California Gold (22 page)

“I know him. Is it against the law?”

Coglan hit him.

The blow knocked him over, chair and all. He bit his lip to stifle a yell. Coglan sucked his silver tooth noisily and signaled Jackie forward to help him right the chair.

“Don’t give me lip, laddie buck. You’re not the one with the authority to ask questions.”

Mack glared. Coglan chuckled; he liked that.

“If you know Marquez, that tells me a lot about you. We don’t want your kind in the City. I’m here to make sure you’re absolutely clear on that.”

The softness of those words made Mack’s scalp crawl.

“I want to impress on you that we don’t want and won’t tolerate radicals like you stirring things up, threatening and insulting our civic leaders. I want to demonstrate that to you so you’ll never forget.”

He extended his right hand, palm up. A big paste diamond in a pinky ring glittered.

“Jackie, give me the knucks.”

He slipped them on his right hand. Mack stared at the ridges of yellow metal.

“This will just be a light lesson, Chance. I sense that you’re a smart enough fella to learn it right off. After we let you out, you’ll have twenty-four hours to leave San Francisco. Mr. Fairbanks persuaded Mr. Huntington to drop charges—avoid a lot of useless bad publicity—in exchange for assurance from headquarters that we’d get rid of you.”

He grabbed Mack’s hair with his left hand and yanked. Mack clenched his teeth and slitted his eyes. Pain seemed to come from all parts of his body, consuming him.

“After midnight tomorrow, if a member of the force spots you anywhere in the City, you’ll come back to this room for another visit. After that one, you won’t be in any shape to walk anyplace.”

“You fucking ape,” Mack gasped. “If I ever catch you by yourself in a fair fight I’ll kill you.”

His words reverberated and died. When Coglan got over his surprise, he put on a pious face.

“That was nasty, laddie buck. Rash and nasty. That’ll prolong your lesson a bit.” And Coglan hit him.

Blood glistened on the metal knuckles. Coglan’s merry eyes belied his soft tone. By the door, Jackie scratched his groin and watched with a smile.

Sit up
, Mack shouted in the silence of his ringing head.
Don’t make a sound. He wants crying and screaming.

Coglan hit him again.

Mack rose with the blow, taking the chair six inches up and slamming it down again. Coglan’s gold-plated fist rose and fell, rose and fell, administering his lesson.

“Beginning to catch my drift, are you?” Coglan was breathing hard. Mack’s eyelids were almost swollen shut. The detective was a shimmering blur that divided into two Coglans, then fused again.

“I don’t hear you, laddie buck.”

Mack spat at him. It landed between his own feet, blood-red. And Coglan hit him again.

Two policemen carried him out and flung him on the curb. There was a glitter of blue-white as rain obscured buildings and haloed lights. Mack groped for a purchase on the curbstone, missed, and slid into the gutter face-first.

He jerked his head up, sputtering, and water sluiced some of the dried blood from his face. A lightning bolt excited a horse harnessed to a hack across the street, and it neighed wildly and pawed the air.

The hack door flew open, and a woman jumped out, then a man. They splashed through puddles while Mack floundered, rain dripping from his brows and nose and chin. In another burst of lightning, Mack recognized Bierce.

“Christ. This town is a moral leper colony.”

“Stop your posturing and help me, Ambrose.” Nellie tugged Mack’s arm out of the gutter. They got him into the hack and away while the policemen watched from the shelter of the jail doorway, amused.

“They broke your nose,” said the elderly doctor Nellie had awakened at 2
A.M
. Mack sat gingerly on a chair under the gas in the doctor’s surgery. He was bare to the waist. His torso was a landscape of purple and yellow, and he could barely see through his slitted eyes.

“As to internal injuries, I detect nothing, but we’ll have to wait and reexamine you to be certain.”

Mack thought of Coglan’s deadline.

“The physical damage will take plenty of time to heal,” the doctor continued. “For a month or so, you’re going to look as though you boxed thirty rounds with Jim Corbett.”

“And lost,” Mack said. Only Bierce smiled, leaning against the wall next to a hanging skeleton.

“Send the bill to the
Examiner
,” Nellie said.

“I want to see him again in three days.”

“Sure,” Mack said through his cut and swollen lips. “Thanks for your help.?

