The Daredevils (24 page)

The house declined steadily and visibly each night, which turned out, of course, to be a good thing. Father brushed it aside as a knee-jerk popular response against which there was no, never had been a, remedy. It was a little wave. Charles was not fooled: Father was visibly relieved, almost cheerful. The only question was, what kind of relief, what kind of good cheer was it? There were two distinct modes: either he felt he had gotten his way, or he knew something, something that only the rulers of the city could know, and was pleased that he did not have to be, as it were, patriarchal, judgmental, and dismissive about something he had always had little sympathy for in his son's life—but what could the nature of such knowledge be? How could a play, that Father found trivial, matter politically, even when it was, if it was, the politics that happened around the Tree at the Center of the Universe, with its roots in corruption and decay and its flowers in heaven?

Before
The American
was canceled, and the openings of the theater's other two shows indefinitely postponed, a bomb, contained in a small suitcase, was hurled, or more properly, dropped, from the balcony. It wasn't clear if the bomber was trying for the stage or the audience, but the bomb killed actors and wounded musicians: Grandpa Garagiola, portly Teddy Blair, pretty Mary Girdle, Vera's blossoming understudy Catherine White, community-minded newcomer Margaret Stensrud—who came off the stage into the wing with such force that she knocked Charles unconscious—and his friend Gene Woodcock were all blown to bits. Charles was broadly believed to be the bomber's probable target. But he had been offstage—so briefly, an exit, a breath, an entrance—at the moment of the explosion. Had it been just bad timing? And if he was he the target, why was he the target? Because he was “the American”? An oligarch? An oligarch in the making? Was it simply a blow at the aristocracy as made manifest by the Minots and their theater and their disgusting play? Or was he the target because he had been associating, as the protest signs made clear, with anarchists. Was he perhaps not the target at all? Had an anarchist meant to scare the war-mongering general public? Or were the railroaders, working on a decade-old grievance with William Minot, simply doing what they did best: destroy—either good or evil, depending on your point of view. These possibilities, along with the indispensable frame-ups—railroad barons framing anarchists, anarchists framing railroad barons—merged and then, in an orgasmic release of spermy public rumor-mongering, was made manifest in what the Buddhists call “the ten thousand things,” an effectively infinite process of variations of the species
conspiraciensus.

He was summoned to Fall River Mills, to the ranch, where everybody, including Amelia and Pastor Tom, his two older brothers and the women they were engaged to, his younger brothers and a platoon of their friends, were spending the summer. He had not wanted to seem to be fleeing the city, the horror, as his family had, and decided to stay for as long as he could stand
it. He felt he could stand it forever with Vera, but her whereabouts, he was once again told, were unknown, and he saw he could not press his concern, not an inch. Two weeks later, on the day of the Preparedness Parade, dispirited and restless and confused, he went to the shop and found it full of new faces. Nobody could tell him where even someone as integral to the shop as Jules was, either. A mechanic who claimed to have done some work for him told him he thought they were going to watch the parade from a rooftop of a building on Market. He gave Charles the number, then asked him if he knew of anybody who wanted to buy rare old motorcycles.

“Like what, for instance?” asked Charles, sensing a joke in the offing.

The mechanic, pink lips reaching out from an oily face to close around the mouth of a bottle of beer: “Like an '02 Triumph with a Belgian Minerva motor?”

Someone standing near said, “What's that?”

The mechanic said, “This is the kid had a Belgian waffle he wanted to unload.”

“Minerva,” Charles said. “And my name is Minot.”

“A Belgian Minot and his name is Minerva.”

“Other way around,” Charles said.

“Whatever,” said the mechanic.

“I'd take the waffle,” said the other man, “but who needs a Minerva? You gotta shut the engine off every time you come to a stop, don't you?”

The mechanic nodded and belched. Charles thanked him for his help, left the shop, and made his way as near to Market Street as he could get. Walking through dense and happy crowds waving flags, he heard a marching band. Climbing five flights of stairs, he came to the last door and stood before it. He knocked and waited. Knocked a second time and continued to wait. Then opened the door and stepped into the sunlight. There were enough people on the roof to make it impossible to see everyone at once, and he paused on the threshold. There, he saw that everyone he could see was looking at him.

