by John Jakes
The partners were eager to buy their second boat but could find nothing suitable. Mack was thinking about the problem when he crawled into his bunk late on Friday night. Bao was already snoring in the bed below. Mack lasted about three minutes, and then sleep plucked him away.
About midnight, a sound woke him. At first he couldn’t sort it out from the familiar lulling lap of the water on the ferry hull. He raked his hands through his sleep-mussed hair, listening. It sounded like a marine engine throttled back to minimum power. Who could be coming along at this time of night?
He glanced out the porthole beside his head, but could see only the rippling reflections of the red and white port and mast lanterns. He dropped over the side of the bunk and shook Bao’s bare shoulder.
“What is wrong?” Bao said, waking slowly.
“Not sure. I think we’ve some visitors. Or else someone’s way off course.” No one else ever docked at the half-collapsed pier by the mud flat.
In the dark Mack pulled on his suit of flannel underwear. Now he berated himself for not taking the precaution of keeping at least one pistol aboard Bay Beauty. They had simply assumed the SP would compete hard, but fairly.
Bao, having dressed quickly, poked Mack to signal that he was ready. Mack started for the companionway, only to stop again at a sound from above.
A footfall. Then many footfalls. Men jumping aboard.
He felt the other vessel bump their hull. “Who’s there?” he shouted, crashing the door open.
He rushed on deck and saw a dark figure swinging a sledge at a window of the pilothouse. Glass burst inward, the shards snatching the green glow of the starboard lantern and winking as they fell.
A quarter-moon shed pale misty light on the scene. Mack counted at least eight men. They’d come from a rust-bucket launch tied up alongside. A tall man with a familiar long beard was in charge, gesturing fore and aft with a crowbar. “Two of you see to the engines and the bilge pumps. Tear this fucking boat apart.”
Mack doubled his fists and charged. “Get the hell off this vessel—”
A man he didn’t see in time lunged in from his left, striking his legs with a two-handed sweep of a two-by-two. Mack fell and skidded chest-first on the deck. Bao jumped at the man, but he turned and drove the board into Bao’s ribs, hammering him back to the rail. Bao held his side, howling in Chinese.
Mack breathed in long wild gulps. Lurching to his feet, he scrambled up the steps to the pilothouse. Redbeard was inside, slipping his crowbar between spokes of the wheel. Quick leverage snapped four of them. Mack made it through the door just as Redbeard shattered the wheel yoke with two blows.
Mack leaped on him, but Redbeard hurled him off and started to bash him with the crowbar.
A piece of tooth flew out of Mack’s mouth and blood Spurted from his upper lip. Then Redbeard rammed the crowbar into his privates. Mack fell backward out the door. He grabbed for the stair rail and missed, landing on his back on deck, almost knocked out.
Redbeard clambered down and stomped on him. Mack cried out, clutching his middle. “Told you we didn’t want Chinks competing with white men in this bay,” Redbeard said. “Got it now, have you?” He made a kissing sound, spit on Mack’s face, and disappeared.
Mack fought the gut pain, pulling himself up by grasping the rail. He stumbled forward and wrestled an ax from a man savaging the hull. He heard someone’s sledge blasting out the last pilothouse window just as he rammed the ax handle under the man’s chin and shoved him over the side.
Mack felt dizzy with a mix of fright and rage. All around him, shadow-men wielded crowbars and axes. Bao ran here and there, punching, dodging blows, screeching curses in Chinese. It was futile; there were too many. Mack heard the inside benches splintering and, below, the tortured sound of metal being pried and bent. Down there too, someone was chopping the hull.
He staggered aft and found a man with a knife slashing the new awning he’d hung to protect the open stern deck. Bao rushed the man, grappling him around the waist and crushing him in a savage hug. The knife clacked on the deck. Another man, the one with the two-by-two, now raced at Bao from the dark.
“Bao, behind you!” Mack shouted. He started to run, but time seemed to liquefy and flow too slowly; he couldn’t cover the distance fast enough. His arms pumped. His bare feet slapped. Not fast enough—The man behind Bao swung the lumber; it seemed slow, so slow. Mack kept running, getting nowhere—The board struck the back of Bao’s head and he arched, pitched onto his knees…Horrified, Mack watched the blood splatter and spurt from Bao’s broken skull.
