Bones of the Barbary Coast (Cree Black Thrillers)

by Daniel Hecht

  At moments, despite these preoccupations, my thoughts also turn to the wolf-man: what a wonderful and strange thing he is, what we might learn from him. Seeing him with that wild kitten struck me with the force of a revelation. Perhaps it was only that I was so desperate at that moment, expecting only violence and evil, and the sight of his momentary gentleness so directly contradicted my dire expectation. But I also wonder if such a creature, so savage in appearance yet capable of such kindness and camaraderie, might not teach us a great deal about our own paradoxical nature, and how to make better of it.

  And, too, I feel concern for him. He lives as an utter outcast, a stranger amongst every specie of being, and in circumstances as perilous as can be imagined; there are a thousand ways the world could abuse him. Clearly, he has survived by fleeing from temporary nest to temporary nest, always at risk of discovery and injury. With his hideous outward appearance, I could not doubt that any man might shoot him on sight, especially in that he was accused of every awful thing that happens; or that those of a certain strain of mind would see him as a spectacle worth a fortune if exploited properly. It is a miracle that he has survived this long.

  FRIDAY, JUNE 14, 1889

  Three more days have passed in this unendurable tension. My script is almost illegible . . . my hand trembles. I cannot eat or sleep; every knock at the door, every man who appears on the mission steps, every carriage in the street, sets my heart racing so that a sweat comes out all over me. Here it is, I think, my doom: Percy, returned to destroy me. When Rev. Wallace visits the mission, I watch his face with apprehension, afraid I will see the iron mask of disapproval there, the building wrath and accusation that will any moment be unleashed against me.

  I can no longer take pleasure in my walks, for I am afraid that dapper, striped suit and weasel smile will materialize in front of me; even on the busy commercial streets, I gasp when a horse like Percy's appears, or a man of his build or bearing.

  At home it is no better. When Hans comes through the door, I am all but paralyzed with fear that he will have heard from Percy, and that he will march straight to me, pick me up by my scruff and throw me into the street. And when he only appears his ordinary self, whether affectionate or tired, preoccupied or businesslike, I watch his face for signs that he has received the awful news and is concealing the fact as he contemplates how to respond.

  In my mind I form all kinds of explanations, pleas, arguments, excuses; I imagine myself indignant and denying everything; or, admitting it, wretchedly repentant or steadfastly defiant. But not knowing precisely what Percy will say, or invent, or what role Margaret will have played, I cannot imagine a response that seems adequate. I am somewhat mystified as to why Percy has not already acted on his threats, and at moments indulge a wild, irrational hope that he has just decided to let it pass. That lasts only an instant, until the memory of his bright, calculating eyes comes back to me, and then I know that the delay is only because he is plotting his moves carefully for maximum effect; perhaps he is even drawing it out deliberately, knowing and savoring the misery it must be causing me.

  And when I am not knotted with anxiety about this, I worry about Margaret, whether she is well, what will become of her. From my mission work, I know all too well what happens to whores as they age, as their market value diminishes, as disease and the violence that surrounds them eventually destroys them. Some few do make a break from that life, or succeed so dramatically that they become financially independent, but Margaret is not likely to do either. Does she not see the toothless, haggard, wretched women, reduced to begging and char-work, dying young, or just disappearing suddenly, all around her? I fret about whether I should visit her again, and what to say to her if I did. At one moment I resolve to visit; at another not; at one I am furious with her for what Percy has done, at the next unsure how much a hand she had in it; at times I think of closing my heart off from her forever, then a moment later am sure I would die were I to try, or ever lost my sister again for any reason.

  And, such being my penchant or habit, I have conceived another urgent reason to go to my sister. For it occurs to me that she might not be so debased as to have set Percy upon me; it may be that she was in some way coerced to her complicity. Perhaps her agitation at my meeting Percy was out of concern for me, fearing that he would conceive some such scheme. This possibility fills me with hope, and the question has taken on a great significance for me. At times I think its answer might present me with a larger truth about my own kind, one that will lay to rest either my worst fears or my fondest hopes. One or another must be shed, I am beginning to think, for I truly doubt my heart can endure two such conflicting sentiments, such uncertainties, in such extreme degree.

