The light from the lamp illuminated the empty bottle, the thick glass distorting the flame behind it. A few last drops shimmered at the bottom.
"Looks like it's time for another." Al's chair creaked as he rose to his feet to call for more whiskey. Laura's face was expressionless as she glanced at the bottle and then looked down at Adama, her hand stiffening on his shoulder. She don't like the idea of him drinkin' more, but she won't tell him so in front of an outsider.He nodded in approval.
"Or…mind if I call for a pot of coffee? I've got a long fuckin' night ahead of me, and my mind may need its full clarity."
He watched Adama's eyes lose their chill. "A pot of real coffee sounds good." Behind him, Al saw Laura's shoulders relax as well.
He chuckled as he went to the door. "Real" coffee? Palate still scarred from too much ersatz coffee during the war, Adama?"
That got a rueful grin. "You'd be surprised what people try to turn into coffee when supplies run out." Adama turned to look up at Laura, shared memories in their eyes. His chin brushed her hand as she touched his jawline with her forefinger in a discreet caress. He leaned back, his head almost touching her stomach. He seemed to welcome the respite before getting back to business.
Al stopped with his hand on the doorknob and turned towards the couple again. Something about that last statement rang out of tune. He scrutinized Adama, eyebrow raised. "A man could wonder anew where people had come from, that they talk about wartime deprivations with such a tone of recent memory."
Adama's smile faded. "Some memories stick with you longer than others."
"Plenty enough truth in that." Al looked at him a long moment before turning the knob. "If you'll excuse me..." Stepping into the hallway, he left the door ajar behind him.
He called for Johnny from the hallway, then addressed Adama over his shoulder. "As we both have considerable distaste for others pryin' into that which ain't theirs, I'll be leavin' the door open and you'll refrain from strayin' too far from your chair." He moved away from the open door and called for Johnny again.
Dan leaned against the upstairs railing, stoic as he listened to Al's grumbling. "What do you mean, 'Johnny ain't here'? Where the fuck is he?"
"I told you, boss, he's been outta sorts all day, thinkin' on Jen. Couple hours ago, he said he was goin' up on Boot Hill, set some flowers at her grave to pay his respects, it bein' the anniversary of her"—he looked away—"her passing."
Jesus fuckin' Christ! We'll have to install a boardwalk between here and the cemetery if this bullshit catches on. Might as well throw flowers into Wu's pigpen while we're at it, maybe weave a garland for the fuckin' sled.He wondered briefly if Hearst had fed his chopped-off finger to the pigs…wouldn't have surprised him, though, if the cocksucker had kept it as a souvenir.
Al casually studied his left hand, rubbing the stump and feeling a fingertip that hadn't been there for over a year. He finally looked up with flat eyes. "I'd not harm a hair on the head of any one of you boys without good cause, but Dan, you will tell me if I have a problem in Johnny."
Dan took off his hat to rake his fingers through his long hair and then set it on his head again, brim level. "Naw, I'm thinkin' Johnny's just tryin' to ease the door shut on Jen's memory." His tone turned conspiratory. "He's lookin' to take up with the new gal, come in from Nebraska."
"Well, God bless youth and stiff pricks, then. And about fuckin' time." He felt some of the tension leave his neck at the thought of Johnny finally moving on. "Jewel!" Al called below as the crippled cook bent to clear off a table. "Put on a pot of coffee and send it up by someone with two good legs when it's ready, hmm?"
"Fuck you, Al." Jewel rolled her eyes as she turned towards the kitchen.
Thank God somebody was acting normal tonight. He turned back to Dan with a sigh. "Anyways, then, since Johnny's made himself scarce, I want you to escort Mrs. Adama back to the hotel. Me and her man have some more talkin' to do."
"Sure." Dan leaned closer, eye on the open office door as he whispered. "You get what you needed from talkin' to him and her together?"
"Oh,fuck yeah. They've been workin' at something together for a long time, got a whole language of winks and nods between 'em goin' in both directions. Looks like they've been equal partners in whatever they've been up to." Al shot a glance at the couple talking quietly in front of his desk. She was staring a hole through the stack of books on the desk's corner but seemed to be keeping her hands to herself.
"And somethin' else," he continued. "Last war they were in wasn't any fifteen years ago. Adama's seen battle a hell of a lot more recent. Maybe Mexico…something more than skirmishes with the heathens."
"Huh. I woulda guessed they maybe spent some time runnin' riverboat cons or the like." Dan leaned back to catch a glimpse of the pair.
