1906: A Novel

by Dalessandro, James

  "Heard y'r boy come home ta'day, Lieutenant."

  Byron nodded and forced a smile. He entered the Hall of Justice and promptly took the elevator to the sixth floor.

  The elevator doors opened to his nephew, Anthony Fallon, a gangly, simpleminded rookie dressed in a thick blue tunic and busy measuring the hat size of a defiant Tong who sat naked on a wooden stool. "Six and a quarter," Anthony called.

  Sergeant Whiskey Willy Tate scribbled an illegible number next to "Crown Size" on the Bertillon sheet.

  "You sure you're doing it right this time, Anthony?" Byron called out. "Yes, sir, Uncle Byron, Lieutenant, sir. Done it three times, like it says on the chart." Anthony pointed to the wall where dozens of charts on eye color and ear shapes hung under the banner "Bertillon System of Criminal Identification."

  "Where's the other one?"

  "That Chinese lady, Ah Toy, come by and made bail for 'im. Soon's I'm finished with this one, he's sprung too."

  A rill of acid bubbled in Byron's throat.

  "Uncle Byron. I mean Lieutenant Fallon, sir. Father Yorke is waiting in your office."

  Byron bolted through the fire door, his footsteps clanking on the iron steps as he scampered to the Detective Bureau a floor below. He burst through the back door and skipped across the heavily stained floor.

  Four detectives were scattered among the forty wooden desks, a long leather belt flapped softly as it turned the ceiling fans overhead. He spotted Father Yorke through the glass window that separated his office from the detectives' squad room. The last time Yorke had shown up on a Sunday, Christian had been stabbed while on patrol.

  "Peter. What the hell are you doing here?"

  Peter Yorke, the Warrior Priest, a stout man with thinning hair and a raspy baritone, had been a leading figure in the Irish revolt until the British sent him packing under threat of death. His ministry now included the San Francisco waterfront and the souls who were quarry to shanghaiers and boardinghouse owners. He turned to the man sitting next to him, a human scarecrow shivering and wet inside a gray woolen blanket.

  Jessie Fallon cast his sunken eyes up at Byron and sent a jolt through his uncle's heart.

  "My Lord, what the hell happened, Jessie? We tore the city apart looking for you and Elliot! Almost six months you've been gone."

  It took a moment for Jessie to find his voice. "Kelly. Shanghaied us an hour after we pinched two of his men. Six of 'em jumped us. The Whale, Scarface, didn't get a look at the rest. Never had a chance to draw our revolvers. Belaying pins, busted us up real good."

  "I'd tried ta' take 'im to Doc Genovese," Father Yorke intoned. "He insisted on seein' you first."

  Jessie struggled, his voice reed thin and trembling. "They shipped us on a British bark, the Liverpool. Twelve of us shanghaied. Limey captain laughed when Elliot told him we were cops. Elliot liked to have a fit, demandin' they take us back to San Francisco. Captain tied him to the boom, made the crew take turns floggin’ ‘im. I tried to stop it. When I come to again, my head was split, my ribs was busted. Elliot looked half-dead, ain't never seen a man beat so bad." Jessie chewed a piece of biscuit, his stare a thousand yards away. "Near the end, they give us two tablespoons of rancid beans, half a cup of water. Men was eatin' their leather belts, drinkin' their own piss. Elliot. . . ."

  "Take your time, Jessie," Byron told his nephew.

  "Elliot. Elliot stole a crust of stale bread. They give him forty lashes. Captain tied him naked to the anchor chain, above the water line so's the salt water would lick his wounds. They locked me in the fo'c'sle so I couldn't get to him. It was freezing. I could hear Elliot screaming, banging against the bow, then he got real hoarse, his voice gave out. They up and left him there for the birds to pick at."

  Jessie's lip trembled, his skin translucent, the blue veins around his eyes twitching with his spiny jaw. Byron produced a flask of brandy and Jessie sipped.

  "Half the lot of them jumped ship as soon as they hit harbor," Father Yorke added. "Once they abandoned ship, the captain kept their wages. Three of the poor souls drowned. The Sausalito ferry fished Jessie and two others out of the bay."

  "When I get my strength back," Jessie said, "I'll put a bullet in Kelly's kneecaps and one in his skull. Three bullets, one for Elliot, one for me, and one for the rest of the men."

