California Gold

by John Jakes

  Fairbanks tore off his coat, then his white tie. Unfastening his waistcoat, he broke button thread, and two buttons spun through the light and bounced on the Oriental rug. Carla wandered past him, opened the bedroom door, and turned on the light.

  Fairbanks’s hands shook as he tried to open the silver cigarette case. Hearing a cabinet door, then glass rattling, he hurled the case down, spilling cigarettes, and ran into the bedroom.

  Pushing Carla, he banged the cabinet shut with his knee. “You’ve had absolutely your last drink of the night.”

  “Get out of my way.”

  “Carla, you’ve had enough.”

  “Enough of you.”

  She feinted left, but he wasn’t fooled, and, blocking the cabinet with his body, seized her wrists. Her lipstick was smeared again; a hook of red decorated her cheek. She’d repaired her makeup twice during the evening—twice that he knew about.

  “Sit down,” he said, shoving her.

  Off balance, she backed into the double bed and went down with a little gasp. Fairbanks stood over her like a wrathful father. “I have had my fill of this kind of behavior. You spent the whole damned evening fawning over that flaming queer who couldn’t even keep you upright on the dance floor.”

  Carla leaned back on both hands. “He’s more of a man than you.”

  “Speaking from firsthand experience, are you?”

  “You have a spiteful rotten temper, darling. Go fuck yourself. You bore me.”

  She rolled sideways off the bed and lurched back to the parlor. Fairbanks noticed stain rings on the peach satin. What had she spilled all over herself? And in front of whom? He ran after her. Hearing him behind her, she snatched off one silver pump and tried to clout him with the heel. He grabbed the shoe and threw it, breaking the pane of a window overlooking Market Street. The velvet portiere ropes swung to and fro. His head was buzzing.

  “Pay attention, Carla. No, damn it, don’t sneer and turn your back. I am not going to be fobbed off one more time with your spoiled arrogance. You made a spectacle of yourself downstairs. You started with Chance, but he was only the first. There were important people at the ball, people who must be influenced in this election. It’s the last time you’re going to embarrass me. For the duration of the campaign, it is—the—last—time.”

  “My. Oh my.” She giggled. “I’ve seldom seen you so passionate. Certainly never in bed.”

  He pushed her again, dropping her on a sofa of Turkish leather. To his amazement, she laughed, turned her smeared face upward and laughed. The buzzing in his head grew louder.

  “Carla, I mean this warning. You’d better not do anything to embarrass me from now until November or you’ll pay for it.”

  “Oh, is he scared? I believe he is. Dear little Walter, the uncrowned prince of California, is scared—”

  “My future rides on this campaign,” he shouted. “Not only my job, but my reputation.”

  She laughed and knifed him again. “Why are you so scared, sweetheart? Because you’re pitted against Mack Chance?”

  A sudden, awful, total silence. An auto honked down on Market. Distantly, in the Bay, a ferry bell rang. Fairbanks admonished her with a shake of his finger, but it was feeble, without heart.

  “You’d just better heed what I said. If you don’t, you’ll regret it.”

  “If I’m still here.” She flounced over and picked up her ermine.

  “Where are you going? Back to him?”

  “Maybe. Why not? He’s a better man than you’ll ever be. He’s beaten you at every turn. He even raised your son.”

  “My—?”

  His mouth hung open, and his sleek hair, shiny as his dancing pumps, straggled over his forehead. At that moment he resembled nothing so much as a child lost in a dark wood.

  Carla leaned against the brightly papered wall, hands behind the small of her back. Her round breasts moved up and down, the only sign of her excitement. She placed the next knife gently, almost tenderly.

  “Yes, I said son. Mack isn’t Jim’s father. It was you. That New Year’s in Pasadena. I worked out the dates. I’m positive about it.” Venom flowed into her smile. “But you see, I wanted Mack to raise him. I knew he’d be a better father.”

  “Better? Mack’s boy ran off, for God’s sake. The whole town knows it.”

  “Well, yes—things went wrong. Doesn’t change anything. I was his mother, and I had a choice to make. I made it. Just one more little contest that you lost to the best man, Walter.”

  “You slut.” He shook her by the shoulders. “You dirty vindictive slut.” He bounced her against the wall and she fell, crying out.

