As he circled, staring out at the lush green valley and the creek swollen with spring runoff, he thought of his mother Isabella, who had died a month before he entered the University. It made him tearful that she was not present to witness his finest moment.
On Stanford Lane, his friend and mentor, the patrician Director of Graduate Engineering studies, fretful and asthmatic Professor Rudy Durand, raised a small red flag. Hunter stopped the Waltham at a white chalk mark and gunned the engine several times. The flag dropped.
The motorcycle lurched, throwing the front wheel skyward, spitting a puff of ebony smoke, and slammed back onto the ground, the rear wheel blasting sand and pebbles down the lane. The howling machine gasped, bucked, and bolted forward.
In fifty yards, he had it up to thirty. Thirty-five, forty, forty-five. Hunter's heart pounded as he roared down the quarter-mile stretch, the wind ripping at his leather jacket, flattening the goggles against his eyes. The umbrella of eucalyptus funneled and amplified the sound across the valley. Above fifty, the road threatened to tear the tires from their steel rims. Hunter pushed the throttle lever to the bottom of its transit, fighting desperately for control as he charged toward Professor Durand. Fifty, fifty-five, sixty.
Half on and half off, Hunter crossed the finish line as Professor Durand clicked the watch. The gallery cheered and spun like tops as the blast of wind sent hats and bonnets flying.
"Sixty-four and one-half miles per hour," the professor shouted. "That beats the California motorized record of sixty-three miles per hour."
Hunter circled the crowd, pumping his fist like a victorious gladiator, and offered a good-bye wave. He charged across the picturesque quadrangle, past the majestic sandstone buildings, and through the stone Arch of Triumph, slowing briefly to capture a melancholy glimpse of the campus. He was struck by an eerie feeling, a disturbing sense that he might never see his beloved Stanford again. The feeling was so keen that he abruptly turned the Waltham in a wide circle, fixing in his mind the buildings and the great arch, the towering barn and golden-poppy dotted hills, finally offering a pained salute to the memory of Jane Stanford.
North he flew, onto majestic El Camino Real, weaving through belching Fords ferrying churchgoers and over-laden wagons hauling the spring harvest from the lush Santa Clara Valley.
His thoughts turned to his father's home, and the apprehension did not ease. He had rarely returned during those six years, unable to leave his stable mates; a plan that Byron had secretly arranged, an attempt to dampen Hunter's interest in the family's bloody business.
On the evening before his son's return, I suggested to Byron that after a six-year absence Hunter might scarcely recognize the City.
Both Hunter and I had been born in 1883, into a dark and silent world poised for transformation by a flurry of technological wonders such as the world had never seen. In just over two decades the world had changed more than in a millennium. We witnessed the coming of the telephone, electric light, aero plane, automobile, wireless telegraph, phonograph, antiseptic surgery, the moving picture and the X-ray machine.
In 1900, one of Hunter's heroes, Samuel Langley, pioneering aviator and director of the Smithsonian Institution, had declared that all of the world's great inventions had already been discovered. If all of the world's great marvels had already been invented, Hunter wrote, how could he invent them? In the six years since he had last lived on Telegraph Hill, those once-wondrous things had become staples in the public diet. San Francisco was bursting at the seams with change.
Byron had taken to sharing his son's frequent letters with me, until I felt I knew him almost as well as his father did. Hunter's musings included a hodgepodge of ideas: the enhancement of police work by scientific applications, his zeal for the progressive/conservationist politics of Teddy Roosevelt, theories on wireless communication, fund-raising activities for the defense of I.W.W. lion Big Bill Haywood for his trial in the bombing death of Idaho Governor Steunenberg, fervent support for the clarification of English via the Simplified Language movement, and Hunter's personal guarantee that the aero plane would soon replace the railroad as the principle transporter of people and goods.
In one missive received a week before his return, Hunter argued that Thomas Edison had become more influential than Queen Victoria in the five years since her death; ragtime and a new music called jazz would soon liberate the common spirit, replacing opera and helping to bring equality for Negroes; he finished with a timetable for the triumph of Suffrage and Industrial Unionism (less than ten years).
