by Howard Fast
“I know the boat,” Lomas said. “But my God, Dan, you can’t go out there and kill a man. Not over a load of crabs.”
“Let’s just go.”
“Dan, I don’t like it.”
“You can take what you like or don’t like and shove it up your ass.” Lomas, a big, burly man, fifteen years older than Dan, looked at him steadily and then nodded. “All right. I’ll take that. I don’t know what’s eating you, but it’s in your gut.”
The boats were pushing off, backing slowly into the fog that lay like soup on the bay. Lomas leaped into his boat and Dan followed. “I’m sorry. Forget it,” Dan said. Lomas nodded silently. They didn’t speak as the boat nosed its way through the fog.
An hour later, the fog had lifted. “Just keep looking,” Dan told Lomas. “Forget the crabs. You say you know the boat?”
“I know it. White launch with a black stripe. He’s got one of them new diesels, powerful bastard, he can outrun anything. He’s from somewhere in San Pablo, they say Pinole.”
It was nine o’clock before they found the white launch–or it found them. Dan stood at the bow, the shotgun at his feet. “Don’t be too eager,” he told Lomas. “I’m going to open her hull. Then take off.”
“Suppose the crew can’t swim.”
“Fuck them.”
“They got pistols.”
“Screw their pistols. Tell Billy and Ralph to keep their heads down.”
“O.K., you’re the boss,” Lomas said. He stood at the wheel, letting the fishing boat run along, as if they had taken their catch and were heading home. The white launch lifted a wake on a course that would cross their bow.
“When I open her hull,” Dan shouted, “put us hard abeam and head back. They’re dragging a dinghy, so they won’t drown.”
The white launch cut its motor and swung into a course alongside the fishing boat about twenty feet away. There were four men in the launch, two of them boys of sixteen or seventeen, two of them older men. One of the older men stood in the bow, waving an automatic pistol, shouting for them to cut their motor. Dan bent, picked up the shotgun, and let go with both barrels at the hull of the launch at the water line. The man with the pistol fired wildly. Lomas spun the wheel and kicked in all the power they had. There were two more shots from the pistol that hit nothing, and when Dan steadied himself and looked back, the launch was already sinking.
*
The following morning at the breakfast table, Thomas Seldon said to his wife, “Mary, listen to this–from the front page in today’s Chronicle: ‘San Francisco shipowner raises the ghost of vigilantism. Taking matters into his own hands after a series of pirate raids on crabbing boats, young Daniel Lavette, owner of a fleet of eleven fishing boats, rode shotgun on one of his own vessels and sank an alleged fish pirate in San Pablo Bay. For the past month local fishermen have complained to the authorities that they were being robbed of their catch. All to no avail. Yesterday, the owner of the largest fleet of fishing boats on the waterfront took matters into his own hands, and armed with a double-barreled shotgun sought out and sank the launch Dazzle, owned by Henry Slocum of Pinole. The launch was hulled by buckshot and sank in a few minutes. According to the Sheriff of Contra Costa County, Slocum denies any wrongdoing and claims that the attack by Lavette was entirely without provocation. On the other hand, he refuses to press charges against Lavette, claiming that an ordinary citizen of Pinole could no more expect justice in San Francisco, where the shipowners interests are at stake, than he could, to quote Mr. Slocum, “from the Emperor of China.” Mr. Lavette and his partner, Marcus Levy, operate, in addition to the fishing vessels, a fleet of ships that hauls garbage from Oakland and a coastal lumber ship. Mr. Lavette is the son-in-law of the prominent banker Thomas Seldon.’ ” He put down the paper and looked at his wife. “Front page,” be added.
“Why? In God’s name, why?”
Seldon shrugged. “I suppose he was fed up and decided to do something. I wish he hadn’t done it this way.”
“The whole thing makes me ill. Riding shotgun. Garbage boats.”
“He’s had the garbage ships a long time now.”
“Not in print. Not on the front page of the Chronicle. I don’t know how I’ll face anyone after this.”
“Most people won’t mind it a bit. It’s a rather romantic action.”