  Through the glass partition, Byron spotted the desk sergeant pointing Hunter toward his office. "Father, take Jessie to Doc Genovese. Don't feed him too much or his belly will burst. I'll get a signed statement from him later."

  "I want to be there, Byron. When Kelly gets his bloody due and an honest man can walk the waterfront."

  "You can give him last rites at the hanging, Father."

  Father Yorke took Jessie by the arm and helped raise him from the chair.

  Hunter was so anxious to see his father he failed to recognize his cousin Jessie as he squeezed past him at the door.

  "Hello, dad."

  "Hunter. Welcome home, son. You're all finished then?"

  "Graduation isn't until May, but I finished my last examination this morning. I put a motorcycle together. A proto-type they call it, not even in production. Broke the state speed record."

  "You graduated first in your class, did you?"

  "Yes, sir. I did two graduate projects instead of one, the motorcycle and a water survey for Chief Sullivan. I dropped it off at the fire station a little while ago. The Chief looked like he aged some. All that fire and worry."

  Hunter offered an uncertain smile, dismayed at how old and tired his father looked.

  "I imagine you're going on some interviews with engineering firms. Last I looked, nobody's built that bridge across the Golden Gate you were always talking about."

  "I'm going to have to put off bridge building for a time. I have a job already."

  Byron stared at him uneasily. "And what might that be?"

  "I joined the Department."

  "I'm sorry, son. I thought I heard you say you joined the Department."

  "Yes, sir. That's what I said."

  "Ahh, so I'm not deaf. No. The answer's no."

  "I thought maybe you had to take a test or go through some kind of training or something. Six years into the twentieth century and all you have to do to be a San Francisco cop is fill out a piece of paper and sign your name on it."

  "No one told me about it."

  "I asked the recruiting sergeant not to say anything. It was a surprise."

  "I'll have a word with him. The answer's no."

  "Dad, I'm almost twenty-three. I'm a grown man. I earned my own way through Stanford, never asked anyone for a dime. I didn't do it out of disrespect."

  "Don't play possum with me, Hunter. How many times have we had this conversation?"

  "It was more like a monologue, dad."

  "And don't patronize me. I had this conversation with your mother a few days before she died. She made me swear on the Holy Book. Six years of college, a master's degree, all those awards. For what? To walk the Barbary Coast and risk your life for twenty-two dollars a week?"

  "The waiters have a union, the housepainters have a union, even the piano polishers have one. Maybe if the men in the department got organized like everyone else in this city, they wouldn't have to settle for pitiful wages and take bribes from shanghaiers and opium dealers so they can feed their families."

  Byron walked over and made sure the door was tightly closed. "Watch what you say between these walls, Hunter. The manure shovelers will have a union before we do."

  "I'm sorry, dad. I have ideas eating me up inside. Last month the New York City cops won a murder case using fingerprints. Fingerprints!

  What do we have, the stupid Bertillon system? Measuring someone's hat size? 'Yeah, officer, the guy who robbed me had a distended ear lobe and a black spot on his iris. His hat size was seven, maybe seven and a quarter’. Fingerprints, dad. We could solve half the unsolved murders in San Francisco with fingerprints, evidence collection, crime scene photographs."


  "I got this sinking feeling nothing I say is going to matter to you."

  "If Christian can cut it, so can I."

  "The only thing you two have in common is stubbornness."

  Byron looked at the clock. It was not half over yet and the finest day of his long career was dying before it started.

  "You chose your life, dad. All I'm doing is choosing mine. If you would rather, I can get my badge and weapon from the desk sergeant."

  "The Fallons hang their own dogs, son." Byron walked behind his battered desk and pulled a shiny a patrolman's star from a drawer.

  Hunter held his hand out. Byron ignored it and pinned the star to the pocket of Hunter's shirt. "You could walk a beat on the Coast ten years before you make it up here to the Bureau, Hunter. That's hoping you live that long."

  "Nobody kills the Fallons, dad. It's the Irish in 'em."

  "You keep talking malarkey like that and I'll have to do what no man ever wants to do. Bury his own child. From now on, as long as you work here, I'm your boss, not your father. Understood?"

  "Yes."

  "Yes, sir."

