Bones of the Barbary Coast (12 page)

"How old is this kid? Twelve? Thirteen? You fucking piece of shit, how old is she?" But the father was in no shape to answer. Bert ground him against the door frame, shook him like a scarecrow and then tossed him on the floor like the trash he was. The girl wouldn't look, just hid her head and cried. Bert was panting and he could feel the red swelling in his neck and face. He strode out to the two who stood at the door. "You want some too?" he said. He pushed the slender young man aside and swung a foot into the balls of the muscle-bound one before either could react. The guy fell back, skated across the floor on his ass and stayed sitting there, gasping for air.

No one budged. Everything stayed frozen except the tumbling clothes in all the round windows.

Bert turned back. Nearing's face was twitching with nerves, but he managed a quick smile. Bert shook himself, shot his cuffs, straightened his shirt. Then he turned around to the son, who hovered in the doorway, wanting to go to his father but afraid to move.

"You," Bert said. "Your old man's English isn't so good, so I want you to translate for me." He gestured for the young man to go to his father, sprawled half in the hall, half in the center room. The kid scuttled over, knelt, lifted the patriarch's head to his lap.

Bert hunkered down and gripped the father's face in two hands so he couldn't break eye contact. "Tell him just as I say it. First, you have the money next time, every time. The law doesn't like what you're doing and I don't either, so if you fight me you're guaranteed to lose every which way. You think this is bad, there's four guys out in the truck who'll come in here and put you out of business for good. Tell him."

The young man rattled it out, and Bert understood enough to know he was translating correctly. Bert held the father's head until he felt him try to nod his assent.

"Second thing, and listen closely. You're gonna be ashamed because now those girls know you're not such a big shot after all. You're gonna want to take it out on them, them seeing you humiliated like this. But I'm coming back here in a week and in a month, and I'm going to check up on them. If I see a bruise, a scratch, a frown even, I'm gonna take you in the back room there, put you in one of your machines and cook you in the chemicals. Got it?"

The son translated. The bloodied face of the father nodded with a series of jerks. Bert kept up eye contact until the flame of hate and resistance had been replaced by hopelessness in the dark eyes, then tossed the skull-like head back into his son's lap.

The clothes were still filing around on the conveyor, zombies on parade drill. Out at the front counter, the kid opened the cash registers and handed over whatever was in there, even the checks, which were no use to them.

They drove back to Nearing's car. Nearing was having a ball, recounting what happened, mimicking the expressions on their faces. Now that the adrenaline was fading, Bert felt like shit, his hands sore, a muscle pulled in his shoulder. Worse was the feeling that he'd eaten or drunk something poisonous, something that was still in his blood.

He pulled up behind Rich's car and they sat for a while as Nearing worked inside his duffle, divvying up the night's take, setting aside the bundle for Koslowski. Bert pocketed his without looking at it.

"You were in top form, Bertie," Nearing crowed. "I was ready to crap myself, but you—man! Eye of the
tiger!
You scared the living shit out of them."

"Okay, Rich. I gotta go home now."

"Come on! You love this shit! You love it and you're good at it. Admit it, man!"

"I don't love it."

"Go
on,
Bertie, you the
man\
Credit where credit's due!"

"Shut up. I mean it."

Nearing's eyes narrowed. He looked offended at what he must have mistaken for Bert's tone of moral indignation. "Hey Bertie, why do you think Koslowski and me asked you back in? We know your rep—Bert 'Machete' Marchetti. I
saw
you, man, okay? You don't think we've seen it before? You get off on it, man. Don't even try to bullshit me."

Nearing wasn't getting it. It was time for him to shut up before something bad happened, but he didn't know it. Bert held onto himself hard for a few seconds. Finally he just looked over at Nearing, nodded. "Okay, Rich. Now I'm tired, I'm an old man, gotta get my beauty sleep, yeah?"

Smiling again, Nearing punched his shoulder and got out.

14

C
REE BEGAN WEDNESDAY with a terrific run through the Presidio, a labyrinth of winding streets and parkland that capped the northern tip of the city. Her AAA book said it had been the site of the first Spanish fort in the area, and then a U.S. military base that had been converted to private offices and residences and public recreation areas. Curving roads, big overhanging trees, tile-roofed buildings, broad lawns and soccer fields, ocean air spiced with eucalyptus tang: utterly lovely. One minute she was running through a neighborhood of white stucco duplexes and four-units, the next she was plunging down a steep curving lane into deep jungle where innumerable paths snaked off into the green, tempting her feet. She felt as if she could run forever.

