The Americans

by John Jakes

  Carter’s eyes grew remote. “A relative of mine. But not a close one.”

  “I see. Well, you’ll like the Bay. Take it from a native son. One you’re going to hear about, too. They say it’s too late to be a gold or silver millionaire so I’m going to get rich being a writer, or maybe the prince of the oyster pirates.” He waved and started out of the terminal. “Good luck, Mr. Kent.”

  “Thanks,” Carter called after him. “But how will I recognize you when you’re famous? What’s your name?”

  “First name’s John, but I go by Jack.” A trolley bell on Market Street muffled the rest of what he said. He waved a second time and disappeared in the fog.

  Tough little beggar, Carter thought. Likable in spite of a certain arrogance. Like so many millions of Americans— like Carter himself a few years ago—the boy believed that his own sweat and diligence, plus the unparalleled opportunity the country afforded, would automatically combine to make him wealthy. But only a few realized that dream. Very likely the boy wouldn’t.

  Still, you never could tell. Some were born with a gift for successfully capitalizing on what they were given, be it a little or a lot. Willie had that gift.

  Carter studied the newspaper. Doing so was almost like meeting his old friend. The Examiner even sounded like Willie, from the masthead which proclaimed him “editor and proprietor” to the box on the front page, which promised:

  The most elaborate local news, the freshest social news, the latest and most original sensations, and the relentless, exposure of every scheme to rob the common man of hard-earned money or dearly won rights. This is our pledge no matter how loftily positioned the perpetrators of such schemes may be.

  “—oughtn’t to let passengers bring that damn rag on our boats. Hearst’s always attacking the line.”

  Carter glanced up. Two ferrymen with lunch pails were passing, evidently on their way home. In reply to the first man, the second grumbled, “Oughtn’t to let Chinks ride in the same cabin with white men, either.”

  Carter recognized the ferryman who’d disapproved of his friendliness, and was in turn recognized with a contemptuous glare as the men went out the door. The hostility surprised Carter. San Francisco was supposed to be a tolerant, cosmopolitan town. It had enjoyed that reputation ever since the great discovery at Captain Sutter’s mill brought Europeans, Orientals, and South Americans flocking to California to join the Americans in the search for gold.

  The Examiner’s front page revealed the reason the Southern Pacific ferrymen disliked the paper so much. Next to a short, lurid account of the knifing of an Italian sailor in a “foul Chinatown crib,” there was a longer piece about a Southern Pacific derailment in the Livermore Valley. It was a minor accident; two passengers were slightly injured. But the reporter, a Mr. Bierce, made the derailment sound like a wreck of huge proportions, and used it to justify an attack on the line.

  This is but one more harbinger of an even greater disaster yet to come. For accidents will inevitably happen when timetables become forlorn jests, and profit is the only god the railroad serves. How can there be anything but catastrophe after stupefying catastrophe on the Southern Pacific when schedules are never adhered to, and trains are invariably so late that the passenger is exposed to senility?

  But Southern Pacific management does not care about such matters. Let its wretched road-beds be littered with the mangled bodies of trusting women and innocent babes in arms!—no one in the board room will deign to notice. The road to wealth is the only road which concerns humanitarians such as Mr. Leland Stanford.

  One of the railroad’s owners, if Carter remembered correctly. He was amused to see that Willie’s wrath extended even into typography. The paper had set the name as £eland $tanford. Carter knew his old friend well enough to suspect that some of Willie’s crusading spirit sprang from his knowledge that controversy improved circulation.

  God, what he wouldn’t give to see his friend again. Perhaps the boy named Jack was right. Perhaps he could make money in California, just as his grandmother had. Then, when he once again encountered Willie, he’d be able to look him in the eye with no shame.

  Of course he had less than three dollars for a stake, and absolutely no notion of how he’d survive in San Francisco. But he still had his wits. He’d put them to use to solve the problem—

  Provided he didn’t perish of pneumonia or starvation before the night was over.

