by John Jakes
“Alex,” he yelled, waving as he swam through the human sea. Alex heard his name, turned, and peered through the dull daylight.
“Mr. Chance.” The sight of his employer seemed to upset him.
Alex’s sweaty shirt was smudged with dirt. He’d rolled up his cuffs to a point just below his black sleeve garters. Alex never showed his sleeve garters, or went out with soiled linen.
“Sir—I didn’t know where you were, or when to expect you. The mayor’s committee—”
“Yes, I heard. Are you out for some sightseeing like everyone else?”
“No, sir. I am here in hopes of—that is—sir—have you been home?”
“Not yet.”
“You don’t know about your son?”
In the palpable heat of the infernos to the south and east, Mack grew cold.
“Is Jim hurt?”
“Sir, not exactly. On Sunday evening, the professor, Angelina Olivar, and I were all out of the house, for various reasons, for a period of several hours. I was the first to come back, at approximately a quarter past ten. Since Angelina was not due to return until early Monday, I checked Jim’s room to see that all was well. I couldn’t find him. Apparently he slipped away sometime during the evening.”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘slipped away’?”
“Excuse me, sir, I’m sorry—” With a guilty look he blurted, “Ran off.”
“Oh, Jesus. No.”
“We tried to contact you, sir. We didn’t know precisely where you were. The Del Monte said you had left. Yosh told us to expect a call on Monday, but it never came. Belatedly, then—Monday evening—we asked the local authorities to attempt to contact other law-enforcement agencies south of here. I must say candidly, when your name was mentioned, we did not get the best cooperation…” Mack was too stunned to react to that. Alex continued, “I have been out all morning. Ever since the earthquake woke the household. I hoped I might spot Little Jim somewhere. There are so many people abroad, and I feel he must still be in the City—”
“Are you sure he ran away?”
“He removed many of his things from his room. The bed was still made—”
“Did you call the police on Sunday night?”
“Naturally. At once. We gave them a full description of Jim.”
“Damn it, can a seven-year-old boy with a limp be that hard to find?”
“No, sir. Last night a foot patrolman saw him on Market Street. He lost him in the crowds. This morning—well. You see for yourself. The police have no time.”
Somewhere another building came down in thundering ruin. Mack scanned the sky, Union Square, the crowds. Tears of rage and guilt began to run. He fought them.
“God, where is he?”
A detonation, louder, different, shook the pavement. People screamed and pushed, flinging their arms over their heads.
“It’s another quake—”
“No, no—they’re dynamiting. The army’s dynamiting. Firebreaks—”
A second detonation followed, and a third. “Sir,” Alex began, “if I might suggest—”
Mack whirled away, shoving a man crowding next to him. He didn’t think coherently, just ran.
He hurried up the steep slope of Powell Street. Behind him, the fire south of the Slot was burning along a mile-and-a-half front, from the Bay all the way to Sixth Street, and from Folsom to Market. Fire was gutting the entire Call building at Third and surging on toward the Palace Hotel at Montgomery. The produce-district fire was advancing as well, and the Hayes Valley fire was spreading in the direction of Mechanics’ Pavilion and City Hall. It was a panorama worthy of Hell.
Mack ran away from it, up Powell toward home.
He passed a small pigtailed girl wandering with a rag doll.
He passed an old Chinese woman sitting in a doorway, her cheeks shiny with tears. A white bone poked through a torn black trouser leg. “Broke,” she said to Mack as he ran by. “Oh, broke.”
He passed an Italian with a pushcart full of sheet music.
He passed a coffeehouse where two special policemen had cornered a looter. One pulled silverware from the man’s coat pockets; the other beat the thief with a truncheon.
Mack struggled up the hill to California Street, an awl of pain turned deep in his chest. The hours of hunger, shock, and exertion finally took their toll. He leaned his forehead against the cold granite of the new, but still unopened Fairmont Hotel. Unexpectedly, he thought of Margaret, her place on Mission Street. Destroyed, surely. Was she all right?
He raised his head, his white hair blowing in the hot breeze. He was so tired he wanted to drop. But he had to go on. To the mansion—
But why was he hurrying? What could be done if Jim was gone? Who could find a lone boy among so many thousands in flight?
