California Gold (12 page)

The takers and those they take from
…

“Of course, knowing it and proving it are two different things,” Bierce said. “But the
Examiner
does keep trying—” An electric bell rang. “One hour till deadline. Duty calls.” He started away.

“Ambrose, just a minute,” Nellie said. “Mr. Chance needs work. Have you heard of anything in town?”

“Unskilled, I presume,” Bierce said in a way that made Mack boil. “Sorry, no.”

Hearst said, “Ned Greenway was looking for a man last week. Could you stand to work for a self-important snob, Mr. Chance?”

“Who is he?”

“Local sales representative for Mumm’s champagne. And the arbiter of San Francisco society. Our own, self-appointed Ward McAllister. Delivering for him, you’d get to meet all the best people.”

“Look but don’t touch,” Bierce said. “Charmed, all.” After a mock bow, he sauntered off. Hearst shook Mack’s hand with vigorous enthusiasm.

“Good luck to you. Nellie, I want to discuss the next exposé, the Receiving Hospital.” He shot away into the smoky chaos of the editorial rooms. An unseen press started to rumble; Mack felt it in the floor.

Nellie stood, smoothing her skirt. “Well, Mr. Chance, how do you feel about delivering champagne for a snob?”

“It’s work. Will you call me Mack?”

Her chin came up and there was a startled look in her large eyes, as if she hadn’t expected that gesture of interest. But she wasn’t displeased.

“Why yes, I will. Here, let me write out Greenway’s address and you can go straight around while Mr. Hearst and I discuss how I’m going to surrender myself to the abominable conditions at the Receiving Hospital.”

N
ED GREENWAY PROVED TO
be all that Hearst said, and considerably more: pompous, posturing, a little whale who strutted or, alternately, minced around his office on tiptoe. He was forty or so, with a magnificent handlebar mustache and the florid complexion of a drunk. He interviewed Mack at half past one in the afternoon, informing him that he’d been up only half an hour. A silver tray bore his breakfast: hard-boiled eggs, a salt cellar, and a bottle of Mumm’s Extra Dry. He talked more about himself than about the job. “I have drunk more wine than any man in America”; “Last year I set a new record, twenty-five bottles in one day”; “I am creating in San Francisco a society fully the equal of New York’s Four Hundred.” He conducted the interview wearing a full suit of evening clothes. He never wore anything else in public.

On the pittance Greenway paid, Mack couldn’t afford a good room, or even a good neighborhood. He found a place next door to Major Wells’s Salvation Army headquarters, farther up Montgomery in the seething belly of San Francisco’s wickedest district, the Barbary Coast. Mack rather liked the raffish array of pawnshops, whorehouses, secondhand-clothing stores, cheap cafés, and concert saloons, where the melodeons cranked away at all hours and barkeeps slipped chloral hydrate to the unwary. When the victims passed out they were slid through the back door to the crimps; next day they woke up on the ocean, part of a crew bound for the Japans. Mack’s pugnacious manner was a good defense against crimps. He was bothered only once, and the crimp crawled away with his balls kicked.

The hours on Greenway’s wagon were long and the cases of Mumm’s heavy, but the job taught him the layout of the city in a matter of weeks. He spruced up his wardrobe with a plaid suit from a secondhand shop and called at the
Examiner
to see Nellie. The editor informed him she and Bierce and three staff artists had rushed to Sacramento, where a Central Pacific express had derailed and overturned due to a switch failure. Six were dead. Ironically, Hearst had sent his team to the site by special train, over the rails of the line his headlines damned:

BLOODY TRAGEDY ON

THE “LINE OF DEATH”!

Horrific Sights! Relatives

Seek Loved Ones

Among the Corpses!

Absolute Silence from

the Rail Moguls Greets

Latest Outrage Against

Public Safety

The byline of the featured dispatch was Ramona Sweet. Mack felt proud; he knew a celebrity, Mr. Hearst’s answer to the famed Nellie Bly in New York. He tore out the story and tacked it up in his room next to a city map he studied for a few minutes every night.

When he didn’t feel like eating in a café, or ran short of money, the Salvation Army officers next door could always find him a bowl of soup; they did it for anyone who lived in the neighborhood. Mack soon felt at home.