  Seeing Fairbanks curl his hands into fists, Carla groped for a hold on the drop front of a writing desk. It pivoted down and her weight pulled the desk over. Ink gushed from the well; steel-nib pens flew; creamy Palace letterheads and envelopes sailed like seabirds.

  “I’d kill you, but you’re not worth it,” Fairbanks said in a breaking voice. He gathered a homburg and overcoat, and a moment later the door slammed. Carla bent her back and shut her eyes and laid her cheek on the overturned writing desk.

  At half past four the next afternoon, Gaspar Ludlow knocked softly on the door of the sanctum.

  Ludlow was assistant chief clerk of the legal department. A smarmy young man, always smiling to please, he’d graduated from the business course at U.C. Berkeley and been employed by the SP for three years. The previous Thanksgiving, he’d created a vacancy by planting a Lincoln Steffens book on the desk of his immediate superior. The man was fired and he was promoted.

  “Come.”

  Fairbanks was at work in shirtsleeves, writing on a ruled sheet of yellow legal paper. The clerk wasn’t accustomed to seeing the general counsel without his coat, or doing anything so mundane as using a lead pencil. Fairbanks hadn’t come in until half past nine. Ludlow was on another floor at the time. When he got back to the department, others whispered about it. Walter Fairbanks III was a punctual man; it was part of his perfectionism.

  Several clerks told Ludlow his chief looked ill, and he did. His face pale as a bowl of cold oats and haggard, he handed Ludlow the yellow sheet.

  “That is a description of a runaway boy—all of the description I can provide, anyhow. I don’t know what name the boy may be using, but he bears a strong resemblance to Mrs. Fairbanks. His left foot is crippled, and he limps. He would be about twelve years old now. It’s presumed that he ran away from San Francisco just prior to the earthquake. He may be dead. He may have left the state. If neither is true, I must locate him—for personal reasons. Transmit the description to every California sheriff and police department friendly to us.”

  Ludlow immediately characterized it as a futile assignment. However, one didn’t get ahead in the SP by disagreeing with superiors. “We’ve paid enough money over the years to make certain there are plenty of those, sir. I’m sure we’ll have some good results promptly.”

  Fairbanks stared at him with a sick expression, as if he were sure of nothing any longer.

  76

  IT WAS A THURSDAY in the last week of September, a stiflingly hot day. Elihu Flintman drove over from Covina in his buggy—not for him these newfangled autos, or any other creation of a dubious modernism. Despite the heat, he wore his heaviest suit, single-breasted and black, together with a black bow tie and fedora. He looked more like a preacher than most preachers.

  Like thousands of others, Flintman had migrated to California from the Midwest. After his heart attack he had retired as vice chairman of the Merchants and Farmers Bank of Xenia, Ohio. Because of his heavy brows and big fan beard, he bore a strong physical resemblance to Charles Dickens, especially those stiff frontispiece portraits. Spiritually he was kin to Mr. Scrooge.

  A visitor’s buggy was tied outside the octagonal house. Flintman pulled in beside it and noted, as usual, the platoon of gardeners busy on the grounds. Flintman despised the Tabernacle of the Sun Universal, particularly because of its extravagances and pret
enses, including the abundance of white flowers and shrubs and the cheery yellow and white paint adorning its headquarters.

  Flintman’s wife, Winona, worshiped the place, however. She worshiped the founder, whom Flintman considered no better than a crook, and perhaps a lunatic. Elihu Flintman yielded to the authority of no man, but with Winona it was different; he did what she told him, sometimes resentfully, but he did it. He’d volunteered to keep the tabernacle’s books because she wanted him involved.

  Flintman was the tabernacle’s first trained bookkeeper. Brother Paul didn’t want him, but the elected board of elders decided it was a good idea, and insisted. Previously, the founder kept the books. Flintman’s exposure to the grossly inexact records, full of smudges, blots, and strikeovers, led him to launch a kind of secret crusade. Certain the founder stole a lot of the money the communicants paid into the tabernacle, Flintman was searching for hard evidence he could present to the elders, and particularly to Winona.