  "Yessir."

  "Come with me. I'll get you your weapon."

  He led his self-conscious son across the squad room as the detectives stared.

  "They hate us," Byron said quietly. "Get used to it."

  Christian arrived at the top of the stairs, still sweating from a workout at the police gym that included six rounds of boxing with his burly cousin, Max Rinaldi. Christian moved deliberately across the room, stopping to return the hostile stares of the few detectives scattered about the room. He stopped when he got close to his father and was about to speak when he noticed Hunter's shirt.

  "Jesus Christ, dad, tell me that ain't a star he's wearin'."

  "It's Easter Sunday, Christian, try to show the Lord a little respect one day a year."

  Byron left Christian stewing and joined Hunter in the corner of the room.

  He pointed Hunter to a dusty desk with foot-high stacks of paper. Wagon wheels thundered, horses whinnied frantically in the street below.

  "These animals have been crazed for a week now," Byron said, waiting for the ruckus to diminish. He had difficulty looking at Hunter. "Can you use a typing machine like this?"

  "Yes, sir. I bought Jack London's old one from him when we were at University Prep. Remington Number Seven. We boxed some, him and me. Hell of a sailor, good street fighter but not much with the gloves on. All that dissipation and what not."

  Byron stifled an unwelcome grin. Since childhood, Hunter had instinctively offered twelve answers for every question he had been asked. "Then this is your weapon. Get done what you can, then get your camera and all the film you can muster up. Meet me at Digli's on Montgomery at noon."

  Hunter started to protest but thought the better of it. Beginning his career with an act of insubordination might not do wonders for his tenure. He looked down at the desk and thumbed the edge of the ragged pile.

  The reports were handwritten, barely legible and bore dark brown stains that were either coffee or blood. He scanned the top page; a complaint from a prostitute named Susie Starr who claimed her pimp Antoine owed her two hundred dollars and gave her a runny dose. Hunter's enthusiasm for police work suffered its first setback.

  Byron gazed over at Christian, who smirked nearby, then turned back to Hunter. "Tonight you can go visit Jessie and see how he's doing. I have work to do."

  "Jessie? Jessie who?"

  "Your cousin. That was him you passed on the way in."

  "What happened to him?"

  "He tried to arrest Shanghai Kelly's men," Byron said, lingering to see it register with his son.

  Byron took a few steps toward the center of the room, where he spoke softly to Christian. "Meet me at Meigg's Wharf at seven o'clock tonight. And don't be late this time or I'll have your badge and your hide."

  "What's going on at Meigg's Wharf?"

  "You'll find out when you get there. When you leave the wharf, I'll have warrants for you and The Brotherhood to serve on John Kelly and his men."

  "Easter Sunday?"

  "Father Yorke brought in Jessie this morning. He and Elliot got shanghaied aboard a British bark by Kelly's men. Scarface, the Whale, probably Chicken Devine, that dirty lot always sticks together."

  "Where's Elliot?"

  "The English captain flogged him to death, left his bones for the birds to pick at." Byron could see the fury rising in his oldest son, his jaws working so intently Christian could not have spoken had he cared to.

  "And stay out of the bars. I want no tomfoolery when we pinch them up tonight, understood?"

  Christian offered a pained nod, and then waited until his father was out of earshot.

  He eased himself enough to reclaim his smirk and sauntered over to his brother. "You know, Hunter, a career as the department secretary ain't that bad. Really."

  "Go to Hell, Christian. I can fight and shoot as well as any man in here." He looked toward his father, his braggadocio fading to concern. "What's dad up to that he's working Easter Sunday? He looks worried."

  "Don't know. He's probably just a little daft his favorite son decided to chuck all that learnin' and make flatfoot like the rest of his sorry kin."

  "There's something else."

  "See there, Hunter. You made detective already."

  "Just like I can tell you don't have a clue what he's up to, and it riles you."

  "Maybe we can just stop beatin' on guys, let you read their minds for us."

  Hunter smiled and stared intently at Christian. His older brother looked like he had shrunk in those six years, the cocky grin unable to mask a troubled spirit.

  Christian examined him like a shepherd dog cocking his head from side to side. "I don't know what dad's up to. But you're right. It must be something if he's working on Easter."

