million fluke of Blanche being spared by an accident of timing. Arthur or Ernest—she can’t be sure which, and their dark faces have melted into a single monstrous mask in her mind’s eye—perhaps they came to San Miguel Station to kill Jenny, not Blanche, and that’s just what they did. Whichever of them held the shotgun and looked through the sight, he chose not to shoot Blanche. She doesn’t know why, but she’s pretty sure she knows what happened. He waited calmly until Blanche, struggling with her laces, bent out of his line of fire, and then he blew Jenny to pieces.

Her gaze snags on a clock on the restaurant’s mantelpiece. Almost one already. The funeral’s at two.

But she finds she simply can’t do it, can’t stay away from the funeral. And she has to see Jenny’s face one more time, it occurs to her, before they nail the lid down.

The placard outside Gray’s says Memento Mori. Blanche stares at the boy holding it up. “What’s a—”

“Photograph of the victim, fresh took,” he rattles off, “thirty cents for a cabinet card, gilt-ruled, carte de visite only a quarter or five for a dollar …”

He’s lifting the top off his box with enthusiasm, but Blanche averts her eyes from the glossy images and makes for the front door of Gray’s.

What if she’s too late already? In the marble-floored lobby, a man’s going by in some kind of white uniform. “Pardon me, sir, but where do you keep the … the bodies?”

“Mortuary,” he answers, jerking his thumb downward.

That must be a fancy word for deadhouse. She speeds down the granite steps, her heels clacking.

Somehow she assumed the room would be empty, but it’s crammed: doves, miscellaneous men, grubby street kids of both sexes … The mortuary has the air of a high-class fishmonger’s, decorated for a festival. Flowers on stands all around, but there’s a tang in the air, something faintly off underneath the perfume. Three coffins, each lying on a bed of chunked ice, but only one of them is open. It’s ringed with gawkers, five-deep.

“Excuse me.” Outrage flares up in Blanche when she can’t get through. “Let me by.”

“Don’t push so,” cries a woman.

This wins her a little elbow room. People stare, mutter, even smirk at her as if she’s some kind of star. “Blanche la Danseuse,” she hears somebody say.

She ignores all that and shoves her way to the front.

Jenny’s corpse looks infinitely strange. Partly because the short hair’s been combed back neatly—more neatly than Blanche ever saw her wear it. The dieners have made her look like … a girl. A crop-haired, weather-beaten girl, head resting on a small white pillow. Somehow pale under her dark tan: exsanguination, wasn’t that Crook’s word? All the blood’s been wiped away. Just a girl, swollen around the left eye with bruising showing through the paint, because somebody punched her in the face just a few hours before somebody else shot her dead.

Blanche stares, trying to fix the image in her mind like a photograph. A memento mori. The small brown hands are—not exactly joined as if praying, but clasped around a white flower. Incongruous, as if Jenny is personifying Virtuous Suffering in some tableau vivant. It’s not the pristine charity nightshirt that’s transformed her; that’s a neutral garment, one a man might wear. It’s more the fact that she’s not strutting, not swaggering, not moving at all: still.

Blanche would be better off turning away and wiping this hoax from her memory. Surely at any moment her friend’s going to let out a horse laugh and spring up, somersaulting out of the coffin, crowing, Fooled you all!

That very first night Jenny came back to number 815. Pulling Arthur’s green shirt on over her head the way men do, snapping at Blanche when she went into the bedroom: A little privacy! Then, even down in San Miguel Station, in the room they shared for three days, Jenny kept her clothes on. Even on Wednesday night, Blanche remembers now, pulse thumping faster. Why didn’t Blanche wonder then? Was Jenny a touch prudish, for all her blunt talk? Did she prefer to keep her femaleness out of sight, out of mind? It was just one of Jenny’s many oddities.

Blanche worms her way around to the head of the coffin, possessed by a terrible curiosity. Standing behind Jenny’s pomaded hair, she slips her hand under, where the nape is soft against the ironed pillow.

A gasp goes up from the watchers. “What do you think you’re doing?” demands a man behind her.

Blanche ignores them all and slides her fingers underneath Jenny, right down the back of the starchy nightshirt. The flesh is so chilled. She can’t feel it, what she’s looking for, considerable scarring. She’s going to have to see for herself.

“Hands off, miss!”

“How dare you disturb the dead?”

Somebody yanks at Blanche’s arm but she fights him off, and before she can lose her nerve she reaches across the body and grips Jenny’s shoulder, pulls hard enough to make her roll sideways. Blanche was prepared for the corpse to be stiff, but it’s not. Jenny moves languidly, that’s all, like a sleeper who’s hard to rouse. An awful smell rises above the florals.

Two dieners seize Blanche’s arms and haul her away, then hustle her up the stairs. “Could be had up for interfering with a cadaver!” scolds one of them.

Blanche sits on the curb outside the undertaker’s, her head reeling. Puts up her parasol so that no one will see her face.

She knows she’s touched what she shouldn’t have; laid bare what should have stayed hidden. Jenny was most herself with her clothes on. Sorry, Blanche is so terribly sorry. For seeing what Jenny never wanted seen. For not understanding until she saw. For not looking till now.

How many years did she spend in that nightmare of an institution grubbing at the earth behind the fence? The supervisor finally got fired for—what was it the woman said on the train yesterday?—taking liberties. Imagine how many liberties the man in charge can take with children before someone calls for a grand jury investigation. Blanche shudders, rocking backward and forward. What did he—what did they all—do to Jenny, to a girl who refused to be like other girls? The ladder of pink scars. And other things that don’t show up so clearly. How hard did they try to break a spirit as playful and pugnacious as Jenny’s?

The tears are spilling out of Blanche’s sockets; her head has turned to hot liquid and she’s moaning like some blinded calf. Crying not for Jenny’s death, but for Jenny’s life. For the short, lousy lives of all the children.

After some minutes Blanche wipes her face and tilts her green parasol back a little. She estimates the size of the gathering crowd; well, no fear of Jenny going lonely to the grave. Some must be gawkers, of course, but many have the swollen eyes of friends who are mourning. Real friends; old friends. For all her irksome qualities, Jenny had that gift—she could make you care about her without hardly trying. She had hundreds of friends, clearly, while Blanche had just one. For less than a month. And Blanche, reckless and ignorant, led that friend straight to the barrel of a shotgun.

She chews her lips, scanning the crowd. No tall, mustachioed Frenchman standing ready to gun her down. But it’s not as if Ernest would do it in public, anyhow. He’ll find a private moment.

A pair of uniformed women emerge with baskets and wreaths of lilies and carnations and arrange them on the coffin. Trying to soften the unmistakable shape, Blanche supposes.

