California Gold

by John Jakes

“Any news, sir?”

  “Same as yesterday. And the day before. And last week. No one’s seen him.”

  Alex cleared his throat. Two boys ran by rolling hoops. “Yes, sir…Well. I’ve been waiting anxiously for you to return.” They continued a slow walk down the trampled lane between the tents. Three were empty. Mack had let most of the servants go; he wouldn’t need them in a new place, and they had left to find other jobs. He’d paid each of them six months’ wages.

  Alex pointed to the tent established as a temporary office. “Mr. Haverstick has an agenda of urgent matters needing your attention. Particularly the insurance claims.”

  “Rhett knows my feeling. If those companies try to discount my claims so much as one percent, I’ll take them to court for eternity. People in San Francisco paid premiums for years in good faith. Now some of these crooks turn around and chisel.”

  “Yes, sir, there is a problem in that regard. Our claims with Aetna of Hartford are in fine shape: But Hamburg-Bremen Insurance is reneging.”

  “Sue the bastards,” Mack said darkly, thrusting his hands in his pockets. “Hire the best lawyers in Germany. I can afford to fight those welshers for all the people who can’t. What else have you got?”

  “These, sir.”

  He displayed the roll of plans hesitantly. “Mr. Starr dropped these by this morning.”

  “Who the hell’s Mr. Starr?”

  “Mr. Kingsley Starr, sir. Of the firm of Starr and Meldrum. Original architects of your house.”

  “The mansion?”

  “Yes, sir. Mr. Starr assumed that with rebuilding starting up all over town at such incredible speed, you would want to…” Mack’s tired dead eyes bored into him, making him falter. “He—uh—brought the original plans, together with sketches of some suggested modifications.”

  Mack kept staring. Alex cleared his throat once again.

  “Of course, sir, the architect knew nothing about your son being missing. He only meant to be helpful.”

  Mack’s truculent expression softened, and he extended his hand. Relieved, Alex gave him the plans.

  “Tell Rhett I’ll see him tomorrow or the next day,” Mack said. “I’m going to nap for an hour. Then I’m going to the camp at Harbor View. I haven’t asked there for a week.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Mack started away, then noticed Alex on tiptoe.

  “Something else?”

  “Only, sir, that—may I say—we all remain deeply grieved by your loss. But we’re confident Jim will be found alive.”

  “Thanks, Alex. I’m sure too. It can’t come out any other way.”

  In his dark tent, with a bright swathe of pale sun and leaf shadow on the canvas, Mack stared at the plans. Rebuild that place? Now? He wanted to laugh. Or burn the plans in the barbeque, which Angelina Olivar tended in her role as housekeeper. Instead, he tossed the plans under his cot and lay down. He slept and dreamed of Jim and the blizzard again, waking abruptly in the midst of a hard rain and howling wind that nearly knocked the tent down. His cheeks were wet with tears of fright and, soon, fresh tears of guilt.

  Wild Bill Flyshack was not a pleasant man. Slovenly and crude, he spoke with a constant leavening of sarcasm. He chewed rather than smoked cigars, and was always spitting out specks of green wrapper.

  “Pinkerton’s will need a photograph of your son, Mr. Chance.”

  Mack explained why he had none.

  Flyshack spat. “You mean to say you had two pictures and you didn’t even save one? You saved an oil portrait of yourself, I notice.”

  “I wasn’t the one who—Never mind. Do you want to discuss my deficiencies, or this case? All you need is a photograph of my former wife. There are plenty of those. Jim looks exactly like her.”

  “Nobody looks exactly like anybody,” said Wild Bill Flyshack.

  “For Christ’s sake, will you try to find him or not?”

  “For the retainer you’re paying, we’ll hunt for St. Peter and all the archangels and throw in Judas.”

  “I’ll pay a substantial bonus over and above the reward when you locate him.”

  “If Mr. Chance, if. I courted my wife for sixteen years. I pursued her, I pleaded with her, I beggared myself buying her presents. On my forty-third birthday she said yes. On our second day at our honeymoon cabin, lightning hit the outhouse and fried her. Nothing in this world is guaranteed—especially not the life of a boy gone this long under these circumstances.”