Byron was exhausted when he finished reading this letter aloud. I, on the other hand, though dubious about Hunter's technological predictions as I considered the march of progress a dehumanizing lockstep toward sooty oblivion, was touched by his impassioned belief in social progress, a commonality of spirit that, I must admit, awakened my former schoolgirl interest.
That Sunday, April 15, as he powered north through the once-rustic Peninsula, Hunter fretted over the proliferation of gabled mansions rapidly replacing the blinds and lodges where he and his father and brother Christian had hunted boar and pheasant. The astonishing wealth of San Francisco, fountainhead of the West, was spilling over and the Peninsula, the puddle beneath the spout, was in danger of becoming an amorphous suburban lump stretching from San Jose to San Francisco.
Hunter motored onto the final stretch, the Bayshore Highway, the imperial city towering just ahead of him. He reached back to check the two documents inside his saddlebag.
The first was a letter from the San Francisco Police Department, confirming his acceptance. He would be the first college graduate to join the department, provided his father did not kill him first.
The second was the engineering survey he had prepared for San Francisco Fire Chief Dennis Sullivan, entitled "An Independent Survey of Tectonic Movement along the San Andreas Fault and Its Effect on Subterranean Water Systems in San Francisco."
In the days that followed, we would realize how those two documents might have changed the fate of nearly half a million souls.
Chapter 2
TELEGRAPH HILL
APRIL 15, 1906. 5:45 A.M.
The San Francisco Police Department was the only life Byron Fallon had ever known. He had joined at age seventeen, believing it God's calling that he help end violence and corruption in the lawless city. He was a devout Catholic, blessed with a fearlessness and natural intelligence that earned him the rank of detective by age twenty-five. He bore two distinct physical traits that were of significance to his line of work: a set of cornflower blue eyes so soothing that they sometimes coaxed confessions from reluctant miscreants, and a pair of enormous hands that often worked where the former did not.
The fact that the dozen members of the Fallon/Fagen/Rinaldi clan had never taken a dirty dime had long ceased to bother—at least openly—other, less scrupulous police officers. It simply left a larger pot, and fewer hands to be divided among.
In 1895 Byron had been promoted to Chief of Detectives for his work in solving the sensational Belfry Murders at the Emmanuel Baptist Church. A church acolyte with a predilection for bathing in chicken blood while engaging Barbary Coast prostitutes had murdered two young girls and left their bodies in the church steeple, a case that became front-page news in all five of the town's papers.
As sunrise approached Easter morning, the bald, thick-limbed, fifty-three-year-old patriarch of the Fallon clan arose after another restless night. He paced his bedroom in the highest house atop Telegraph Hill, a two-story Italianate Victorian with modest dormers and white fish-scale siding. He paused at a window and gazed across San Francisco Bay as the water turned a shimmering pink, and a golden crown appeared atop Mount Tamalpais twenty miles away. He lifted a photo taken during vows at Mission Dolores: Isabella in a white lace dress and black velvet choker, silk flowers woven through her upswept hair, and he sporting a gray pinstripe morning coat, red cravat, and well-waxed handlebar.
"La luce splendida," he muttered, as
he had every morning since she died of pneumonia.
Above the faded cherry chiffonier an electric light suddenly burned. Byron had it installed two years earlier, when he had the house electrified, so that his Cantonese housekeeper, Mr. Lee, could signal his arrival and not be shot as an intruder. Byron took his Colt revolver from beneath the pillow—it is doubtful he had taken a step in more than thirty years without it—and padded across his bedroom on feet akin to bony flapjacks. His hips tilted left, his shoulders twisted right and his right hand, the one that clutched the Colt, dangled lower than the other. Tattooed by scars and divots, he moved like a broken puppet repaired by a drunken craftsman.
"I make Hunter room with fresh blanket for him," Mr. Lee said, as he poured hot water into the basin before hurrying back to the kitchen.
Byron stared through the tiny bathroom window to Mount Tamalpais across the bay.
"How's the miracle this morning?" Isabella's voice. It had happened often lately: her voice, the rustle of her skirt, the waft of her familiar scent. "Fine," he answered.
