California Gold (83 page)

“Leave that.”

“Sir, it’s a valuable piece of art.”

“I’d rather have my son.”

“I know, sir. This is my choice to save.”

He slipped out the gate with the portrait of Mack still balanced on his shoulder.

All of them but Alex and Mack piled into the Rolls-Royce, crowding in like comedians in a nickelodeon picture, eleven people in an auto built for seven. She sagged but her springs held.

Mack turned for a last look. He saw for the first time the crack in the left-hand pillar. It ran down through the cartouche, cleaving his initials.

It’s God’s judgment, I think…

The fire swirled above the roof of the Fairmont and danced behind its windows. Yosh watched anxiously. “Mr. Chance?”

What arrogance,
Mack thought, staring at the pillar.
What stupidity.
This was his punishment.

Jim was his punishment…

“Please hurry, sir,” Alex said.

Mack’s face convulsed. With a great heave he threw the orange crate back through the gates. Papers scattered; ledgers flew. Overhead, wind gusts whirled flaming sticks and debris. Some landed on the mansion’s highest cupola, and a little white thread of smoke unraveled.

“Burn, goddamn you.”

He turned around and walked away.

Standing in front of the Silver Ghost, between the acetylene lights, he had a pale, wild, almost demented look. He flung off his torn vest and threw it in the street. Those in the car saw the Shopkeeper’s Colt riding in its holster on his right hip.

“Follow me, Yosh.”

He started walking. The car crept forward, Alex walking, behind. On his shoulder, Mack’s painted eyes stoically watched the Fairmont burn.

The false sun heated the back of Mack’s neck. The false noonday lit the way ahead. He led the slow burdened auto down from Nob Hill, leaving the hill to its conqueror.

While the fires raged, the City was on her knees. They burned all through Wednesday and Thursday. On the western fire line at Van Ness Avenue, soldiers spread and lit kerosene to burn houses and create firebreaks. More dynamiting made plenty of noise but experts later said it did little or no good.

The price of holding the Van Ness line was high. With manpower concentrated there, the fire to the northeast jumped Washington Street and consumed parts of Russian Hill and North Beach. To the east, the fire burned to Columbus Avenue, then on toward the waterfront.

On Friday, the fire storms spent themselves and the fire fighters began to win. Fireboats helped save most of the piers on the Bay. The western fire jumped across Van Ness, but there the breaks held. Then, on Saturday, it rained, and the reckoning began.

The death toll approached five hundred. No one could be sure how many had been lost in collapsed buildings that later burned. Fires had razed over 2,800 acres, wiping out 490 city blocks and 250,000 dwellings. They had destroyed six times as much land and property as the London fire of 1666. Even the Chicago fire of 1871 was but two thirds the size.

The great landmark buildings, the banks and theaters, were gone. All the records in City Hall, the books in the public libraries, the Nob Hill mansions of the Big Four, gone. The ferries had never stopped running, but the cable cars were out of service indefinitely.

San Franciscans responded with astounding pluck and heart. They had beaten disasters before, and they would beat this one. The Committee of Safety immediately opened 150 relief stations to distribute survival portions of food and water. Distant towns and states loaded food and blankets into boxcars and sped them west.

Schoolchildren took up collections. Foreign nations sent money, the Japanese alone giving almost a quarter of a million dollars. In all, $9 million in relief aid poured into San Francisco to house and feed its homeless in the enormous tent camps erected on every available square foot of green space and ocean beach.

Less generous were some of the companies that had smilingly insured San Francisco’s goods and real estate when the skies were blue. Now, with smoke hanging in the air, some of them reneged. Claims ran to over $500 million, and many honest firms pledged to pay in full. Twelve American companies did so and went bankrupt, but several European insurers either discounted claims as much as 25 percent, or welshed altogether.

The mind-numbing proportions of the disaster slowly emerged. San Francisco was far from the sole casualty. To the north and south, the quake had buckled the earth for a distance of two hundred miles in a path up to forty miles wide. North to Fort Bragg and south to Salinas, railroad tracks had softened like taffy, risen and frozen into roller-coaster hills. Eyewitnesses said sidewalks shot up and stopped like elevators arriving at the second floor. Earth along the opened fault line moved as much as twenty-one feet. In Sonoma County, downtown Santa Rosa was leveled. At Palo Alto, on the peninsula, the university sustained massive damage. Large sections of San Jose were rubble.

