"Yeah, that's right," Gabe said. He was ready to depart from there, call the conversation quits, and have nothing more to do with Francis Calhoun forever. It was true they'd grown up in the same neighborhood, but they hadn't exactly been together. Having little interest in beating up the weak and defenseless just for the fun of it-as opposed to doing so for profit-Gabe had been one of the very few children in the neighborhood who hadn't gone out of his way to make Francis Calhoun's youth memorable. If Francis now looked back on that inactivity and remembered it as a deep and abiding friendship that was his own business, but Gabe wanted no part of it.
But Vangie was saying, through that rather odd, toothy set smile, "Well, any friend of Gabe's is a friend of mine."
"My feeling exactly," Francis said. His own smile didn't seem to have any teeth in it at all; his lips curved limply, like a couple of anchovies on a plate.
"I guess that must be an Eastern suit," Vangie said, aiming her smile at his loud clawhammer coat.
"I'm glad you like it," Francis said, preening a bit. His clothes were flamboyantly cheap and somewhat the worse for wear. The worn coat was shiny here and there, but the colors were nearly blinding at this close range. Over it he wore a short cape with a bright pink lining. His dark hair was all wet down, and he gave the general appearance of a lunatic undertaker or an apprentice carnival barker. Drawing a lace-fringed handkerchief now from the cuff of his coat and dusting himself off, he said, "One does pick up so much dirt in the street, doesn't one? Did you say you were a local girl?"
She smiled sweetly. "I didn't say. Do you spell Francis with an i or an e?"
"Well, that does depend."
For a reason he didn't entirely understand, these two were making Gabe very nervous. Before either of them could say anything more, he stepped between them, took Vangie's arm, and said, "Nice seeing you again, Francis. We'll have to have a drink sometime and talk over the old days."
"An excellent suggestion," Francis said, taking Gabe's other arm. "And no time like the present. Shall we go somewhere for an aperitif?"
CHAPTER EIGHT
Francis regarded the waiter with some mistrust. "Have you ever heard," he inquired, "of a Pink Lady?"
"You probably want one of them hotel dives down by the waterfront," the waiter said.
Francis sighed. Even here in the plush saloon of one of the big hilltop hotels, surrounded by city fathers in black coats and railroad men smoking cigars, one had to deal with the plebeian mind. "A Pink Lady," he explained loftily, "is a form of beverage. Ask your bartender, perhaps he has experience of it."
"A Pink," the waiter said, "Lady." He had the beetle browed look of a man who's put up with a lot in his life and maybe isn't going to put up with much more. He eyed the trio at the table as though thinking of falling on them. Heavily he said, "Pink Ladies for everybody?"
"Sounds as though I might like it," the girl Evangeline said. She was sitting there with her elbow on the table and her forearm straight up and pinkie crooked as though she were holding a teacup at the vicar's. Every time Francis caught her eye she gave him the same set smile.
The waiter looked at Gabe flatly. "You, too?"
"Whisky," Gabe growled. "In a glass." It would take more than that to improve the waiter's disposition. Wordlessly he turned and went away.
Francis leaned back and looked around the large genteel room, its quiet muffled by money and mohair. He had brought dear old Gabe and Gabe's little urchin friend here because he felt the frank need for a little beauty around himself.
Times had been difficult lately; in fact, they'd been terrible. Francis had come out here from New York three years ago to make a fresh start with new friends in a setting more amicably attuned to his nature than New York City's rough and tumble. Of course he'd had his ups and downs since then, of which the ups had never been extraordinarily high, but the downs had tended to be bone-crushing. And the current depression looked as though it might turn out to be the worst of them all.
Dimly he heard the girl talking to Gabe, extolling the wonders of San Francisco: two thousand saloons and blind pigs, she was saying, or one for every seventy-six inhabitants. There were three thousand Chinese girls in the city, she said, who had been imported as bordello slaves by the vice lords of the Chinese Tongs.
She went on in that vein. Francis hardly understood her point; it seemed in execrable taste, but what could one expect after all? The Lord knew that Francis had tried to instill an appreciation of the finer things in this wilderness encampment, but it was hard going-ever so hard.
He leaned forward again, waited for a pause in the girl's recital of the less appetizing local statistics, and then said, "Well, Gabe old cock, it really is wonderful to see you again."
"Yeah."
"You've come out West to make your fortune, I bet."
"You bet."
"Well, I've never regretted coming out, I can tell you that." Francis smiled in easy self-deprecation and said, "Not that I've become one of your local millionaires, don't get me wrong."
"I wouldn't do that," Gabe said.
"But the city itself," Francis said, "is tres jolie. And the people… well, there are rough edges to them, of course, but deep down they're really quite a tolerant lot. Far more so than back East."
"Yeah."
"I have been making my living," he said, emphasizing the past tense, "as a designer. Fashion, you know."
The girl's smile thawed a little. "Ladies' fashions?"
"In a way," Francis told her. "Designs for the theater, you know."
She looked more and more interested. "The theater?"
"The cancan shows, in fact," Francis said. He said it proudly, though he knew there were those who misunderstood the visual element in the cancan shows, and thought of them as nothing but unredeemed sex. He himself knew better and was prepared to defend the shows at the drop of a sneer.
But the girl didn't sneer. Leaning closer she said, "That must be real interesting," and Francis realized that, like most women, this girl Evangeline was stage struck.
"Oh, it is," Francis said. "Or it has been, at any rate. Unfortunately the Philistines just closed us again. They do that every so often." To Gabe he said, "You may have seen the posters X-ed out all over town."
"Yeah, I think I did." Gabe was spending most of his time looking around the room, waiting for his drink; it was the girl who was doing the listening.
Nevertheless, it was to Gabe that Francis preferred to address himself. "This city," he said, "is full of gambling, harlots, swindlers, and an array of vice you wouldn't believe, Gabe. I mean, it's absolutely wide open. Not that I object personally; I mean, live and let live is my motto. But every once in a while the city fathers go on a puritan spree, announcing they're going to clean up the whole city and turn us into some sort of Boston or something-and what do they wind up doing? They close the cancan shows!"
"Yeah," Gabe said, looking around the room.