A Race to Splendor (20 page)

“When we hook up the water, I mean,” he amended.

“Well, the old cistern’s probably located about…
there
,” Amelia said, relieved that the issue of her sleeping quarters was postponed for a while. A mountain of the building’s remains would have to be removed before the well would be uncovered.

“What about your grandfather’s safe?” J.D. pressed.

Amelia eyed the debris for a moment and then pointed.

“I expect it’s about twenty feet to the right, under where the bar used to be.”

He heaved a disappointed sigh. “Oh.”

Thayer had not allowed her access to the safe to gather her grandfather’s papers after she’d lost the court hearing. “What’s in the safe, anyhow?” she asked, fighting off a stab of resentment. “The deed to the place?”

She immediately regretted her arched tone and wished she had better control of her emotions when it came to ownership issues of the Bay View.

It’s finished… just accept that and be grateful for what you have…

Instinctively, she slipped her right hand into her pocket and slid her fingertips across the smooth surface of three playing cards she kept close as a strange touchstone to the past.

J.D. replied matter-of-factly, “I’d locked all the profits of our first weeks of business in there… gold bars, gold coins, mostly… and important papers—though God knows what the fire’s done to the insides of the thing. Getting to that money would help a lot, though.”

“Meaning you wouldn’t have to gamble or go into further debt with Ezra Kemp?”

He turned and gave her a measured look, as if weighing the advantages and disadvantages of taking her into his confidence. “It’s bad enough Kemp’s the only source of decent lumber,” he said, “but having to pay nearly double for him to advance it to me on credit is worse, and… if I’m not soon able to pay as I go, he could ultimately end up my partner, which is something I’d like very much to avoid.” He shook his head with an air of discouragement. “The biggest hurdle to getting this lot cleared is that there’re just not enough workers available for this kind of back-breaking labor.”

For a few moments, Amelia and J.D. silently scanned the charred, splintered boards and mounds of broken glass and crumbled concrete.

Finally, Amelia proposed quietly, “I can probably get workers to clear this out.”

J.D. turned and stared.

“How?”

“A Chinese crew.”

“Amelia, don’t be absurd!”

“I think I know a man who can supply you as many workers as you need.”

“Right, and every white laborer I’ve managed to bribe to work here will walk off the job.”

“Not if we build a high fence around the property and the Chinese work from midnight until an hour before the deliveries arrive.”

“So you’ve given this idea some thought?” he asked, regarding her closely.

“Yes, I have.”

A look of skeptical hope filled his eyes. “And you say
you
can supply these men?”

“I believe so. At any rate, I can ask. Are you willing to take the chance?”

A voice inside Amelia’s head called out…
and what kind of chances are
you
taking?
What would Julia Morgan say to this dangerous scheme, proposed without her knowledge or consent?

J.D. regarded his architect for a long moment. “I’ve discovered since you returned from Paris that you’re a woman not to be underestimated, Amelia Bradshaw.”

She ignored the feeling of pleasure that washed over her.

“It’s a very risky proposition, Mr. Thayer.” She wondered if she’d gone slightly mad even to suggest such a scheme. “Dangerous, in fact, for you, for me, and certainly for the Chinese workers. Angus would
definitely
think we’re completely daft.”

“Angus McClure can be a world-class fussbudget.”

“And we must inform Miss Morgan, of course.”

“No!” he said firmly. “She’d have to advise against it, and I don’t want an argument over this.”

“You do realize that I jeopardize my own position, don’t you? I promised Miss Morgan to keep her informed about everything I do.”

“Then why did you offer to supply Chinese workers when you know your employer would most likely disapprove?”

Amelia flashed him a faintly sheepish smile. “Because I would like nothing better than to see this hotel open on the anniversary of the quake—alongside the Fairmont. We need to rebuild the cistern so we can get our plumbing functional as soon as possible. And,” she added with some vehemence, “I detest Ezra Kemp.”

J.D. paused, his dark eyes revealing nothing. “Well, mostly I’d prefer to beat the Fairmont in this race. But you’re right… hiring Chinese to work at night to clear out this mess appears to be about the only way I can see for both the Morgan firm and the Bay View Hotel to get out from under Kemp’s thumb and finish this hotel on time.”