“I hardly agree. I don’t know why we ever went along with that marriage.” Seldon was reading his paper again. “You really don’t care how I feel about it, do you? If you think Jean is happy, you’re wrong.”
He put down the paper. “What has she said?”
“It’s what she doesn’t say. We don’t talk anymore. She’s indifferent. They’ve been there weeks without drapes, and when I asked her about them, she just stared at me.”
“That’s nothing to worry about. She told me she’s having them handwoven in San Jose or some such place.”
“I just can’t understand a house on Russian Hill. Jean’s not artistic,” she complained in what appeared to her husband to be a non sequitur, but in her mind referred to the artists and writers who were moving to Russian Hill. “And a family now. There’s room enough in this house. Not that I want him here–”
“Mary,” her husband interrupted, “you ought to stop that. For one thing, Dan Lavette is making money hand over fist. He denies her nothing. And for another, Jean will do as she damn pleases. You know that.” He went back to his paper. “You know,” he said, “there’s going to be a war in Europe. The handwriting’s on the wall.”
Two weeks later, on the second day of August, Dan burst into the offices of Levy and Lavette, waving a newspaper and yelling for the presence of his partner. The fact that Mark Levy was there in plain sight made no difference; Dan was filled with excitement and exuberance and it suited him to shout, and when he was that way, Mark saw him as a kid, an explosive kid whose own excitement and energy had to be communicated. It never irritated Mark; and when it irritated Sarah, he explained that Dan was like his brother only more than a brother–something she never entirely understood, not then and not in later years.
It was just about seven months since Mark and Dan had sold both the shack on the wharf and the chandler shop on the Embarcadero, renting instead a large brick warehouse between Battery Street and Sansome Street Part of it was turned into a larger shipping supply depot; one wing in the back was devoted entirely to the manufacture of the metal-cleated denim trousers that Sarah Levy had devised; and the rest of it, half of the ground floor of a two-story building, twenty-five hundred square feet of space, had become the offices of their burgeoning enterprises. Finally evicting themselves from the rooms behind the store, the Levys had purchased an old Spanish Colonial-style house on a hillside in Sausalito. The house was run down and badly in need of repair, but it was all Sarah Levy had ever dreamed of, and she convinced her husband that seven thousand dollars for the tile-roofed, tile-floored house with its long, cool, pillared galleries and the seven acres of land around it was a tremendous bargain, even if they had to put twenty thousand more into renovation. The figure came to a good deal more than that in the end, but Mark had no regrets about the house. It was true that now he would be a commuter, his life at the mercy of the cross-bay ferry, but the incredible beauty of Main County more than compensated for that; if he had second thoughts, they were mainly fixed on the partnership he had entered into.
He was a slow-speaking, easygoing man–enchanted with the driving force of Dan Lavette and very often not a little terrified by it. It was Dan who had talked him into mass production of the denim trousers. Sarah wanted no part of it, and once they had purchased the place in Sausalito, she retreated there, with the flat statement that the house and the children were sufficient. “I want no part of business with Danny,” she said, to which Mark replied, “But you talked me into that. You were all for it.” “And I was right. But I want nothing to do with it. I hate business. I hated it when we had the store. I hate it more now.” “Then you hate what I do with my life!” he cri
ed angrily, and she protested, “No, no, no– I love you, and you are doing what you must do.”
All of which was reasonably unreasonable, and, anyway, she adored Dan, who could do no wrong. She didn’t have to face his explosive energy, his endless schemes, his need to gamble and drive them to the edge of disaster, his crazy adolescent arithmetic that said that if six garbage ships made so much money, twelve would make twice as much, his argument that by fighting the pirates he was saving the fishermen whose losses drove them to sell their boats–and then his petulant and increasing hatred for the fishing fleet and the detail its operation involved.
“Danny will grow up,” Sarah argued. “Give him a chance. So far he’s been right.”
“Right because we’ve been damn lucky and because with half of his crazy schemes I put my back to the wall and fight him tooth and nail. But I can’t go on doing that.”
Here it is again, Mark said to himself, as Dan shouted, “Mark, this is it–the big bomb! I told you, I told you!” Mark was bending over Feng Wo’s desk, reading a row of figures, and Feng Wo smiled gently and understandingly. Now Feng Wo had the title of office manager; he had a bookkeeper assistant and two lady typewriters, as they were called.
