California Gold

by John Jakes

  Fairbanks jumped up so fast the stool fell over. A man with his foot in traction called, “I’m trying to rest here.”

  “You ran away from him, Jim.”

  “What’s that to you? Maybe there were reasons.”

  “But you’ve never gone back to him—” Fairbanks grabbed his wrist. “You’re my son. Macklin Chance has beaten me every other way—he isn’t going to beat me with my own flesh and—”

  “Let go. Get away.”

  Fairbanks held on, control crumbling. The boy twisted his strong tanned wrist but Fairbanks held on.

  “Dammit, let go, mister—you’re crazy.”

  The lawyer’s gray-metal eyes had a strange frantic light in them. “Oh, Jim, I beg you—”

  “Matron?” Jim shouted over Fairbanks’s shoulder. “Matron!”

  My own son’s frightened of me. Look at him, terrified. Chance did this.

  Fairbanks let go of Jim’s wrist and stepped back all the way to the aisle. His hand flew to his cravat. It didn’t need straightening but he straightened it. A swift look revealed the matron bearing down, skirts flying, a bull-necked orderly close behind.

  “Sir, you are not permitted to come in here and disrupt—”

  “Excuse me,” Walter Fairbanks said. He shoved the matron, then rushed by her, avoiding the orderly’s grasping hand, and ran out of the ward.

  He ran down the noisy wooden stairs, the heat of humiliation fevering his face. He ran past puzzled employees peering from doorways and a cashier’s wicket. He ran out of the hospital, beaten.

  80

  THREE NIGHTS LATER, AT dark, Fairbanks walked into Three Dog Alley in the squalid Chinese section on upper Broadway.

  Fairbanks was usually a controlled man, but for three days and nights he’d been out of control, drinking recklessly, yet staying sober enough to, first, conceive the idea and, second, make his inquiries. He’d cashed a large draft at a correspondent bank of Fairbanks Trust, and with that money he loosened tongues.

  Yes, one saloon keeper said, that man had been seen around town. Another informant said the man had a liking for the poppy. A third sent him to a tea parlor controlled by the Hong Chow Company, the largest criminal tong in Los Angeles. An enormous oily Chinese with a dropsical eyelid and a diamond-studded ring in his left ear grinned and wriggled his fingers for more money—$50 wasn’t enough. He pocketed another $50, shrugged, and said Fairbanks might try Mr. Tom Sun Luck’s in Three Dog Alley. No guarantees.

  Sometime during this rolling binge, Fairbanks remembered his wife’s plea and telephoned San Francisco. He didn’t reveal any details of his defeat at the hospital, but simply told Carla the boy had a new life in Southern California and didn’t want to return to his old one.

  “Oh, tell me—how did he look?” she asked.

  “Fine,” he said, and hung up. He leaned his head against the wall by the telephone. “Goddamn you, Chance.”

  So he’d not told his wife everything. Not said a word about his drunken binge—a necessary purging of his pain, and a purifying and focusing of his intent. He certainly would never utter a word about this expedition into a filthy little corner of hell called Three Dog Alley.

  Though it was warm in Los Angeles, he’d put on his overcoat to hide his fine clothes. You didn’t advertise your station or prosperity in this kind of criminous sewer. Strange foreign eyes blinked at him from windows in dim hovels. By the light of pretty paper lanterns on a porch, a girl of twelve or thirteen opened her blouse and showed him breasts like small pears. An old woman with an idiot grin and no teeth fondled his arm. “You like a boy, gen’man?”

  Fairbanks walked on. A short-haired dog with scaly flanks squatted in front of him, shitting. Fairbanks kicked at the dog and it snapped back at him.

  He walked perhaps a block but it seemed like miles. Finally, following the directions on a crumpled scrap, he located the establishment of Mr. Tom Sun Luck by means of Arabic numerals painted under Chinese characters on the door post.

  Mr. Tom Sun Luck was a curious hybrid: white skin, Oriental features. Quite old, he was unctuously accommodating. In his round cap and threadbare silk gown, he conducted Fairbanks to his cellar, a dirt-floored corridor with curtained doorways on both sides. Heavy white smoke with a fruity odor drifted the length of it. Mr. Tom Sun Luck led him to a beaded curtain at the end, which he rattled by brushing it with his four-inch fingernails.