He woke in the sitting room of Nellie’s flat, which was located, fittingly enough, on the slope of Russian Hill. The gray light of day fell through a huge bay window awash with windblown rain. It cast strange moving shadows on Mack’s ruined face. Every limb, every joint hurt in some fashion.

He’d been sleeping on a pallet of furs, sables and sea otters. Nellie didn’t believe in killing wild animals. Where, he wondered, did these pelts come from? The sitting room had other unusual features. Contrary to fashion, it contained very little furniture beyond four plain, solid-backed chairs, a table, and a sideboard, all of which looked old, handmade. Three framed photographs of stern dark-eyed men hung over the mantel. One man wore a huge round fur hat. No carpets covered the beautifully finished floor, just the scattered furs. A four-foot silver samovar decorated with elaborate filigree dominated one corner. Nellie had once told him vehemently that she was American, her Russian ancestors existing only as memories. He wondered.

Nellie brought him a bowl of golden broth. “You look horrible.”

“I can thank Walter Fairbanks.”

“At least you’re not going to prison.” She sat while he spooned up some broth. He had trouble swallowing. “I have a valise for you in the bedroom, and clean clothes.”

“Nellie, I won’t run.”

“You haven’t any choice. They own the police force. I’m not saying any money changes hands. It’s just that the SP is such a power, such a presence. Mr. Hearst wouldn’t dare oppose them if he didn’t have the senator’s fortune and prestige behind him, and the newspaper.”

“Those people are too damn powerful. They’re nothing but dictators.”

“A lot of Californians agree. Mr. Huntington and his partners have had almost twenty-five years to entrench themselves. But you can’t kill the Octopus by yourself, nor can I. Not even Mr. Hearst can do it alone. If it’s ever to happen, it will take time, thought, and a great deal of courageous effort from people in every part of this state. Meantime, the railroad runs things. At the moment they’re running you. I don’t want you to leave, but you won’t be safe unless you do.”

“It’s cowardly.”

“It’s good sense.”

Under her prodding, he told her of things that needed to be done when he left. Captain Barnstable was owed money from the receipts on deposit in Oakland. “Bluedorn’s Coal Yard too.”

“I’ll see that both are paid.”

“I have twenty-one dollars on deposit at Wells, Fargo…”

“Leave it. Anything else?”

“No. Everything I owned sank with the
Bay Beauty
.”

“Except this.” From the mantel she brought T. Fowler Haines. She brushed the cover with her palm. “I thought you’d want to take it. I’ve also been curious about this.” She drew Carla’s gold scarf from between the pages. “It’s expensive.”

He thought quickly; she still didn’t know about Carla. “My mother’s.”

“Indeed. Unusual. I would have guessed it belonged to a younger woman. From the color.”

At another time, he might have been amused, flattered by the jealousy of some unknown rival, but he was relieved when she didn’t pursue it. She replaced the scarf and gave him the guidebook.

Mack turned the book in his hands, riffled the pages, and read a few sentences.
A more beautiful, hospitable country never spread its panorama to the human gaze!
He shook his head.

“I was going to get rich in a year or so. Walk right through the golden doorway…” His hand clenched the spine of T. Fowler Haines. “Swampy Hellman was the first one who shut the door in my face. Then there was Fairbanks. The scum from the Oakland piers. Coglan…” Something hard, gnarled, grew within him. He sat up straighter on the pallet of furs. “They slammed the door this time, but it won’t stay shut forever. They can bolt their goddamn door and hammer in a hundred nails. I’ll still come back and kick it down and break it up for kindling. I’ll tell you something else…”

He struggled to his knees, alarming her. “Be careful, Mack, you’re not—”

“Next time,” he interrupted, taking hold of her shoulders, “next time, Nellie, I won’t come sneaking into San Francisco aboard some little fishing skiff. I’ll sail right up to the SP pier in the biggest, longest steam yacht you’ve ever—”

“Stop.” She whispered it, pressing her hand to his lips. Her eyes shone wet as the rain that slashed the bay window and hid the hills of Marin. “Please stop. You’ll only make yourself feel worse.”

“You don’t believe I can do it.”

“I believe you should get out of San Francisco before midnight. Do you have anyplace to go?”