The man Bao held twisted away, laughing. Bao’s unpinned queue writhed like a black-and-red snake. Then Bao screamed, and time flowed again.
Mack leaped on Bao’s attacker and tore the two-by-two out of his hands. Then he beat him about the head with it, driving him back, using it like a sword. The man moaned, “Jesus,” and vaulted the rail into the water.
Bleeding and sweaty, Mack wiped mucus dripping from his nose. He felt the boat list and heard water gurgling. She was hulled.
Turning, he said, “Well, at least there’s one less of the sons of—”
The other man had found his fallen knife. Crouching over Bao, he turned to look at Mack, then rammed the blade into Bao’s chest and ran.
“She’s finished, boys. Good work. Let’s go.”
The ferry tilted more sharply, going down on the port side, scraping against the crusted and slimy pier pilings. Men were jumping back aboard the rust bucket, and her engines roared up and carried them away. She bore no running lanterns. Mack watched her white wake spread under the faint misty moon, Redbeard’s laughter carrying over the water.
Mack knelt and raised his partner’s heavy body in his arms, pulling Bao’s fat shoulders onto his knees. “Bao Kee. Oh God, Bao Kee.” He didn’t dare pull the knife out. “I’ll put you down. I’ll try not to hurt you. You lie here while I run for help…”
Bao’s eyes opened. He seemed to recognize who was holding him. His voice was faint and dry as rice-paper pages rustling.
“Kum Saan—Gold Mountain—is dust.”
He smiled, as if saying, That is life’s way and died in Mack’s arms.
Mack hoisted Bao Kee onto the pier and laid him under the moon while Bay Beauty slowly sank into the flowing high tide. The moon lit his tear-filled eyes. This was not going to be the end. By God, not nearly. He knew the man responsible and he knew where to find him.
14
THE FOLLOWING EVENING, C. P. Huntington received Walter Fairbanks in the large suite permanently reserved for the railroad chief on the seventh floor of the Palace Hotel. After Huntington’s clerk was sent into the next room and the door closed, they sat down for a working supper—oxtail soup, quail under glass, champagne.
The suite offered the same modern amenities found throughout the luxury hotel: fifteen-foot ceilings; call buttons connected with the desk downstairs and with a service pantry on the floor; elaborate multijet gas fixtures (electricity was promised but not yet installed); a completely private chamber equipped with bathtub, washstand, toilet. Such things no longer impressed Mr. Huntington. In his world, he expected them.
Collis Potter Huntington was sixty-seven. A Yankee peddler from Connecticut, he’d made his first substantial money as an Argonaut. On the Isthmus of Panama, he decided he could make some quick money by supplying potatoes, rice, sugar, and similar necessities to others who, like him, had started across the Isthmus on the way to California. To get his goods, Huntington went into the jungles to trade with local people, walking twenty and thirty miles one way on many a trip, defying the fevers and ticks and bad water that weakened and even killed lesser men. In those young days, he was hard as bar iron.
Later, in Sacramento, he went into the hardware business with a partner, forming Huntington Hopkins & Company of K and L streets. He frequently dashed to San Francisco to check incoming ships and temporarily corner the market for blasting powder, shovels, or other items in demand in th
e gold mines. It was in a room above the hardware store that he and the other men who would become the Big Four first heard the young engineer Theodore Judah propose his transcontinental railroad over the mountains. Huntington was no patriotic visionary; he liked the idea because it could create a monopoly on fast movement of freight to the Nevada silver mines and thus drive a lot of teamsters out of business.
A tall man, he was running to flab now. He maintained that symbol of business respectability, a neat full beard, gray-shot, and was an altogether unassuming and forgettable figure except for the black silk skullcap he wore to hide his humiliating baldness. When he was exercised, however, his keen blue-gray eyes caught fire. Men antagonized him at their peril; his enemies called him “ruthless as a crocodile.”
At the moment, supper over and pressing business out of the way, he was expounding some of his philosophy to the smartly dressed attorney.