Dan grabbed Mark by the arm and fairly dragged him into the part of the partitioned warehouse floor that constituted his office, furnished so far only with a desk and three chairs, the partition wall decorated with a great map of the Pacific Ocean and its bordering land masses. Once inside, Mark turned to Dan, spread his hands, and said, “No. Whatever it is, I don’t want to hear it. We took a beating on the crabs and the season is over. You got forty-five fishermen on the payroll and less than five thousand dollars in the bank.”
“The hell with the fishing boats! Will you listen to me? Did you see the paper?”
“What paper?”
“The newspaper, Mark, the newspaper.” He spread it out on the desk. “Read it. Germany has declared war on Russia, and the smart money says that this is only the beginning. Within a week, England and France will be in this. I phoned Tony from the house. He’s had half a dozen cables from Italy, and he says that in Europe there’s no question about what’s going to happen. Italy will fight Austria and Germany, and then it’s France and England.”
“All right–granted. The world’s gone crazy. Thank God we’re here in America.”
“You don’t see it, do you?”
“See what?”
“Just look at the map.” He pointed as he spoke. “Germany has the largest submarine fleet in the world, and England’s spread all over the goddamn map, Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, Malay, India. Do you know what that means? It means that we’re the lifeline, the West Coast, San Francisco–it’s going to make the Gold Rush look like a kiddy bank. We’re heading into a war that’s going to make every shipowner rich as God.”
“Danny,” Mark said tiredly, “we got one ship and it’s a coaster.”
“And five years ago we had no ships.”
“We’re overextended, we’re short on cash, we’ve both of us been spending like drunken sailors–and anyway I’ll be damned if I can celebrate this lunacy that’s going on in Europe. Even if it was possible, which it isn’t, I don’t want to build a fortune out of blood.”
“Why? You got moral scruples? How many millionaires came out of the Civil War? And that was our own flesh and blood. We didn’t make this war.”
“That doesn’t make it an occasion for celebration.”
“Come on, old buddy. Don’t get sore at me. Just sit down and listen. I haven’t been so wrong, have I? We been in clover–you got to admit that. We had problems, we got problems. We solve them. I got ten suits and a house on Russian Hill, and Sarah’s got her hacienda. So maybe we didn’t do so bad for a Dago fisherman and a sheeny storekeeper.” He grinned, pushing Mark gently into a chair. When Dan was like that, Mark couldn’t resist him. “You going to listen?” Dan asked.
“You crazy bastard–O.K., I’ll listen.”
“Now I’m not saying we do this. Just think about it. We sell everything, the fishing boats, the garbage ships–and believe me, old buddy, the contract alone’s worth seventy, eighty thousand dollars–the coaster, the pants business–everything.”
“We’re making money on the pants, good money.”
“The hell with it! Levi makes better pants. They’ll buy us out and that’s better than having them kill us. Their patent was in first and sooner or later they’ll take us to court.”
“All right,” Mark sighed, “we sell everything. What then?”
“Then we got a cash base. We borrow a million dollars, and we buy or build a string of freighters.”
“Just like that–we borrow a million dollars.”
“Why not?”
“Because the whole thing’s insane, Danny. Who’s going to lend us a million dollars? Tony? We couldn’t ask him. He’s a small banker. He can’t put out that kind of money, not in a deal like this, and we just couldn’t put him in such a spot.”
“I know that.”
“Then where would the money come from?–and that doesn’t mean I buy this scheme.”
“We’re just talking.”
“Like hell we are. I know you.”
“Mark, buddy, I’m not trying to con you. You’re the best friend I got in the world. But I’m sick and tired of what we’re into. Perdo tempo.”
“What’s that?”
“Time wasting. Ships are real.”
“And where do you get the million dollars?”
“From Seldon.”
“You’re kidding. That old bastard wouldn’t give you the right time.”
“Maybe–but I never asked for anything. Not one nickel. I’m not going to ask him personally. This is a banking proposition. Either he sees it that way or not. But I got to have you behind me, not looking at me like I lost my mind.”
