California Gold (82 page)

A woman lay in a Market Street doorway with her skirt hoisted, both her hands clutching the door frame above her. She heaved up and down and screamed like a hurt child as a man and another woman crouched on the sidewalk in front of her. Mack saw them pull a bloody newborn baby from between her parted legs.

Half a dozen men overtook him from behind, three pushing wheelbarrows full of canvas sacks stenciled Fairbanks trust. The other three carried pump shotguns.

“What have you got there?” Mack asked, stepping toward the nearest barrow.

“A million dollars in bearer bonds,” one of the armed men said, taking aim. “You want a close look? It’ll be your last.”

“No thanks, I believe you.”

Mack stood aside and they rushed on down Market with their barrows. Going where? The Ferry Building? Oakland? Were the ferries still running?

He recognized a police sergeant who was trying to direct traffic and asked him for details.

“Oh, Mr. Chance, it’s a catastrophe,” the policeman said in his lovely Irish brogue. “There’s no water except what can be pumped from the cisterns and the Bay. None of the fire alarms worked. All the battery jars at the Chinatown alarm station broke in the quake. Poor Dennis Sullivan was mortally injured when headquarters came down…” Sullivan was fire chief, a twenty-six-year veteran, and the man who’d pleaded for money to improve the water system. “…and there’s nobody as keen and sharp as him to direct the firemen. We got a third blaze, a bad one, back there in Hayes Valley.” He pointed over Mack’s shoulder. “Some damn fool woman tried to cook breakfast with a damaged flue. It’s God’s judgment, I think. ’Tis a sinful town, this one. Whores and sodomites. Sodomites and whores—”

“How’s Nob Hill?”

“Safe so far. Who knows for how long?” Mack watched the apocalyptic clouds. The
Call
building jutted like an iceberg in a smoky sea.
Who knows for how long?

He fought on to within a block of the
Call.
The crowds were heaviest here; thousands packed Market Street from curb to curb, asking questions, offering opinions. They weren’t typical sightseers, Mack realized when he was among them. They weren’t lighthearted; they were worried.

“Think the
Call
will go?”

“Not on your life. The building’s fireproof.”

“The Crocker building was fireproof. It’s gutted.”

“The Palace is standing. See her flag flying down there?”

“Hurrah for the old Palace…”

Some of them applauded.

The general noise level was incredible, the roar of the south-of-Market fire background for horses trotting, windows bursting, soldiers and police yelling, children crying, autos honking as they wove reckless paths through the crowds with cargoes of bodies or the wounded. Unseen buildings continued to crash down.

Mack pulled out his watch. Almost noon. A cry went up and a plume of smoke was visible spewing from a window on the
Call’s
top floor. Windows began to explode, a torrent of glass falling toward the street. People around Mack pushed and screamed and ran. A triangle of flying glass slashed the back of his neck.

The policeman had used the right word:
catastrophe. The
heart of San Francisco was not yet gone, but it was going.

He turned up Grant, then west again for a quick look at Union Square. It was packed with people, and so far unscathed. On the edge of the square he bumped into a man he knew from the Bohemian Club.

“Chance. You’re on the Committee of Safety—do you know that?”

“No, I don’t, I just got back—what’s the committee? What’s it for?”

“The mayor organized it to run the fire fighting, the emergency hospitals—everything. Fifty of the City’s best. Jim Phelan’s chairman. They’ve sent appeals to Mayor Mott in Oakland and Governor Pardee in Sacramento. I saw your name when they posted the committee list at ten. They’re supposed to be in session right now.”

“Where?”

“Not sure. I heard they left the Hall of Justice for the new Fairmont…”

“Thanks,” he said, pushing and shoving his way onward toward the Dewey Monument with the Winged Victory figure crowning it. On the Geary Street side of the square, a man was shouting and waving. “Get away to Oakland. Launches to Oakland, Pier Thirteen.”

“How much?” someone yelled.

“Fifty cents.”

“That’s thievery.”

But twenty other people rushed after the tout.

Mack kept squeezing and pushing forward, toward Post Street on the square’s north side. Another mass outcry turned him around suddenly. Four upper floors of the
Call
were ablaze. Behind it, the fire clouds rose two miles or more, darkening the sky. To the southwest, similar clouds indicated that the Hayes Valley fire, the fire from the woman’s breakfast, was spreading. The constant crash of collapsing buildings made it sound like wartime.

