Frog Music (23 page)

… a social outlaw, then, but not deserving of persecution, especially in these United States to which so many are drawn by the promise of tolerance. It is to be hoped that the cowardly assassin who cut short the thread of her life will be brought to the gallows he rightly deserves.

Now Blanche’s gaze snags on her own name, the first time she’s ever seen it in print, except on a broadside outside the House of Mirrors. “A Frenchwoman of no character who performs at one of Chinatown’s most notorious white establishments.” That stings, although it’s absurd for her to care. “Here follows the murdered girl’s companion’s story.” Which sounds comical, something from a children’s rhyme about the miller’s wife’s cousin’s shoe …

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?

“The younger sister, Blanche, subsequently died at the state asylum at Stockton.” Blanche blinks. The sister again. Could Cartwright have muddled up the names? Wouldn’t Jenny have mentioned it if she had a sister called the same thing as her new friend Blanche—even if she didn’t want to volunteer the information that the girl was a lunatic?

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.

Beunon is quick to point the finger of suspicion at her cast-off
maquereau
, Arthur Deneve, and his intimate Ernest Girard who she attests made threats of violence against both herself and Bonnet. But after the couple’s sudden and acrimonious separation more than a week ago, the said Deneve is known to have left the City for either the eastern states or his native France.

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?

When she and Jenny ran into Ernest four days ago on Waverly Place, he was alone, Blanche remembers. Could the Siamese twins have had a falling-out? Or has Ernest left town too, by now, and joined his comrade in France or the eastern states?

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.

She looks down Kearny toward the corner of Sacramento. Because she’s realized something. If there is any seed of truth in Cartwright’s fabrications—if someone from the
Chronicle
went to number 815, asked around, and was told that Deneve had left town—then it may be the case that the
macs
have scuttled away from the apartment, at least. Blanche’s apartment, and the whole building she owns from foundation to roof tiles: the one thing she hasn’t lost. A roof over her head, to shield her. Somewhere she won’t need anyone’s permission or help; somewhere she’ll be safe from threats real and imagined. Somewhere to hole up until she’s able to get a grip on things again.

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.

Down Blanche goes, her steps slower now. The walls are slick with humidity. Number 815 Sacramento is no palace, but it’s a pretty fine structure, for San Francisco. It should stand till the next big quake, at least. It’s certainly better than the narrow rooms Blanche grew up in, back on the Ile Saint-Louis. Infinitely better than the Cirque d’Hiver quarters, all paint tubes and used rags, with a whiff of lion piss. Why did Blanche let Arthur mock her for being a little bourgeoise the day she produced the deed to the building like a magic trick? It was no small thing, making fifteen hundred dollars from dances and
michetons
. What’s Arthur ever done since being invalided out of the circus but swan around town looking lovelier than Blanche does?

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 puts her ear to the smooth grain of the door and listens hard. Not a sound. The
macs
could be fast asleep, of course; they often turn day to night.

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.

She straightens up. Ready for flight, but where to, where can she hide in this echoing mausoleum? It occurs to her that neither Arthur nor Ernest ever fumbled with the key this way; even when pickled, they always entered with élan. So who—

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.”

He shakes his head so vehemently his braid leaps like a lizard behind him. “Legal own building all way up, five floor, plus attic make six. I pay your husband eighteen hundred dollar Saturday.”

“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.”