There’s some gamin barely bigger than his sandwich board parading past as if he’s at a fair: MYSTERIOUS MURDER OF FRENCH FROG GIRL. ADDITIONAL PARTICULARS FROM THE SCENE. “The father’s twenty minutes late already,” somebody comments behind her.

The old actor who lives in Oakland now; Blanche forgot all about him. She still can’t quite imagine Jenny with anything as ordinary as a family. Where were they, what did they do to help her when the judge sent her to the Industrial School?

The sandwich-board boy turns and Blanche reads what’s on the other side: WOMAN’S MANIA FOR WEARING MALE ATTIRE ENDS IN DEATH. Fury, acid in her throat.

There are three carriages lined up behind the hearse. Blanche realizes she’s going to be left behind, and she doesn’t even know where the funeral is taking place. She hurries alongside and tries to look in the open windows. The third carriage is empty. In the second she recognizes a ghastly face among a bright-costumed knot of filles de joie. “Maria,” she makes herself cry out.

The one-eyed hag beckons Blanche in, though the carriage is a squeeze already. Maria makes the introductions, and Blanche can tell the others are titillated to meet her. She forgets their names at once and leans against the worn upholstery, shutting her eyes.

There’s so much Blanche still doesn’t know about Jenny’s past. She opens her eyes and looks out at the milling crowd. She wonders exactly what kind of trouble with the law got Jenny locked up in the first place. Could she have been in one of those gangs of adolescent hoodlums for which San Francisco’s notorious? What kind of crowd did she run with, before the Industrial School and after?

Jenny was on the town for a while, Blanche knows that much. Moving in the sporting set, with its quick enmities and long memories. And at one point things fell apart badly enough for Jenny—despite her ebullient spirits—to decide she was better off dead. How would this Adrien have felt about Jenny walking away from him after she woke up from her overdose? Blanche wonders whether he might have nursed his resentment over the years, the way Arthur nursed his. What old debts did Jenny carry, what old scores did others want to settle with her? She was enough of a thief to swipe a priceless bicycle, after all. What other laws did she break? Could frog-hunting really have been the sole source of her cash? And why has Blanche been assuming that Arthur and Ernest were Jenny’s only enemies, that Jenny’s getting tangled up in Blanche’s complicated life was the only possible reason for her to have been killed?

These thoughts make her dizzy. It’s unbearable, the not knowing. Most of the time Blanche is sure of what happened, because she can feel Arthur’s hatred like a fire under her feet. But every now and then, the pieces fall apart in her mind and she can’t fit them back together. Two days since the murder, the nation’s finest detectives, newsmen striving for justice, a resolute coroner, and yet nobody seems any closer to the truth of how Jenny died.

An old man limping up the street, the crowd parting for him: this must be Sosthenes Bonnet. Well, not that old. He still has a performer’s uprightness about him, and a clever face. Not like Jenny’s, though; nothing about him is like Jenny that Blanche can see. Only his stunned stare at the hearse gives him away as the chief mourner.

Someone opens the door of the third carriage and puts the step down to help him in. It’s what’s-his-name, Portal; Blanche belatedly recognizes the lachrymose cook from Durand’s brasserie.

Now the hearse is pulling away, and all the carriages are following.

The small cortege heads down Dupont a few blocks, then turns west on Geary Boulevard. They’ve left most of the crowd behind at the undertaker’s. “Where are we going?” Blanche asks the girl beside her.

She goggles. “The cemetery, where else?”

“But which one?”

“Odd Fellows,” supplies Maria. “They’ve donated a plot.”

“Very suitable,” an older woman in bloodred rouge quips, “since Jenny was such an odd fellow!”

Maria shuts her up with a gesture.

“Oh, come,” the woman complains, “she enjoyed a laugh at her own expense …”

Blanche doesn’t want to hear any of it. Not their witticisms, nor rebuttals, nor sentimental musings on Jenny’s character … Blanche can’t bear to find out that everyone in the City knew Jenny better than she did.

“Did you get that scratch from a bullet?” the youngest-looking girl asks her.

Blanche shakes her head and shuts her eyes again.

Another one tries: “Is it true you went crazy in the deadhouse and dragged her corpse about?”

“Well, if we’re obliged to squeeze so tight we might as well get some conversation out of her,” the first mutters.

The carriages drag slowly through the hillside cemetery, a little city divided into neighborhoods. Carved signs mark out the sections belonging to the firemen, the typographers, the Protestant orphan asylum. The Chinese vault, where bodies are kept ready to be sent back to their homeland, is strewn with what looks to Blanche like the remains of a banquet: rice, joss sticks twisted black, singed squares of that curious pretend money they make out of paper stamped silver or gold. Low Long, she once asked her lodger, why do your lot work so hard?

The shoemaker told her that they had to save up enough to send themselves back, either-either.

Either what?

Pay for journey back, Miss Blanche, dead or live.

So their bones wouldn’t lie restless in California, you see. Blanche considers the bleak question now: Where will her bones end up?

They pass a much bigger, tonier cortege; hear violins. She feels oddly nettled that Jenny’s isn’t the only funeral in town.

They come to a halt now. She cranes out the window and sees the black-suited croque-morts lifting the coffin down and placing it at the side of a pit with freshly spaded edges. (The soil is reddish, bone-dry.) The women spill from the carriage, shaking out their skirts. No priest, Blanche suddenly realizes, which means no eulogy, no requiem. Are they going to put Jenny in the ground without a word? No music, even? That doesn’t seem right.

The sky is white-blue, steely hot. Rain on a funeral sends a soul to heaven, Blanche remembers, but no chance of a drop today. Now, there’s a curious thought: Jenny in heaven. Angels, robes? Somehow Blanche can’t imagine her anywhere but San Francisco, always wandering down some steep street, just out of sight.

Gravediggers in dusty overalls lower the coffin on straps. Then pull the straps back up, loose now. They glance around for instruction. Nobody seems to be in charge. The staff from Gray’s stand still, as if their duty is done. Sosthenes Bonnet has covered his face with his hands, Blanche notices.

In a shaky voice, an elderly woman strikes up what sounds like a hymn.

Most of the small crowd join in, some of them dissonantly. Sosthenes Bonnet’s rich old voice comes in on the third line.

Blanche remembers Jenny singing. She did it like breathing. The child star could have stayed on the stage, warbling and strutting with her parents, pleasing the crowds. Could have done any number of things. To think of all the lives Jenny tossed aside so she could live this particular one. And who’s to say she ever regretted it?

After a couple of verses, the hymn peters out. The diggers hoist their shovels.

A wave of anticlimax weakens Blanche’s legs. What now?