Looked at one way, it was an unspeakable nightmare, but in another, it became an achievement. Who else but Californians could survive a mammoth quake and the worst fire in man’s history, yet exhibit such courage, spirit, and resilience? In this mood, the City began to shrug off her shock and despair and was soon displaying the charming cockiness that had always made her special. Handsome Gene Schmitz proclaimed, “Our fair city lies in ruins. But as your mayor I say—these are the damnedest, finest ruins ever seen on the face of the Earth.”

Cleanup began. Soldiers patrolled with bayonets to keep order. City government resumed its operations in the Whitcomb Hotel on Market Street. Architects declared their intention to implement the Burnham plan at last. God had already cleared the land for them.

People shared living space, food, memories of good times and of narrow escapes as they ate their rations shipped over the rails from Chicago or Denver or Jersey City. For a while, everyone forgot to hate the SP.

Within three years, virtually every block of the City’s commercial heart, her downtown, was rebuilt as if there had never been an earthquake, never been a fire. The alchemy of time was already turning the base metal of disaster into the gold of legend. Years afterward, San Franciscans still boasted of “the damnedest, finest ruins ever seen.”

E
VEN BEFORE THE FIRES
went out, Mack was moving—roaming through the parks and along the ocean beaches. He showed his pass signed by Governor Pardee. Over and over, to the camp commandants, soldiers with bayonets, refugees, he said:

“My son is seven, going on eight. His most noticeable feature is a limp; his left foot is crippled. He’s tall, and mature for his age. He’s fair-haired, with dark-blue eyes. I don’t have a picture of him, but he looks exactly like the woman in this photo from the
Oakland Tribune.
Have you seen him?”

On Saturday, the day it rained, he went to the temporary police headquarters, the park station out on Stanyan Street. The place was bedlam, officers coming and going, distraught relatives shouting and weeping. Mack’s name got him into the office of Chief Drinan immediately. Drinan knew about the disappearance, but had nothing new to report. He muttered a few words of sympathy that Mack found perfunctory, and sent him to see Detective Mulvihill.

“Ike Mulvihill,” the detective said, giving Mack a damp handshake. His desk looked like someone had emptied several wastebaskets on it. “Sit down, sit down.” Mulvihill gestured to a flimsy chair. He was a spindly, gray-haired old-timer with bags under his eyes, a shirt that gave off a stale odor, and a tie on which he’d spilled innumerable cups of coffee and mugs of beer.

“I suppose it’s about your son,” Mulvihill began, shuffling some papers aimlessly. “We have the description, but he hasn’t been seen. Under the circumstances, it isn’t surprising. Hundreds of persons are still missing. I mean literally hundreds. But I’m telling you, sir, you’re making our job harder because you can’t provide a photograph of this boy.”

“I had two of them. Both burned along with the house. I was interested in getting my people out, rather than personal effects. I trust that won’t hamper you from working on the case.” Mack was growing sarcastic.

“When we have the time and can spare the manpower,” Mulvihill said. Perhaps he was tired—worn out—but he too seemed unsympathetic, and he shrugged in a way that snapped Mack’s temper.

Mack hammered his desk. “The time is now, detective, not next week or next month.”

“Don’t yell at me, Mr. Chance. Don’t you come in here and yell. I’ve got my hands full.”

“Haven’t we all. I want you to
do
something.”

“Don’t take that tone with me. Remember who you’re speaking to—”

“You do the same, goddamn it. I’m a taxpayer—”

“But no friend of the government of this city,” Mulvihill exploded, shooting him a look. He began shuffling and arranging papers again, rapidly now, his eyes fixed on them. “I’m busy, Mr. Chance, you can see all these cases of people missing just like your boy. We’ll do our utmost, as we would for any citizen. If we come up with something, we’ll inform you right away. Where are you living?”

“We’re camping in the panhandle of Golden Gate Park.”

