Belle Cora: A Novel (74 page)

Big Pete pointed to the other side of the square: “That’s David Broderick, ain’t it, Ned?”

“Standing on the wagon. Yes,” agreed McGowan.

Pete nodded to me. “That’s the boy you want to meet.”

I looked: a lean, bowlegged man of middle height in an ill-fitting suit stood on a wagon, his face lit by a torch in the hands of a man beside him. At this, my first sight of David Broderick, I remembered how often I had heard his foes speak of him as “that ape,” and “that monkey.” He had a battered-looking face, a sunken nose wide at the bridge with flaring nostrils, and with the long distance between nose and upper lip so important to satirical illustrators who want to make Irishmen resemble chimpanzees. But the eyes of this ruthless political boss who had risen from the streets, his eyes were the anomaly of his countenance: they were suffering eyes, sensitive, compassionate. They looked as if they were about to cry.

His wagon faced the 110-foot flagpole made of a single tree—given to the people of San Francisco, California, by the people of Portland,
Oregon—which an advance party of vigilantes had already prepared as a gallows. “This is murder, don’t fool yourselves!” shouted Broderick from his perch on the wagon. “Don’t you know these vigilante fellows are bigger thieves than this man they’re in such a hurry to hang? If you help them,
you’re
a criminal. If you stand by and let them do it, you’re handing them the power to roll over anyone who won’t lick their shoes! It ain’t about this Jenkins fellow, don’t you see; it’s about who’s next.”

Someone shouted, “You’re next!”

“And after me, some friend of yours!” Broderick shouted back. He started calling out the names of people he recognized in the crowd, telling them he thought they had better sense than to be here, keeping such bad company.

Charley touched my arm and pointed.

“Oh no,” I said. “Oh my God. Oh, damnit.”

Broderick was surrounded by a group of tough-looking fellows, and to his immediate left was my brother Lewis.

“Lewis!” I cried. “Lewis, get down from there. Get away from him!”

I shouted it as I might have when he was a boy and I had caught him playing on the roof or taunting some ferocious dog. But of course he couldn’t come down from there: being there was his job. He was working for Broderick. He was one of his shoulder strikers from New York. I had seen him and talked with him only last week, and he had not told me, and I had no idea how long he had been hiding it from me. We had both learned a great deal about hiding things, it seemed.

When Brannan’s men were forty feet from the flagpole, they put the noose around Jenkins’s neck. Broderick and his associates, including my brother, got off the wagon and rushed the vigilantes. They were joined by a handful of men from other directions, including several policemen. I felt sorry for the stupid thief being hurried to his death and began to hope that Broderick would prevail.

Big Pete said, “Five to one he hangs.”

Charley had his arm around my waist, and a barely perceptible tightening of his grip told me that, for the first time tonight, he was interested. “How much?”

“A hundred.”

“Make it a thousand.”

Big Pete handed me his lucky hat, but Charley and McGowan kept theirs on as they rushed in to join the fight—Big Pete to help the vigilantes, Charley and McGowan to stop them. The two sides fought, hundreds of men, a churning mass of arms, shoulders, and heads moving in and out of the flickering light. My attempts to follow the individual efforts of Lewis and Charley and McGowan did not help me to understand what was happening. Eventually, I became aware that Broderick’s men had captured Jenkins. They had their arms around him. Some were trying to get the rope off his neck; some were trying to pull him free of the vigilantes. But Brannan’s men held the rope, and that turned out to be the most important thing. I inflicted further damage on Big Pete’s old hat, twisting it in my hands, as I watched the contest devolve into a tug of war. The noose was still around Jenkins’s neck, and he was slowly strangled in the mêlée; still the struggle continued. The corpse, jerked this way and that with a puppet’s borrowed life, had lost its own meanings. It was no longer a man hoping to be saved or, if necessary, to die bravely, but a ball two teams were fighting over. The vigilantes made steady progress. At the last minute, whether out of respect for Oregon or because the flagpole presented unforeseen difficulties, they put the rope over a beam on the old adobe building. Brannan yelled, “Pull together—let every honest citizen be a hangman.” The body rose. It wasn’t on a pole, but it was a flag now, just the same.

I looked around for Lewis, but I couldn’t find him. Charley and Big Pete returned, both sweaty and gasping for breath, in good humor, having enjoyed the sport. David Broderick, slapping his clothes and twisting his shoulders as if to loosen his muscles, walked to his wagon, ten yards away from us. Strangely calm, he stood in the street before a wagon wheel, listening to Ned McGowan. As I watched, Ned stretched his arm out in my direction, and David Broderick turned his head and looked at me.

LII

AT AN INQUEST THE NEXT DAY
, after Jenkins was taken down, a police officer refused to testify, saying that if he did he would be killed by the secret organization that now ruled the city. The day after that, there was another battle in Portsmouth Square, with fists, boots, and sticks, when Broderick’s people broke up a meeting of Brannan’s people.

I was very worried about Lewis, so I sent a note asking him to visit the house, by the back entrance, during the afternoon. He came at the appointed time and place, but he disobliged me by bringing three friends: men of a sort that my servants would have never let through the front door. “This is Billy Mulligan,” he said proudly. “This is Jim Casey. Billy, Jim, this is my old friend Belle, who I used to know in New York,” and he winked, making me angrier.

