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The two women gazed around the room, their faces like dough pans. Beckman dipped his cup in the dredges of the punch bowl and filled it with pink champagne and melting sherbet. He snapped his fingers for one of the black servers to refill the bowl. “Do you want to be escorted out, Mr. Holland?”
“Thanks for the offer. I’ll try to hobble out on my own.”
“You’re a public fool, sir. An object of pity.”
“I cain’t deny it. My boy got blown up on the Marne.”
“Yes?”
“I was told the surgeons took a shovel load of shrapnel out of his legs and side.”
“If you’re telling us the world is a charnel house, you’ve arrived a bit late with the news.”
“What’d you do to the woman at the brothel?”
“I know everything about you, sir. You destroyed your family and ruined your career as a lawman. Take your tattered mantle somewhere else.”
“If I find out you hurt her—”
“Good night, Mr. Holland.”
Beckman resumed talking to the two women as though Hackberry were not there.
HACKBERRY WALKED BACK through the kitchen and into the street and stood in an alcove where a horse-drawn carriage was parked. The paving stones were as brown and shiny and humped in the rain as loaves of bread. Along the wall was a row of paint and thinner cans. Over his shoulder he could see the empty bowl the waiter had taken from Beckman’s table. One of the horses stretched forward, spreading his legs, and urinated on the stones. Hackberry grabbed a half-empty can of paint thinner and filled it up.
He went to the kitchen door. The waiter was chopping strawberries for the punch. Hackberry came up behind him and placed a dollar bill in his hand. “There’s a lady with two children who needs he’p crossing the street. Would you take an umbrella to her, please?”
“Yes, suh.”
“I’ll watch the bowl.”
“Where’s she at?”
He hadn’t lied. “Right on the corner.”
He couldn’t go through with it. He went back outside and poured the can in the gutter, then began walking toward a saloon, fog rising in sour flumes from the sewers.
No, he wasn’t done with Arnold Beckman, just as he had never been done with Harvey Logan. He turned around and walked back through the hotel kitchen and into the dining room. In Hackberry’s absence, the waiter had refilled the punch bowl and set it by Beckman’s elbow.
“What’s the expression about a bad penny?” Beckman said.
“You like the punch?”
“You did something to it?”
“Don’t make enemies with people who have access to your food.”
“Really?” Beckman drank from his cup, licking a piece of strawberry off his lip. “Have breakfast with me in the morning. Great fortunes are made only twice in a nation’s history. During its rise and during its fall.”
“I had an experience with Harvey Logan that I’ve drug around like a corpse on a chain. It happened when I was so drunk I couldn’t stand up. Ole Harvey treated me like spit on the sidewalk. Harry Longabaugh had to intercede on my behalf. That was a special kind of humiliation. Logan topped it off when he threw me a dollar and told me to take a bath and buy myself a can of crab lice powder.”
Beckman worked a piece of food from his teeth with his thumbnail, then sucked the spot clean. He laughed without making any sound.
“I deserved his scorn,” Hackberry said. “That’s what makes it so bad. I tried to catch up with him and even the score, but he killed himself after he got shot in a train robbery.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I never thought I’d meet a bucket of shit that would equal Logan’s standards. Then you came along.”