  He crossed the airy veranda to the frosted-glass front door. The pie-wedge rooms of the octagonal house were all connected to a central foyer, which you reached by walking straight back from the entrance. The tabernacle was decorated in typical late-Victorian style, with heavy furniture, palms in pots, and every spare inch filled with something. For the walls the founder had commissioned some unknown hack to paint a series of sunlit California landscapes. These cheap works hung everywhere, along with small versions of the tabernacle’s metal sunburst.

  The door of a counseling room off the foyer stood ajar, and through the opening Flintman saw buxom Deacon Rowena at her desk. She had prospects: two retirees, dressed in their shabby best, their hope-filled faces craggy with age. Flintman pitied them, for Deacon Rowena, young and sun-browned, was spreading before them a segmented belt of canvas about five inches high.

  “This is the solar longevity belt. The founder himself developed and approved it. You’ll note the eight segments, corresponding to the octagon shape, of the tabernacle. Each segment collects and stores the healing energy of the sun in special honeycomb cells. The cells disperse the energy into the body gradually and pleasantly. I think you’ll agree that the price we ask—three hundred dollars—is remarkably low when I tell you this: Combined with Brother Paul’s principles of good health and sunlight therapy, the belt is effective against many forms of malignant tumor. We’ve printed this little brochure with testimonials of Californians who have been completely cured.”

  Old veined hands reached eagerly for the pamphlet. Deacon Rowena’s eyes flicked to the door, sensing someone there, and Flintman hurried on. He was no scientist, but he presumed the belt was worthless, and the testimonials fraudulent.

  The bookkeeper opened the door of his office. His occasional assistant was seated at the left half of a partner’s desk. Sunlight falling through a window lit his hair like a great nugget of gold. He was a handsome lad, and tall. In front of him lay invoices, ledgers, his Chinese abacus with its lacquered dragons racing around the edge.

  “Good morning, Jim David.”

  “Good morning, Mr. Flintman.”

  The bookkeeper hung his fedora on a peg. Suddenly he spied something peeping from beneath an account book. Jim blushed, discovered. Flintman pulled out three dime novels with lurid covers, issues of Pluck and Luck and Work and Win, and one of Motor Stories.

  “Not in this office, Jim David,” Flintman said, throwing the dime novels into a waste can.

  “Those are good stories—” the boy began.

  “They are trash. Especially those ridiculous tales of boys who earn millions after a stranger’s plug hat is blown off on Fifth Avenue and they retrieve it and discover he’s the richest man in New York, childless, and possessed of a completely unmotivated urge to share his moneymaking secrets with an adolescent. Trash,” Flintman repeated, and sat down. “What have you been doing this morning?”

  “Checking the bank deposits. I found another mistake.”

  “Show me, show me.”

  Jim gave him the open ledger. “An extra zero on the weekly deposit to Brother Paul’s account. Instead of eighteen hundred dollars, it’s eighteen thousand.”

  “That’s the second such error in as many months.” Flintman snapped the ledger shut. “I’ll call it to his attention. Is he here?”

  “No, sir. He went to the horse races. He’ll be back late in the afternoon, Deacon Beatrice said. You could wait and visit him upstairs.”

  “Can’t do it this evening. Busy. Besides, I never go upstairs. I am his bookkeeper, not his crony.” The tabernacle seethed with gossip about the activities up in the founder’s rooms. Flintman had never ventured there, but now he thought perhaps he should. Perhaps he ought to search for evidence to confirm the rumors. Especially with Winona babbling about rewriting their wills to include a large bequest to the tabernacle.

  “I’ll confront him in due course, my boy. But it won’t do any good. He’ll laugh and say it’s an oversight, just another oversight. A lot of honest and sincere people in this tabernacle are getting mighty tired of Brother Paul’s oversights.” He set his lips primly. “You’re smart with figures, Jim David. A good worker too. I’m glad I was able to steal you from Mr. Sprue once a week.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The bookkeeper’s righteous face softened a little. “Is Sprue your stepfather?”

  “No, he just looks after me.”

  “Have you no family in California? No mother?”

  “I never knew her.”

  “A father?”

  Jim’s eye quickly shifted to the trashed dime novels. He stared at them, struggling to hide his pain.

  “Once. But not anymore.”

  He bent his head and went back to work.