I brought them into the parlor. On their best behavior, they waited for my invitation before settling comfortably into the furniture and looking all about them in hope of seeing beautiful women. Each was dressed in his own garish combination of plug hat, swallowtail coat, plaid trousers, and brightly patterned waistcoat. Their manner was sweet and easygoing. I knew them by reputation. Billy Mulligan, a short-legged fellow with an acne-scarred baby face—like a badly deteriorated fresco of an adorable cherub—was the onetime boxing promoter who had befriended Lewis last year; probably it was he who had introduced Lewis to David Broderick. He was going to die in 1862, during a shoot-out and in a condition of
delirium tremens
, soon after he began firing his gun randomly out of the window of his room in the St. Francis Hotel. James Casey, a slim young fellow with a sad, puzzled face and prematurely receding hair, had done a term in Sing Sing Prison. He was going to be lynched in 1856 for the shooting of a newspaper editor who had mentioned Casey’s prison record in print.

As for Lewis Godwin, soon after arriving in California, he had gotten a reputation by winning prizefights, and then won a small fortune by losing them, until no one, including his brother Edward, would bet a penny on him ever again. Then he and Billy Mulligan were hired by a couple of men to win a dispute over a contested mine. Then they had been involved
in a shoot-out in which a woman selling tamales across the street had been hit by a stray bullet, whose bullet was never determined, and then they had come here. And the date and circumstances of my brother’s death will be related in their proper sequence among the other events of this narrative.

I sent word that the girls were not to come down, but I had Niobe bring out some wine, along with bread and oranges and dates and cheese, which counted here as delicacies, and talked with Lewis and his friends for almost an hour, just so they would not feel slighted. Then I begged them to go, on the grounds that members of the Vigilance Committee often came here during business hours, and if they stayed there was bound to be a brawl—for I knew what caliber of men they were!—and that the breakage would ruin me. They laughed and they departed, except for Lewis, whom I asked to stay a little longer.

As soon as they were gone, I said, “These men you call your friends—they’re no good, and they’re not going to do you any good.”

He stood up. “I came because you’re my sister and I need to see you sometimes. I didn’t come for this.” He thrust his arm into a coat sleeve. I clutched his gaudy silk vest. “Let go.”

“If you could hear the things I’ve heard about that man,” I said. He knew I meant Broderick. “You’re such a fool. If you heard what is said …” I was vague as to details, because I was too upset to remember. “No one respectable likes him—a politician who surrounds himself with hooligans. Hooligans like you, who he’ll toss aside the minute they’re not useful to him.”

“What do you know about it? He’s not like a politician. I’ve seen him go into fire—a real fire, that could have killed him—to get a friend out safe.”

I released him, as if his argument about Broderick’s heroism had moved me, and he was in less of a hurry to leave. “Well,” I said, “that takes courage, to be a fireman.”

“It does,” said Lewis.

“Jack Cutter was a fireman. I suppose he wasn’t all bad.”

He went for the door again, and I didn’t grab him this time, but I did say, “I thought you’d want to stay and visit Jocelyn.”

He hesitated a moment. “You know she won’t see me here,” and he
went stomping down the hall in those big boots that make all the men of the West feel a couple of inches taller than they really are.

A FEW HOURS LATER
, when I told Jocelyn what Lewis had said, she shrugged and told me he was right. I changed my clothes and left her in charge, and went with Charley to the house of Tom Gallagher, where Judge McGowan had arranged for me to meet David Broderick.

Gallagher, who had built the city’s first theater, the Jenny Lind, lived with his wife, their maid, their cook, and an occasional lodger, just for company, in a three-story house on the plaza. Ned McGowan was already there when we arrived. Gallagher’s wife, who had come from nothing, just as Gallagher had, was friendly and natural with me, and we all had a fine dinner served on real silver and good china. Broderick recognized Charley as one of the men who had tried to save Jenkins’s life, and commended him for it. Charley said he was glad of Mr. Broderick’s good opinion, but he had to be honest: he had been trying to win a bet, and his friend Big Pete of the El Dorado had been helping the other side only because of the bet, and Mr. Broderick shouldn’t hold it against him. Broderick did not reply. McGowan said that anyway Charley had tried to do the right thing, though the results had been unfortunate.

At last the table was cleared. Gallagher and his wife invited the rest of the company to enjoy cigars and brandy in another room, Broderick and I stayed behind.

We examined each other, and I found him quite frightening on close inspection. His associates lived to satisfy their immediate appetites. If there were such elements in his own character, he had mastered them. At dinner he had drunk only water and had eaten the capon as if it were a bowl of mush; when he glanced at me, the sorrowful expression on his ugly face seemed to say various things: that we were both mourning someone, or that he still loved me even though I had disappointed him in some profound way. When I had first seen those saintly, grieving eyes of his up close, I had wanted to tell him: don’t do it, you can’t win against Sam Brannan, he’s heartless, and nature has given you a mother’s heart. But by this time I had sensed the steely purpose behind the sad eyes, and I had concluded that David Broderick was a fanatic. To feel himself
another inch nearer his destiny was the only pleasure that meant anything to him.

Now, having no small talk for the likes of me—or for any woman, I supposed—he said, “You said you had something for me. What is it?”

“Four members of the executive committee of the Committee of Vigilance are regulars at my house; they come, they drink, they have a good time. They brag, to impress the girls. They get drunk enough, they brag about the committee and what they know, the secret signs and signals and plans. I thought that might interest you.”