The Chase (27 page)

“How about Mexico?” Bell asked, impressed with Marion's intuition.

She shook her head. “Margaret could never live in Mexico. The land is too primitive for her tastes. Buenos Aires in Argentina is a possibility. The city is very cosmopolitan, but neither of them speaks a word of Spanish.”

“Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai,” suggested Bell. “Any of those cities hold any interest?”

“Australia or New Zealand, perhaps,” she said thoughtfully. “But I've learned over the years in his employ that Jacob doesn't think like most men.”

“My experience with the man has led me to the same conclusion,” Bell said.

Marion went quiet as she passed him more helpings of the pot roast, potatoes, and vegetables. “Why don't you give your brain a rest and enjoy the fruits of
my
labors?” she said, smiling.

“Forgive me,” he said honestly. “I've been a bore as a dinner companion.”

“I hope you like lemon meringue pie for dessert.”

He laughed. “I adore lemon meringue pie.”

“You'd better. I baked enough for a small army.”

They finished the main course and Isaac stood up to help clear the table. She pushed him back down in his chair.

“Where do you think you're going?” she demanded.

He looked like a young boy startled by his mother. “I wanted to help.”

“Sit down and finish your wine,” Marion said smartly. “Guests don't work in my house, especially male guests.”

He looked at her slyly. “And if I wasn't a guest?”

She turned away from him for fear her inner emotions might show. “Then I'd make you fix a plumbing leak, a squeaky door hinge, and a broken table leg.”

“I could do that,” he said staunchly. “I happen to be very handy.”

She looked at him disbelieving. “A banker's son who is handy?”

He feigned a hurt look. “I didn't always work in my father's bank. I ran away from home when I was fourteen and joined the Barnum and Bailey Circus. I helped put up and take down the tents, fed the elephants, and made repairs on the circus train.” He paused and a sad expression came across his face. “After eight months, my father found me, hauled me home, and sent me back to school.”

“So you're a college man.”

“Harvard. Phi Beta Kappa, in economics.”

“And smart,” she added, properly impressed.

“And you?” he probed. “Where did you go to school?”

“I was in the first graduating class of Stanford University. My degree was in law, but I soon found that law firms were not in the habit of hiring women lawyers, so I went into banking.”

“Now it's my turn to be impressed,” said Bell honestly. “It seems I've met my match.”

Suddenly, Marion went silent and a strange look came over her face. Bell thought something was wrong. He rushed to her side and slid his arm around her.

“Are you ill?”

She looked up at him from her coral green eyes. They seemed dark in thought. Then she gasped. “Montreal!”

He leaned toward her. “What did you say?”

“Montreal…Jacob and Margaret are going to make a run across the Canadian border to Montreal, where he can open another bank.”

“How do you know that?” asked Bell, bewildered at Marion's strange attitude.

“I just remembered seeing the city Montreal scrawled on a notepad beside his telephone,” she explained. “I didn't think it meant anything of importance and dismissed it from my mind. Now it all makes sense. The last place authorities would look for the Cromwells is in Canada. They can easily take on new identities and buy off the right people to become upstanding citizens who start up a solvent financial institution.”

The look of confusion faded from Bell's face. “The piece fits,” he said slowly. “Canada is probably the last place we'd think to look. The obvious escape route used by felons over the years is over the southern border into Mexico, using that as a springboard to travel farther south.”

Then, slowly, his thoughts of the Cromwells evaporated and he became quiet, gentle, and loving as he picked her up in his arms. “I knew there was a reason I fell in love with you,” he said, his voice becoming low and husky. “You're smarter than I am.”

Her whole body trembled as she entwined her arms around his neck. “Oh, God, Isaac. I love you, too.”

He gently touched his lips to hers as he carried her from the living room into the bedroom. She pulled away and looked up, her eyes now mischievous. “What about the lemon meringue pie?”

He gazed down at her lovely features and laughed. “We can always eat it for breakfast.”

Bell could not have predicted nor much less have known that within a few hours the pie would become but a dim memory.

C
ALLED THE HALLMARK OF THE
W
EST, THE
S
AN
F
RANCISCO
of 1906 was a maze of contradictions. One writer described the city as the Babylon of grandiloquence, the Paris of romance, and the Hong Kong of adventure. Another went so far as to portray it as the gateway to paradise.

It may have been dynamic and exciting, but, in truth, San Francisco was a sprawling, filthy, soot-ridden, foul-smelling, brawling, corrupt, vulgar city with less charm than London in the seventeen hundreds. It intermingled incredible wealth with sordid poverty. Coal smoke from steamboats, locomotives, foundries, house furnaces and stoves enveloped streets already blanketed by the dung of thousands of horses. There were no sewage-treatment plants to be found and the blackened skies reeked of foul odors.

Most all the houses were built of wood. From the nice homes on Telegraph Hill to the stylish mansions of Nob Hill to the shacks and hovels in the outlying districts, it was described by the city's fire chief as a sea of tinderboxes waiting to be lit.

The image and the myth were to change dramatically within two and a half minutes.