Amelia remained silent for a moment. Kemp and his ilk were fast acquiring a stranglehold on the recovery of San Francisco. Just as with the cruel discrimination against the Chinese people, their domination of the building trades was increasing by the day. It just wasn’t right!

“So you’re willing to take this risk?” she asked.

“To get the money out of that safe, I’m willing to risk almost anything. But no one must know, Amelia. Not Kemp. Not Miss Morgan. Not the Committee of Fifty. And certainly not Dick Spitz and his men.” He turned, seized her hand, and gave it a conspiratorial squeeze. “I give you my word, we’ll succeed in this, and do it right under their noses!”

Well, now,
she thought, enjoying the warmth of his touch,
I’ve just shaken hands with the devil.

Chapter 17

A few evenings following Amelia’s late-night visitors outside her basement quarters at the Fairmont, she was again awakened by the muffled sound of the cistern being opened and the low, sing-song chatter of voices. Outside, wispy fog half-obscured the figures of Loy Chen, little Foo, and a third person—all gathered around the open well.

Amelia watched from the basement door as Loy inserted the hose into the cistern. Then he seized the other end and trailed the simple siphoning device down the slope to the huge jug positioned in the wheelbarrow that he used for transporting the water to his makeshift laundry establishment.

As the group wrestled with the unwieldy hose, Amelia realized that the newcomer was a young woman in her late teens with black hair cut in a chin-length bob and shiny as a patent leather shoe.

Amelia returned to her room and reached for her boots—now kept in her satchel at night to avoid their becoming nests for homeless rats. She donned the woolen coat acquired from donations at the Presidio’s Red Cross shelter when she’d served as a nurse, and hurried outside.

“Here.” She smiled at Foo who looked suddenly apprehensive. “Let me give you a hand. Your end of the hose seems to have a mind of its own.” The young Chinese woman helping the child to keep the hose in place darted a fearful glance at her co-workers. “Hello, Loy,” Amelia called softly. The enveloping fog invited whispers. “How’s business?”

“Good!” he replied cheerfully, manning the hose at his end. “Everybody like clean clothes. You up early. How’s hotels?”

“Good,” she echoed. “Everybody wants them to open on time. The workers are doing their best to see that it happens.”

When the enormous jug in the wheelbarrow was filled, the trio at the cistern pulled out the hose and jumped back to avoid getting splashed. Loy smiled. “Thank you, missy. You work hard too.”

“And who is this?” She nodded in the direction of the young woman.

“Cousin. Family dead.”

Even in the diffused light of near dawn, Amelia could see the girl lower her gaze. The skin on her right cheek was scarred, as was her right hand and, Amelia suspected, the arm shielded by her right sleeve.

“What is your name?” she asked gently. Barely out of childhood, the young woman looked up, wide-eyed, and cast a questioning glance at Loy. “Does she not speak any English?” Amelia said to Loy.

“Tell name,” he directed his cohort.

“Shou Shou,” the girl replied, barely above a whisper. She pointed at the laundryman. “Loy save me.”

“From the fire?” Amelia asked, concerned by the scars disfiguring an otherwise lovely young woman.

Shou Shou nodded emphatically. “Locked in—”

“We go now,” Loy interrupted. “Like missy say—need sleep to work.” He bowed from the waist and herded his charges down the hill without a backward glance.

“Wait, Loy—”

But Loy kept walking down the slope, calling over his shoulder, “I bring you dinner. Fish and rice. Seven o’clock. Workers gone then. Thank you, missy.”

Amelia ran a few steps and caught his black silk sleeve.

“Please… I have something to ask you!” She lowered her voice a few notches. “Can you supply fifty men to clear rubble at the Bay View Hotel?”

A look of undisguised joy lit Loy’s features. “Sure, Missy! When? Tonight?”

“No, not tonight,” she replied hastily. “Call on Mr. J.D. Thayer tomorrow and he will discuss arrangements. The men will have to work at night—”

“Oh, Mr. Thayer very nice man! He friend of Ling Lee. She friend to Shou Shou and me. I
like
work for him. No one see us there, promise! Everything be fine, missy. I go tomorrow. See boss at Bay View.”

Amelia was startled by the news this young man had known J.D.’s concubine, Ling Lee. Before she could say anything further, Loy Chen whirled on his soft slippers and in a twinkling, the three residents of Chinatown and their wheelbarrow full of water disappeared into the misty morn.