The old actor is making his halting way from the grave back to the carriage, leaning on Durand’s arm.

“It should have been Paris,” she hears him complaining to Portal, on his left.

“Monsieur Bonnet?”

He blinks at Blanche rheumily.

“Mademoiselle Beunon,” supplies Durand. “She was with Jenny in San Miguel Station.”

The expressive face contracts. “Mademoiselle.” A sketched bow. “I was just remarking that my daughter should rest in Paris.”

“Not at all,” says Blanche too sharply, following his gaze to the pit that the gravediggers are starting to fill in. “Jenny loved this city ever since she saw it burning.”

“Burning?”

“Saw it from the ship, the day you landed,” Blanche prompts him.

He shakes his head.

“She told me—” Blanche starts.

“There’d been a fire some weeks before, I believe,” says Sosthenes. “Blackened stumps everywhere. But nothing burning anymore, no. They were rebuilding already.”

“But Jenny insisted—”

Portal scowls at Blanche and takes the old man by the elbow.

“Jeanne was barely two when we came to this place,” says Sosthenes with a sorrowful smile. “How could she remember anything of the journey?”

Blanche is thrown. Is the man’s memory gone, or was Jenny’s deceiving her? (Even at twenty-seven, Jenny had had a long time to lick grit into a pearl.) Was she spinning a yarn, setting the stumps alight again to transform her ordinary arrival into a hero’s landing? How many of her anecdotes were fictions, Blanche wonders, and did Jenny even know the difference anymore?

He turns, gapes. But he’s not denying it.

“Leave him be, mademoiselle,” protests Durand.

Blanche presses on. “Couldn’t you have saved her from that?”

“Saved our Jeanne?” Durand is trying to move Sosthenes toward the carriage, but the old man twists away and comes back to Blanche. “If we could have saved her from her own nature,” he says with a trembling mouth, “we wouldn’t have had to ask the judge to send her to that place at all.”

Blanche blinks at him. “You asked him?”

A proper family, Jenny quips grimly in her head, that’s a guarantee of happiness.

“I begged him on my knees,” admits Sosthenes with a grandiloquent gesture. “It was said to be a sort of quarantine for the young—a house of refuge from the corruptions of the City, so that delinquents could be reformed before they fell into serious crime.”

How could Jenny have paid regular visits to this poor excuse for a father? Brought him a share in her earnings? “Did you ever see the skin on her back?” Blanche demands.

His face crumples like a page. “We didn’t know what it was like in that place,” he says. “We had so little notion—”

“Scarred,” she interrupts, “like the hull of a goddamn boat!”

Tears are scoring his cheeks now, which gives Blanche a certain satisfaction.

Durand and Portal, waiting for Sosthenes some yards away, are looking daggers at her.

The father takes Blanche by the hand; she flinches from his hot grip. “Jeanne was unmanageable, uncivilizable,” he confides. “Un enfant sauvage! With my wife not well and our younger girl in tears all the time—I simply—how could I have been expected to—”

“How convenient,” barks Blanche. “Pack one off to rot in the reformatory and the other to die in the asylum.”

“Our Blanche didn’t die, only the baby,” Sosthenes says, confused. “They’d have sent word, wouldn’t they?”

“What baby?” She’s nearly shrieking.

“My daughter was enceinte, you see, though I never knew the exact, ah, circumstances. At the asylum—the poor creature, he didn’t live a week.”

Blanche is almost too angry to speak. Another baby? Jenny’s nephew. Was this one nudged along toward his death? she wonders. Did anyone in the asylum feed him, even? Hold him? All the missing children. Washed into the world against their will, to do their time, a day or a year, before being sent out of it again. P’tit, she cries out silently, P’tit.

Durand’s cook is at Sosthenes’s elbow, leading the old man away from Blanche. “Stop harassing a grieving old man,” Portal throws over his shoulder.

Guilt paralyzes Blanche. What right has she, of all people, to accuse?

Jenny’s father sobs something as he goes. “It’s all true, Adrien.”

Adrien.

No. The cook? Portal, the cook at Durand’s?

Wait. It’s a common enough name, Adrien.

The cemetery’s almost deserted now. The carriage of doves has left without Blanche.

She starts walking east, toiling through the thick air. Her parasol wobbles overhead, weighing down her arm. She’s busy trying to make sense of Jenny; she’s flabbergasted. To try to kill yourself over a man because he’s wrecked your life—and then, years later, to treat him as a friend? Forgiveness, is that the word for it? It seems too simple a term for whatever happened between Jenny and Adrien Portal. Some deeper alteration, then? When Jenny left off skirts and put on pants, did some old scars not bother her anymore—did they no longer feel like hers? You’ve got the wrong Jenny Bonnet. Had Jenny managed to convince herself that she’d metamorphosed into someone entirely new?

“Miss Beunon!”

Cartwright, trotting behind Blanche. Where did he come from? She shakes her head furiously.

“A single question.”

She marches on.

“Please.” He pants. “Help me make sure your friend’s story doesn’t fade away.”

“It’s on every front page,” she snaps.

“It’s been only a day and a half. By Monday she’ll be lucky to get a paragraph at the back between stolen watches and run-over dogs.”

Blanche halts. Purses her lips. “What’s your single question?”

“Are you acquainted with a man called Lamantia?”

He persists. “I think you’ve heard the name, at least? He’s an importer on Market Street.”

She keeps shaking her head. It doesn’t sound as if he knows about the Palace. Curiosity’s like a pebble in her shoe. “Why does he matter, this Lamantia?”

“I don’t know for sure that he does. But he was in San Miguel Station on Wednesday morning.”

When she and Jenny were off frog-hunting on Sweeney Ridge? Blanche steps away from the newsman in confusion and panic.

“Yesterday Mrs. Holt told me about a stranger getting off the train on Wednesday,” adds Cartwright, keeping up with her. “A big man, dark, citified. She hadn’t thought to mention it to Detective Bohen, because it was on the day before the murder!”

But what could possibly have taken Lamantia to San Miguel Station? The Sicilian wasn’t even aware of Blanche’s connection to that crazy girl in pants till she told him about the murder yesterday. Unless—

Blanche stumbles, almost falls. On second thought, wasn’t it rather overdone, his insistence that he’d heard nothing at all about the case? Too busy to read the papers. Perhaps he wasn’t too busy to hire someone to track down his bella bianca after Blanche dropped out of view for a couple of weeks and left him pining. Didn’t Madame volunteer the fact that he’d been making inquiries at the House of Mirrors? How much had he paid Madame for the information that Blanche was at San Miguel Station?