He washed and shaved and slid into a boiled shirt, brown bow tie, tan leather galluses, and a brown wool suit, purchased at the Emporium the previous week for the rather indulgent sum of nine dollars. He placed the Colt in a holster on his right hip, slipped a .32 caliber derringer into his right front pocket and a razor-sharp Buck knife in his left. Then he pinned a seven-pointed detective's golden star to the pocket of his vest.
In the kitchen, Byron toyed with his liver and eggs, a breakfast that had once caused normally taciturn Mr. Lee to ask him how white men could eat the things they do. The clanging of the Filbert Street cable car, his morning signal, sent Byron toward the door, his breakfast barely touched.
"Hunter make policeman like you, Lootenant Byron?" Mr. Lee asked as Byron headed for the door.
"No, Mr. Lee. We won't be needing him. By tomorrow, things will be different here."
Byron donned his bowler hat and stepped outside, inhaling the fragrant spring air that San Franciscans believe God created especially for them. Twelve blocks south, the lights of Market Street's hulking skyscrapers, some as high as eighteen stories, glowed carnival green against the violet light of morning. The jangle of forced laughter and tired fandangos drifted from the Barbary Coast saloons just below Telegraph Hill. He had heard but a few scattered gunshots the night before, the Coast almost tame compared to when he walked its streets as a patrolman years before.
He stared east, along the piers of the Embarcadero, a thousand masts waving back like an enormous field of wheat. Past and present jockeyed for position as stodgy, steam-powered tugs and graceful wind-powered clippers plowed against a meandering riptide. A paddle-wheel ferry and a tiny Whitehall boat crossed paths, the latter having deposited the latest shanghaied victims from the Barbary Coast at one of the barks or whalers anchored offshore.
Byron boarded the cable car for the steep three-block ride to Montgomery Street.
"Happy Easter, Lieutenant Fallon. I was down to Molinari's yesterday mornin' buyin' some strained tomatoes and Gino tol' me Hunter's comin' home from college." The city's only Negro gripman eased the brake lever and ratcheted up the hook that snagged the heavy cable underground. The six-ton car lurched forward, jerking and rumbling past the Victorian row houses.
"Yes, he does, Pericles. He comes home today."
"That will be one fine Easter present, Lieutenant Fallon."
"Yes, it will. And a Happy Easter to you too." Within seconds, the rising sun illuminated the entire bay and filled the cable car with blinding amber light.
It was the brilliant beginning to what Byron expected to be his most glorious day. Before the sun rose again over Telegraph Hill, he planned to arrest the mayor, city attorney, police chief, and all eighteen members of San Francisco's Board of Supervisors. It would be the greatest political coup and launch the biggest corruption trial in American history.
President Roosevelt himself would issue a statement from Washington, announcing that San Francisco would serve as the model for a national crusade against graft.
The heinous crimes of shanghaiing unwitting men and slave trading in helpless Chinese girls would finally end. Honest businessmen would no longer suffer the official extortions of City Hall. The blight of urban America, the rule of city "Bosses" and their political puppets would hear its death knell. If Roosevelt's grand scheme succeeded, Byron believed it would usher in a new era in democracy, one safe from the pervasive power of Big Business and Boss Rule to control every aspect of modern life.
By April 17, two days later, the appearance of the great Caruso at our Grand Opera House would be a coronation of virtue over evil, of good men replacing bad. Byron Fallon would wield the scalpel that excised the cancer eating at the heart of our beloved San Francisco, and the ripple would affect an entire nation.
What he did not know that morning was that the final task would not be his.
That duty would soon fall to another member of the Fallon clan.
Chapter 3
UNION STREET
APRIL 15, 1906. 6:00 A.M.
Christian Fallon's nightmare had begun a year earlier. At first it was a chorus of sounds: dogs howling, horses nickering, the tinkling of chandeliers, people whimpering, followed by the ghastly wrenching of post and beams, of roofs and floors collapsing. Within weeks of the first dream, the unnerving sounds were joined by terrible sights: cascading torrents of mortar and brick, plumes of smoke and flame billowing from a vast sea of wreckage, all finally joined by the noxious scent of burning paint and varnish, wood and flesh.
