by John Jakes
56
ON THE NIGHT OF NOVEMBER 4, 1905, Francis J. Heney addressed a campaign rally at the Mechanics’ Pavilion. It was organized by the so-called fusion ticket, a coalition of Republican and Democratic candidates running against Schmitz and the hand-picked nonentities of the Union Labor slate. Heney had cleared his schedule and made the long trip from Washington to support the fusion group.
Mack and Fremont Older sat in the second row. From that low angle, they could barely see the little attorney behind the lectern. But they heard him:
“I personally know that Mr. Abraham Ruef is corrupt. I look forward to the time when I will be free to prove it in court, and I will do so gladly. If Eugene Schmitz and his crew of thieves are reelected for two more years, graft will become so intolerable that the people of San Francisco will beg me to come back and put them, and Mr. Ruef, in the penitentiary where they belong!”
On November 6, Boss Ruef published an open letter to Francis J. Heney, calling the lawyer’s allegations lies and accusing him of a murder in Arizona. The next day, San Francisco voted.
Mack waited for the returns in Fremont Older’s office at the Bulletin. The editor’s wife, Cora, had come over from their rooms at the Palace. She knew what the election meant to her husband. A lovely, retiring woman whose shyness some mistook for snobbery, she and Mack tried polite conversation, but no subject lasted longer than a minute.
Outside Older’s goldfish-bowl office on the second floor, reporters typed and shouted into telephones. Mack watched the city-room chalkboard, increasingly nervous about the numbers posted for the Union Labor candidates. At half past eight, Older poked his head in.
“I’ve been calling around. It looks bad all over town.”
At a few minutes before ten, Mack was aware of a sudden lull in activity. Older walked in again. “Get your things, Cora. It’s over.”
Mack peered through the glass at the chalkboard. Until his eyes focused he saw blurs instead of numbers. Damn it, on top of everything else, he needed glasses.
“Schmitz?” he said.
“Schmitz for the third time. Probably by more than forty thousand votes. That’s the largest plurality he’s ever received. As for his slate—just look. Every one of those eighteen toadies and charlatans elected to supervisor. What’s wrong with this town? The people fall down and beg to be raped and plundered.”
Cora Older helped her husband into his jacket, then put her arms around him and held him a moment. As Mack lifted his hat from the rack he heard noise in the street. He ran to the window.
“There’s a mob coming.”
They watched the first ranks surge around the corner, Ruef’s cheering, chanting partisans filling the street from sidewalk to sidewalk. Their torches flung huge moving shadows on buildings.
A lot of them staggered drunkenly. They brandished bricks, bats, and four-sided box banners, and blew tin whistles and tin horns. They overturned a ragman’s cart, blocked a horsecar heading for the barn, and rocked it. Some of them surrounded the downstairs doors of the Bulletin.
“We can’t go back to the hotel now, Fremont,” Cora said.
“Of course we can. I’ll not let that riffraff interfere with us.” Older put on his homburg while Mack was observing a new commotion below, a kind of human whirlpool spinning in the midst of the mob. At the center was Ruef, hatless, riding on shoulders.
Ruef shot his arms up in a great V. Someone spotted Mack and Older in the second-floor window and then someone else hurled a brick that fell short. A window shattered on the ground floor.
People threw more bricks and rocks and more ground-floor glass broke. Older grabbed his walking stick and ran out. Mack followed, trailed by a protesting Cora.
The editor stomped downstairs, kicking at broken glass littering the foyer. He went straight to the doors and flung them open, Mack beside him. People in the pushing, shoving mob threatened and cursed them, while the torches smoked, the box banners bobbed and turned, showing now a serious face of Ruef, now a smiling one.
Out there, above the crowd, the Boss suddenly sank from sight. Laughing, breathless, he was rescued and raised again. He spied the men in the newspaper door. Ruef pointed at them. “There’s Fremont Older. He isn’t an editor; he’s a raving anarchist.”
The mob raged predictably, and Ruef’s sweaty face glowed with excitement as they bore him on. A woman spat on Mack. He wiped it from his nose and cheek. Then a man darted at Older. “Who’s that slut behind you?”