  63

  SLOWLY A SEMBLANCE OF normal life returned, and the municipal government began to function again. Inevitably, the truce of good will between the Ruef machine and its enemies, the truce that prevailed in those first days when the priorities were cooperation and survival—inevitably that truce was forgotten. Burns set operatives to digging. Through the influential men who backed him, Francis Heney exerted pressure on District Attorney Langdon and Langdon agreed to make Heney an assistant DA at the appropriate time.

  Mack decided he couldn’t live and conduct his business in the park forever, and began to search for a large flat to rent. He quickly found there was no rental space to be had, so he bought a two-floor building on Greenwich Street, on the Bay side of Russian Hill, which the fire had spared. The earthquake had demolished the owner’s brewery. His wife, a spiritualist, earnestly explained to Mack that the dead striving to escape from the earth had broken it open along the fault line and caused the quake. Husband and wife wanted no more of San Francisco. For cash they closed the sale of the duplex and moved out the same day.

  The building was frame, with large bay windows in front. Mack set up offices in the lower apartment and lived above. The house was identified by its number; there was no name outside, no initials.

  Alex hung the Sargent behind Mack’s desk. Mack didn’t want it there, or anywhere about him, but somehow Alex considered it important to hang the portrait, so he didn’t press the issue.

  Mack chose to live alone. Señora Olivar came in from 7 A.M. to 7 P.M. each day to cook and clean. He found her a small house on a sandy windswept street out near the ocean. Alex Muller lived in a rooming house and applied for housing in one of the fifty-six hundred refugee cottages being pounded together in the parks. Winter would come soon, winter and its rain, and tents wouldn’t serve. The hideous little houses stood in dreary rows with scarcely a foot between them. Some had two rooms, some three. Alex and Sophia planned to be married before Christmas, and as a family, they were eligible to rent one of the cottages.

  Professor Lorenzo Love lived in a rooming house too. There was nothing for him to do. Mack knew it was foolish to keep paying the tutor’s salary, but he did so out of a superstitious belief that as long as Love was kept on, Jim would be found. Mack shaved his beard and he finally bought spectacles, round with steel wire frames. Having sold the Silver Ghost, he bought a small black Oldsmobile. He didn’t mark it with the familiar cartouche; nothing bore that insignia anymore.

  One day in late July, Haverstick telephoned Mack with great excitement. “There’s a letter that you should see. The signature’s unreadable, and the sender doesn’t mention the reward, only the flyer. But the description fits. I mean it fits perfectly.”

  Mack nearly wrecked his auto driving over to the reopened law offices. He slammed open the gate in the waiting-room rail, brought a shriek from a stenographer just backing out of a supply closet, and practically tore the crudely written envelope from the hand of his attorney. It bore a blurred address in Visalia, in the Central Valley.

  Person you seek resides with Randolph family, Wild Horse Road, Visalia …

  There followed a perfect description, without mention of the false birthmark. Mack couldn’t help feeling an enormous surge of hope. “Did you call Flyshack?”

  “No, he’s down below the border in Ensenada, checking out another lead.”

  “Good, I’ll go to Visalia myself.”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t do that, Mack. You can’t be sure this isn’t another—”

  “This time
I feel it. I feel it. It’s Jim. I’m going.”

  He spent a sleepless night staring out the window of a sooty railroad car, and late the next afternoon, in blistering heat typical of the Valley at that time of year, he stopped his hired buggy on a dusty yellow side road identified back at the turnoff as Wild Horse Road. The side road had become too narrow for the buggy, so he hiked the last quarter-mile between broad flat fields, sweat soaking him under his duster.

  His hope sagged a little when he saw the pitiful plank shanty at the end of the dirt track. A sickly rooster scratched in the dust and ran off as he approached, and he smelled pigs in a pen. He remembered Haverstick’s skeptical expression when he said he’d make the trip personally, and he began to have a feeling that he’d let his emotions run away with him. And yet if there were the slightest possibility…

  He knocked on the ramshackle door, his heart hammering.

  An old gray-haired woman in a faded and patched print dress opened the door. Her skin was blue-black.

  “Yes?”