At 5:12
A.M
., on the morning of April 18th, the sun was beginning to lighten the eastern sky. The gas streetlights had been shut off and the cable cars began to clatter from their barns for their runs up and down the many hills of the city. Early workers began walking to their job as those who worked during the late-night hours headed home. Bakers were already at their ovens. Police on the early-morning shift still patrolled their beats, expecting another quiet day, as a light wind without the prevailing fog blew in from the west.

But at 5:12, the peaceful world of San Francisco and its surrounding towns was shattered by an ominous, rumbling roar that came from the depths of the earth a few miles under the sea beyond the Golden Gate.

Hell had come to San Francisco.

The foreshock shook the surrounding countryside and was felt throughout the Bay Area. Twenty-five seconds later, terrifying, undulating shock waves from the massive earthquake surged across the city like a monstrous hand sweeping stacks of books off a table.

The rock of the San Andreas Fault, whose walls had been grinding against each other for millions of years, abruptly split apart as the North American Plate under the land and the Pacific Plate beneath the sea unleashed their grip on each other and shifted in opposite directions, one to the north, the other to the south.

The unimaginable force raged toward the helpless city at seven thousand miles an hour in a disastrous spree that would leave monumental death and destruction in its wake.

The shock wave struck with savage swiftness. The pavement of the streets running east and west began to rise and crest before falling into troughs, as the quake rolled relentlessly forward and sent block upon block of tall buildings rocking and swaying like willow trees in a hurricane. Wood, mortar, and brick were never meant to withstand such an onslaught. One by one, the buildings began to crumble, their walls falling and avalanching into the streets under a cloud of dust and debris. Every window in the stores along the avenues burst and shattered onto the sidewalks in a shower of jagged shards.

Huge five-and ten-story buildings in the downtown business section toppled in a horrendous crash that sounded like a cannon barrage. Chasms opened and closed on the streets, some filling with groundwater and spilling into the gutters. The rails of streetcars and cable cars were twisted and bent like strands of spaghetti. The most violent shocks lasted for slightly more than a minute before diminishing, although smaller aftershocks continued off and on for several days.

When the full light of day showed through the chaos, all that was left of a major city of tall buildings, comprising a vast number of stores, offices, banks, theaters, hotels, restaurants, saloons and brothels, houses and apartments, was now a hundred square miles of jagged mounds of shattered masonry, splintered wood, and twisted iron. Though they'd looked substantial, most of the buildings were not reinforced and fell to pieces before the earthquake was thirty seconds old.

The city hall, the most impressive edifice west of Chicago, sat smashed and destroyed, its cast-iron columns lying shattered in the street. The Hall of Justice was a skeleton of mangled steel girders. The Academy of Sciences gone as though it had never stood. The post office was still standing but effectively demolished. The Majestic Theater would never stage a show again. Only the redoubtable six-story Wells Fargo Building had refused to tumble down despite a ravaged interior.

Thousands of chimneys had been first to fall. None was built with an earthquake in mind. Reaching through and high above the roofs, unable to bend and sway and with no support, they shuddered, then fractured and fell through houses and onto streets that were already clogged with debris. Later, it was determined that over a hundred people died from being crushed in their beds by falling chimneys.

Wooden two-and three-story homes leaned drunkenly in all directions, twisted on their foundations and tilted crazily in grotesque angles. Oddly, they stood intact but had shifted as much as twenty feet off their foundations, many across sidewalks and into the streets. Though their exterior walls were intact, their interiors were devastated, floors having collapsed, beams ruptured, the furniture and the inhabitants ending up crushed and buried in the basement. The cheaper houses in the poor part of town had collapsed in a pile of splintered beams and siding.

Those who had survived the earthquake were frozen in stunned shock, unable to speak or conversing in whispers. As the great clouds of dust began to settle, the cries of those who were injured or trapped under the fallen structures came as muffled wails. Even after the main force of the quake had passed, the earth still shuddered with aftershocks that continued to shake walls of brick onto the streets, causing their own tremors and strange rumbling sounds.

Few cities in the history of human civilizations had suffered as much devastating destruction as San Francisco. And yet it was only the opening act of an even-worse scene of disintegration that was yet to come.

 

T
HE SHOCK
hurled the bed Isaac and Marion were occupying across her bedroom. The apartment house around them rumbled and shook in a series of convulsions. The noise was deafening as dishes crashed to the floor, bookcases collapsed and the books scattered, pictures were slung off the walls, and the upright piano rolled like a boulder down a mountain across the slanting floor only to fall into the street because the entire front wall of the apartment house had detached itself from the rest of the building and cascaded in a flood of rubble onto the street below.

Bell grabbed Marion by the arm and half carried, half dragged her through a hail of falling plaster to the doorway, where they stood for the next thirty seconds while the horrendous noise became even more deafening. The floor moved like a stormy sea beneath their feet. They had barely reached the temporary shelter of the doorway when the great chimney at the top of the roof toppled and fell crashing through the two apartments above and smashed through the floor not ten feet away from them.

Bell recognized the bedlam as an earthquake. He had endured one almost as bad as the one that destroyed San Francisco while traveling with his parents in China when he was a young boy. He looked down into the pale face of Marion, who looked up at him, dazed and paralyzed by shock. He smiled grimly, trying to give her courage, as the shock waves tore the floor in the parlor from its beams and sent it collapsing into the lower apartment. He could only wonder if the occupants had been killed or were somehow managing to survive.