Last night's visit to the wolfman's house had resulted in another disappointment. For a while she thought she was picking up the perimortem moments of an earthquake victim, a sense of alarm and chaos and crushing weight. But that was too easy to imagine, and was probably a projection of hers, a frustrated subconscious attempt to force her way into the wolfman's experience. In any case, it didn't tell her anything useful. Mainly, she'd spent the time thinking about Bert and his old cases and Skobold's tragic story about their lost children. She had come away from Skobold carrying a knot of his grief in her chest, and for a time, sitting cross-legged in the wolfman's crypt, she just gave up and wept. Whatever resonances of the past, the dead, might linger in the house, they couldn't compete with the overpowering emotions of the present and the living. She had returned to the motel deeply exhausted.

But the world had gone around and the sun had come up. Running helped purge the other stuff. Cool, crystal clear weather, brilliant sun slanting down in shafts of warmth between the towering eucalyptus trees and spacious pines: Even with the new complications, she regained confidence that she could untangle some of Bert's problems.

Today's agenda was mixed. According to the archivist at the History Room, the quake and fire had destroyed most pre-1906 birth and death records; in any case, she wouldn't know where to look until she had a closer estimate of the wolfman's age. But pre-1906 newspaper collections were in good shape, so at some point she could also try a direct search for reference to the wolfman. Also, the archivist had given her the names of several private sources for genealogies and other historical materials, and Cree had called to leave messages asking for research appointments.

First, though, she needed a better general orientation in her subject; it was hard to make sense of specific historical data unless she could put it in context. After her run, she drove downtown, cruised a couple of bookstores, and bought three books on San Francisco history. She carried them and a cup of coffee to one of the outdoor benches between the library and the Asian History Museum.

White collar city employees came and went, a park crew was picking up trash in the plaza, a few tourists snapped photos; the homeless people were pushing their shopping carts down side streets to do their daily foraging. Cree dove into her books, speed-reading, jotting notes when thoughts or questions struck her. Time to get an idea of what kind of world the wolfman had lived in.

General impression: San Francisco in the last half of the nineteenth century was one kick-ass wild town.

In just a few decades, it had exploded from a scruffy settlement of a few dozen people on a marshy, sandy peninsula to a major port city of half a million. The mushrooming changes made for a chaotic situation, with people arriving and needing shelter and food and water and sewage processing and entertainment and booze where none of it had existed previously. It was a place of breakneck change, danger and opportunity, fortunes made and fortunes lost.

On one hand, there was a growing population of upright, decent people coming in, establishing lives of family, commerce, church, the arts, and so on. They built houses, started businesses, Worked jobs, constructed libraries and schools and theaters, paved streets, made laws and civic codes—good citizens, building civilization on the wild West Coast, land of opportunity. Within a few decades, San Francisco boasted every cultural refinement the century had to offer.

But the city had been started by the huge influx of gold-seekers in 1849, a stampede of rough guys that was refreshed by a comparable rush of frenzied silver-miners after the Comstock Lode discovery ten years later. Among them came every shade of sleazy entrepreneur, con man, and thug—as Bert had said, mostly rough and tumble guys without a lot of family responsibilities or scruples—and the city administration they created was for most of the century so corrupt that it was little more than a branch of the vice empires.

Thousands of Chinese came, too, looking for gold or to make lives in America after building the Central Pacific Railroad. They didn't speak English and were often persecuted by the whites, so they set up their own separate city in Chinatown, with legitimate enterprises as well as extensive criminal industries.

The bad guys waged continuous war on each other, sharks feeding on sharks. In Chinatown, wars between crime syndicates sometimes climaxed in pitched battles between small armies that left scores dead in the streets. Another ongoing war raged between regular citizens and low-lifes, between criminal gangs and law enforcement. One gang, the Sydney Ducks, liked to start fires just to create a distraction that would let them rob and loot without interference; the Ducks burned down as much as half the city on five occasions. In response, the furious citizenry formed vigilante armies that struck back by rounding up any men they thought might be crooks and hanging them from scaffolds in the streets. During one of these convulsions, five thousand armed men seized the armory, built their own military fort complete with cannons, and took control of the city government that had encouraged crime and corruption. They hanged a few suspected crooks and exacted some concessions from City Hall. Afterward, many of the insurrection's leaders became influential men—and just as corrupt as the politicos they replaced.