That Sunday morning, five hours after Christian, elder of Byron's two sons, returned from foot patrol on the Barbary Coast, was the seventh day in a row that his nightmare had raged full fury. He began to twitch, his thoughts a nickelodeon of horror: buildings ablaze, writhing victims and torn bodies scattered among the collapsed walls and chimneys, people dashing about bloodied and tear-streaked, naked or in nightclothes as dazed firemen watched helplessly near their fallen horses and shattered hydrants.
"Christian! Christian! Wake up! Christian!"
He opened his eyes to his wife Elizabeth staring down at him. At twenty-nine her delicate Welsh features were lined with fear and worry, her thick red hair sporting streaks of gray.
"Christian. Please. You have to tell somebody."
He squirmed in the creaking brass bed until the images faded and he could catch a breath. "Who should I tell, Elizabeth? My father? Chief Donen? So they can take my badge and send me down to Agnews with the other loonies? They already think I'm crazy." He slipped from beneath the patchwork quilt, retrieved his gray woolen trousers and a navy-blue sweater and tugged them over his knotted frame.
At five feet nine and a hundred and sixty-five pounds, he was the greatest bare-knuckle boxer on the Barbary Coast, where such matters are routinely determined. He had Byron's square jaw, Isabella's deep-set eyes and a face so chiseled it created its own shadows. Police work was the only profession he could follow. Fishing made him seasick and the numbers on a carpenter's rule appeared oddly backward. Bartending would have presented an even greater peril.
He was also the co-leader of a fearless group of five young Irish and Italian cops whom the Bulletin had dubbed "The Brotherhood" for both their familial relationship and devotion to the reformist rhetoric of the expatriate Irish priest, Father Peter Yorke. Along with his four cousins, Francis and Patrick Fagen, and Max and Carlo Rinaldi, they supplied the muscle and firepower for Byron Fallon's burgeoning war on shanghaiers and slave traders.
"I'll be back in time to take the kids to church," he said as he kissed her. Then he trudged down the dark, narrow stairway into the cool morning.
He paused briefly, staring down Union Street at the one-story shops and cheap two-story tenements, cluttered plumbing stores and faded blacksmith stables and grimy machine repair shops. Scattered among them were scores of taverns that served free lunches, saloons where working men drank ten cent shots of whiskey un
til dawn.
Christian tried to banish the nightmare from his foggy mind and shuffled down the heavy concrete sidewalk, everything padlocked and sleepy in a still morning air thick with salt from the bay marshes two blocks away. He arrived at the corner of Webster Street where a light burned in the Hartford Insurance office.
A tinkling bell announced his arrival.
Ian Senzon peered up through wire-rimmed glasses permanently embedded in his fleshy cheeks.
"Ian. I had a hunch you might be the only man on Union Street working Easter."
"Sunday morning, only time I get to catch up on my paperwork. You up early or getting home late?"
"Wasn't sleepin' too well. I was thinking maybe I should go ahead and take out that policy."
Ian dug through the clutter on his desk and found a blank application form. "Just fill in your name and sign it."
"This will protect everything?" Christian inquired.
"Since you don't own the building, there's no coverage on that. But all your possessions, your clothes, your furnishings, anything in case of fire. It's two policies actually. If anything happens to you, God forbid, Elizabeth will receive three thousand dollars. Something a cop should have, to my thinking."
Christian signed his name and slid over a dollar and twenty-three cents, two months' premium. He wished Ian a Happy Easter, then boarded the cable car as it made the morning's maiden journey to North Beach.
Christian loved few things—his family, Elizabeth and little Katie and young Byron—and after them, fighting and Irish whiskey. He was quick to rile and in a confrontation that required fists or firearms, there were few more capable. His temperament was so unlike Hunter's that Byron had sometimes wondered how they could be siblings.
A change had come over Christian that year, a pained and distant look that, coupled with a burgeoning indulgence in strong drink, worried his wife and his father to no end.
1906: A Novel Page 2