The painted wagon said
GREENWAY’S SPIRITS
. Mack tied his horse to a trash can in the alley behind the Odd Fellows Hall, then opened the wagon’s back doors. He wore his work uniform, a loose white shirt, cord breeches, boots, and a canvas apron. It was eleven o’clock on a Friday evening in September. Infernally hot for San Francisco.

He pulled out cases of Mumm’s Extra Dry and stacked them on the stoop. Noisy conversation flowed out through the hall’s back doors, along with the music of Ballenberg’s Society Band. One of Mr. Greenway’s recently organized Friday-night cotillions was in progress. The dancing had started at ten, and chefs would serve a buffet supper at midnight. Mack’s job was to deliver the iced champagne at the last possible moment.

He puzzled at the heavy, almost martial beat of the music, which didn’t sound like dance music to him. A police whistle blasted inside and people applauded. He didn’t understand the ways of these society types.

He had turned to the wagon, bracing himself to pick up three cases at once, when he heard a man come out, complaining loudly. “Crazy in there. That little fart-face blows his whistle and they all march around like a bunch of tin soldiers. Ain’t like any dancing I ever—” The man stopped abruptly as Mack turned to face him.

Mack was just as surprised, and immediately tense. “Good evening, Mr. Hellman.”

Hellman scratched the dimple in his chin. His white tie hung crookedly and his formal suit resembled a potato sack. Sucking on a pungent cigar, he keenly studied Mack.

“Move over,” he said finally. “I got to sit down.”

Mack put down the cases. Carla Hellman’s father seemed positively affable—as if he’d never pointed a revolver at Mack and threatened to kill him. And, even more amazing, Mack was actually glad to see him.

“Jesus, hot in there.” Hellman yanked at his collar as if it were a noose. He eyed the crates. “So—this is where you got to. You don’t need water. You got champagne.”

“I don’t drink it, I just deliver it.”

Hellman shrugged. “Work’s work. Ain’t nothing disgraceful about it so long as you make money.”

“I don’t make enough to suit me.”

Hellman stabbed the air with cigar. “Now I like that. That’s the attitude of somebody who’s going to succeed.”

Mack tapped one of the champagne cases. “Excuse me, I’ve got to take these inside.”

“Say hello to my daughter if you see her.”

“She’s here?”

“You don’t think I’d put up with this on my own account, do you? Sure she’s here. This is a big fancy affair. I got to tell you, Mr.—” He struggled for the name.

“Mack Chance.”

“Well, Mr. Mack Chance, my daughter liked you right away out there at my ranch. She said you’re an ambitious
jüngling—
young fella. She liked the way you talked back to me.”

“I wasn’t trying to talk back. I was thirsty. One drink wouldn’t have cost you anything.”

“Now listen, we discussed that.” Hellman waved the cigar again. “The law is the law. You got to learn to respect it, and use it, if you want to make money. Hellman’s lesson number one.” He puffed. “Here, take this. It’s a dance favor. Crappy, if you ask me, but maybe you can use it.”

He handed Mack an expensive wallet of black-dyed calfskin the elegance of which was spoiled by a garish pasted-on picture of an orange sun setting over rock formations. A lettered ribbon said
THE YOSEMITE VALLEY
.

Mack thought it was beautiful.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Sure, I got a dozen better. By the way, Carla ain’t by herself in there. She came with that lawyer you met, Fairbanks. He just took that big job. Number-two man in the SP legal department.”

Mack’s stomach churned in disappointment. “I can understand why he’d want to escort your daughter. She’s the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen.”

“Like her mother,” Hellman said with a strange scowl. “That’s a big part of Carla’s problem, don’t you know. Beautiful women are always messed up. When they’re spoiled on top of it, you got real trouble. I take the blame for spoiling her. I gave her too much because she’s the only child I got. I love my daughter, but I also know all about her, Johnny—”

“My name is Mack, not Johnny.”

Hellman slapped his knee and guffawed. “By God you’re all right. Got sand—ain’t that what these westerners say? One more little tip before you go.” He slid closer on the stoop, getting dirt all over his satin-striped formal trousers. “Confidential. Be glad you ain’t got the money to hang around with Carla. It’s the going after, not the getting, that fires her up. Soon as she gets what she wants—a new hat, a new man—she don’t want it anymore; she wants somebody new. On top of that, when she drinks too much she acts wild. I wish somebody could straighten her out, but it’s impossible. God pity any man who tries. I’m telling you as a father—you don’t want to get mixed up with her.”