Mack crossed Post on his way back to Powell. Suddenly he spied Alex Muller over near the entrance of the St. Francis. Hatless and coatless, Alex dove across Post into the square Mack had just left. Mack recrossed the street and chased him.

“Alex,” he yelled, waving as he swam through the human sea. Alex heard his name, turned, and peered through the dull daylight.

“Mr. Chance.” The sight of his employer seemed to upset him.

Alex’s sweaty shirt was smudged with dirt. He’d rolled up his cuffs to a point just below his black sleeve garters. Alex never showed his sleeve garters, or went out with soiled linen.

“Sir—I didn’t know where you were, or when to expect you. The mayor’s committee—”

“Yes, I heard. Are you out for some sightseeing like everyone else?”

“No, sir. I am here in hopes of—that is—sir—have you been home?”

“Not yet.”

“You don’t know about your son?”

In the palpable heat of the infernos to the south and east, Mack grew cold.

“Is Jim hurt?”

“Sir, not exactly. On Sunday evening, the professor, Angelina Olivar, and I were all out of the house, for various reasons, for a period of several hours. I was the first to come back, at approximately a quarter past ten. Since Angelina was not due to return until early Monday, I checked Jim’s room to see that all was well. I couldn’t find him. Apparently he slipped away sometime during the evening.”

“What the hell do you mean, ‘slipped away’?”

“Excuse me, sir, I’m sorry—” With a guilty look he blurted, “Ran off.”

“Oh, Jesus. No.”

“We tried to contact you, sir. We didn’t know precisely where you were. The Del Monte said you had left. Yosh told us to expect a call on Monday, but it never came. Belatedly, then—Monday evening—we asked the local authorities to attempt to contact other law-enforcement agencies south of here. I must say candidly, when your name was mentioned, we did not get the best cooperation…” Mack was too stunned to react to that. Alex continued, “I have been out all morning. Ever since the earthquake woke the household. I hoped I might spot Little Jim somewhere. There are so many people abroad, and I feel he must still be in the City—”

“Are you sure he ran away?”

“He removed many of his things from his room. The bed was still made—”

“Did you call the police on Sunday night?”

“Naturally. At once. We gave them a full description of Jim.”

“Damn it, can a seven-year-old boy with a limp be that hard to find?”

“No, sir. Last night a foot patrolman saw him on Market Street. He lost him in the crowds. This morning—well. You see for yourself. The police have no time.”

Somewhere another building came down in thundering ruin. Mack scanned the sky, Union Square, the crowds. Tears of rage and guilt began to run. He fought them.

“God, where is he?”

A detonation, louder, different, shook the pavement. People screamed and pushed, flinging their arms over their heads.

“It’s another quake—”

“No, no—they’re dynamiting. The army’s dynamiting. Firebreaks—”

A second detonation followed, and a third. “Sir,” Alex began, “if I might suggest—”

Mack whirled away, shoving a man crowding next to him. He didn’t think coherently, just ran.

He hurried up the steep slope of Powell Street. Behind him, the fire south of the Slot was burning along a mile-and-a-half front, from the Bay all the way to Sixth Street, and from Folsom to Market. Fire was gutting the entire
Call
building at Third and surging on toward the Palace Hotel at Montgomery. The produce-district fire was advancing as well, and the Hayes Valley fire was spreading in the direction of Mechanics’ Pavilion and City Hall. It was a panorama worthy of Hell.

Mack ran away from it, up Powell toward home.

He passed a small pigtailed girl wandering with a rag doll.

He passed an old Chinese woman sitting in a doorway, her cheeks shiny with tears. A white bone poked through a torn black trouser leg. “Broke,” she said to Mack as he ran by. “Oh, broke.”

He passed an Italian with a pushcart full of sheet music.

He passed a coffeehouse where two special policemen had cornered a looter. One pulled silverware from the man’s coat pockets; the other beat the thief with a truncheon.

Mack struggled up the hill to California Street, an awl of pain turned deep in his chest. The hours of hunger, shock, and exertion finally took their toll. He leaned his forehead against the cold granite of the new, but still unopened Fairmont Hotel. Unexpectedly, he thought of Margaret, her place on Mission Street. Destroyed, surely. Was she all right?