***

J.D. inserted a finger between his neck and the freshly starched collar attached to his spanking new dress shirt. He noted with pleasure how good it felt to be wearing formal evening clothes again after so many months dressed in virtual rags. His new wardrobe was only the first of many improvements in his life, now that his father’s banker friends on the Committee of Fifty had released the first funds of the loan they’d granted him for the reconstruction of the Bay View. The last of the money he’d had in his pockets the day of the earthquake now could be spent on a few luxuries, like some decent clothes.

A shipping carton containing the rest of his order from a New York haberdashery sat on the new brass bedstead, delivered earlier that day and set up in a room with only a raw wood floor and joists. He felt lucky, though. At least he and Barbary were no longer living like gophers in an underground burrow. Of course, the draft would continue to whistle through the plywood walls until the insulation and lathe and plaster were installed on the first floor level. But it was a damned sight better than a tent in the Presidio or a stone cold basement at the Fairmont.

Progress…
he thought
. Progress.

Amelia’s brigade of Chinese workers were whittling down the mountain of debris behind the fence they’d built. His daytime crews had gone about their business, and if they’d noticed a change when they worked on the upper floors of the hotel and looked down at the land where the gambling club had stood or the lot next door he’d bought adjacent to his own land, no one said anything to him about it. J.D. had concluded that the chore of breaking up and hauling out the rubble was too lowly a task for Spitz’s men and they just ignored it.

Lucky for him, Amelia had noted after climbing the scaffolding to the top floor that the head carpenter, Jake Kelly, had erred in the way his crew had installed the first roof joist. They had been forced to pull it apart and realign it properly. Dick Spitz hadn’t been happy that the “lady architect” had caught the mistake, but
he
was.

Thinking of roof joists and climbing scaffolds inevitably drew his thoughts to the subject of Amelia herself—and that was forbidden territory. Even so, he couldn’t stop reflecting on how calm and collected she’d been when she informed Spitz of the problem. Dressed in a clean shirtwaist and gored skirt and sturdy boots, she’d been a pretty sight debating with that uncouth lout. She was no classic beauty, to be sure, but with that figure; clear, smooth skin; and her mass of brunette hair piled atop her head, she was a
damned
appealing woman… even when she wore men’s trousers beneath her skirt!

J.D. gazed into a shard of mirror that had started life in a gold frame and resolutely turned his thoughts to other subjects. He’d rescued the glass from the rubble and leaned it against one wall in his makeshift bedroom. For a long moment, he surveyed the handsome tweed suit, cambric shirts, starched wing collars, and two pairs of trousers hanging on nails he’d pounded into the wall studs. Knotting his tie, he began to consider various schemes to lure more capital to complete the rebuilding. To do that, a man couldn’t look like some refugee, could he? Now, if the Chinese workers could hurry up and gain access to either the cistern or the walk-in safe still buried deep under the wreckage at the back of his property—or both—J.D. would consider himself a happy man.

Except for Ling Lee and Mother…

Funny how he’d begun to see the unfair treatment of these two women at the hands of men in their lives in a rather similar light.

Firmly putting all such errant thoughts aside, J.D. slammed his new hat onto his head and donned the stylish overcoat that would protect him from the evening chill. With a pat on Barbary’s head and an order to “stay!” he headed outdoors for the Winton parked on Taylor Street, wishing that he didn’t need to ask Kemp for yet another favor.

***

J.D. parked the Winton near the wharves and strode up the gangway a few minutes before the Sausalito ferry pushed away from the dock. Soon the boat was heading north, cutting through the choppy water as it passed Alcatraz Island, a garrison where Confederate sympathizers and renegade U.S. soldiers had been held nearly half a century earlier. In 1901, the fortress’s cannons had been dismantled and J.D. wondered what the desolate twelve acres in the middle of the bay was good for now.

Before long, the
Cazadero
nudged against the dock and J.D. disembarked for Sausalito’s two-story terminal that let onto the commuter train platforms where standard-gauge electric cars would whisk him to Mill Valley in less than ten minutes. The quality transportation signaled that the territory across the Golden Gate straits was coming into its own as the locus of second homes for wealthy San Franciscans. Many city residents, in fact, had camped out in them since the quake. Marin County also served as a place where lumberyards, shipbuilding, and dairy and vegetable farms thrived in support of the larger cities trying to rebuild across the bay.