  Mack’s heart was heavy as a rock then. With sweating hands he fumbled the letter and a flyer from an inside pocket. “Is this— That is, I’m looking for Randolph—”

  “Yes, this is the Randolphs.”

  “I’m from San Francisco. I received this letter saying—that is, there’s a young man missing, you see. A white boy, with blond hair and a bad limp. He’s my son. The letter says he’s living here.”

  Her eyes suddenly sad with sympathy, she opened the door wide. “Mister, I can’t read that letter, nor write, but the only lame boy here is my grandson Lester. Yonder.” Mack saw a black boy about Jim’s age, standing with a homemade crutch under his left arm.

  “Jesus,” Mack said, unable to stop the tears welling. “Jesus, why would someone write a letter like this?”

  “You got somebody that don’t like you?” the woman said softly. “There’s a lot of cruel-hearted people out in the world. I’m mighty sorry if one of ’em tried to hurt you.”

  Who? he thought. Carla? No—ridiculous—she wasn’t that depraved. Fairbanks, then? Or someone in the San Francisco Police Department with relatives in Visalia? Someone who’d found out about the false birthmark reference, and thought he’d play a fine joke with just a letter and a stamp? Mack knew he’d never learn the answer. Jesus God, she’s right—what kind of despicable scum is out there? he thought, shaking his head to fight back the hot tears.

  The woman was watching him, concerned. He collected himself and gently squeezed her arm. “I’m sorry I disturbed you. I’m very sorry…” He turned and stumbled away, hearing the door close behind him.

  He was still churning with fury and disappointment, but he had enough presence of mind to leave a $100 bill under a stone, but visible, in the center of the yard. Then he walked on toward the buggy, his face dead and expressionless.

  Back in the City, Haverstick was sympathetic about the incident, but candid too. “You’ve got to expect that sort of thing.”

  “That kind of viciousness?”

  “Yes. Look how Jim was crippled in the first place. You’re neither bland nor uncontroversial, Mack. You’ve made enemies. It happens to anyone who accomplishes anything. And you’ve accomplished a great deal. I’m sorry, but that’s the truth.”

  For days afterward, Mack still felt numb. It was then, for the first time, that he began to admit to himself, in the deep privacy of his heart, that Flyshack’s warnings about the difficulties of finding Jim, especially as more time passed, might—just might—be right.

  That summer saw the resumption of politics as usual in San Francisco. The SP didn’t like the incumbent governor, George Pardee, feeling that he was not quite friendly enough, cooperative enough. Through its spokesmen, Herrin and Fairbanks, the railroad announced support of James Gillett, congressman from the First District, as the Republican candidate. He was the personal choice of the SP’s president, Mr. Harriman.

  The party’s nominating convention was to be held in Santa Cruz in the first week of September. Abe Ruef controlled all the members of the San Francisco delegation, and they in turn could tip a nomination one way or another by voting as a bloc, according to the Boss’s directions. It was assumed that Ruef would endorse Gillett, but he surprised everyone by letting it slip before the convention opened that he wanted the nomination for J. O. Hayes, publisher of the San Jose Mercury.

  “What a stupid choice, even for a grafter like Ruef,” Mack said. “Hayes is a complete nonentity.”

  “Calm down,” Fremont Older said. “Ruef isn’t serious about Hayes; he’s just playing a game. You know as well as I do that the Boss wants an appointment to the U.S. Senate one of these days. Who can arrange that for him? The men who control the votes up in Sacramento. Walter Fairbanks. Bill Herrin. The gentlemen of the SP. So I predict a great ray of light will fall from heaven, the Boss will suddenly change his mind and generously swing his delegation behind the railroad’s candidate. Wait and see.”

  At the Sea Beach Hotel in Santa Cruz, the Boss did indeed have an amazing change of heart, and the votes of the San Francisco delegation delivered the nomination to James Gillett.