Older swung his stick at the man’s head, narrowly missing. The man fled, jeering.
People in the mob lit Roman candles and shot their fizzing colored fireballs aloft. Others set off squibs and salutes in the middle of the crowd or heaved bricks at the last pieces of glass hanging in the ground-floor windows, knocking them out in a tinkly shower.
“Burn down the town while you’re at it,” Older snarled. “I’m going to the Palace and get drunk. Cora, take my arm.”
“And mine on this side,” Mack said.
With Cora between them, they stepped out on the firelit glass. The mob kept jeering and threatening them, but gradually flowed away, leaving room for them to walk.
Two blocks down Market Street, they found Walter Fairbanks watching the celebration. When he recognized Mack and the Olders, he smiled as if he were their warmest friend. Green and pink Roman candles fizzed in starry parabolas, coloring his gray eyes.
“Good evening, Fremont. Mrs. Older. Chance. This is one you lost.”
“We lost the battle, not the war,” Older said, not cordially.
“Still keeping score, Walter?” Mack said.
Fairbanks smoothed his thin mustache with his index finger in quick, agitated motions. “It’s a habit I can’t break. Good evening, all.” He tipped his silk hat and turned up Mason, quickly gone in the glare of saloons and walk-up hotels.
Downtown San Francisco resounded with bells, horns, tin whistles, drunken singing. Someone fired a volley from a gun. Older seemed pale and spent all at once.
“I’ve decided something, Cora. In a few weeks I’m going to leave you for a while. It’s time I bought a ticket to Washington. I’ve waited too long already.”
“Buy two tickets,” Mack said.
Phelan, Spreckels, Mack, and Older convened their reform committee in a private dining room of the University Club. Mack quickly voiced concern about Francis J. Heney. “He’s the ideal man, but if we get him, we’ve got to recognize that the murder charge will be used against him.”
“The case is fourteen years old,” Older said. “I’ve had a man in Tucson investigating. Here’s what happened. The wife of a certain doctor wanted a divorce. The doctor was a brute with a bad temper. He announced he’d shoot any lawyer who took his wife’s case. Heney did, and the doctor attacked him in public. In the scuffle the gun went off and the doctor died. Heney was cleared immediately. Fifty people witnessed the shooting. My reporter brought back signed statements.”
“One problem out of the way, then,” Mack said.
“There’s a bigger one,” Phelan said. “You can’t approach the federal government without evidence of a federal crime.”
“I’ve been working on it,” Older snapped. “You all know girls from the Orient are brought into the City for prostitution. They’re sold in Chinatown for two to three thousand dollars a head. Two of my best men dug up something else about the trade. The girls are passing through immigration misrepresented as wives of American citizens of Chinese ancestry. The marriage papers are forged right on Grant Avenue. I secured two notarized affidavits citing names, dates, and circumstances.” He leaned back. “We have a federal offense.”
Spreckels was jubilant, but Mack less so. “Can you connect it to Ruef?”
“I suppose,” Older said with a shrug. “He’s mired in prostitution. At least his people are. I don’t think it’s necessary to prove a connection; we just use the evidence to get Heney here, get him appointed special prosecutor. Then he goes after Ruef on every front.
Pack your bags, Mack. I bought our tickets this morning.”
On December 3, 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt received them in his study, the remodeled Cabinet Room of the Executive Mansion.
A welcome fire blazed in the hearth. Outside, an unexpected snow fell, soft and wet, its fluffy three-inch icing decorating the bare trees. The storm had snarled wagon and horsecar traffic and brought chaos to the essentially southern town.
Mack thought the forty-seven-year-old Roosevelt resembled a thick oak tree growing in front of the fire. He was about five feet eight, with a bulging chest and thick midriff. The visitors felt his enormous energy, saw the flash of his blue-gray eyes behind his ribboned glasses. The President continually clenched his teeth, and he had huge teeth.
Roosevelt allowed five minutes for social talk. He presented them with inscribed-copies of his memoir The Rough Riders, and showed them a prized photograph—a studio portrait of himself, much younger, in a grotesque cowboy costume, heroically posed with Winchester and scalp knife.
