A Race to Splendor (30 page)

“I pay Clarence to please
my
tastes on these grounds. A bust of your mother near the fern grotto is quite enough, thank you. You’ll make the place look like a mausoleum.” To J.D. he said, “Let’s go.”

Kemp made no offer of libation when they reached his paneled inner sanctum. Instead he sat behind his desk and glowered. “City Hall says get rid of those Chinks or they’ll shut down your construction.”

J.D. felt a stab of alarm. Loy and his crew had nearly cleared the old lady’s lot the previous night and could continue digging the new cistern tonight. By tomorrow, or Friday at the latest, he’d be done with using Chinese labor for a while, which would reduce his exposure to prying eyes that might report him to the Committee of Fifty, his principle source of future funding. He couldn’t wait until the day he could call a halt to sneaking Chinese onto his property, not to mention ending these tortuous visits to Mill Valley to “court” poor Matilda.

“The rubble will be gone in two days’ time,” he replied, affecting a shrug. “Tell them they have my word on that.”

“Face it, J.D. Your fool cement bunker has already eaten up all the funds you found in your safe, hasn’t it? You don’t have a plug nickel right now and can’t afford for me to raise questions about your illegal hiring practices with the Committee of Fifty.”

So Kemp hadn’t
yet
played this card with the Committee—or his father.

“You’re right,” J.D. agreed pleasantly. “But by now the point is moot. I’m virtually done with using Chinese labor at the site.” He glanced at the watch dangling at his waist. Sears Roebuck’s best. “I’ve so enjoyed my time with your daughter and Miss Stivers this afternoon, but I’m afraid I must depart before dinner.”

“You may not be staying to dinner, but you’re
marrying
Matilda, Thayer. Either that or, I warn you, there are many more ways I can think of to ruin your plans at Taylor and Jackson.”

“Until next week?” J.D. said, smoothly ignoring this latest of Kemp’s threats.

***

A few hours before dawn, Amelia was abruptly awakened by someone pounding on the door to her small room in the Fairmont’s basement. She was due to move over to the Bay View very soon and leapt out of bed at the thought that something terrible had happened at J.D.’s hotel—yet again.

“Missy! Missy, come! Bad men hurt boss man! Come! Come!”

“What?” Amelia was still too sleepy to be self-conscious about wearing her nightclothes in front of a Chinese laundryman who was whispering hoarsely at her from the door of her bedchamber.

“We need doctor! He very sick in Chinatown. Come quick!”

“
Who
is very sick, Loy?”

“Boss at Bay View!”

“Mr. Thayer?”

“Yes! He very,
very
bad.”

“Good heavens!” she exclaimed. “Wait outside while I dress.”

Fortunately, Julia wasn’t there to hear all this commotion. She had taken the last ferry to Oakland and wasn’t sleeping at the Fairmont this night.

Loy stood outside Amelia’s door as she scrambled into her clothing. Her fingers were trembling as she buttoned the fastenings on her shirtwaist and donned her boots without bothering to find her stockings. Why in the world would J.D. be in Chinatown at this hour? Unflappable Loy had said he was “very, very bad,” which could only mean something truly dreadful had happened.

“We get Dr. Angus?” Loy asked as they ran down Taylor Street toward the Bay View. Amelia could just make out the Winton parked in front of the entrance.

“Yes,” she said breathlessly. “I’ll drive to the Presidio to get him. Then we’ll go to Chinatown.”

In minutes she was trotting beside Loy, racing to the spot where the Winton was parked in front of the Bay View.

“What happened, Loy?” she said, panting from exertion. “Where, exactly,
is
Mr. Thayer?”

“Bad men came tonight and hit him. Hit Chinese too. Chinese all run away. Bad men took him in wagon to China Alley.”

“Chinese men did this?”

“No. Round-eyes. They hurt Mr. J.D. very, very bad,” he repeated.

So the Chinese called Caucasians unflattering names as well, she thought.