By what, gunning her friend down in front of her? This is ludicrous. But what does Blanche know about the man, really, except how he fucks? Let me look after you as you deserve, Lamantia wheedled at the Palace. Him being the killer makes no sense, but since when have men’s cravings to own women ever made sense?

“Miss Beunon?”

She waves Cartwright away. She has to think. Because if by any chance Lamantia is behind the murder, then that would mean Arthur and Ernest are … well, not innocent, that word will never fit. They’re snakes in the grass, child-stealers, brutes at the very least. But if they didn’t shoot Jenny, they’re not quite demons. A notion that chokes Blanche like a pair of hands around her throat. Can Ernest possibly have been sincere yesterday at the apartment when he railed against her for defaming his friend as a murderer? When he gave her one last chance to make things right and get her baby back? A chance Blanche threw away today at the inquest like a used handkerchief.

“Mrs. Holt said the gentleman wandered around as if lost,” Cartwright rattles on,” but then he struck up a conversation with the chicken farmer.”

The change of tack bewilders her. “What chicken farmer?”

“This Louis fellow, the Canadian. I checked, and he really has been in San Jose since Thursday. But it seemed a touch too convenient that he’d happen to leave San Miguel Station on the very morning of the shooting. And aren’t chicken farmers usually stone broke, and so perhaps ripe for tempting?” Cartwright speaks as if telling the plot of some thrilling dime novel.

“What are you talking about?” demands Blanche.

“The importer could have hired this Louis, you see? The wife—when I pressed her, she admitted that her husband did talk to an Italian on Wednesday, name of Lamantia.”

“He might have contracted the job out to someone else,” says Cartwright uncertainly, “so he could go to San Jose and provide himself with an alibi, you see.”

A substitute for a substitute, like some corridor of mirrors? “It’s a crossroads in the goddamn scrublands,” Blanche retorts. “How many killers for hire do you imagine could be found there?”

“Phil Jordan?” he suggests with a shrug. “John McNamara?”

“It’s too complicated. It’s nonsense. My Arthur did it!” Blanche screams at him. (Why did she say my? Why, after all that’s come between her and that man, does she still slip into thinking of him as hers?) “I’ve been telling you, all of you, but none of you seems to listen.”

Cartwright’s breath hisses tiredly. “The problem is, you see, the lack of evidence—”

“Evidence be damned. Who wanted me and Jenny dead? Arthur. Because I dared to walk away from him after all these years,” says Blanche with a sob that’s almost triumphant, “and it was Jenny who gave me the strength to do it, and she died for it.”

She stalks away.

She’s almost at the gates of the cemetery when Cartwright hails her again. “Just one more question—”

Blanche groans.

“Only for background,” the journalist pleads, “to liven up the story. What was the appeal?”

Is that a legal term? she wonders.

Blanche stares at him. And growls, “You never met her.”

On Dupont, when she finally gets back to Chinatown from the cemetery, the evening heat’s streaking the burnt cork on a young song-seller’s cheeks. On arrival in America, Blanche was disconcerted by blackface minstrels, but now she doesn’t bat an eye even when they’re wearing skirts. This one is pealing out his song in falsetto, holding up the freshly inked lyric sheets in one hand and his petticoats in the other:

He doesn’t look at all bad, actually; prettier than some real girls. The music gives Blanche a reason to stand still and catch her breath.

Her thoughts move turgidly. She has to do it, this one last show for Madame Johanna tonight. After clearing her spurious debt to the madam, Blanche should have almost three hundred dollars left. That should be enough to buy her some kind of future. Rent, food, clothes. It’ll give her time to hide away from the macs, at least, and wait for P’tit—or for news that he’s never coming back. Blanche presses her hand to her face for a moment.

In a few minutes she’s standing by the stately doors of the blue-and-white mansion. The sign is fresh painted and almost as tall as Blanche.

FOR ONE NIGHT ONLY!

THE LIVELY FLEA’S FAREWELL TO THE TOWN.

LAST DANCE OF MURDERED GIRL’S BOSOM PAL.

Well, Blanche might have known Madame would milk the tragedy. She’s almost surprised there isn’t a large drawing of Blanche wearing nothing but a bloodstained corset.

The expressionless doorman lets her in. She can hear waves of laughter from the Grand Saloon; she pauses and puts her eye to the crack between the doors as she’s passing. Some burlesque about the epidemic? Lola and Paquita with what looks like—could it be?—fresh cranberries pasted all over their arms, chests, and faces. A month since Blanche has been here. The gaudy thick carpets, oil paintings, marbles, and, above all, the long mirrors are a shock to her senses.

She turns down the corridor that’s just for performers. Her skin crawls. Just one last time.

The empty dressing room at the end has been freshly wallpapered. She fingers the familiar costumes. Hourglass-shaped ball gowns, orthodox enough until they end above the knee. Military: fringed trunks, frogging, and tassels. The Andalusian outfit has a calf-length split skirt and castanets. The alabaster statue costume, more or less transparent. Hamlet, complete with Yorick’s skull, and boots that lace to the thigh. A bowl of wax fruit, a bow and arrow … Nothing looks appealing. It was always shoddy glamour, Blanche can see that now.

There’s a faint tap at the door. “My dear, so glad,” says Madame Johanna, putting her head around the door. Then her eyebrows soar. “All in mourning black tonight?”

“It seemed fitting.” Blanche keeps her eyes on the tiny faux-pearl buttons she’s doing up. “Ever so tasteful, the sign out front,” she adds, scathing.

The Prussian spreads her cloud-gray sleeves. “My doors are open to all who seek sensation. I don’t discriminate.”

“Well, that’s for sure,” Blanche mutters, tugging an opera glove up past her elbow. She needs to ask about Lamantia, just to put to rest that strange theory of Cartwright’s that she’s been turning over and over in her mind. But she’ll wait until after she’s danced, because she can’t afford to start another quarrel right now.

“The Professor wants to know what you mean to treat us to tonight.”

“‘Flea’ and ‘Bang Away, Lulu,’” says Blanche.

A pause. “Just two numbers?”

“Oh, I think that’ll provide enough sensation.”

Madame is clearly debating whether to press the point, to demand a lot more for the extraordinary fee of five hundred dollars. Instead she withdraws.

Blanche goes to stand outside the door to the stage, recognizing the final thumps of Fabienne’s flamenco skipping-rope act. The piano’s been tuned, which is some relief. She goes over her routines in her head, trying to block out the sound of Madame’s hushed, thrilling voice as she warms up the crowd for the enigmatic Blanche la Danseuse.

Blanche opens the door a crack to check whether the lights have gone low. She waits for silence. The excited babble of the audience dies away in the near dark.