He knew they were looking at nothing, at an actor, and was untroubled.

He saw Vera, deep in conversation with the woman he had met the night Farnsworth had beaten her up. Talking to the woman but looking at him.

She saw Charles see her and looked away.

His heart began to thump—insisting he was something—as he searched the crowd for Warren Farnsworth and his sworn agency of death. How Farnsworth's jealous wrath could prevail, even survive, in the face of a mass murder only days old, Charles did not know. Appraised calmly, from a crucial but not necessarily great distance, it was impossible to countenance. No sane man would kill another who had just survived a bomb blast over a sexual matter. Remove that distance, though, and place your mind back onstage with the carnage, with the severed limbs, the rolling, rocking heads coming to a stop in the limelighted pools of brilliant, smoking, crimson, still-spreading blood, the heaps of intestine and organ meat that had been actors draped like bunting on the furniture or fallen like confetti on paraders . . . and whether or not you thought they could be replaced and that the show would go on, as everything was replaced and every show went on, and that terror was ordinary and that there were no sane men, not in the moment of the act as every moment was a moment of an act, there, on the stage, you saw that everything was possible and that the only way to go on was to see that you were some kind of nexus of nothing, or nexus of everything, if you preferred, and therefore immortal. In other words, Warren Farnsworth could very easily step up and stab him in the heart, or—how had Father's Montaigne put it?—make a person repent by killing them?

He saw “Owl,” Tom Moody, who was wearing a large sombrero, talking to a Mexican gentleman he had seen before, and Moody's wife, Minnie, but no sign of Farnsworth. He moved to the edge of the roof, where people were lining up and leaning over the wide stone parapet, watching the miniature paraders below draw slowly nearer and nearer. Then the entire street was alive, as with a single undulating thing. As far as he could see in either direction, the street was filled with tight formations of marchers, throbbing with manifestations here and there of the great power of crowds and parades, colors flickering and changing, the formations seeming to move
without moving, little flutterings on the edges and deeper within the only evidence of propulsion. The noise was now steady and loud enough to cause the people nearest him to speak up and lean together, nodding emphatically at everything they heard and said to each other. Distant whistles and cheers and rolling hurrahs rose and fell in the flux of sound churning below them. The first band disappeared in the southwest and a second appeared in the northeast. Slowly it made itself heard. Banners swayed with the labored gaits of their holders and with the wind, which came and went pleasantly. Keogh and his cavaliers had been at the head of the parade, and Charles had not seen them. Someone he didn't recognize was taking pictures, endowing himself with what would later be a priceless collection of photographs: influential and sometimes infamous San Francisco radicals laughing and goofing around and looking, if you didn't know who they were, like picnickers. Walking among the crowd—everyone nodding politely and sometimes smiling gently—he saw the tall fair man who had so disliked Dickens and Dostoyevsky—and Hardy, he sputtered to himself with faint but real hysteria in his inner voice, how could ANYONE NOT LIKE THOMAS HARDY?—and listened to him tell a story about himself and, if Charles understood correctly, Jules, kidnapping the obnoxious son of the headmaster of their private school, binding and gagging the boy and locking him in the basement of a summer home in Watch Hill, Rhode Island, leaving him there and being delayed in their return by a hurricane. The Mexican gentleman, he learned, was preparing to leave San Francisco, to meet his brother in St. Louis, where together they would raise funds for the defense of a third brother, who was still in prison in Mexico. These were men, he was told by the woman whom he'd seen huddled with the now-vanished Vera, the likes of which you could not find outside of Mexico and Russia, men who gave up wealth and power and privilege to help the downtrodden.

“You won't find them in America,” said the woman, “that's for sure.”

“No,” said Charles, edging away, “you sure won't.”

“No indeed,” she confirmed, following him. “In America, you find ‘the American,' don't you?”