“Look at that dude,” he said in his high-pitched voice. “Promotion photograph for Hunting Trips of a Ranchman. Ridiculous outfit. Putnam’s insisted. Promotion—everything’s promotion to those book fellows. I hope they get over it someday.”
Mack mentioned that Johnson sent greetings to the President.
“Sergeant Hugh Johnson,” Roosevelt responded. “Tall lanky fellow. Bully fighter, that Texan. Took a bad wound at El Caney. Convey my regards. Now—business.”
Older summarized matters. Then he said, “Mr. President, San Francisco is a captive city. Abraham Ruef controls the mayor, the entire board of supervisors, and, for the moment, the district attorney’s office. William Langdon, the new DA, is not so much corrupt as green. He used to be superintendent of schools. Ruef persuaded him to run after six experienced lawyers refused. The Boss will put pressure on him, that’s certain. So what we have out there, sir—in addition to the federal immigration violations I have documented—is what amounts to a municipal bordello. Virtually every man in the government is for sale.”
“I am aware of the corruption, sir. I was first made aware by certain gentlemen at the time of that grand golden banquet. Corruption on such a scale rots the moral fiber of California. Indeed, it taints the whole country.”
Impressed by the man’s aura and by the office he held, Mack nevertheless spoke calmly, with little nervousness. “Sir, our reform group can do nothing more—”
“You took a stand, Mr. Chance. You made a moral choice. I do not call that nothing.”
“Thank you, Mr. President, but I’m referring to concrete steps. Legal action.”
“Yes. Understand. Continue.”
“We’ve escrowed nearly six hundred thousand dollars in a special fund for hiring detectives, renting offices—but that’s as far as we can go. We need someone with the competence and authority to spend that money on investigation and prosecution.”
“You have kept your activities largely covert?”
“Yes, sir. We didn’t want to tip our hand until we had an attack plan.”
“Oh, but they know who we are,” Older said. “They know very well that we’re after them. Mr. Chance here, Mayor Phelan, Spreckels—we’re all watched from time to time. Mack and his son were brutally attacked.”
“Yes, I’m aware. Very sorry about it. Go on, Mr. Chance.”
“I suppose what’s most galling is that we’re all tarred as anti-Semites.”
Roosevelt snatched off his pince-nez. “Is there any truth in that?”
“Absolutely none.”
“It’s a damned insult,” Older said. “To us, and to honest Jews. That little bast—Mr. Ruef would be a crook if he were a Catholic, a Muslim, or a Hottentot.”
Roosevelt locked his hands behind his cutaway and observed the falling snow a moment. Then he returned to his desk and showed them a sizable file.
“You have written me in some detail. I asked the Justice Department for a report on the authenticity of your allegations.” He squeezed the file. “Most of what you say is corroborated. The matter of the Chinese women gives me grounds to act. I don’t do so lightly, gentlemen. Never strike a blow if you can avoid it. But if you cannot, never strike softly. I offer you two of my best men.”
“Two,” Mack exclaimed.
“Yes, sir. Mr. Heney, whom you requested, and my chief of Treasury Secret Service, Bill Burns.”
“William J. Burns, the detective?” Older asked.
“The same. Every prosecutor needs a smart investigator to ferret out evidence for indictments and trials. I’ve already asked both men to meet you tomorrow morning at Willard’s Hotel.”
Older’s face shone. They hadn’t expected this much largess. He jumped forward to pump the President’s hand. “Sir, there aren’t words to—”
“Wait, wait,” Roosevelt said. “You may be less enthusiastic when I tell you that my order relieving Heney and Burns of current duties will take effect only when those duties are complete. Burns must clean up some cases. Francis Heney is still prosecuting Senator Mitchell and the others who stole our public lands in Oregon in order to strip them of timber.”