The tune is a nervous tarantella, slow at first, then it starts to hurry, and Blanche twitches. It’s a simple routine, no intricate steps to remember or feats of flexibility to perform. She simply pretends there’s something in her clothes, flea, spider, skeeter, bee, wasp—it really doesn’t matter so long as she imagines it vividly enough. The music’s half the trick of it: stop and start, itchily agitated, then more and more maddened as the invisible parasite starts to bite. Madame’s always advertised the Lively Flea as Blanche’s specialty, “straight from gay Paree,” and in June, when some girl on California Street started doing it, Madame sent a bouncer over to put paid to that. But the fact is, Blanche picked the gist of the act up from another showgirl who spent only a few weeks at the House of Mirrors before heading off to Chicago. The only difference is that Blanche plays it in earnest, not for laughs.

Tonight what she pictures is one of the vicious mosquitoes from San Miguel Station. She flinches, twists, spins around on herself. Her fingers pursue the invisible invader up her gloves, down her neck, under her sweeping black hem. Every micheton in the house must be able to imagine where the bug’s got to, every tiny fold and crevice.

Some of the michetons in the audience look more alarmed than aroused, it occurs to Blanche, but does she give a good goddamn? She goes into one last fit of frenzy and collapses in the middle of the stage.

“Whoooooo!” Men are throwing up their hats and catching them, roaring “Blanche! Blanche! Blanche!”

She waits for the clamor to die away. Do they like her like this, laid low? Hair in her eyes, kohl halfway down her cheeks, kneeling in a plain corset and drawers like any destroyed woman?

The Professor’s eyes are as neutral as ever. He gives Blanche that private nod that means Ready? Then launches into the simple, jolly chords of her last number.

Rage; Blanche recognizes the feeling at last. Deep down revulsion at the prospect of spending another night of her life turning this old crank.

She summons her forces and stands. Hand on one hip, like some slapdash streetwalker. “‘I wish I was a diamond,’” she begins sweetly,

Her gestures are broad, almost clownish, and the men love it. For the chorus she throws out her arms, conducting the audience like an orchestra.

Blanche used to find this song funny, used to relish its casual obscenity. Tonight for the first time, she’s struck by how sad it is.

She capers blithely across the stage. “‘My Lulu had a baby—’” Her voice wobbles badly over the word; she didn’t see that one coming. But she presses on, only a note or two behind the piano.

P’tit in a culvert, a storm drain, a sewer? Don’t. Don’t. Sing on.

She won’t falter, won’t offer Madame any excuse to dock her pay tonight. She’ll give all the sons of bitches their money’s worth. She dances faster and faster. The verse about the candle, the verse about the railroad coupling pin. The michetons join in the chorus every time, thrilled by the filthy words. Blanche has the impression she could sing on forever and these men would stay here, hunched over their erections, roaring their part back at her.

She trots out the verse about the sister with syphilis, the one about the minister, the one about the trucker. This song is never going to end. As in some dance of death, the characters parade in Blanche’s mind’s eye, all these grotesque humping revelers.

That reminds her of Jenny, of course, Jenny with her flip appeals to the jury, her quips to newsmen, her crazy whims. So strange to think of Jenny coming to the House of Mirrors. This year, last year? Blanche wishes she’d known. Wishes she’d had the wit to notice Jenny with her hat down, in a chair at the back like any of the fellows, watching.

Just another couple of verses. Blanche shuts her eyes and roars it out for Jenny. Dances for Jenny, who’s in a hole in the ground tonight. Who for her own reasons thought Blanche the crème de la crème.

When Blanche looks out into the audience next, she sees the silhouette out of the corner of her eye: the long, broad outline of Lamantia, elbow propped on the far edge of the stage. His eyes moist, his smile appalling. And she flees.

At the Eight Mile House in San Miguel Station, the night of Wednesday, September thirteenth, is sticky. Jenny and Blanche have had a long ride and a hike up Sweeney Ridge, then a quarrel in the bar with the stableman from Marshall’s when he came for the buggy. There’s been a lot of merriment and even more liquor. Jenny’s in rare form. She insists on buying the hack from Marshall’s and John Jr.’s pony each a bag of oats for a treat, because you never know, it might be one of their birthdays.

It’s all quiet now. The saloon’s empty and the McNamaras have settled down in their back room. Blanche and Jenny are sprawled on the bed drinking cognac by the light of a single candle. Jenny’s shed her jacket and waistcoat, for once, and Blanche is down to chemise and petticoat but she’s still too hot.

“You’ll never give up, will you?” asks Jenny out of nowhere.

“Give up on what?”

“The kid.”

Without warning, a tear slides from Blanche’s left eye.

Jenny doesn’t move to wipe it away as a regular friend might.

It runs sideways across Blanche’s tilted cheek and drops to the wrinkled bedspread. She blinks back the others. “It’s only been …” She counts in her head, the exhausting stretch of time since she fled from the apartment last Thursday night, fled from the threat of rough handling by three men, but still, how could she have forgotten P’tit? “Six days, that’s all.”

“Yeah, but I don’t think you’d give up on getting him back even if it was six years. Even though—no offense,” says Jenny, “but you didn’t seem one hundred percent enamored of P’tit while he was with you.”

Jenny nods. “Got to keep the story moving.”

“Well, circus crowds don’t want the story, they want the trick they saw on the bill, and they won’t go home till they get their money’s worth.”

“So you’re saying that circus folk, once they dig their teeth in—”

“Arthur’s just the same, and so’s Ernest,” says Blanche, leaden. “No surrender.”

The silence that falls between them has hurt in it, but a sort of fellow feeling too.

“Apropos,” remarks Jenny, “you ever hear about the two frogs hopping through the woods?”

“Oh, just get on with it and tell me.” The green blind Jenny fixed has come off its nail again already, Blanche notices.

“Hopping along, happy as Larry”—Jenny mimes the frogs with her hands along the folds of the bedspread—“till they tumble into a pit. They screech for their friends, of course. All the other frogs gather around and peer down. Well, those two unlucky fellows try their damnedest to get out.”

Blanche fakes a yawn. “Is this going to be one of your longer stories?”

“They jump, jump, and they’re bang-up jumpers too but the pit’s just too high. They get tired. Then tireder.”

Another yawn, even wider. “I know how they feel.”

“‘Give over,’ the other frogs start calling down to them. ‘It’s never going to happen. You’re as good as dead. Hate to say it but we told you so. Always reckless, strayed where you shouldn’t …’ So one of those two frogs finally croaks.” Jenny acts his collapse and death, a final pathetic uh.

“But the other, he keeps right on jumping. ‘Damnation,’ the other frogs are shouting, ‘what kind of a crack-brained creature are you? What’s the point? You could be done with all your pain by now if you’d just lie down and let out your last breath.’ But you know what? That frog won’t leave off no matter what. Hops and gasps and hops and moans, worn out, blood on his feet …”

“Enough!”