“No. I guess I’d better try the other city—Los Angeles. A man I met said there was a land boom down in the cow counties.”

He rested his hands lightly on his legs, kneeling there while she walked to the window. She crossed and uncrossed her arms in a restless, troubled way.

“Nellie.”

She looked at him.

“Any possibility that you’d come along?”

She caught her breath, trying to hide her emotions, but a huskiness in her voice gave her away. “No.”

He knew she meant yes, there was a possibility, she wanted to go. She was slim and fragile and yet, gazing at her, Mack thought her perhaps the toughest person he had ever met. It made her all the more desirable.

“No,” she repeated more strongly. “I have work to do here. I have a place where I can be heard. Maybe make a difference.”

“You’re damn near as ambitious as I am.”

She didn’t deny it.

He went to her in the window, slowly, hurting, and touched her hair. “I hate to leave you. I don’t altogether understand you, and I don’t think too much of your ideas about women or what they should do with their lives, but ever since Yosemite—maybe since that day I jumped in the water and ruined your stunt—you’ve meant a lot to me.” He curved his bruised hand, nestling her chin in his palm, caressing her cheek with the inside of his fingers. He felt tears. “You still do.”

Some fierce storm raged in her dark eyes then. He saw the turmoil without fully understanding it. She reached up and clasped his hand against her face.

“Oh God, Mack. I think I’d have been better off if I’d never met you.”

“Maybe I should say the same but I can’t. It’s like the falls where we loved each other. They go over the edge because there’s no other way. No way to stop the force—”

“You’re a strange, complex young man. Driven.”

“You’re not driven?”

“Yes, but not into the shackles of matrimony. I have too much to do with my life.”

“Who ever said…?”

She tore away, crossing her arms again. “It comes to mind when two people lo— When they have feelings for one another. You have to know what I am, that’s all. Then, if you know and you still want me…”

Their eyes held. The rainy light cast its moving shadows on them. “I’ll be here if you come back,” she added.

“I will. To open that door.”

“I believe you, I believe you.”

He flung his arms around her, but it was questionable as to which of them came more eagerly into the embrace. Nellie’s kisses were hungry and sad at the same time. He held her as tightly as he could, ignoring his injuries. When they fell to the furs, rolling back and forth and kissing, he knew making love would bring exquisite pain. She stopped it.

“It would hurt you too much.”

He heard what she really meant. It would hurt her too, in a different way. Her voice was soft steel when she said it; he didn’t argue.

Later, saying little, she sat with her legs drawn up and her hands locked around her skirt. She watched him pack and latch the valise, and then she watched him go. She heard his footsteps fading on the outside steps, the rain soon muffling them altogether. She bowed her head and cried.

A
S A SHARP WIND
from the northwest chilled the summer evening, the clouds blew away, revealing a sky ablaze with stars. Dots of blue and white and yellow sparkled on the hills of San Francisco.

Mack limped along the rutted road leading south over the peninsula. Every now and then he shifted the valise to his other hand. About half past eleven, he paused to rest.

He gazed at the City again. Hurrying through San Francisco’s first elite residential districts south of Market, he’d felt small and worthless. The splendor of the lights enhanced the feeling, as did his pain and the wild, unreasonable emotions whipped up by Bao’s death, Fairbanks’s felling him, the police edict.

He felt both disappointment and wrath. But then he thought of the familiar nightmare, all the years in the cold white winters of Pennsylvania. He thought of Pa, and the promises, the hope that this state represented for hundreds of thousands, and for him.

They had defeated him in the City, but there was a lot of California left. In the south he’d start over. There he’d make the dream come true. And then he’d come back.

“Never be cold again. Never be poor again.” He recited it like a church litany, let it buoy him. Giving the City a last look, he picked up the valise. His body still protested, but his spirit felt refreshed. He grasped the guidebook in his pocket and hobbled into the dark.

El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciúncula—Our Lady the Queen of Angels.

In 1781 Spanish governor Felipe de Neve established a pueblo on the Los Angeles River to produce crops for missions and presidios along the coast. A determined band of settlers from the state of Sinaloa—thirty-four married soldiers and twenty-four married settlers, including some Indians and blacks
—
were the first residents.