  That night, state committee chairman Frank McLaughlin threw a dinner party at his seaside home, his honored guests Gillett and Ruef. It occurred to McLaughlin that all those attending might like a souvenir of the evening, a memento of the triumphant alliance of the San Francisco machine and the greatest, most powerful corporation in the state, the West— perhaps the whole country. He brought in a photographer. The important guests, having imbibed heavily, saw nothing wrong. Little Abe sat in the middle, like the kingmaker he was. Gillett stood behind him, a comradely hand resting on Ruef’s shoulder. Posed on either side, in various stages of inebriation, were Porter, the SP’s choice for lieutenant governor; Fairbanks and McKinley of the railroad law department; two judges; and assorted political operatives of the corporation, including its chief lobbyist, George S. Patton, Sr.

  Everyone had a grand time making the photograph. No one saw anything wrong with handing around copies to friends later. Ruef inscribed several for favor-seekers.

  Then the opposition papers got hold of it. The Monarch of the Dailies captioned it HARRIMAN’S CABINET. Fremont Older called it the shame of California. It was perhaps the single most famous political photograph in the state’s history. And it was a match thrown on the carefully gathered kindling of the reform campaign, kindling that had been piled up at some cost, then almost forgotten in the aftermath of the quake.

  The Republican convention and “The Shame of California” shocked the reformers into action. On Sunday, October 21, 1906, District Attorney Langdon went public in the city papers, announcing the graft investigation and identifying Francis Heney and William Burns. He stated that special detectives had been shadowing Ruef and others for months, collecting evidence, and he promised indictments. Later that same week, selection of a new grand jury began.

  Like a trapped ferret, Ruef bit at his attackers. His captive supervisors issued an order suspending Langdon and appointing counselor Abraham Ruef as DA. The opposition immediately filed a restraining order, arguing that the district attorney was a county, not a city official, and therefore not subject to removal by the Board of Supervisors. Superior Court upheld Langdon in his job. The ferret was in the corner.

  Jim flailed and fought his way through the blizzard. Snowflakes melted on his eyelids. He was freezing.

  He dropped to hands and knees in a huge drift and dug down to find the path. As soon as he dug the hole, the storm filled it. The strange snow was as fluid as running water.

  Some distance away, hatless, Mack floundered toward him. He knew Jim was somewhere ahead but couldn’t seem to reach him. The howling wind kept battering him back, blinding him with flying pellets of ice.

  “Jim? It’s Pa. I’m coming. Hang on—”

  Mack saw dark shapes towering in gaps in the flying snow-shanties on the hillsides, the superstructures of mine heads. He knew this place.
Why couldn’t he find the path?

  Suddenly, another rip in the snow veil revealed his son digging frantically. Mack threw himself forward and shouted Jim’s name again. The boy raised his head. His skin was gray, his mouth blue.

  “Pa? Pa, here I am….”

  Mack laughed triumphantly. Only twenty or thirty feet more, and he’d swoop the boy up in his arms and take him home…

  A grinding in the earth made him look down. The snowdrift shuddered and split open, and underneath, a great crevasse of ice appeared; it was half a mile deep.

  Snow crumbled under Mack’s feet. As the crevasse widened, Jim reached toward his father with pleading arms…

  Their fingers almost touched. Then Mack fell into the blue depths of the ice gorge, and landed hard on his back.

  On the carpet at Greenwich Street.

  Weak autumn sunshine filtering through the lace curtains patterned his face. Mack rubbed his head and yanked at the silk dressing gown binding him around the legs. Blinking and straightening his spectacles, which had slipped off his left ear, he climbed to his feet amidst the litter of last night’s newspapers. He remembered now: He’d drunk two bottles of wine, then lain down to nap.

  Someone was knocking. He stumbled to the parlor door. On the landing, Señora Olivar gasped with relief.

  “Señor Chance, are you all right? I heard a great thump.”

  “I was asleep on the couch. I fell off.”

  Angelina Olivar twisted her apron. “I was so worried. For two hours and more, I have been thinking I must wake you.”

  Mack turned his stubbled face toward the soft light at the windows. “How late is it?”

  “Sir—it’s half past ten.”

  Mack groaned and rubbed his temples. Sleeping late was becoming a habit. An escape.

  Noisy wagons passed in the street. Municipal crews worked all day and all night. Older said they were cleaning up something like six or seven million bricks.

  Señora Olivar was still standing at the door. “Yes?” Mack said. “What else?”

  “A gentleman is downstairs. An old friend who has come home again.”