“And now it’s getting dark.”

Blanche groans. “Is this poor fool going to suffer all night?”

“Poor fool, my ass. You know what? Finally leaps so high, he’s out of the hole!”

“Great,” says Blanche. “Bonne nuit.” She’s just saying that for impudence; in fact, she’s wide awake.

“His friends—so they call themselves,” Jenny adds darkly, “they gather round. ‘Why’d you keep on jumping when we told you it was impossible?’ That frog grins at them, and says, ‘It just so happens I’m stone-deaf.’”

Blanche puts up one hand like a child at school. “That makes no kind of sense. If he’s deaf, how can—”

Jenny swats Blanche’s hand down. “He’s reading their lips, I suppose, close to. ‘When I was down in the pit,’ he says, ‘I figured y’all were cheering me on.’” She lets out a huge whoop of laughter. “‘Cheering me on!’”

Blanche shushes her. “Everyone’s asleep.”

“We’re not.”

“I would have been, half an hour ago, if you hadn’t insisted on talking my ear off.”

“No, you wouldn’t.”

Blanche flips over onto her back. “I should be worn out after trekking all that way up a mountain and down again.”

Jenny chuckles. “Sweeney Ridge is hardly a mountain.”

“Ain’t you one bit tired?”

“You lying hound.”

“Unless I’ve been up for a week,” Jenny concedes.

“Everybody gets—”

“I ain’t everybody.”

“Oh, hold your bragging tongue for once.” And Blanche flings out her hand to cover the woman’s mouth.

Jenny catches her wrist this time, holds it hard.

All of a sudden Blanche knows why she’s so awake. Knows what she’s itching for, desperate for, what she hasn’t had in what seems like weeks.

Jenny’s not looking away, like you’d expect. She’s on the verge of laughter.

Blanche tugs her wrist out of her grasp.

Jenny reaches for her cognac on the bedside table and finishes it with a swirl and a gulp, but without taking her eyes off Blanche.

Is the woman a cold-blooded thing, Blanche wonders, beyond ordinary human urges? “Stop watching me,” she says, for something to say.

Jenny’s eyebrows go up.

“Some like to watch more than they like to do. Is that why you came to the House of Mirrors that time?” Shaping the question into a dart. “Is that your particular poison?”

A ghost of a smile.

“I’ve had men pay through the nose to watch other men take me,” remarks Blanche, turning away and rolling onto her belly. “Some like to peek through a knothole in the wall. Or loll in an armchair and know that I’m seeing them watching. Some prefer to give instructions: ‘Pull her nipples, rub her bit …’” She waits.

“And you?” asks Jenny after a few seconds, oddly courteous.

“Why would I be expecting you to say that?”

The tone, its calm neutrality, pushes Blanche over the brink. “I like it all, even the stuff I don’t much like,” she says, spelling it out. She needs Jenny to understand this. “Whatever’s done to me, as a general rule, suits me fine.”

A nod.

“You might as well know what you’re dealing with.”

Jenny says nothing, only nods again. Not smiling anymore.

The silence between them, like a heavy blanket, unbearable. “You just going to lie there like a bump on a log?” demands Blanche hoarsely.

“It’s all right,” says Jenny.

“What is? What’s all right?”

“Whatever you do. Whatever you want.”

“Don’t you dare tell me what’s all right,” spits Blanche.

“It’s all hunky-dory.” Jenny rolls up one sleeve.

It’s panic that’s making Blanche so mean. “Don’t do me any favors,” she warns Jenny. “You’ve got nothing I need.”

The woman takes her time. Starts rolling up the other sleeve.

“You know what you are, Jenny Bonnet?” snarls Blanche. “Not one thing nor the other, just some kind of gelding.” Arthur’s insult is the only weapon she can grab hold of this minute.

Jenny doesn’t say anything to that.

What happens then—

What does it matter what the two of them get up to, exactly? It’s just bodies doing what they must.

She’s lost every stitch she was wearing but Jenny’s clothes are still on. At one point Blanche reaches under the hem of that shirt and Jenny collects that hand, does something to it that makes Blanche’s whole body double over and convulse. Jenny’s trousered thighs are hard, much like a man’s; her small hands are as dry as a man’s; her mouth on Blanche’s prickling skin is nothing like a man’s. She’s a slight woman who looms huge in the candle’s yellow light. That contemplative expression, those burning eyes.

Held down, Blanche grinds her face into the mattress. Filled, crammed, crushed, taken, and strangely enough it turns out a fist can be just as much of a cock as a cock. More purposeful, even, because of the curiosity with which that fist moves, plotting Blanche’s undoing. Blanche bites down on the pillow to stifle her cries. She’s a breaching whale, a powder blast in a mine. Her nails score the sheet, and her spine cracks like a whip. Bullets of bliss go through Blanche, blowing her apart.

Saturday, the sixteenth, Blanche is undressing at the House of Mirrors. Three days since Jenny laid hands on her. Hands that lie boxed underground tonight, holding a white flower.

With shaking fingers Blanche yanks off her tights in the little dressing room, not caring when the gauze rips. She’s climbing back into her own sweaty pink dress when Madame appears in the doorway with a glass of brandy. “A rather ungracious exit, hein? No encore for your devotees?”

“Lamantia, in the front row,” says Blanche, rounding on her. “Did you see the way he was looking at me?”

“That’s what they pay for.”

Madame’s eyes are wary, as if Blanche is gibbering.

“The day before Jenny was shot! You’re the only one who could have told Lamantia I was there.”

A sigh as the Prussian hands Blanche the glass, as if it’s medicine. “Yesterday you insisted I gave Monsieur Deneve the same information. Is this to become a daily accusation?”

Blanche gulps the brandy. She doesn’t know what to think. Think isn’t the right word for the fog of suspicion that fills her head. It just can’t have been Lamantia who shot Jenny, nor this Louis fellow. Arthur left town a week ago, and Ernest’s friends claim they were with him and Madeleine all that evening. The case is goddamn unsolvable.

“Was that really your last dance?” says Madame.

“My last for you,” mutters Blanche as she carries on dressing, fast.

A silence. She feels the madam’s appraising eyes on every line of her body. “Of course, one can’t help but wonder how many years longer these opportunities will be within your grasp.”

Blanche presses her lips together, fumbling with buttons.

“You do have a head on your shoulders and a certain natural stamina,” remarks Madame Johanna. “What I ask myself is, Are you entirely lacking in ambition?”

Blanche is going to ignore the baiting and get this cuff fastened if it kills her.