“Yes,” he said. “I think that's safe to say. I'm not sure why you think you have to say that to me now, but—”

“Look,” said the woman, “I'm not going to
bite
you. I'm as horrified as I can be.”

“I'm sure everybody is horrified. Perhaps only the bomber himself is not.”

The woman's lip, her whole lower jaw, began to tremble. Her eyes without warning clouded with tears and reddened.

“I happen to think the bomber is not excluded from horror.”

The woman sniffed and choked when she tried to speak. “I am so sorry. We, I, none of us, we never never hated you.”

“I can assure you that I do not feel hated, and never have done.”

“No, no, no,” sobbed the woman without moving her face. “Hate is so, so, so wrong.”

Impassively, slowly, carefully, Charles reached into the pocket of his jacket and gave the woman a handkerchief. She dabbed at her eyes and blew her nose, handed it back, smiled.

“We love ‘the American.'”

“I am sorry to say I never learned your name, after all we've been through.”

“Lucy.”

“Where,” asked Charles, “did Vera get off to?”

“I don't know. She saw you.”

“Neither she nor I were blown to pieces the other day so I am thinking she has
got
to be on the planet somewhere!”

Lucy stared at him, frightened.

“Is Jules here?”

Still frightened but speaking blankly. “Yes.”

Minnie Moody was telling someone that she had for a fact given piano lessons to a Pinkerton detective. “He was Polish and liked the Chopin mazurkas I played for him.”

Turning away with a half-smile, Charles heard the end of another story. “The defendant jumped to his feet and shouted, ‘Gentlemen, let me ask you,
do you believe a man such as this one we have before us?' He was sobbing with incredulity, let me tell you, as we all would have been, knowing the asshole he was talking about. ‘You wouldn't whip your dog on the testimony of such a creature!' he plead. ‘No honest man would! Any man who would believe such a man would not deserve to have a dog!'”

And Charles laughed knowingly with the rest of the crowd, seeing that they were watching him and hoping—he judged—that he would laugh. He turned, the wind catching his hair, and saw Vera leave, the Mexican gentleman holding the door for her. He thought of following her, but did not. He watched the photographer take a few more pictures, then asked if he could look through the viewfinder. The photographer gestured toward the camera, and Charles bent toward it. Just as he was about to straighten up and step back, he was astounded to see Vera and Jules step into the frame. They smiled broadly, waved. He straightened up and stepped back.

They were already at the door.

Another wave from Vera and they were gone.

On Steuart Street, across from the Ferry Building, where the paraders had gathered to begin their march, the last of them were heading out: some very old men, Grand Army of the Republic veterans, some Sons of the American Revolution, and a group of Spanish-American War heroes, displaying the battle flag of the First California Volunteers. None of these men were hurt by the blast of the copycat suitcase bomb, which exploded just after the Volunteers had begun to march, but forty others were, and ten of them were killed. A policeman caught a little girl by the ankle, but had only her leg to show for it. The rest of her was some ways down Steuart. Three deaths elsewhere in the city were almost instantly connected to the bombing of the parade. The bomber, it was conjectured rather swiftly and easily, either just before or just after he'd activated his bomb and left it in its suitcase at the corner of Steuart and Market, had stabbed to death three people with whom he was associated in some way: Jules Beveridge, Lucille Olivet Brown, and Amado Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi (an erstwhile minister in the Juarez cabinet in Mexico City, exiled and in hiding with his
brother). Brown and Fernández de Lizardi were found together, naked, in a bed in the basement of the motorcycle shop owned by Beveridge. The room housed a printing press, and the shop was frequented by radicals of every type—including anarchists. Warren Farnsworth was arrested in a doctor's office where he was trying to get ointment for his eczema; and while claiming innocence, did not explicitly repudiate the idea (instantly current in the papers) that once he'd begun murdering—or had committed his soul to the unforgivable horror of it—he found he could not stop himself. Arrested also, on the Russian River while claiming to be fishing, was Thomas Moody, allegedly the mastermind of the plot, and Israel Minkowski. A dozen other men and women, including the infamous anarchist, Alexander Berkman, were arrested but released soon afterward.