  On Wednesday, I spent the evening at home with Hans, a rare thing as our lives go now. We made ourselves comfortable in the sitting room, I with some needlepoint and he with his newspaper. At one point I looked up from the mess I was making with the thread to see him with his paper lowered, dark eyes on me in a way I took to be accusing.

  I thought he would begin the terrible process, but all he asked was, "Lydia, are you well?"

  "Yes, of course!"

  "But your hands are shaking. And your cheeks are hollow; you haven't been eating."

  "Oh, it's nothing. I'm a little under the weather, I suppose. That's all. No appetite."

  He came to where I sat and put a hand on my shoulder. I flinched from the touch. He is such a large man, and with him towering over me I could feel the strength in his body, like some great engine, and wondered at how that strength might be used or not, contained in civil gesture or not, and what force or choice within him directed it to one end or another. What is it in any man, where in him is the organ, that makes that choice? I thought of Percy's words, that Hans would strike me, and wondered if he would. I could not be sure. The pressure of his hand on my shoulder was heavy even with an affectionate touch, and I knew I could never bear to feel that enormous weight or force turned against me in anger. I hid my needlepoint, lest he see what a tangle I'd made, and raised my eyes warily to his; but he was already looking across the room, his thoughts elsewhere.

  "Well, you must take better care of yourself," he said. "Can't have you getting sick."

  "Hans," I said, greatly surprising both of us, "do you love me?"

  He looked back to me with puzzlement in his dark eyes. "Haven't I sworn to always love you, before God and in the presence of our community?"

  "But what does the word mean?"

  At that, he crouched down next to my chair, so that our eyes were almost level. "Have I been unkind in some way?" he asked.

  "No, never once!"

  His concern eased. With his thick black hair and heavy beard, his face so often appears stern, but now he only looked benevolently curious and amused.

  "So you are in a philosophical mood," he said.

  "I suppose I am." In fact I was suddenly on the verge of confessing everything to him, I yearned to do so and so face the consequences and have it done with, just to escape this harrowing waiting and anxiety. I suppose I wanted him to say then that he loved my secret heart with his secret heart and that nothing I could do or say, or that the world could do, would ever precede or obstruct such love. Yet I could not begin it. My heart was wrung as I realized I did not know my own husband's nature well enough to know how he would respond.

  He returned to his reading, and, unsettled, I went to tend to the silver in the dining room. From there I glanced covertly at him through the doorway. There was Hans in his accustomed spot in his big chair, beneath the gas lamp, reading. His spectacles only partly concealed his frown as he read something that displeased or irritated him, and in every way he appeared a forbidding man: huge, dark-bearded, heavy-browed, massive of limb, deep of voice, stern of manner; a man of exacting standards. I thought: I have taken this man to my naked self, to body, heart, and very life; at moments he displays the greatest sweetness and tenderness; how could it be that I am not sure of him, that I canno
t claim to know him or trust him? How can it be that I fear him, even, my own husband and lover?

  And, uninvited, the memory of the wolf-man and his kitten came suddenly to me: the astonishing surprise and relief of encountering such benevolence in such a savage creature, and all the thoughts the vision had prompted. Oh, how I would welcome such a gesture to me, at this moment! It occurred to me that if I can extend to the wolf-man the hope of humanity, surely I can do the same for my own husband! I am without an ally in my terrible predicament, but I think I must find one, and soon; what better place to seek an ally than under my own roof?

  I think: Hans wooed me, and I accepted him. Perhaps it is time, now that we are married two years, that I wooed him in return. Mine will be a very different courtship, not so cordial and gallant as his; for in courtship one generally poses and flourishes, charms and flatters, presents one's best face, wit, and manners; it is a stage-play of benevolent exaggerations and misrepresentations enacted upon the parlor floor. Whereas mine will have to begin with the truth. It will, I am afraid, be a difficult conquest to make.