“I have a broad interpretation of the term corporate expense, Walter. Rails and rolling stock are legitimate expenses, but so is the money we spend for a politician’s vote in the state legislature or the Congress. I can tell you precisely how much it costs, in either body, to pass a bill favorable to us. I cheerfully disburse money to politicians who have done right by us, friendly newspapers, the local Associated Press man, many others. Spending generates control. Control generates profit.”
“That’s a breathtaking concept, Mr. Huntington.”
Huntington wasn’t lulled by the flattery. “It’s just the way I operate. You’d better too, if you want to get ahead in this company. You have a lot of promise. You don’t let niggling scruples stand in me way of the right deal, the right contract. That’s why I wanted to share—”
There was a loud knocking on the door.
“No one else is expected,” Huntington said, fire in his eye. “Pedley!” he shouted. “See who’s there and send him packing.”
As the clerk ran from the adjoining bedroom into the foyer, Huntington waited, seeming, while the knocking continued.
On the other side of the double doors, Mack shot looks both ways along the gallery. Below, in the Grand Court, a string trio played, and the hoofs of carriage horses rapped on marble paving. The Montgomery Street entrance was a half-oval that allowed patrons to be driven right into the hotel.
Mack’s face bore garish bruises and his chest, thighs, and stomach ached. He’d put on a jeans jacket, clean but shabby, given him that morning by an Oakland harbor mission, along with everything from shirt to shoes. He’d scrubbed up and combed his hair, but even so, no one would ever mistake him for a Palace guest. Outside the barbershop on the Jessie Street side of the hotel, he’d slipped the shoeshine boy a nickel for the number of Huntington’s suite. Then he’d sneaked through a passage next to the billiard parlor and climbed seven flights of a service stair; he didn’t dare risk a ride in one of the mirror-paneled elevators.
He knocked again, his eye fixed on the nearby pantry; he hoped he got inside before the butler got back from his errand.
The doors opened.
“I want to see Mr. Huntington.”
The whey-faced clerk with round glasses blocked his move forward. Over the man’s shoulder, Mack saw a bearded man wearing a skullcap; he recognized him from engravings and photographs.
“Mr. Huntington is not available without prior—”
Mack’s hands shot to the clerk’s shoulders and he shoved him sideways with no trouble, then stepped inside and kicked the doors shut. As he strode through the foyer to the spacious sitting room, Huntington, who had leaped up, angrily hurled a napkin to the carpet. Mack saw a second man now, and it took him aback: Fairbanks. The lawyer’s index finger smoothed his tiny auburn mustache, a nervous motion.
“I’ll have your job,” Huntington spat at the visitor. “I am a valued patron of this hotel, and no employee dares break in on—”
“Sir, he doesn’t work here,” Fairbanks said. “This is one of the owners of the nickel ferry.”
“What?”
“This is Chance, sir.”
“What I own is forty percent of nothing,” Mack said. “The ferry’s at the bottom of the Inner Harbor.”
Huntington came around from behind the table as if loath to use it as a barrier and Fairbanks stepped back quickly out of his way. Huntington confronted Mack eye to eye. He was several inches taller.
“So you had an accident—” he began.
“Which you and your damned railroad arranged and paid for.”
“That’s ludicrous. An insult. Make sense, young man.”
“Try this. Your thugs did a thorough job. They sank our boat and then one of them smashed my partner’s head open, stuck a knife in him, and killed him. A decent harmless Chinese who just wanted the right to earn a living. You’re a murderer, Huntington.”
Fairbanks clamped a suntanned hand on Mack’s arm.
“I’ll handle this,” Huntington exclaimed as Mack flung Fairbanks off.
Fairbanks hesitated, momentarily resentful, but Huntington paid no attention. “By heaven, sir,” he said to Mack, “if you think that the Southern Pacific Corporation, or I personally, would ever stoop to employing physical violence of the kind you describe, you’re a madman. I will compete with you, or anyone, legitimately. I will employ every business means at my disposal. But I do not condone wanton destruction, or murder—I would never authorize either, and I am outraged to hear you suggest otherwise.”
Huntington’s combative style and his certitude made Mack less certain. “Someone arranged it,” he said.
“Open the door, Pedley,” Fairbanks said, knocking aside fronds of a potted palm as he started for the foyer. “I’ll get someone to help us remove—”
“I said I would handle this.”