Al shook his head. "She's not the type. Look at her, Dan. If you saw her by a craps table, would you walk up for a chat, lookin' for flattery and an invitation to put your hand under her skirts if you laid enough money on the felt?"
Alarm spread over the big man's face. "Hell, no. Not without expectin' either her or him to try and gut me. They both kinda got that look about 'em."
"Well, mind your manners on the walk to the hotel, Dan. I ain't been so bold as to search her, and she reminds me of certain others we know who have a fondness for those little ladies' guns."
Al walked back into the office, Dan trailing a step behind. The expression on Adama's face was bordering on hostile, and his woman's eyes were looking on the hollow side. Al noticed she'd kept to her post, standing behind Adama's chair. He moved around her to get to his side of the desk, pausing to say, "You can borrow one if you like," as he pointed at the small stack of books. She fingered the blue cloth cover of a worn copy of Sonnets from the Portuguese,by Elizabeth Barrett Browning,curiosity in her eyes, before pulling back.
"Thank you for the offer. Perhaps another time." She smiled as she lightly kneaded Adama's shoulder. Al shrugged as he resumed his seat. "Not one for poetry myself, but that came recommended by a refined lady of my acquaintance." He gave Laura a self-deprecating grin. "Hard as it may be to imagine that a woman of quality would be in my circle." He turned his attention back to Adama, ignoring Dan's muffled snort.
"It's getting late and your lady looks past ready to loosen her laces and relax. I'll have Dan walk her back to the hotel while you speak your piece on Hawkeye and other topics of interest."
Adama looked Dan up and down, paying close attention to his knife in its sheath. His eyes were icy and narrowed as he rose, standing close to Laura's side. "I heard you calling for Johnny for that. Why'd you switch to Dan?"
Suspicious cocksucker. Al sighed and folded his arms on the desk. "It seems Johnny's indisposed, overcome by grief and in need of weeping over the grave of one whore before movin' on to the next." He closed his eyes for a second. He supposed that sounded callous even for him.
"Pardon the crassness of my tone, Mrs. Adama. What I mean to say is that a girl he was sweet on was killed a year ago today, having to do with the type of misfortune for which I now hire your husband to help us avoid in the future." He watched sympathy wash over their faces, and for a moment he was tempted to accept it. He'd had little enough sympathy directed towards him since that night. He got the feeling they might recognize the inevitability of sacrifice and hard choices from perhaps having walked similar roads in their past. Adama frowned, his hands clasped in front of him, the picture of a leader's resignation to unavoidable loss. The schoolteacher's face had lost some of the sternness that had been there, compassion taking its place.
Their reactions made him feel like they were seeing something in him that he preferred to keep to himself. He found their careful regard unsettling. He glanced down at the floor, feeling the aftermath of that night again. The sharp memory of hot blood and cheap perfume distracted him, making him miss Mrs. Adama's quiet question at first.
He frowned. "Sorry…what was that again?"
She had a touch of kindness around her eyes. "I asked what happened…the young woman who died?"
Al got to his feet, feeling a strong and angry need to deflect this unwarranted compassion. " 'What happened' is that I called her into my office after she fucked her last customer, shut the door, and cut her throat about two feet from where you stand." His eyes felt hot as he added, "The bloodstain spread to where the edge of your skirt is now." He nodded towards Laura's feet as she turned to look at the brush-worn spots on the floor, turning back to him with cooler eyes.
Unwanted sympathy dealt with, Al strode to the door and nodded to Dan. He heard Adama talking to his wife in the background, giving quiet instructions about locking their door and putting a lamp in the window when she was safely back.
"I'll be there in an hour or so. I don't think this'll take long." Adama's voice sounded annoyingly confident, too calm for Al's liking. He was starting to resent what he considered an excess of composure in the both of them. There were still remnants of sympathy around the wife's eyes that he found especially disconcerting.
He grabbed Dan's arm on his way out the door. "Tell whoever's bringin' up the coffee to bring up another fuckin' bottle." He gave Mrs. Adama a direct look as he spoke and was gratified to see all kindness leave her eyes. He wondered if her man was a mean drunk, free with his hands when liquored up. He shrugged. He'd find out from E.B. soon enough if that were the case. She looked like she could handle herself, if it came to that.
As the door shut, he heard Adama sit back down, chair legs scraping on the floor.
"I thought we were finished with drinking for the night."
Al turned and ran a hand over his face, feeling like he'd aged ten years since breakfast. "I decided clarity was fuckin' overrated."