Fortunately, the Winton started right up when Loy turned the crank, hopped into the passenger seat, and Amelia sped away from the curb in a squeal of wheels. She didn’t allow herself to focus on J.D.’s condition in some hellhole a few blocks away and, instead, allowed the sheer panic that had taken hold to force her to concentrate on piloting the vehicle down Lombard Street as if the Devil himself were chasing their tailpipe.

“Very, very bad” could mean the worst had already happened…

As they barreled through the night toward the Presidio and the possibility of recruiting medical help, Loy shouted through the wind, “We almost finish out back just as bad men come. Many others hurt too, missy.”

Amelia felt wretched to think Loy’s friends had come to grief on a job she’d secured for them.

“Do you know why they attacked Mr. Thayer?”

Perhaps J.D. had been gambling and neglected to pay his debts. Or maybe some old lover of Ling Lee’s decided to even the score.

“Bad men no like Chinese working for Boss. Banged on heads with sticks…”

Sick at heart, Amelia focused her gaze on the road ahead and suddenly swerved just in time to avoid running over a dog that had wandered onto Lombard Street.

“Ahhhh…” Loy cried. “Missy bad driver!”

“I’m a
good
driver!”

“Hurry, but careful! Mr. Thayer maybe dead now. Doctor will know.”

“You actually think he might be
dead
?” Loy’s words echoed her own terrified thoughts. She pressed harder on the accelerator. Fear gripped her stomach and made her short of breath. What if he’d actually been killed?

Amelia fought a mental picture of J.D. lying dead in some dark alley a few blocks away. A lump rose in her throat. She couldn’t deny she was close to tears over the possibility that the notorious James Diaz Thayer had been shanghaied—or worse. She strained to hear Loy’s words buffeted by the wind whistling past the open-air car.

“I follow bad men down Jackson Street. To China Alley. Wait long time outside. Then, go see Mr. J.D. He not speak. So come find you. You bring doctor.”

If he were still alive, would they be able to get help to him in time?

Amelia steeled herself as the Winton’s tires screeched once again when she rounded a corner at high speed.

***

Angus McClure was easily awoken, having spent his adult life being roused for such emergencies. Within fifteen minutes, Amelia had wheeled the motorcar to a halt on a steep incline on Jackson Street next to a narrow alleyway.

“You’ll have to come inside with us,” Angus directed. “It’s not safe for anyone, especially a Caucasian woman, to be in this neighborhood in the wee hours. Stay close.”

Loy led them down a narrow, steep-sided lane that smelled of urine and chickens and strange herbal scents that Amelia couldn’t begin to identify. All the windows had iron bars designed to keep thieves out and the harlots in. Sad, silent faces peered out at them as the trio moved gingerly along the shadowy cobbled walkway in an alley that was half new construction, half burned out hulks.

Shou Shou and Ling Lee once lived near here…

Amelia could hardly bear to look at the poor creatures staring back at her, Asian women who were slaves in a country where some white women already had the vote! It was revolting. No wonder Donaldina Cameron had become their devoted advocate.

Loy pounded his fist repeatedly on a door at the end of the alley. Finally, someone opened its little sliding window and peered out. After a lengthy, high-pitched exchange with much gesturing on Loy’s part, the door itself swung open and Amelia caught a whiff of what she could only assume was opium smoke.

“Follow closely and don’t say anything,” Angus ordered.

“I’ll try not to breathe either.”

Amelia pulled her shawl more tightly around her head and shoulders and ducked her chin to her chest as they made their way through several foul-smelling corridors where tiny rooms branched off on both sides. Rough-hewn beds, cribs really, were built into the walls. Half naked women and effeminate young boys lolled beside glazed-eyed men snoring in drug-induced sleep. An odor of cooked cabbage nearly made Amelia gag, but she forced herself to swallow and keep up with Angus and Loy.