  “Right there. You pay me now.”

  Fairbanks jammed $10 into the queer creature’s hand and the ringers shut like a spring trap.

  “Leave me alone with him.”

  “Sure, OK, mister bigshot.” Tom Sun Luck shuffled away into the dark.

  Fairbanks parted the curtain and stepped through. A wick shimmered in a small shallow bowl of oil standing on a crate. It was the only illumination in the dirt-walled cubicle.

  Eyes closed, Wyatt lay on his side in a wood bunk covered with sheets of a Chinese newspaper. He wore a filthy dark sweater and pants. His right hand dangled over the edge of the bunk, near a crate littered with paraphernalia: a small clam shell that held a long steel needle and a small brown ball of opium; a spirit lamp, extinguished at the moment; a pipe with an ivory-banded bamboo stem, ivory mouthpiece, and large four-sided Happiness bowl.

  He approached the foul bunk, his soles crunching on something that might have been dried rodent droppings. Wyatt’s eyes opened.

  “Hello, Brother Paul. Do you remember me?”

  Wyatt’s white-spiked hair had a dull greasy shine and his once-handsome face was dirty and wasted. Blinking, he lifted his head a few inches. “I remember.” Grunting, he worked his left elbow under his side and raised himself a little higher. “No more donations. I’m not Brother Paul now.”

  What a pathetic joke. What a pathetic man. “I know. It took me a long time to find you in this hole. I imagine you’re extremely short on money.”

  Wyatt’s enlarged eyes showed a sleepy interest. “I have money. Money comes in. But it isn’t enough anymore. Never enough.”

  “I’m prepared to pay you a very considerable sum in return for…” Fairbanks licked his lips. “A service.”

  “That’s nice. How much?”

  “Enough to buy a lot of these.” Fairbanks indicated the pipe. “For a long time to come.”

  “That’s nice,” Wyatt murmured again. “What do you want?”

  “I want someone…”

  As he’d done at the hospital, he faltered. The magnitude of the step brought to mind the platitudinous pronouncements of his law-school professors. It gave him pause, until he remembered all the wrongs done to him.

  “I want someone—taken out. Is that the phrase? Removed. Is that clearer?”

  Wyatt swung his legs off the bunk and sat up. He pushed his fingers through his white-winged hair, smoothing it back from his temples. Sickle moons of dirt showed under his fingernails. Now that Fairbanks had adjusted to the cellar’s pervasive opium smell, he could pick up another, more offensive one. Wyatt’s clothing was foul as a privy.

  “You mean killed.”

  Fairbanks swallowed. “Yes.”

  “Lovely. Why not?”

  Quickly Fairbanks parted the rattling bead curtain. The dark cellar was still empty. He went back to the bunk.

  “If you do the service, my name must never be connected with it. Never.”

  “It’s possible,” Wyatt said. “Anything’s possible for a price.” He smiled at his caller. “Who is it?”

  If he answered, he couldn’t go back. Well, what of it? The deed first contemplated in anger could be done handily, because this piece of human refuse was desperate, and there would be no witnesses to a bargain. The morality of it didn’t trouble Fairbanks, only personal safety after the fact.

  “I said, who is it?”

  “I’ll tell you. When you hear, I believe you’ll be eager to help me.”

  X

  CALIFORNIA GOLD

  1911

  In 1905, in Chicago, a new and differ
ent kind of labor union arose. The old A.F. of L. was an alliance of craft workers, men who clung to their pride and skills and wanted no part of common, untrained laborers. But Eugene Debs, “Big Bill” Haywood, and other socialists decided that exclusionary pride was dangerous and wrong. Trade unionism, and the new century, demanded something better, the International Workers of the World.

  The new union planned to organize the skilled and unskilled alike, industry by industry, not craft by craft. The IWW pushed first into the lumbering regions of the Pacific Northwest. Soon, shocked citizens and outraged owners were hearing a new rhetoric, one that called for the “pie in the sky” of a worker’s paradise, brought about, if need be, through sabotage and the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

  Reaction was predictable. General Otis called IWW men “criminal syndicalist scum,” and sneered at them as “Wobblies.” The name caught on.