And there was the committee…
He identified himself to a guard and walked into the Fairmont Hotel.
Former Mayor Jim Phelan noticed when Mack entered through a rear door of the parlor, which still smelled of fresh paint. From a draped table up in front, he said, “Mack. Welcome. You’re a sight.”
“Drove up from Carmel. The quake caught me at Half Moon Bay.”
“We’re trying to decide how to save this town,” Rudolph Spreckels said. He was seated among the committee members.
“It’s too late.” The voice belonged to Fairbanks.
His remark angered Phelan. “Don’t talk that way. San Franciscans may be guilty of a lot of things, but they aren’t quitters. They don’t sit down and cry. Shall we get back to work, gentlemen?”
Fires burning at 2,000 degrees and higher rapidly consumed entire blocks. Granite pillars melted, shrank, and cooled as misshapen rocks. Steel beams bent like sticks of macaroni in hot water. Iron folded like shirt cardboard, sandstone cracked like window glass, concrete crumbled into sand.
At 1 P.M. the army began dynamiting north of Market Street. The produce-district fire was sweeping west.
At 3 P.M. the flag on the Palace Hotel vanished in the smoke, and the great old hostelry waited for the end.
By 8 P.M., with the sun down, an eerie false daylight illuminated the City. Frantic fire fighters watched the westward advance of the produce-district blaze, then reorganized to hold the line at Powell Street.
The south-of-Market fire crossed Eighth Street.
The third fire, the one started by the unknown woman at breakfast, raged on from Mechanics’ Pavilion toward City Hall. Someone had christened it the Ham and Eggs fire. It jumped Market Street at Ninth, mating with the south fire to create a new one—bigger, deadlier, a huge hot hurricane of flame. The fire rushed west toward the Mission District.
At the Fairmont, as everywhere else, telephone lines were dead, and commandeered autos came and went with messages, orders, reports on the position of the fires. The Committee of Safety rushed available supplies to Golden Gate Park, facing a possible one hundred thousand people homeless for the night. A messenger from Oakland said an emergency train was already en route from Los Angeles with doctors, nurses, food, medical supplies.
By 11 P.M. it became certain that Chinatown was going. All of its ten thousand residents were flung from their homes and shops into streets already overflowing with refugees.
Mack worked through the night with only a cup of cold tea and half a stale roll to sustain him. Shortly before 3 A.M. he heard running in the corridor outside the parlor.
“We have to evacuate the hotel,” someone cried. “The fire’s jumped to this side of Powell.”
“Mack, you’d better go home,” Phelan said. “Save what you can.”
The official fire-defense line moved west to Van Ness. The produce-district fire burned along Bush Street and Pine Street, taking a building, heating the next till it ignited, taking that one, and heating the one beyond. The fiery dominoes fell one by one, randomness injected only by shifts of the breeze.
After the fire took the first blocks of Bush and Pine west of Powell, the wind turned it north on Mason,
toward the wooden gingerbread palaces of the rail and silver kings.
The mansion on Sacramento Street had sustained severe quake damage. The great Tiffany skylight was gone, its remains littering the foyer three stories down. The floor of Mack’s bedroom canted at a thirty-degree angle.
In his office, he packed a Calgold orange crate with ledgers and papers. At 3:40 A.M., the exodus from the house began. Señora Olivar carried out a precious painted Madonna. Professor Love carried out his Bartlett’s and some other books. The servants carried gladstones, teapots, Bibles, photograph albums.
Yosh drove around the corner in the Silver Ghost, her acetylene lights poking through the smoke. She lacked her ruined tenders and spare tire and was dented, but she was oddly grand, bright as an ingot. Yosh parked her at the gate, pointing west.
Coatless now, Mack struggled down the steps with the orange crate. He was beaten to exhaustion, to a kind of numbed somnambulism. But he kept moving. One foot ahead of the other. The servants were watching him with concern.
In the confusion of firelight and shadow, he bumped into Alex, who was carrying the large Sargent painting on his shoulder.
“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.
VIII
RUINS
1906-1908
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.”
62
EVEN 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 tempor
ary 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?”