Again Fairbanks stopped.
Huntington stepped closer to Mack, never blinking. “I do know your name, Mr. Chance. I have an extensive file on your shabby little ferryboat. I instructed Mr. Fairbanks to make you a substantial offer for the assets of the line—an offer you spurned. Now you come here saying I was forced to resort to hiring thugs. Absurd. Where’s your evidence?”
“I…” Mack’s mouth felt dusty.
Huntington leaped on his hesitation. “I’ll tell you where it is. There isn’t any evidence, because what you said is a pernicious lie, and you are either beside yourself with emotion, or a criminal lunatic. Get out of here, you gutter scum.”
Something flared in Mack’s head. He leaped for Huntington with both hands.
“Great God,” Huntington cried, reeling sideways and groping behind him. Fairbanks shot between them and threw Mack backward just as Huntington’s hand caught the tablecloth and brought down an avalanche of crystal, china, champagne bottles, serving domes, food, and drink.
Mack stumbled against a writing desk, then righted himself. Fists up, Fairbanks ran at him, malicious anticipation in his gray-metal eyes. Mack got his own fists in position in time to deflect the lawyer’s whipping right hand.
Mack tried to recall some of what Corbett taught him. He bobbed left and feinted, and Fairbanks’s next punch sailed by. The lawyer looked astonished. Mack took the opportunity to jab his jaw—it glanced off—then crossed with his left. That blow was solid. Fairbanks’s eyes glazed a moment and he retreated.
Mack didn’t press. He felt a fool, trying to box in the middle of a sitting room. Huntington ran by, throwing him the kind of look he might give a plague rat. “Damn you, Pedley, stand aside.” Doors crashed open; cello music and a faint hum of Grand Court activity drifted in. Huntington’s voice had a hollow quality as he shouted down seven floors.
“Police! Get the police up here! This is Huntington—I’ve been assaulted!”
Mack scanned the four doorways that opened off the sitting room. Could he escape through any of them? Which one? He’d been stupid to let his grief and rage goad him into this. What had he expected—that Huntington would fall to his knees and babble a confession?
In the corner of his eye he caught b
lurred motion. Mack spun toward Fairbanks, whipping up his guard. But the lawyer was faster, his punch well aimed and powerfully delivered. Mack’s head snapped back and he went down. He flopped on the thick carpet and watched the gas nozzles of the ceiling fixture go round and round like a carousel. The floor spun under him. Damn fool, when will you learn?
Dazed, he heard the elevator stop, and then the police came charging along the gallery.
Mack lay on his back on the stone floor. It was the only space he could find. Five men were squeezed into a holding cell at the Kearny Street jail that was designed for two. The cell had no lights and it reeked of a full waste bucket in the corner.
A pickpocket had claimed the iron bunk. Two drunks maundered and bickered. The bull-like figure of Diego Marquez occupied the only stool. When the police threw Mack in the holding cell, he’d been astonished to discover Marquez among the prisoners. The priest had listened attentively while Mack told of his misadventures with the ferry, and his accusation of Huntington. Now Marquez sat perfectly still, powerful hands folded in his lap, while lying on the floor, Mack tried to sort out the truth from suppositions and outright fantasies generated by his anger. He slipped his hands under his head, thinking aloud.
“Maybe Huntington was telling the truth. Plenty of white men on the waterfront hate the Chinese, especially a successful one. Bao poached on Redbeard’s oyster beds, and I saw Redbeard watching us the first morning we ran the ferry…” He changed position, resting his crossed wrists on his forehead. “I don’t know what to think.”
“I think you ought to shut up,” one of the drunks muttered.
“Go to hell.”
The pickpocket lurched from the bunk, and pissed noisily into the waste pail. Marquez unfolded his hands and turned slightly on the stool. The gaslight that came through the barred doors at the end of the corridor of cells revealed dark bruises around both eyes, stigmata of a recent beating.
“I think I would agree with you about Huntington,” the priest said. “He probably wasn’t responsible. He hires politicians to drive out his competitors, not criminals. It’s too bad that you’ll never have a positive answer, but you won’t. You know the railroad’s passion for secrecy.”