  III

  ANATOMY OF A WEREWOLF

  26

  THURSDAY MORNING AT City Hall provided Cree with another series of very minor findings, long shot possibilities, and outright disappointments.

  Trying to find out more about Hans Schweitzer and Lydia Jackson, she stopped at the Bureau of Records and Statistics, where the clerk told her that their birth and death records dated only from April 1906; earlier records had been destroyed in the quake and fire. Same with marriage records. Same with autopsy records. However, religious groups maintained their own records of births, deaths, and marriages, and many of those had survived; it all depended on whether the church in question had burned or not. Given that Cree didn't know whether Hans or Lydia had been religious, let alone what denomination they'd embraced, it didn't sound like a promising tack.

  She moved over to property records. She knew Hans had owned the house until 1914, well postquake, so if he'd bought another place within city limits his name should show up in surviving records. She did find the deed that transmitted the house to O'Brien—as she'd suspected, Schweitzer had attached a provision binding the now-vacant downhill lot with his property in perpetuity—but no Hans or Lydia Schweitzer appeared at any other location in 1914 or the years following. She skimmed tax rolls for fifteen more years and didn't find Hans. He could have rented, relocated to Oakland or to Istanbul, or died while on vacation in Tuscany or Tahiti. There were lots of Jacksons, but no Lydia; she could have divorced and remarried, died, or moved to Zanzibar.

  Cree's frustration mounted. She might never find the descendants the Schweitzers might or might not have, let alone any records they might or might not have left them, which might or might not mention the wolfman.

  The morning's only real accomplishment was that she finally reached Gerald Payson and managed to wrangle an afternoon appointment to check out the Payson Collection's archives. That left a few hours for a more direct, if long-shot, search for the wolfman: the newspapers. She walked back to the New Main Library and laid claim to one of the microfilm cartels on the fifth floor, not far from the wall of gray steel file drawers that housed the newspaper film archives. She set up camp with a small thermos of coffee and a bagel with cream cheese secreted in her purse.

  She pulled spools for the San Francisco Chronicle and Call-Bulletin, randomly choosing five years scattered through the period the wolfman had most probably been alive. But then another errand occurred to her.

  The Chronicle, late summer, 1981. She found the first reference on August 12, one paragraph detailing the apprehension of five "juvenile gang members" for a grocery stickup. A few days later, three inches about TEEN OFFENDER CHARGES POLICE BRUTALITY. The article didn't offer any details she hadn't already gotten from Ray.

  She didn't find another reference until mid-October, RAYMOND FILES CIVIL SUIT. This one included a photo of Ray, apparently a high school yearbook shot from before the injury. He was what she and her friends used to call a "dreamboat," the type whose name they'd write in ballpoint on their palms so they could sneak looks at it during classes and give themselves goose bumps: a handsome, thoughtful-looking boy with wonderful eyebrows, an innocent masculinity.

  The last article was about Bert's acquittal, which featured a posttrial photo of Bert in a roomful of cops. He had just been exonerated; he should have been happy, and the other cops certainly looked gleeful, score one for the good guys. But Bert wore the face of a man who had seen hell close up and was still being chased by its monsters.

  She rewound the spool and put it away, trying to decide what to do. She could be up front with Bert about Ray, tell him that's who was sending the e-mails, tell him it was a symbolic gesture; urge him to forget the murderer-who-got-away idea. Or, she could keep quiet about Ray in the hope Bert would never connect him with the messages and the whole thing would just peter out. Without any new messages arriving, maybe Bert would get distracted by other obligations, and they could move on; at some point, she and Skobold would figure out the wolfman bones, so that immediate catalyst would be removed.

  She puzzled over it for a time and finally decided that right now her best option was to do the job she was here to do. She did her best to put the problem out of her mind as she threaded the film for 1866 and began scanning.

  Nothing relevant jumped out at her, but then she wasn't really expecting anything. This was more like flying over the countryside in an airplane, getting a general idea of the lay of the land.