  He tossed the paper back in the barrel. With his hands in his pockets, he stepped out into the fog. He immediately began shivering. He knew why he’d stayed in the terminal so long—not merely because it was warm, but because passing through those doors plunged him into the city.

  And into the possibility of failing again.

  ii

  He wanted to buy something to eat. But Julia’s peace of mind was more important. He found the nearest Western Union office and spent all but fifty cents of his money to send her a telegram. He told his mother that he was in San Francisco, and in good health. The clerk who took the blank darted a look at Carter’s pallid, sweat-drenched face, but said nothing.

  His stomach was hurting because it was so empty. He had no idea where he’d sleep tonight. Some alley, probably. Out on Market Street again, he observed a couple of sinister men drifting along in the fog, eyeing the few pedestrians who were abroad. He heard raucous laughter and rough language from several grog shops.

  He found the Examiner as easily as the boy said he would. He smiled as he gazed up at the impressive goldleaf signboard, well lit, which proclaimed the paper the MONARCH OF THE DAILIES. Typical Willie.

  Reporters were hurrying in and out since there was a new edition to be readied for tomorrow morning. A crowd of people stood reading news bulletins block-printed on long sheets of paper which were hung side by side on the front of the building. A man in a waterproof came out to put up a new one. It dealt with torrential storms and damaging floods in the East.

  Carter blew on his stiff hands, shoved them back in his pockets and turned north along a street with a moderate slope. It soon brought him to a public square surrounded by solid buildings, including several brightly illuminated, obviously first-class hotels. One of them on the east side of the square bore the words Hope House above its canopied entrance.

  He stopped out in front, impressed by the finery of the guests coming and going through the main doors. It was his grandmother’s friend, the mulatto for whom Gideon had wanted him to work, who owned this establishment. He approached the doorman, a burly fellow in a kind of bastardized hussar’s outfit.

  “Excuse me, sir. Is Mr. Israel Hope still alive?”

  “Why the devil do you want to know about Mr. Hope?” The doorman shoved him. “Get up to the Coast with the other riffraff! If I see you loitering here again, I’ll call the foot patrol.”

  Carter swore. The doorman started toward him, huge hands raised. Carter dodged across the street and was soon safe from the man’s wrath.

  He moved on up the hillside and quickly found himself in a neighborhood of quite a different character. The shops were narrow, the lighting within them dim. The shopkeepers wore embroidered robes and queer caps. Young Chinese toughs in American clothing lounged in doorways, watching the passing crowds as closely as did their robed elders.

  Carter turned into an even narrower street teeming with people. Paper banners decorated with Oriental characters and fire-breathing dragons hung down from clotheslines strung above the thoroughfare. Beyond an open door he glimpsed men lying in tiered bunks in a sweet-smelling haze. Before the door closed, he saw a huge woman in a silk robe pass a pipe into one of the bunks.

  In the next block, the merchandise offered for sale was female, and most of the potential customers were sailors— German and French, Italian and American. Loudly, often obscenely, they commented on the women available, some of whom posed inside their windows. Most of the women were well past youth, and ugly, but a few were pretty. One of the latter, frail and no more than fifteen years old,
caught Carter’s attention. She was seated on a stool. She pulled up her blue silk gown, spread her legs, and smiled.

  The callousness of the display shocked him, but no more than what was revealed by the girl’s smile. Only one tooth remained in the rotted black interior of her mouth. He waved to show he wasn’t interested. The prostitute spewed a string of filthy English words and slammed a shutter in his face.

  He hurried on, ignoring hands that plucked at him and whispering voices that offered a cup of plum wine; a pipe of opium to promote lovely dreams; a bag of ginseng to make his ladylove want to copulate all night.

  After another block or two, the neighborhood began to change again. He was in a congested area of secondhand clothing stores, pawn shops, cribs containing white girls, and elaborate saloons with names such as the Fierce Grizzly, the So Different, the Nymphia, the Bella Union. There were plenty of whores on the sidewalks, searching for customers, and scores of men drifting among them; many of the men were reeling drunk.