For nearly a full minute, they kept on their feet, clutching the doorframe, as their world turned into a nightmarish hell that went far beyond imagination.

Then slowly the tremors died away and an eerie silence settled over the ruin of the apartment. The cloud of dust from the fallen plaster ceiling filled their nostrils and made it difficult to breathe. Only then did Bell realize that they were still on their feet, clutching the doorframe, with Marion wearing a flimsy nightgown and him in a nightshirt. He saw that her radiant long hair had turned white from the plaster's fine powder that still floated in the air like a mist.

Bell gazed across the bedroom. It looked like the contents of a wastebasket that had been dumped on the floor. He put his arm around Marion's waist and pulled her toward the closet, where their clothes still hung on hangers, free of the dust.

“Dress and be quick about it,” he said firmly. “The building isn't stable and might collapse at any minute.”

“What happened?” she asked in utter confusion. “Was it an explosion?”

“No, I believe it was an earthquake.”

She stared through the wreck of her parlor and saw the ruined buildings on the other side of the street. “Good Lord!” she gasped. “The wall is gone.” Then she discovered that her piano was missing. “Oh, no, my grandmother's piano. Where did it go?”

“I think what's left of it is down on the street,” replied Bell sympathetically. “No more talk. Hurry and throw on some clothes. We've got to get out of here.”

She ran to the closet, her composure back on keel, and Bell could see that she was as tough as the bricks that had fallen around them. While he put on the suit he'd worn the night before, she slipped into a cotton blouse under a coarse woolen jacket and skirt for warmth against the cool breeze blowing in from the sea. She was not only beautiful, Bell thought, she was also a practical, thinking woman.

“What about my jewelry, my family photos, my valuables?” she asked. “Shouldn't I take them with me?”

“We'll come back for them later, when we see if the building is still standing.”

They dressed in less than two minutes, and he led her around the gaping hole in the floor made by the fallen chimney and past the overturned furniture to the front door of the apartment. Marion felt as if she were in another world, as she stared out into open air where the wall once stood and saw her neighbors beginning to wander bewildered out into the middle of the street.

The door was wedged tight. The earthquake had shifted the building and jammed the door against its frame. Bell knew better than to attack the door by charging against it with his shoulder. That was a fool's play. He balanced on one leg and lashed out with the other. The door failed to show the least sign of give. He looked around the room and surprised Marion with his strength when he picked up the heavy sofa and shoved it against the door like a battering ram. On the third thrust, the door splintered and swung crazily open on one hinge.

Thankfully, the stairway was still standing, winding its way to the floor below. Bell and Marion made it past the main entrance and found a high mountain of debris piled outside the apartment house, thrown there when the front wall crashed and buried the street. The front section of the structure looked as if it had been sliced clean by a giant cleaver.

Marion stopped, her eyes welling with tears at the sight of her mother's piano sitting smashed on the crest of the rubble. Bell spotted two men making their way down the street through the wreckage on a wagon drawn by two horses. He left Marion for a few moments, walked over and conversed with the two men as if striking a deal. They nodded and he came back.

“What was that about?” asked Marion.

“I offered to pay them five hundred dollars to take your mother's piano to Cromwell's warehouse by the railyard. When things get back to normal, I'll see that it's rebuilt.”

“Thank you, Isaac.” Marion stood on her toes as she kissed Bell on the cheek, stunned that a man could be so thoughtful about such a little thing in the midst of such disaster.

The army of people crowding the middle of the street was strangely subdued. There were no wails or cries, no hysteria. Everyone talked in whispers, glad they were alive, but not knowing what to do next or where to go or whether the earthquake would strike again. Many were still in their nightclothes. Mothers cuddled young children or clutched babies while men talked among themselves studying the damage to their homes.

A lull settled over the ruined city. The worst, everyone thought, had to be over. And yet the greatest tragedy was yet to come.

Bell and Marion walked to the intersection of Hyde and Lombard, seeing the cable car rails that now snaked like a meandering silver stream to the streets below Russian Hill. The cloud of dust hung tenaciously over the devastation, slowly dissipating as it was carried toward the east by the offshore breeze. From the docks protruding into the water around the Ferry Building west to Fillmore Street, and from the north bay far to the south, the once-great city was a vast sea of ruin and devastation.

Scores of hotels and lodging houses had collapsed, killing hundreds who had been sleeping soundly when the quake struck. The screams and cries of those trapped under the rubble and the badly injured carried up to the hill.

Hundreds of electrical poles had toppled, their high-tension wires snapping apart, whipping back and forth like desert sidewinders, sparks shooting from the tattered ends. At the same time, pipes carrying the city's gas had split apart and now unleashed their deadly fumes. Tanks in the basements of manufacturing plants holding kerosene and fuel oil ran toward the fiery arcs thrown from the electrical wires where they met and burst in an explosion of orange flame. In destroyed houses, coals from the fallen chimneys ignited furniture and wooden frameworks.