J.D. climbed into the gold-lettered carriage and watched the verdant landscape slip past his window as the four-car train gathered speed along a stretch of seashore known as Richardson Bay.

No wonder Ezra Kemp liked Marin so much, J.D. thought with a glance at the giant redwood trees whizzing by. Kemp must feel right at home among his fellow ne’er-do-wells, grabbing up land for a song from distressed owners hit by the financial panic of the previous decade, then cutting down entire forests to sell uncured wood. These same environs also attracted smugglers, rumrunners, off-track bookies, and a variety of other shady characters relying on the remote geography to provide cover for their questionable schemes.

I wonder where that puts me?
J.D. mused, staring through the window at a half-mowed stand of redwoods marching up Mt. Tamalpais, its peak looming above Mill Valley. The mountain offered evidence of the clear-cutting that was providing San Francisco with the lumber necessary for the reconstruction. Amazingly, other than a few collapsed chimneys, hilly little Sausalito and the surrounding countryside showed few signs of damage from the quake, even though the area was located mere miles from the spot on the Mendocino Coast, where the newspapers reported the temblor had originated.

A few minutes later, the train pulled into the Mill Valley depot where, coat in hand, J.D. stepped onto the platform.

“Mr. Thayer, sir?”

“Yes, I’m Thayer.”

“I’m to take you to Mr. Kemp’s house.”

Kemp had apparently sent his livery to transport him via the muddy streets of the little town that took its name from the first mill that straddled Fern Creek back in 1834.

The driver flicked the reins and guided the carriage out of the town center and into a glade encircled by a magnificent forest of mighty redwoods with branches so lofty they blocked any glimpse of the night sky. The conveyance passed a sign proclaiming that they were traveling on a bumpy road called Throckmorton Avenue.

Less than a quarter mile along an adjacent road that paralleled a rushing creek, he caught sight of winking lights tucked among the trunks of the thick-barked trees. Kemp’s mansion built of river rock and redwood timbers was a fantasy construction that looked for all the world like a hunting lodge for Hapsburg royalty nestled deep in a parkland.

Terraced grounds rose in steps from the gurgling brook, etched by parterre hedges and dotted with camellia trees taller than J.D. himself. Stone turrets, capped with thick shingles coated with bright green moss, guarded the four corners of the massive house. A rolled roofline and ivy-covered walls added to the sense that even on a sun-filled day, the Kemp residence would be shrouded in darkness and mystery.

J.D. dismounted from the carriage, nodded to his silent driver, and watched the vehicle disappear around the side of the stone house into deep shadows. He inhaled air pungent with the rising damp and strode along the spongy ground until he reached a stone path, laden with the same tufts of furry moss that clung to the roof. The walkway led to a heavy oak door adorned with a wrought-iron knocker fashioned in the twisted countenance of a troll.

Despite the showy extravagance of his abode, Ezra Kemp largely kept silent about his family’s origins. J.D. had made it his business, though, to learn that his former gambling partner was the son of one Klaus Kemp, a German immigrant who found work as a blacksmith repairing pickaxes in the mines of the Mother Lode. The bearded giant who was Ezra’s sire had sought sexual satisfaction in the arms of a prostitute named Ellie Jenks—a slender young woman who had died giving birth to their ten-pound son. Ezra’s large size and barrel chest bore the stamp of his hard-drinking father, long deceased. His lack of social niceties reflected the world of the mother he’d never known—and the stigma that her profession carried from beyond the grave.

Given such inauspicious beginnings, Kemp’s innate intelligence nevertheless had taught him to seize opportunity when it knocked. He’d parlayed that and a certain mechanical ability into a highly successful lumber empire with saw mills scattered along Fern Creek and the Russian River in the heavily forested lands in regions of Marin and Sonoma counties to the north.

That spring’s calamitous quake and fire had proven to be the most fortuitous event in Ezra Kemp’s life. An entire city begged for the products he supplied: stately redwoods felled and hewn into usable lengths of lumber, along with the means to transport these goods to a city desperate for wood. After years of being shunned by the nobs of Nob Hill, he was suddenly asked to serve on the Committee of Fifty for the Reconstruction of San Francisco and had set his sights on making further inroads into the society that, ironically enough, J.D. Thayer had persistently spurned.