  At four-thirty on the afternoon of October 1, a long curtained touring sedan drove through the tabernacle gate. As the black auto glided up the hill, a pearl-gray glove drew aside one of the rear curtains.

  Walter Fairbanks leaned near the window, studying the yellow-and-white octagonal house on the terraced hill. He’d heard a lot about the place, and the sight of it sent a guilty thrill chasing through him.

  The chauffeur halted the car. “I don’t know how long I’ll be, Sanchez. Pull over there and wait.”

  The chauffeur said, “Yes, sir,” and opened the door for his passenger. After a quick, nervous look around—he saw a few gardeners, many plantings, some distant bungalows—Fairbanks darted up the steps and inside.

  He expected exotic furnishings; he found conventional ones. But the young woman who took his card was anything but conventional—muscular and deeply browned, with huge round breasts. She carried the card upstairs. Within minutes, Wyatt Paul came down.

  His linen suit and clerical dickey shone with a snowy brilliance, and the hand he extended to Fairbanks was brown and manicured. The white streaks in his hair were dominant, sweeping back from his temples like horns on a Viking helmet. His clear blue eyes looked feverish.

  “Mr. Fairbanks. Pleased to make your acquaintance. Good of you to come all the way out to Pasadena.”

  “On the telephone, Mr. Paul, you insisted.”

  “It’s a substantial donation. I thought I was entitled to hand it personally to the top man in the campaign.”

  “Yes, perfectly reasonable,” Fairbanks said quickly. He didn’t dare lose a donation so large.

  “By the way. Communicants here call me Brother, not Mister.” Wyatt caressed the arm of the buxom girl. “Thank you, Deacon Helen. I’ll call you if our guest needs anything.”

  Fairbanks was put off by the smoky glance the young woman gave him as she left. It seemed to say, however briefly, that if the guest wanted her favors, she would readily oblige.

  “Come along and see our sanctuary. I must say, Mr. Fairbanks, you look like you’ve had a difficult day.”

  “I was meeting with the M and M at breakfast—the Merchants and Manufacturers Association—when we got word of the disaster.”

  “Disaster?”

  “You
don’t know? The Times building was dynamited early this morning. Sixty or seventy sticks were planted in an alley on the Broadway side. They’ve no idea how many are dead. At least twenty. Blown up—burned alive—”

  “Terrible. Who did it?”

  “General Otis has accused the striking metalworkers.”

  “I didn’t realize there was a strike.”

  “Largest in the city’s history. Fifteen hundred men have been out since June.”

  “I’m afraid I’m not good about keeping track of mundane matters.”

  “It isn’t mundane to those of us in commerce,” Fairbanks said a bit testily. “It’s life and death for the open shop here. The San Francisco trade locals poured in money and professional agitators. This is the result—anarchy and murder. Otis calls it the crime of the century. He swears he’ll have the culprits in front of a firing squad.”

  “I certainly hope he’s successful. This way, please.”

  Soothed by Wyatt’s charm, Fairbanks followed him across the round central foyer. Wyatt slid back carved doors and they walked out on a dais to a pulpit that faced semicircular rows of pews. Fairbanks glanced around, noting another great metal sunburst suspended on wires above him.

  “This is where I lecture on the principles of solar medicine, physical and emotional health. By the way, you’ll stay the night, won’t you? I have a spacious guest room in my quarters upstairs.”

  “No, I’m afraid I can’t, Mr.—Brother Paul.”

  “You’re turning me down?” Wyatt’s clear blue eyes showed a curious opal blaze. “It’s late in the day, and a long drive back to the city—”

  “But there’s a rally for Hiram Johnson downtown. Nell Ross, the radical writer, is speaking. I must listen to her. Find out what sort of lies she’s spreading about Bell and his slate, so we can counter them. I’m sorry—it’s a duty I can’t avoid.”

  Obviously irked, Wyatt said, “Pity. My evening—ah— socials with some of the deacons are quite special.” A pause. “Quite private too, if that’s a concern.”

  Fairbanks understood what Brother Paul was suggesting, and it weakened his knees. He could certainly use a little discreet companionship after all these weeks of riding the SP from town to town, meeting with grubby merchants and farmers, speaking to groups, and begging money until he was glassy-eyed. But he couldn’t rest or let down until it was over. Until they won.