  As the first decade of the century ended, the Wobblies eyed the golden fields of California, the Valley towns, where rich crops were harvested and large migrant populations could be recruited for the union. From Missoula, Spokane, Denver, and elsewhere, Wobblies began riding the rods into the Valley. They jumped off at places like Bakersfield, Brawley, Stockton, and Visalia.

  Always their technique was the same: agitate, heighten class awareness, promote worker solidarity through mass meetings and street-corner oratory. Rarely did they talk specifically of union organization. Instead, they railed against local “bourgeois” agents who manipulated and cheated field-workers through their “slave labor marts.” Of course the unspoken antidote was organization, but in the Wobbly master plan that came later.

  To make sure they wouldn’t be run out of a town too soon, the Wobblies raised a second cry—“Free speech!” It was a shrewd strategy, because free speech was exactly what the Wobbly-hating authorities had to suppress in order to suppress the union. The harder that police and civil authorities pushed on this issue, however, the harder the Wobblies fought back. Every time they were seriously threatened they sent pleas to union members around the nation.

  In the fall of 1910, Wobblies were riding west in response to the latest war cry in their newspaper: FREE SPEECH FIGHT IS ON!

  And so it was. The Wobblies were campaigning in Fresno. For a couple of months, the police there merely harassed them sporadically, but then, in December, the town stepped up the fight. The Fresno board of trustees unanimously passed an ordinance that said in part:

  It shall be and is hereby made unlawful for any person to hold, conduct, or address any assemblage, meeting or gathering of persons, or to make or deliver any public speech, lecture, discourse, or to conduct or take part in any public debate, in or upon any public park, public street or alley within the 48-block area bounded by Tuolumne, M, Inyo and D Streets.

  This was, of course, an abrogation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The Wobblies advertised again: FREE SPEECH FIGHT NEEDS YOUR HELP! RALLY AROUND! ALL ABOARD FOR FRESNO!

  81

  WINTER RAINS. ALL DAY and all night, they poured over the red tiles of Villa Mediterranean. Mack heard them in his dreams.

  The days of January marched by in gray procession. He tired of working an hour after he began, and his hands hurt constantly. He spread them on his desk. The knuckles were enlarged—the hands of an old man. In every mirror, that old man mocked him: white hair, lackluster eyes behind the round schoolmaster glasses. Something had died—maybe just the energy to pursue dreams.

  T. Fowler Haines remained on his corner of the desk. One afternoon, Mack idly opened to the Foreword: “I have never beheld a place where I would so gladly fix my permanent abode as in this Paradise of sunshine.”

  “Liar,” Mack sighed, and shut the guidebook. The rains of January 1911 poured down. He was forty-two years old.

  The detective Bill Burns called at Riverside.

  “The mayor of the city of Los Angeles hired me for the Times case. We’re going to unravel it and hang those dynamiters. I’ll tell you where I’m looking, Mack: Indianapolis, Indiana. It’s the home office of the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union. I know you feel strongly for union men—well, not union men who do murder; I’d not accuse you of that—but you’re partial to the movement as a whole, you can’t deny it. That’s why I wanted to be square with you. Square and in the open. We’re on opposite sides this time, boyo.”

  They shook hands and Mack wished Bill Burns well.

  On a blowy day of large clouds and cool sunshine, there came to the pretty little town of San Solaro one Yacob Steinweis of the Kalem Studios (for the founders Kleine, Long, and Marion) of Twenty-first Street, New York. He found Mack examining some construction blueprints in the cool shade of the bandstand in San Solaro Park.

  Steinweis introduced himself with a business card instead of verbally. He was, at best, twenty-five years old, a studious but starved-looking fellow with a lot of white teeth and a smile of radiant innocence. Mack presumed you didn’t get by in the picture business, as you didn’t get by in any other, on innocence. Steinweis had to have something more.