  It was slow going but entertaining. There were articles about the post—Civil War Reconstruction out east, about the fortunes of various mining companies, about the Central Pacific Railroad, about corruption at City Hall, about mounting tensions between Chinese and whites and the anti-Chinese legislation pushed through at the state capitol. The Barbary Coast made the news in various ways: murders were committed, ministers and missionaries launched doomed campaigns against vice, the Board of Supervisors was badgered to act on crime, morality, health conditions, or municipal services. The journalistic style of the era was histrionic, opinionated, with a tone sometimes florid and sometimes snide; even the ads were fascinating, hawking all kinds of outrageous products whose virtues were extolled in fancy typefaces and intricate line drawings. The personal ads were astonishingly like today's, full of secret assignations, coded love notes, lonely hearts calling out.

  Cree got her first possible hit in the 1876 spool in a minor article about Golden Gate Park. The planned park was being touted as a great enterprise that would make San Francisco a glorious capital of culture and finance on a par with Paris and Vienna, and work had begun in 1870. SCHWEITZER AMONG FIRMS SELECTED FOR PARK CONTRACT: The article dealt with the assignment of construction contracts by the park commission. The only useful detail was that Schweitzer Superior Masonry had been chosen to build several small stone bridges. That same issue displayed an ad for the company, elaborate curling script accompanied by an etching of a superb brick building in the Victorian style. The ad promised "Old World quality of construction" and claimed a specialty in brick, granite, stone, or marble for projects of any size.

  Same Schweitzer, Hans Schweitzer? Hernandez had said the brickwork in the basement showed excellent craftsmanship; maybe Hans was the proprietor of the construction company and had done it himself. She allowed herself a moment of optimism, made a photocopy, and went on.

  Another hour passed, and her eyes began to feel the strain of reading the grainy screen, following the sliding frames. She ran into other ads for Schweitzer Superior in later issues, none of them particularly informative. But as she struggled to finish the spool for 1888, a different kind of headline caught her eye.

  A SECOND FERAL DOG ATTACK HAS PROMPTED

  INCREASED CIVIC CONCERN

  The Board of Supervisors last night heard complaints from merchants and residents of the Third District who requested the Board's action to relieve the area from the depredations o
f feral dogs. The dogs, which roam the port area in large numbers, are said to pose an increasing danger to pedestrians.

  The recent death of Ezra Painter, a laborer residing in Pacific Street, was cited as a demonstration of the urgency of the situation. Savagely bitten and mauled, Mr. Painter was found near death in Kearny Street on Tuesday morning of this week and died at the medical office of Dr. William Mahoney several hours later. Mr. Painter's is the second death attributed to the animals, with the first being Alice Drummond, a woman said to be in the employ of The Dancing Mermaid saloon, who was found dead of similar causes ten days ago.

  Lanson McAvoy, the owner of a marine merchandise outlet and several entertainment resorts in the district, complained that the attacks have discouraged evening custom at his enterprises. The Rev. Wilson Filbert, who operates the Faith and Fidelity Mission of Battery Street, stated that the Board's most effective means to increase security in the district would be to restrict the sale of alcoholic beverages and to ban women from drinking establishments. Police Chief O'Donnell responded that his department lacks sufficient manpower to police any aspect of the district's activities, let alone animals. Sarah Painter, sister of the deceased Ezra, blamed the nearby concentration of Chinese residents for the increasing numbers of free-roaming dogs, citing the Celestials' poor sanitation and their custom of raising dogs with the intention of consuming their meat.

  After hearing testimony from those concerned, the Board deferred further discussion in favor of other business.

  The only reason she'd noticed it was Bert's including dog attacks among his old cases. Also that she was tired, getting her wires crossed. Was she looking for reference to a disturbingly deformed individual, a werewolf, or a murderer in old San Francisco? If the latter, she should also have made note of the dozens of other killings the papers had reported. There had been plenty to choose from: According to one of her history books, San Francisco had averaged over three hundred murders a year throughout those decades, a per capita rate about one hundred times the current level. Ninety percent occurred in the Barbary Coast.