“This Californian dream is just that, for most folks who make it this far,” observes Madame with a wintry note of pity. “There are still fortunes to be made, but only by the energetic, and that’s how it must be, I suppose; ninety-nine in the gutter for every one in a mansion.”

In a matter of minutes, Blanche promises herself, she’ll walk out the door with her cash in hand and never come back.

Only thirty-three? Blanche is appalled. That creased skin, like a much-turned ledger …

“I sometimes find myself drawn to the idea of taking on a junior partner,” Madame goes on, “a protégée to train up. Perhaps open a branch house.”

Blanche doesn’t understand for a second. And then: “You can’t mean me. A madam?”

“You’ve never aimed so high?”

Blanche doesn’t answer, but her face shows what she thinks of that.

“Ah,” says Madame, “you prefer to carry on letting one man after another use you like a toilet?”

Blanche’s eyes narrow.

“You’ve always lacked judgment when it comes to carnal matters, my dear,” says Madame. “I really fear for you. If you follow your sentimental heart and take on another handsome parasite, the pair of you may starve by Christmas.”

“I loved Arthur.” The words explode from Blanche.

“Yes,” says Madame. “It’s the downfall of this profession. Really, love—one might as well put a blade in the other party’s hands and guide it home.” She mimes the cut along her throat.

“You talk like someone who’s never been fucked,” retorts Blanche.

“It’s not an experience I’ve felt the need to try.”

That startles Blanche. “But—Mr. Werner?” Staring at the gold ring on the bony finger. “Just a mari de convenance?”

“He only ever existed on paper,” says Madame, “which I would call the most convenient kind of husband of all.”

Blanche lets out a gulp of hilarity. To think that this emporium of all the vices, this auction block for maidenheads, has been run all these years by a virgin!

“Substitution?” Blanche puzzles over the word.

“Swapping other bodies for our own, I mean. Taking a managerial role. All business is a matter of trading one thing for another, isn’t it?” The Prussian’s warming to her theme. “Wouldn’t you prefer to be a chess player, for once, my dear, rather than a pawn?”

Blanche shakes her head, marveling.

“I’d take a smaller cut than Deneve did, and do it more honestly. I wouldn’t use you up and call it love.”

The word makes Blanche’s voice crack into a laugh. “You and I have never even liked each other.”

A shrug. “A little pepper improves the omelet.”

Blanche has heard enough. She crosses her arms and leans in very close. “The barefaced gall of you. Offering a partnership when you sent my baby to a slow death at the hands of that so-called doctress!”

She expects outrage, denial, the same old bluster.

But Madame looks right back at her. “Frau Hoffman is one of this City’s necessary evils. A sort of human machine to deal with pregnancies in whatever way those inconvenienced by them require: abortion, shelter, adoption … She is somewhat”—she hesitates over the word—”hardened by her work, of course. Babies die, and not just on Folsom Street. They come into the world weak, even the longed-for ones, and many of them continue to weaken. Each disease takes its percentage.”

“It’s you and Hoffman who take your percentage!” roars Blanche.

Madame goes on as if addressing an appreciative audience. “Death is the state toward which infants tend, just as it’s in the nature of milk to turn and beef to spoil. Like clockwork toys, they’re born with their end wound up tight inside them, all ready to spin itself out.”

“Water, food, clothing, cleaning, that sort of thing improves their chances, of course. Touch, I suppose,” adds Madame. “The doctress’s baby farm is similar to any farm in that she encourages some crops and discourages others, depending on the market. You still may not get what you’ve paid for, due to uncontrollable variables, but you certainly won’t get what you don’t pay for,” she points out with a touch of sanctimony. “Last September, when your man banged on my door, I asked him what you two would pay to have the child nursed out. I needed to know how much you wanted your P’tit to live. How much you’d stake, you see?”

“And Arthur offered eight dollars a week?”

“I suspect he picked the figure at random.”

“The son of a bitch! Why didn’t he ask me?”

“You were out of your mind with fever. Besides,” says Madame Johanna, “what would you have proposed if he’d run home to consult you? Fifteen?”

Blanche wants to believe that she would have said fifteen.

“Twenty?”

“That’s ludicrous.” She goes on the attack. “What was your cut, I’d like to know?”

Madame considers her for a long moment. “Four.”

“Four out of eight!” So just four dollars a week made its way to Folsom Street, to keep P’tit alive.

“Like my countrywoman, I’m running a business. Given what you were earning from me, you could have afforded twenty,” Madame tells Blanche. “You could have told your fancy man to pay any amount of money—or you could always have kept your baby at home.”

“Who offers to pay any amount for anything?” Blanche protests.

“Someone who sees her infant not getting any stronger month after month, I suppose.”

Madame steps very close to her. “What you really can’t bear is that I know your hard little heart as I do my own. You wanted to be rid of that baby.”

“I did not!”

“Well, perhaps you weren’t quite decided, so you hedged your bets and paid eight.”

“Enough!” Blanche seizes her bag. “I want my five hundred dollars.”

A tiny sigh. “Less the two hundred eighteen you owe me for expenses—I’m adding on the cost of the tights you just destroyed,” explains Madame, “that’s two hundred eighty-two.”

“Plus”—P’tit was with the doctress about fifty weeks; Blanche multiplies that by four dollars—“the two hundred or so you made off P’tit.”

“Don’t push your luck,” says Madame silkily.

Blanche opens her mouth to argue, but nothing comes out. She’s suddenly wrung out like a rag.

Madame counts the notes and coins out of a long mesh purse. “You should stay here tonight,” she remarks.

Blanche gives her an incredulous look. Does this spider never leave off weaving her web?

“My doorman tells me there’s likely to be trouble.”

“What kind of trouble?”

Madame shrugs. “A hullabaloo of some sort. Several buildings on Kearny have been torched already—”

“Enough of your swindles.” Blanche holds out her hand for the cash.

“Why her?” Madame’s ash-colored eyes have an oddly shiny quality.

“Who?”

“Jenny Bonnet. What could she give you but grief? What could she do for you that I couldn’t?”

A wild surmise flickers in the back of her mind. “Was it you?” Blanche whispers.

“Was it I who—”

“Did you send Lamantia to San Miguel Station? Was he supposed to shoot Jenny or just fire over our heads? Were you trying to scare me so badly that I’d crawl back to you on my knees?”

Those gray eyes roll upward. “Heaven preserve my patience.” Madame’s voice is a businesswoman’s again. “You have a lunatic imagination.”

Blanche’s cheeks are on fire. It’s true, she’s tilting at windmills. “I wouldn’t put anything past you,” she mutters, stuffing the money into her pocketbook and then dropping that into her carpetbag. “Didn’t you once dip a girl’s hands in boiling water?”