Mack nodded. Hellman obviously didn’t know about the encounter in the fog, and he wasn’t going to inform him.

“Excuse me,” he said again, stooping and heaving the crates up.

“Sure, Johnny.” Hellman sat there squinting into the smoke with a vaguely forlorn expression.

A committee had decorated Odd Fellows Hall with swags of satin and great sprays of flowers. Gaslight rather than electric light illuminated the dancers, who marched four abreast, then split in two and curled back along the opposite side of the floor to the thump of Ballenberg’s strident music. In a faultless tail suit, Ned Greenway led the figure, partnered with a homely old woman, who had to be the Mrs. Martin he’d mentioned to Mack. Greenway said Mrs. Martin was a society leader because some relative of hers had founded the local gas works. Together, Greenway and the old woman decided who was invited to these affairs, and who wasn’t.

The large room smelled of perfume and pomade. Suddenly Mack saw Carla on the other side, chatting and flirting a fan at half a dozen men clustered around. He almost slipped and dropped the champagne.

“Put that under here and be quick,” growled one of the white-hatted chefs arranging the trestle tables with elegant silver dishes of tongue and ham, terrapin and scalloped oysters. Mack slid the crates under the skirted table and unloaded the bottles into boxes full of ice.

With a flourish of snare drums, the dance concluded. Ned Greenway lifted the gold police whistle he wore on a gold chain around his neck and blew a piercing blast. “Supper in twenty minutes, ladies and gentlemen.”

The dancers left the floor, filling the room with happy chatter, and Ballenberg’s bandsmen left the dais to smoke in the alley. Mack started to carry the empty crates toward the kitchen doorway, but at the end of the long buffet, he stopped.

Carla was hurrying toward him.

He searched for Fairbanks, but didn’t find him in the crowd. Then Carla consumed his vision, sailing down on him like a great gorgeous treasure galleon. She wore a gown of dark-green satin with extravagantly high bouffant sleeves. The skirt fell in large folds dusted with gold flecks—little gold stars, he saw as she drew nearer. Her bodice was tight and cut low, showing deep, powdered cleavage. She wore a three-inch-high choker, solid diamonds all the way around, and her earrings too were clusters of diamonds, her tiara a flashing crusty arch of them.

She stood there glittering, breaking his heart with her beauty. “I nearly died when I saw your face,” she said. “What a grand surprise. What are you doing here?”

“Working. Delivering champagne.”

“May I have some?”

Mack glanced nervously at the chefs arranging the supper. “You’ll have to ask one of them.” Several guests had noticed them talking, and had begun whispering.

She looked him up and down with a teasing smile. “You’re certainly a long way from the Valley, Mr. Chance. And I do believe you took a bath.”

“It was always my plan to come here…” He let the sentence trail off, feeling more and more awkward, mesmerized by her stunning looks. Her half-revealed breasts were great pushed-up billows of white cream, inviting kisses…God, what kind of thought was that? Hellman’s daughter could drive a man out of his head.

The teasing smile came back. “You’re pursuing me, then.”

“I meant San Francisco, Miss Hellman. I have ambitions—”

She rapped his chin with her diamond-studded fan. “Yes, I know. And you still have your saucy tongue. But I like that in a man. It means you won’t be defeated easily. I’ll tell you, my dear, I was prepared to be royally bored when I told Walter I’d come with him tonight. I’m not bored any longer.”

Her tongue touched her lower lip and her dark-blue eyes warmed. Mack felt steamy, and conscious of many eyes on them, but Carla didn’t seem to care. “Is there any possibility that you and I could find somewhere to—”

A male voice, quickly growing louder, overlaid hers and made her frown.

“Our forebears were the original Anglo settlers. They bequeathed this state to us as a sacred trust.”

Fairbanks. With a trio of equally elegant gentlemen hanging on his words.

“We must use the political process to continually purify California, instead of allowing it to become ever more mongrelized—Carla my dear. I noticed you talking to someone over here. I couldn’t imagine who—”

When he finally recognized Mack, surprise gave way to something uglier, though he tried to maintain an air of amusement. “My God, the upstart traveler. Surely you weren’t invited here.”

“I work for Mr. Greenway.”

“You’ve gone up in the world—or is it down?” Fairbanks wore white gloves. His little mustache glistened with wax.