  Carter was thankful he was sober. Bright and cheerful as the district seemed at first, he soon noticed watchers in cul-de-sacs or the dim doorways near the grog palaces. Watchers hunting for a man just a little too drunk to defend himself—

  A reed organ in a saloon called the Thalia pealed “O Susanna” into the foggy night. Carter presumed he’d arrived on the Barbary Coast, named years before in memory of the equally infamous pirate coast of Africa. Here, too, there were pirates—as well as at least one man trying to put a stop to the ubiquitous sin. The man marched through the crowd shaking a tambourine and calling, “A free meal and a helping hand always available at the Salvation Army. Eight-oh-nine Montgomery Street, where Major Wells receives those in need!”

  Carter saw rolls of bills clenched in fists, and heard coins clink. Visitors to the Coast who displayed their money were clearly fools. They’d soon be penniless if the platoons of sauntering pimps, whores, and thieves had anything to do with it. He decided he’d better find some other part of town in which to spend the night. Some of the people around him looked vicious enough to kill a sleeping man for his bootlaces.

  He was feeling feverish again. He’d lost track of directions, but he thought Market Street lay behind him. He turned around and started back down the sloping street.

  Almost without his noticing it, dance halls and gaudy bars were replaced by stores and offices shuttered and chained up for the night. The only other men he saw in this all but lightless section were two husky specimens wearing white blouses and tams with red pompons. They were going uphill on the other side of the street. Foreign sailors in port for the night and bound for the Coast, he surmised.

  The sailors’ laughter faded away. Carter reached an intersection. He was about to cross when he heard a soft tapping, and two voices midway down the next block on his side of the street.

  He stepped to the corner of the building and leaned there, studying the block ahead. The two men were going in his direction. He studied them to be sure he wasn’t coming up on a couple of roughnecks.

  No, they looked respectable enough. The one on the outside, tall and frail, had his left arm crooked so the other could hold on. The man on the inside, older, had a cautious, shuffling gait. He poked his stick out ahead of him, tapping the walk. A blind man.

  The fog hung heavily here. The men almost disappeared as they reached the next intersection. More visible were the other two men who startled Carter by stealing out of an alley half a block behind the first two men. The two began to slip along the sidewalk, creeping up on the blind man and his escort.

  Light from up the hill speared through the fog, creating an eerie effect and affording just enough illumination for Carter to see that there was no one else on the sloping street. He was about to be the sole witness to a robbery.

  Or worse.

  iii

  Whatever the crime, it was no affair of his. He’d be smart to slip away.

  Yet a new idea held him motionless on the corner. He had only fifty cents to his name. The hour was late, he felt feverish, and the thought of going hungry and sleeping in the open had become unbearable. He might have stumbled on a way to improve that situation.

  From a distance, the intended victims looked prosperous. Suppose he warned them of the impending danger—he could practically do it from here. If he did, there was an excellent chance that he’d earn a reward.

  After Ortega’s death, he’d vowed that he’d never again voluntarily involve himself in anything that might lead to violence. But the danger here seemed exceedingly small. Surely a shout would scare the thieves away—

  Mercenary considerations aside, there was another reason he lingered on the corner. Although he wouldn’t have admitted it aloud, his conscience demanded that he step in. One man outwitting another—even robbing him, if they were evenly matched—that was the way of the world. But picking on a blind man? That was too much.

  He took a deep breath, jumped down from the walk and ran across the street to the corner of the next block. He kept his attention fixed on the two men gliding along the plank walk behind their prey. The blind man and his friend would certainly have heard a telltale creak if they hadn’t been talking so boisterously and having such a good time; the blind man’s rich, mellow laughter carried all the way back to the corner where Carter crouched.

  He cupped his hands around his mouth, yelling as loudly as he could, “Watch out behind you!”

  The frail man pivoted first, then his companion. Carter could discern a mustache on the blind man’s face but nothing else. The thieves whirled to see who had sounded the alarm. Carter could only tell that they were young, and dressed in dark clothing.