She’s repeating this old rumor only for effect, but the Prussian shrugs. “Hands are inessential in this line of work. I knew she could wear gloves.”

Blanche shrinks away from her.

“Your sort often overestimates your importance to this establishment,” says Madame. “Everyone’s replaceable.”

On her way out the door, Blanche takes one last swig of the brandy.

“Also, hasn’t it occurred to you that if I wanted someone dead, I would use some more discreet and reliable method than a gun?” inquires Madame. “For example, a soluble, delayed-action poison …”

Blanche spits brandy down herself.

And Madame, for the first time since Blanche has known her, laughs.

On the next block, two whites have cornered a nervous Chinese man, are threatening to saw off his pigtail as spoils, but that’s nothing out of the ordinary for a Saturday night; Blanche knows that her intervention would only make things worse. She’s suddenly ravenous. Nothing but expensive brandy in her growling stomach, the same brandy her ruffled bodice reeks of. What Blanche needs is some dinner. She needs somewhere she can grab a bite to eat and distribute her money carefully among various parts of her costume, as she hadn’t time to do before she rushed away from Madame’s. And then a bed for the night, in a room with a lock strong enough to let her sleep without fear of being robbed.

The Oyster Grotto, that’ll do. Blanche could just fancy a bucket of oysters with a half loaf …

But the door’s shut and barred, and when she bangs on it—because she can see lights in the back—nobody answers. Standing there, thumping the knocker, Blanche realizes she’s clutching her carpetbag tight enough to advertise to all and sundry that it contains hundreds of dollars. She forces herself to relax her grip and swing it by her side as she walks, as if all it holds is a change of clothes.

Not a single chow house seems to be open tonight. This is ridiculous.

Blanche rushes the other way, one block, two, scurrying along in her little mules. All she wants is some blasted dinner. She’d settle for a cab, if she can find one, or even a horsecar to take her out of Chinatown. Up ahead, the street’s thick with foot traffic that, as she nears it, looks more and more like a mob. From the alley to her right, a raucous chorus. “‘Bang away, my Lulu …’”

The familiar song must be coming from some bistro or barrelhouse where Blanche can sit out the fuss, have some hot food, and tuck away this wad of banknotes that’s bumping along in the bottom of her carpetbag. So she ducks down the alley—

And realizes her mistake. A score of men outside a dark-windowed building (Double Happy Washing, says the sign), staving in the glass with pickaxes and shovels. They’re sweating, thrilled with themselves. “‘Bang away, my Lulu,’” they roar as they work,

Blanche freezes, but one little fellow’s spotted her already. “Hey, miss.”

The man beside him is stuffing a rag into a bottle. He strikes a match and puts it to the rag, then tosses the burning bottle through a broken window. The laundry’s empty, by the looks of it. The owners must have been wise enough to flee hours ago, Blanche tells herself.

Half a dozen of the men swagger over to Blanche, keeping up their song.

Blanche throws the next line back as gamely as she can manage, because if you can’t lick them, it’s safer to join them. “‘And there I gave her seventeen raps,’” she sings sweetly, “‘and still she called for more, oh, Lordy—’” She’s eyeing the building. No sign of flames inside; maybe the fire went out when the bottle smashed onto the floor.

“‘Bang away, my Lulu,’” they roar back, delighted with her, “‘bang away good and strong—’”

But Blanche isn’t listening to the song anymore because she’s heard something. A faint, high-pitched animal sound over the clamor of voices.

“That’s a baby.” Softly, to herself at first. Then she shouts at the man who threw the bottle and is standing watching the building intently. “Don’t you hear the baby?”

He doesn’t turn his head. Keeps watch as smoke begins to puff out the gap-toothed windows.

Again, that mewing. “Listen,” pleads Blanche. If there are people in the laundry, huddled behind the sinks and wringers, why aren’t they screaming?

“That’s a cat, I reckon,” says one of the gang, sliding his arm around Blanche. “Yum-yum chow kitty!”

She shakes him off. The sound, pitched almost inaudibly high over the crackling of timbers. “Put out the goddamn fire,” she shrieks at the bottle man, “there’s a baby!”

Blanche is rooted to the spot. Tiny flames flare in the man’s small eyes.

“What’s in this bag you’re hugging so tight, miss?” the one slipping his hand around her waist wants to know.

“Oh, little enough,” says Blanche. “Got anything that can fill it up?” she adds with automatic lewdness, holding on tight to her bag while straining to hear cries from the crackling house …

He wrenches the carpetbag out of her grip, this little man, and puts his arm in it up to his brawny elbow.

“Come now, would you rob a girl’s frillies?” Blanche asks, tugging on the bag, still trying to lay on the charm with a shaking voice. Behind her, the laundry roars with flame. If there were people in there, would they still be holding their tongues? A cat, that’s all, Blanche tells herself, sobbing a little. It must have been a cat.

The fellow lets out a joyful whistle. Holds up her pocketbook, coins spilling, notes dancing on the air. He waves the first fistful like a flag.

Blanche will get no better chance to run, and she’s off already, because her body thinks faster than her mind. She hares off up the alley, one shoe heel slamming on the cobbles, the other mule left behind along with her bag, her clothes, her money, every blasted thing she’s got in the world.

The men aren’t even following, she realizes at the corner; they’ve stayed laughing by their fire. “So long, Lulu,” one of them roars after her.

She stumbles down Dupont in case they change their mind. Another fire patrol rattles past, men with hatchets and ladders hanging off the wagon. Patrolmen clattering by on wild-eyed horses. One shoe’s worse than none, Blanche concludes after two blocks. When a half-grown boy brushes past her and tries to squeeze her breast, she pulls her mule off and hurls it at him.

Panting with agitation, she picks the next alley and checks to make sure that it’s quite dark before she ducks in. So small, it’s more of a drain, and it smells like one too. Blanche edges behind a leaning pile of rotting planks and hunkers down. Arms tight around herself. She can smell brandy on her clothes, the slime of vegetables, ash from the fires.

At least she got away from the rioters before they could finish their celebrations by riding her until she was torn apart. At least she’s not trapped in that burning laundry like those Chinese who refused to make a sound, if they were really there. If Blanche wasn’t just imagining what she heard. Count your blessings, Blanche. Count your goddamn blessings.

Her ears attend to the distant pandemonium. She watches the bright end of the alley for the silhouettes of men. Something goes by in a flash. A high-wheeler? Her heart hammers. It wasn’t Jenny. Blanche doesn’t believe in ghosts. She shuts her eyes so she won’t see it again. Squeezes them closed, wrapping the darkness around her.