“Fine. Good day,” Mulvihill said, not looking up. On his way out Mack slammed the door. It made him feel no better. Leaving the station, a new thought struck him. Considering Mulvihill’s age, he was undoubtedly a colleague of Lon Coglan. Maybe even a friend. God; what a situation.

Among the forty thousand camped in the park, Mack and the others from the mansion had set up their own little community in a double row of white tents. They took turns standing in the food and water lines. For the first few days all the water came across from Oakland, transferred from barges to tank wagons that traveled through the ruined city under heavy guard.

Their tent community grew quickly. Rhett Haversack found them, with his wife and five children. Margaret found them, along with two of her waiters and a shy black whore, Gisella. Maison Napoleon was completely gone. She had operated it with a few girls, without dining-room service, in the months since her release from the hospital. Though she’d confessed to Mack that she didn’t have much heart for the business anymore, she’d have to reopen eventually because it was the only trade she knew.

Margaret’s waiters brought an upright piano with them. No one asked them where they got it. In the evening, everyone would gather around to enjoy it. Gisella played and sang; she had a lovely soprano voice. Their favorite was the song people had adopted after the quake and fire, “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight.” Gisella performed it with a hard rocking beat. Sometimes, though, she sang it slowly, like an elegy. Then all the women wept.

He went downtown on Sunday after the fires went out, describing Jim to strangers, showing Carla’s photo. Hundreds were roaming in the sunshine, sightseeing. There wasn’t much to do yet but that. Steam rose from the rain-soaked ruins. Young men in khaki, with rifles, guarded every block, watching for looters. Matterhorns and Shastas of abandoned goods loomed at the street corners, piled there as part of the cleanup. Touring cars painted with red crosses chugged by with food, blankets, clothing. Walls of burned buildings cast long shadows, like cemetery monuments. Row houses spared by the fire leaned over sidewalks at crazy angles, thrown out of plumb but not thrown down.

Perceptions were distorted. Landmarks had vanished, and the skyline was lower, or seemed lower. The City appeared smaller, and downtown intersections revealed vistas of a wasteland. You walked what appeared to be three blocks and found it to be a mile.

While Mack was standing outside the gutted Hearst building, a sad expression on his face, a small round Chinese gentleman came up to him. He gave Mack a smile and a pat on the shoulder and said, “Don’t worry—by and by, we build all new.”

Mack showed him the photograph from the
Oakland Tribune
, to no avail.

On another corner, a rumpled man on a soapbox waved a Bible at half a dozen mildly curious listeners. “Babylon is fallen—Babylon the sinful is fallen! God struck at her painted whores and her prancing deviates. God leveled her dramshops and her play shops. God scourged her thousands of complacent sinners for tolerating such evil …” Mack shook his head; many a zealous preacher was blaming all the devastation on the City’s tradition of easy morality. The preachers never mentioned an inadequate water system.

Near the Ferry Building, Mack ran into Jack London. London’s reputation as a writer and lecturer was solid now, but tainted by sex scandals and his socialist politics. The author wore a baggy blue suit and a Baden-Powell hat. He told Mack that he’d come down from his ranch at Glen Ellen and was writing up his impressions.

Mack went through the ritual of describing his son. London shook his head. Then he said, “I tell you, I’ve never seen San Franciscans so kind and courteous. In this kind of catastrophe, I thought the social classes would turn on each other. I thought we’d have war.”

“You sound a little disappointed.”

London gave him a level stare. “No. Touched. But mark this, my friend. The old Frisco—the city of the nabobs—is gone. The new San Francisco will belong to the people south of the Slot. Factory people, poor people. Look, nothing personal. I hope you find your son.” Touching the brim of his big hat, London moved on.

Bitter about the near-insult, Mack wondered why, if London was so touched and moved by City poverty, he had promptly moved to the country when he made some money.

In conversation later, Professor Love said he thought London’s social theories were balmy, but his stories were original and thrilling, and he was right about the disaster bringing out the best. “
Animus tamen omnia vincit.
‘Courage conquers all things’—Ovid.”

Money bought nothing; there was nothing to buy. Mack stood in the long food lines with lawyers, bankers, society matrons, maids, bricklayers, hod carriers, reporters, milliners, pickpockets.