Mack hid his disappointment. He was impatient. Every now and then when the tickers and telephones happened to fall silent, he would hear Little Jim moving through me great house on Sacramento Street, hear the scrape of the boy’s ruined foot. At those moments he always imagined himself doing some kind of physical violence to Abe Ruef. The urge was even stronger, and darker, when he spent an hour with Jim and saw how much effort it cost the boy to walk, how he never complained. Those occasions generated bloody fantasies: Ruef on a gallows with the trap springing, Ruef fatally shot, squirming in a pool of his own blood…Shameful images, people would say. The hell with them.
“It may be spring before Heney and Burns reach San Francisco,” Roosevelt continued. “I assure you, the wait will be worth it. They’ll take the stick to those looters and grafters. Yes, sir. The big stick.”
He slapped their backs while firmly heading them out the door:
At Willard’s on Pennsylvania, they met Burns and renewed their acquaintance with Francis Heney. Bill Burns was a
Baltimore native and had a tough Irish charm. He’d fallen in love with police work when he was young, his father having been police commissioner of Columbus, Ohio.
“Here’s the way I work a case,” he told them. “Full tilt, and no questions asked. The man I’m after is guilty till he proves otherwise.”
“That approach is efficient, but hardly legal,” Heney said, amused.
“You handle the courtroom, Francis. Let me handle the rest. You don’t catch crooks with parlor etiquette. Hard knuckles, that’s what it takes. Hard knuckles and no sympathy for the bastards. We’ll send this Ruef to San Quentin. Count on it.”
In a westbound Pullman sleeper, Mack dreamed of drowning. He fell slowly through the clear cobalt water of a mountain lake, able neither to breathe nor to propel himself upward. He sank through sunlit depths in which dead things floated—drowned birds, foxes, a grizzly, a stag with a garland of dead wildflowers hanging from its antlers. There were hundreds of drowned things in the water with him. They moved gently, slowly, round and round in a noiseless sunlit dance.
He woke sweating, even though a prairie blizzard howled outside and chilled the rattling car. Except for the blizzard dream from boyhood, no nightmare ever terrified him so much or gripped him for so long afterward.
He thought he understood the dream, and he pondered what he ought to do. Once back in San Francisco, he dispatched a letter to John Muir at his ranch in Martinez. He said he’d changed his mind: The City remained in need of a new water supply, but he would back a search for alternatives; he would oppose the damming and flooding of Hetch Hetchy.
“When I’m here full-time in another month or two, I intend to open a law office,” Francis Heney said to Mack and Older in the latter’s office. “Take on a partner, Joe Dwyer. Tough man, and a fine lawyer. He’s
agreed to approach Langdon about putting me on as a special assistant district attorney.”
Older leaned near the window above the street, puffing on his cigar. “Langdon’s soft as cheese. Ruef will squeeze him to say no.”
Heney allowed a tart little smile. “We’ll squeeze harder with these.” He tapped several files on Older’s desk.
It was early April 1906, a Wednesday. Mack was impatient to end the meeting and get away on a short holiday.
“Burns is already gathering some astounding information.” Heney selected a file from the stack. “The fight trust. A small group of promoters allegedly paid eighteen thousand dollars to ensure that they would be the only ones granted permits to stage prizefights. The informant said Ruef and Schmitz split the bribe.”
Another file. “P.G. and E., our honorable utility. An alleged twenty thousand dollars to persuade the supervisors not to lower gas rates.”
Another. “An alleged thirty-thousand-dollar legal retainer from Parkside Realty, Ruef to guarantee them the streetcar franchise they want on the west side—”
“My God, your informants are hardly reticent, are they?” Older said.
Mack shrugged. “They may be bragging, not squealing. They know the machine owns the police and the courts. They know Ruef and his pals won’t be prosecuted.”
Heney’s mouth set. “They will be now.” He scooped up the files. “Can either of you join me for dinner this evening? I’m meeting Hiram Johnson. I want to recruit him for our trial staff.”
“You’re pretty damned confident, Francis,” Mack said.
“Totally confident. We’re going to clean up San Francisco.”
“Well, regarding dinner, I’m afraid—”
“God above,” Older exclaimed, nearly biting his cigar in half. “I didn’t believe the little thief would do it. Come here, quick.”