  Chapter 6

  NOB HILL

  APRIL 15, 1906. 11:00 A.M.

  I share the controversial notion that the imperial throne of America lies—or did so until recently—not on Pennsylvania Avenue or upper Broadway, but three thousand miles away, on a four-block area of San Francisco known as Nob Hill, so named for the British slang for wealthy: Nabob, or Nob. The American West may not have been built from the Atlantic Ocean outward, as generally assumed, but from the Pacific Ocean inward.

  Several decades ago, the mansions along our eastern waterfront sank through the paddy-shoveled sand into the muck of Rincon Swamp. Soon after, a Scottish wire-rope manufacturer named Andrew Hallidie invented the cable car. Leland Stanford, the principal force behind the western stretch of the transcontinental railroad, financed a cable line up California Street where Nob Hill, once the domain of goats and fresh-air enthusiasts, was quickly parceled like a giant chessboard.

  Stanford and his partners, Collis Huntington, Charles Crocker, and Mark Hopkins, the infamous Big Four, fled to the high ground. They began a chess match of architectural excesses that was described as "an orgy of gingerbread and ignorance."

  The Great Fixer, politician-buying Collis Huntington, struck first, erecting a French château containing enough forged artwork, overstuffed furnishings, funereal drapery, and maudlin decor to earn the moniker "The Big Embalming House."

  A block east, Stanford—who proclaimed while driving the gold spike at Promontory Point, Utah, in 1867 that he had "annexed America," turning the most ambitious construction project in history into the most corrupting influence in American life—soon topped him. The Giant of California built a fifty-room palace whose entrance boasted a seventy-foot high vestibule with the twelve signs of the zodiac done in black marble. Castle Stanford offered a hothouse conservatory, indoor Corinthian pillars of red Aberdeen granite, mechanical singing birds, a music room where a servant changed cylinders every few minutes so that a continual stream of classical music was piped throughout the house, a miniature railroad, and enough gilded mirrors to make escape nearly impossible.

  Stanford had once introduced his new
born son, Leland Jr., to his well-heeled pals by presenting the infant on a silver tray, naked amidst a bed of orchids and chrysanthemums.

  On the adjacent parcel, while eccentric Mark Hopkins was riding about town on a mule selling homegrown tomatoes, his wife Mary built a Norman castle with a Palace of Doges drawing room, velvet-upholstered doors, and a cavernous bedroom replete with angels in precious stone, beneath which she devoured wanton novels whose virginal heroines were prone to bouts of sexual delirium. A relieved Mark Hopkins died before the mansion was completed: the building then became the Hopkins Art Institute.

  Next, Charles Crocker built a French château across from Huntington, turning fifty wood-carvers loose on a patchwork of plinths, cornices, overwrought wainscots, fluted corners, and dizzying curlicues that resembled a cuckoo clock factory constructed by a cloistered madman.

  It was these same Railroad Barons, whose wealth and power corrupted every facet of modern American life, who inspired Frank Norris - in The Octopus - and Ambrose "Bitter" Bierce to take up pen against them, provoking a national outcry.

  I had plenty of time to reacquaint myself with Nob Hill. For several hours that Easter morning, I waited at the as-yet unopened Fairmont Hotel at California and Mason, directly across from where interloper Adam Rolf, whose obsession with being included in the nefarious club had earned him the title of "The Half in the Big 41/2." He had finalized the competition with a Mediterranean-style behemoth sheathed in two-ton Connecticut brownstone slabs. Alcatraz seemed flimsy by comparison.

  As I watched from a fourth-floor window of the Fairmont, scheduled to open that Wednesday, April 18, a parade of painters, plumbers, masons, and upholsterers wove their way through dozens of San Francisco's newest landmarks. Pickets. Pickets seeking higher wages for chambermaids, Industrial Unionism, shorter hours for carpenters, Suffrage for women, jobs for Negroes, vegetarianism, enforced temperance, recruits for Socialism, an end to Imperialism, and a return to God. The Prevent Premature

  Burial consortium and the short-lived Committee for Improved Mastication ("32 Chews to a Healthier You") appeared to have lost steam to the point of near-extinction, as had the Back to Africa outfits. A roller skater headed for the frightening plunge down Mason Street almost took one of the Temperance women with him.