“I guess there’s only one thing to hope for,” Mark said.
“What?”
“That England and Germany don’t go to war.”
Dan got up, walked to the wall, and stared at the map. “Mark,” he said, “you remember the way the city looked after the earthquake and the fire?”
“Who forgets a thing like that?”
“Well, that’s the way the whole fuckin’ world’s going to look a year from now.”
When Calvin Braderman, bearded, with velvet jacket and a black beret, returned to San Francisco after five years in Paris, he brought with him a local corner on Fauvism and names like Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck, Marquet, and Camoin–names which he let drop with authority and intimacy, the suggestion being that if he had not actually shared studio space with these men, he had supped at the same board and quaffed at the same trough of ultramodernism. He also brought with him several dozen of his own paintings and two Derains and a Vlaminck, traded, as he casually informed the people of the press, for his own work.
Even a less-talented artist than Braderman–himself only an average draftsman and colorist–would have been welcomed in the city that already considered itself the Paris of the West; and Braderman was lionized. Jean met him at the opening at Scoffers’ Gallery.
Mary Seldon was wont to say, with a sort of perverse pride, that Jean was not artistic. In Mrs. Seldon’s circles, a commitment to the arts smacked of pornography and associated indecencies; but in all truth Jean, while possessed of little artistic talent of her own–she had done only middling well in her drawing lessons at school–was utterly fascinated by the world of artists. Her eye was still untrained, but she loved color and motion in a painting. Also, she was in the process of building walls against Dan. As her initial infatuation for her husband withered, her own sense of self-esteem lessened. She fought to create in herself a series of interests that would restore her self-confidence, and instinctively she chose areas that she felt were outside of her husband’s ken.
A half a dozen new galleries had opened in San Francisco, and Scoffers’ was one of the most prestigious. Marcy Callan and her
fiancé, Johnny Whittier, had persuaded Jean to go with them to the opening. Watching young Whittier stand dour and silent while Marcy gushed over Calvin Braderman and his paintings set Jean to thinking. Johnny Whittier refused to reach into his pocket for a Braderman painting, but Jean selected a canvas of a group of dancing nymphs and wrote out a check for five hundred dollars on the spot. Hans Scoffers, the gallery owner, immediately turned into a worshipful, overwhelming salesman, and a half-hour later Jean had signed a second check for a thousand dollars and had become the owner of a landscape by Vlaminck, who, Scoffers assured her, was a great and honored artist. At which point Calvin Braderman directed all his charm to Jean, informing her that she was the most beautiful woman he had ever met and that he would not rest until he had painted her. Nor was the gaiety of the occasion marred at all by the fact that two days before German troops had invaded Belgium, after Germany’s declaration of war against France, and in response to this England had declared war against Germany.
Braderman, five hundred dollars richer, insisted that he convey Jean and the paintings to Russian Hill, and they entered her house flushed and delighted with the exchange of compliments, money, and produce. Dan was upstairs, and hearing Jean, it occurred to him that this was the first time in a long while that he had heard her laugh. He came downstairs from the nursery, where he had been admiring the baby, Barbara, to find his wife and a strange bearded man admiring two paintings that were propped for viewing on a couple of dining room chairs.
“This is Calvin Braderman,” Jean informed him. “And this is my husband, Dan.”
Dan shook hands dubiously. He had never seen a man in a velvet jacket before.
“A pleasure to meet you,” Braderman said heartily. “You have a beautiful home, sir, and a beautiful wife–and now a Braderman and a Vlaminck. I won’t tout the Braderman, but the Vlaminck is a beauty, isn’t it?”
“What the devil is a Vlaminck?” Dan said.
Jean and Braderman burst out laughing. They were laughing at him, Dan realized. For some damned idiot reason, they were laughing at him because he had asked what a Vlaminck was. Jean saw the expression on his face and said quickly, “No, no, Danny, we are not laughing at you. It was just the way you said it–and the three glasses of sherry I had at the opening. Look. That one”–she pointed–“that’s the painting by Maurice Vlaminck. He’s one of a really daring school of painting, and they’ve broken all the rules and they call themselves Fauvists, and they’re all the rage in Paris now–”