He raised his head, his white hair blowing in the hot breeze. He was so tired he wanted to drop. But he had to go on. To the mansion—

But why was he hurrying? What could be done if Jim was gone? Who could find a lone boy among so many thousands in flight?

And there was the committee…

He identified himself to a guard and walked into the Fairmont Hotel.

Former Mayor Jim Phelan noticed when Mack entered through a rear door of the parlor, which still smelled of fresh paint. From a draped table up in front, he said, “Mack. Welcome. You’re a sight.”

“Drove up from Carmel. The quake caught me at Half Moon Bay.”

“We’re trying to decide how to save this town,” Rudolph Spreckels said. He was seated among the committee members.

“It’s too late.” The voice belonged to Fairbanks.

His remark angered Phelan. “Don’t talk that way. San Franciscans may be guilty of a lot of things, but they aren’t quitters. They don’t sit down and cry. Shall we get back to work, gentlemen?”

Fires burning at 2,000 degrees and higher rapidly consumed entire blocks. Granite pillars melted, shrank, and cooled as misshapen rocks. Steel beams bent like sticks of macaroni in hot water. Iron folded like shirt cardboard, sandstone cracked like window glass, concrete crumbled into sand.

At 1
P.M.
the army began dynamiting north of Market Street. The produce-district fire was sweeping west.

At 3
P.M.
the flag on the Palace Hotel vanished in the smoke, and the great old hostelry waited for the end.

By 8
P.M
., with the sun down, an eerie false daylight illuminated the City. Frantic fire fighters watched the westward advance of the produce-district blaze, then reorganized to hold the line at Powell Street.

The south-of-Market fire crossed Eighth Street.

The third fire, the one started by the unknown woman at breakfast, raged on from Mechanics’ Pavilion toward City Hall. Someone had christened it the Ham and Eggs fire. It jumped Market Street at Ninth, mating with the south fire to create a new one—bigger, deadlier, a huge hot hurricane of flame. The fire rushed west toward the Mission District.

At the Fairmont, as everywhere else, telephone lines were dead, and commandeered autos came and went with messages, orders, reports on the position of the fires. The Committee of Safety rushed available supplies to Golden Gate Park, facing a possible one hundred thousand people homeless for the night. A messenger from Oakland said an emergency train was already en route from Los Angeles with doctors, nurses, food, medical supplies.

By 11
P.M.
it became certain that Chinatown was going. All of its ten thousand residents were flung from their homes and shops into streets already overflowing with refugees.

Mack worked through the night with only a cup of cold tea and half a stale roll to sustain him. Shortly before 3
A.M.
he heard running in the corridor outside the parlor.

“We have to evacuate the hotel,” someone cried. “The fire’s jumped to this side of Powell.”

“Mack, you’d better go home,” Phelan said. “Save what you can.”

The official fire-defense line moved west to Van Ness. The produce-district fire burned along Bush Street and Pine Street, taking a building, heating the next till it ignited, taking that one, and heating the one beyond. The fiery dominoes fell one by one, randomness injected only by shifts of the breeze.

After the fire took the first blocks of Bush and Pine west of Powell, the wind turned it north on Mason, toward the wooden gingerbread palaces of the rail and silver kings.

The mansion on Sacramento Street had sustained severe quake damage. The great Tiffany skylight was gone, its remains littering the foyer three stories down. The floor of Mack’s bedroom canted at a thirty-degree angle.

In his office, he packed a Calgold orange crate with ledgers and papers. At 3:40
A.M.,
the exodus from the house began. Señora Olivar carried out a precious painted Madonna. Professor Love carried out his Bartlett’s and some other books. The servants carried gladstones, teapots, Bibles, photograph albums.

Yosh drove around the corner in the Silver Ghost, her acetylene lights poking through the smoke. She lacked her ruined tenders and spare tire and was dented, but she was oddly grand, bright as an ingot. Yosh parked her at the gate, pointing west.

Coatless now, Mack struggled down the steps with the orange crate. He was beaten to exhaustion, to a kind of numbed somnambulism. But he kept moving. One foot ahead of the other. The servants were watching him with concern.

In the confusion of firelight and shadow, he bumped into Alex, who was carrying the large Sargent painting on his shoulder.