  He expected the thieves to bolt. When they didn’t, his stomach started to hurt.

  The larger of the two thieves yanked something from his coat pocket. Light penetrating the fog flashed on a pistol barrel. The man waved the gun and shouted at the second robber, “You take care of that meddling son of a bitch. I’ll handle the other two. I want the boss’s bundle.”

  What that meant, Carter didn’t know. But he did know he’d miscalculated badly. These weren’t common thieves who fled when discovered and outnumbered. These were crazy men. And one of them was running back along the sidewalk toward him. The diffuse light flashed on a long knife in the man’s right hand.

  Ortega, Carter thought.

  Over the head of the running man he glimpsed the other thief closing on the victims. Panic dried his mouth. He’d sworn to start over and squandered the chance in a single moment of greed and misguided altruism.

  The thief was coming fast. Even as Carter stepped back, the man shot out his right hand, driving the long blade straight at Carter’s midsection.

  CHAPTER VIII

  THE WEAPON

  i

  HE’D FORGOTTEN HOW CLOSE he was to the edge of the sidewalk. When he stepped backward, there was only air under his right foot.

  Off balance, he tumbled into the street, and landed hard. But that misstep and fall kept him from being disemboweled by the slashing knife.

  The thief had trouble checking his momentum. He skidded to a stop, recovered, and made a lithe turn toward Carter. Distant light from the Coast showed dark eyes and curly hair that glistened as if the man dressed it with Macassar oil.

  Panting, Carter scrambled to his feet. He took three long steps backward. The man on the walk spoke to him in a British accent.

  “Too late to run, mate. I can catch ye if ye try. Shouldn’t’ve shoved yer bleedin’ nose where it don’t belong. Now I’m obliged to cut it off—”

  He leaped into the street and ran at Carter, who darted to one side just as the man again shot his knife hand forward. The thief cursed and tried to shift the direction of his charge. He couldn’t. Carter brought his right knee up. The tip of the knife tore through his trousers at the thigh, narrowly missing flesh. Then Carter’s knee jolted the thief between the legs.

  The man grunted, stumbling to one side. Too close, Carter thought as he
swiped the back of his hand across his eyes. He smelled the stench of fish. A second knife seemed to overlap the one in the thief’s hand. Then Carter saw Ortega at the Red Cod. Flickering and flashing, the past hid the present for a heartbeat of time—

  He heard cursing and came to his senses. He wasn’t out of danger. Fortunately the angry thief was still groggy. Carter ran at him and rammed his knee into the man’s groin a second time. The thief yelled, clutching himself. The knife clacked on the wood blocks with which the street was paved.

  Carter had an impulse to duck down and grab the knife, but he was afraid of losing his momentary advantage. He laced his fingers together and pounded the back of the thief’s neck. Once. Twice. Three times—

  The man gave an exhausted sigh and fell over, barely breathing.

  Carter eyed the knife. Taking huge, gulping breaths, he crouched and closed his fingers around the rough hilt. The fish stench nearly made him gag. It’s only in your mind. He had difficulty convincing himself of that.

  Down the block, the frail man was grappling with the other thief for possession of the thief’s pistol. To Carter’s surprise, the frail man looked anything but helpless now. He had a bung starter in his left hand, and brass knuckles on his right. Ordinary citizens didn’t walk around carrying such weapons. The man was either a thug, the blind man’s bodyguard—or both.

  Clutching the knife, Carter raced toward the struggling men. The blind man stood near them, his back against the building and his lacquered walking stick raised in front of his chest. A few steps more, and Carter could make out some of the man’s features. He looked to be in his forties. His ruddy cheeks and forehead suggested he might be English or Irish. His eyes had a curiously commanding quality—perhaps because they were so large, dominating his face.

  An elegant wide-brimmed hat lay at the blind man’s feet, and the earlier impression of prosperity was confirmed by what he wore: an expensive tweed sporting suit cut in the popular Norfolk pattern, but with long trousers, not the usual knee breeches.