At length, they halted at a closet-sized room shaped like the others they’d seen. On the bed lay J.D., still and deathly pale, sprawled across a filthy mattress devoid of any covering beyond soiled ticking. An empty leather pouch used for carrying coins and nuggets lay at his side. For all intents and purposes, the man was nude, his trousers pulled down to his knees. His shirt—bloodied from a beating to his arms, ribs, and face—was wrapped around his shoulders and neck.

“Amelia, stand outside,” Angus barked.

“Don’t be absurd,” Amelia exclaimed, advancing into the cramped quarters. “You and I dealt with far worse at the Presidio.”

Angus leaned down and listened to J.D.’s chest.

“Robbed, beaten, and left for dead,” he muttered, swiftly opening his medical bag. “Well, at least he’s breathing.”

“Oh thank God!” Relief swept through her, leaving her almost giddy. “Do you think he’s got another set of cracked ribs?”

“He’s badly bruised, but I think his ribs withstood the pounding.” He bent down and sniffed Thayer’s hair. “Opium.”

“Will it kill him?”

“I hope not.”

Amelia thought she might be sick if they didn’t immediately escape from this nightmarish hole. “Well, don’t you think we should remove him at once?”

“Yes. Let’s get him home.” Angus pulled up J.D.’s trousers and together, the physician and Amelia, pulled down his shirt and put his jacket on his battered torso as gently as they could.

“Angus?”

J.D.’s voice was barely above a whisper.

“Yes, you idiot,” Angus replied.

“What’s she doing here?”

“More to the point, laddie, what are
you
doing here?”

“Kemp.”

“Kemp did this?” Amelia said with a gasp. “
Why
?”

“Chinese workers…” he gasped.

“The man is such a patriot,” Angus noted dryly.

“Would seem so. Sent bullyboys to warn me…”

“Or kill you,” Angus countered.

Amelia couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She knew Ezra Kemp was a rather boorish specimen, but she’d never known anyone who would shanghai his own associate!

She thought of the well-dressed, supposedly “respectable” white men she’d just glimpsed indulging their baser instincts in this opium-filled warren. She found it beyond shocking to learn just how sordid and depraved the underhanded dealings of the city’s wealthier male citizens could be. Despite her view of herself as a sophisticated world traveler, she had never viewed the underbelly of society like this and it appalled her. Just as Julia had always warned her, it was a Man’s World, all right, and she wanted no part of it.

Angus helped J.D. struggle to a sitting position. “Do you think you can walk to the motorcar outside?”

“Of course he can’t walk!” Amelia exclaimed as J.D. closed his eyes and slumped against Angus.

His chest appeared as immobile as his ashen face. Could he have just died? Dumbly, she stared at him, a wall of emotion building inside.

Oh, J.D. No! No! NO…

Then she heard him groan and again, relief flooded through her so intensely, she realized in some distant corner of her mind that the world had titled on its axis just now as surely as it had on the day of the quake.

“Angus, let’s
go
!” she pleaded. “We’ve got to get him out of here!”

“Loy, you take one side,” Angus ordered, “and I’ll take the other. Amelia, you get the doors.”

Half carrying, half dragging J.D., they transported him to the vehicle parked in China Alley. With Amelia at the wheel, Angus and Loy looked after the patient stretched out in the Winton’s backseat during the short ride from the brothel up the hill, to the Bay View Hotel. Together, the three ferried him to his room enclosed only with raw concrete and laid him on the brass bed Sears and Roebuck had recently delivered to the building site.

J.D.’s injuries amounted to several nasty bruises to his chest and arms, two blackened eyes, a gash on his forehead—adding to the scars he’d received in the quake—and a sprained wrist. The opium he had inhaled was apparently the cause of his semi-consciousness.

“You’re not too bad, considering the fix you were in, laddie,” Angus muttered. In a louder voice he asked, “What is your name?”

“You know my name, you fool,” J.D. muttered, eyes closed.

From the foot of the bed Amelia asked loudly, “J.D., do you know where you are?”