  One readily apparent trait was enthusiasm. He shook his head when Mack offered him a seat on a bandstand bench, bobbing up and down on his brown calfskin shoes. Though he probably couldn’t afford it, Steinweis dressed himself like an Englishman, in a walking suit of tan worsted, a figured brown four-in-hand, tan derby, gloves, and spats. Somehow his energy amused Mack, while saddening him a little too. He remembered when he’d felt the same way about opportunities.

  “Sir,” Steinweis began, “I am quite experienced in moving pictures—three years as Sid Olcott’s right hand. I worked on many Westerns shot on the Jersey Palisades. I was Sid’s assistant director on the one-reel—” He stopped, unable to continue; no sound came from his mouth.

  “Mr. Steinweis, what’s wrong?”

  The young man reddened, seeming to tense and tremble all over. He made queer gargling sounds. At last he burst out, “N-nothing.” The color rushed from his face. “I have a certain slight problem with—” Another long choked silence. “Stammering. The p-picture to which I referred is—” Finally the name exploded. “Ben-Hur.”

  “I saw that,” Mack told him. “It was good.”

  Steinweis slumped, too overcome with embarrassment to care about the compliment. Mack liked him for admitting his problem. He asked him again to be seated and, this time, Steinweis sank gratefully onto a bench.

  “It isn’t easy being a moving-picture man, and a—” Another painful pause. “A Jew, and a stammerer too. Three strikes, as the ballplayers say. On the other hand, the more obstacles a man confronts, the more he’s challenged to stretch himself and achieve, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes, definitely. But what brings you here?”

  “I came to California originally because I saw more opportunity. But I refuse to work for others the rest of my life. I am looking for—property, land on which to start the Emory Stone Studio. A more euphonious name than Steinweis, don’t you think?” He was relaxed now, and having less trouble with his speech. “I have the promise of a loan if I locate s-suitable land. I found a hundred acres in the foothills of Hollywood. Ideal. Please sell them to me, Mr. Chance.”

  “What property is it, exactly?”

  “Here, I’ll show you, I brought along a surveyor’s drawing.” Steinweis unfolded it and Mack put on his spectacles. “I have studied you, Mr. Chance. For weeks now I have been doing it. You have huge holdings. You’ll never miss this hundred acres. Please, set any fair price and I’ll pay it. Just sell me the land for my studio. Give me my dream in—” After the strained silence: “California.”

  Mack ended the meeting without committing himself. “I’ll think about it and let you know,” he said. Steinweis smiled, shook his hand, and uttered a perfectly articulated thank-you. But he looked heartbroken.

  A week later, two gentlemen from the town of Hollywood arranged an appointment through Alex, and visited Mack in San Solaro. They represented something called
the Committee of Conscientious Citizens. They were pale, forgettable sorts. Mr. Silas Ribner didn’t mention his occupation; Mr. Joe Hughes sold real estate.

  “We’re Christians and Protestants, Mr. Chance,” said Hughes. “We understand you are too. Hollywood is a Christian community—up-and-coming, full of boosters. But we don’t like this movie crowd from the East. We don’t like them renting rooms, and we especially don’t want them settling permanently. That’s why we organized. Our committee got wind of this little New York Jew who wants to buy a piece of your land. We ask you to help us keep Hollywood a safe, clean residential community of Christian people. Don’t sell to him.”

  “You came all the way out here to speak against a man because he’s a Jew?”

  Mr. Ribner’s ire was roused. “A motion-picture Jew. Doubly undesirable. You can see that, surely.”

  “I can see that you’re a pair of bigots.”

  “Mr. Chance,” cried Hughes, jumping up.

  “Out of this house before I throw you down the stairs myself.”

  They left in a huff.

  Two nights later, at half past eleven, Mack received a telephone call from Alex down in Riverside.

  “I was just contacted by the authorities in Hollywood. You know the old abandoned barn on the property Steinweis wants to buy? Someone torched it this afternoon.”

  The next night, after supper, Mack took another call.

  “Jew lover,” said a distant unfamiliar voice, and hung up.

  “God, I don’t need this,” Mack said.

  In other days, in better times, he would have leaped into a fight with Hughes, Ribner, and the Hollywood burghers they represented. He loathed such men. They reminded him of Fairbanks, and of all the others who wanted to slam doors when he first trudged down from the mountains in ’87.