Laura's boot heels came down hard on the steps, striking an angry tattoo on the wood. She brushed past a man on the landing who was busy groping a young woman under her stained cotton blouse. She stood a few steps above the crowd as she waited for Dan to return from a last-minute summons from his boss. There was something pitiful now about the red-faced card players, the blank-eyed women, the drunken men who were trying to force some happiness into their lives.
In the couple of hours she had been in Swearengen's office, either her mood or the crowd's had changed for the worse. She was hit with a sudden longing for artificially clean-scrubbed air, recycled water, and to be perfectly honest, for the respect she had been shown as President Roslin. Dan returned to her side, but he was no substitute for her security detail, she grumbled to herself as another drunk twirled a giggling prostitute into her path. Laura sidestepped in time, moving through the crowd as Dan tried to keep a step ahead of her, shoving dawdlers out of their way.
She looked down, her lips turning up in a half-smirk. Dan was keeping one hand hovering an inch or so from her waist, looking like he wanted to physically guide her to the front door but reluctant to actually touch her body. She got a twinge of feeling like the President again, and brief as it was, it still felt good.
Some of the strangeness of this town started to recede as they stepped through the front doors of the Gem onto the wooden sidewalk. The crowds had thinned now in the late evening, and there was a kind of harmony in their movement. Dusty men with packs slung over their shoulders walked to the tents grouped between the back streets and the beginning of the nearest tree line. The cook-shops had shut down for the night, fires out and pots neatly stacked under rough board counters. Across the street and up a block, women in limp faded lace leaned against the open doorframe of the Bella Union, smoking and beckoning to the men walking by.
"Uh, ma'am? Mr. Swearengen wanted me to give you this." Firelight from the torches danced over the big man's face, creating shadows around his eyes and mouth. There was something animalistic about him…he really was almost bearlike, as Bill had pointed out. Her eyes lingered on the ivory handle of the knife at his belt before noticing the slim book he held in his hand.
"Is that the book from his desk? The one I told him I did not want to borrow tonight?"
Dan pushed it into her hand. "He said to tell you that you ain't borrowin' it, he's lendin' it."
Laura looked at the cover again as they waited for a wagon team to pass. "Your boss doesn't like to hear 'no,' does he?"
" No' ain't a word he hears a whole lot."
She tucked the book under her arm. "Is that what happened to the girl in his office, Mr. Dority? Did she tell him no when she should have kept quiet?"
"It wasn't…it wasn't like that," he sighed, walking her out into the rutted street. "It wasn't nothing personal. Things just started happening that got past his control, stuck him in a place where there wasn't no good answers." He looked at her from the corner of his eye. "The fact that he's willin' to overlook some mighty strange things about your husband and you…if you knew him, you'd know to take that as a sign of how much he don't ever want to be in that position again."
Mud sucked at her boots as she stepped up on the wooden sidewalk in front of the Grand Central Hotel. "And you think my husband can help him avoid that kind of situation in the future?" She tipped her head up and was surprised by the glaze of tears in the man's eyes.
"Ma'am, I don't know if talkin' about militia tactics is gonna help Al or not. Might be the best thing to come out of this is for Al to hear he ain't the only one that's ever been in charge when things went to shit and hard decisions had to get made."
She mustered a thin smile. "Well, Mr. Swearengen will certainly hear he's not alone in that. He may even end that discussion feeling he got off lightly." She turned away from his confused look and entered the hotel. She suspected Dan had glared at E. B. Farnum behind her back. Either that, or guilt from the search, made the little man scuttle into his back office when they came inside. She nodded her thanks to Dan for his escort and headed up the stairs.
Richardson stood in front of the stuffed moose head, extending his pair of small antlers like an offering and whispering under his breath with a prayer-like cadence. He reminded her of an elderly priest she'd known on Caprica at one of the less moneyed temples, she thought as she dug her key out of her pocket.
Locking the door behind her, she lit the lamp nearest the window, watching the outlines of the two men in the office across the street. She no longer felt like she had any idea of the true reason the town boss was seeking Bill's counsel, and wondered if Swearengen himself knew what he was really looking to get out of this.
She turned back to the book in her hands. 'Sonnets from the Portuguese,'she mused. Wonder if this is any good for reading out loud?She reached under her blouse to unfasten a few of the hooks on the corset and finally drew a decent deep breath.
Settling into the chair by the lamp, she began to read, the book falling open to a well-worn page:'When we met first and loved, I did not build / Upon the event with marble…' She looked at the scene across the street again, Bill's familiar profile outlined by the lamplight. She wondered briefly if there was any poetry being written in the Fleet these days, then turned back to her reading.