The Barbary Coast was the name given to the . . . what was it, an entertainment district? A red-light district? A no-man's land? A vice bazaar? In 1880, when the wolfman was probably alive, the area occupied about a quarter of the city on the upper east side, growing out of the docks where sailors and would-be miners came to drink, fight, gamble, and have sex. Given the shortage of women, those females who did show in the early days were in high demand and put to hard use. It wasn't long before entrepreneurs saw the profit potential and began importing women by the shipload.

Reading about sex trade made the hair on Cree's neck stand up. By 1880, tens of thousands of prostitutes were active in San Francisco, most of them in the Barbary Coast and Chinatown. The lowest caste were the older or uglier whores who worked out of stick-and-board shanties called cribs that clustered along seedy streets and alleys. One step up were the women who worked in the "cow yards," large buildings constructed by syndicates specifically to accommodate the wholesale sex trade. Some cow yards contained as many as three hundred cubicles; volume and quick turnover were the keys to financial success.

Of course, there were smaller brothels of every kind, too; only the top of that social ladder attained to the stereotypical coarse elegance of red velvet and polished brass—the stately madam playing hostess, the piano player in the front room with garters on his shirt sleeves. The brothels that maintained a pretense of gentility were called parlor houses and catered to a wealthier class of client.

Alcohol was another major industry, with melodeons and groggeries, deadfalls and "resorts," establishments that ranged from a board across two crates serving raw grain alcohol to fancy clubs selling decent stuff and providing entertainment to go with. It was the fashion to have liquor served by "pretty waiter girls," who also served sexual favors in booths around the main floor or in rooms upstairs. In 1890, the city licensed 3,117 such places, and officials estimated that another 2,000 operated on the sly. Drinking places competed for customers by offering porno peep shows, bawdy dancing, displays of the corpses of famous criminals, dog fighting, and live sex acts that included multiple partner combinations and women with animals.

Sex, booze, gambling, and drugs were the core industries, but robbery, burglary, graft, grift, extortion, murder, slave trading, real estate scamming, and picking pockets also made good livings for their practitioners. And of course shanghaiing, where sailors just off the boat got hit on the head or drugged unconscious and woke the next day as involuntary crewmen on outbound ships. Harbor masters, police, and city officials pocketed a good percentage for facilitating or ignoring criminal activity, so every form of vice, venery, scam, and ripoff flourished from the bottom-feeders right on up to the movers and shakers at City Hall.

Cree shook her head, appalled. One hell of a town, nobody's idea of a wholesome, safe, tranquil place. Yet part of her wished she'd been there, had seen it in all its unholy, wild and woolly glory. Victorian San Francisco sounded like a cross between the dense, fog-dank London of Dickens and Sherlock Holmes and a classic old West cowboy town, Dodge City or Tombstone.

So that was the wolfman's world. But where did he fit into it? Where would he have left a record of his existence?

Cree put her book aside, sipped the last of her cold coffee, and looked around. Across the street, on the sidewalk at the Asian History Museum, some event was shaping up—news vans, TV cameras, a crowd gathering. She watched it with absentminded curiosity.

Bert was right to warn her it wouldn't be easy. The mayhem, the turbulence, the mushrooming growth, the scope and pervasiveness of underworld activity, topped off by the massive disruption of the earthquake and fire: It seemed impossible that they'd ever discover who the wolfman was.

The thought made her sad, because unless her late-night visits to the house revealed something, she'd probably end up disappointing Uncle Bert. This particular John Doe meant a lot to him, as if it were symbolic of his whole career and, as Skobold said, of his lost daughter. Her abduction could also explain his current obsession with every case he'd failed to close, as if all those old cases had absorbed the colossal force of his frustration and passion. She doubted he'd ever get closure on any of that, but it would be nice to lay at least one skeleton to rest for him.

Cree looked over as a clamor of booming and clanging noises started up in front of the museum. Cameras flashed from the crowd as a dozen Chinese men in crimson costumes, waving ribbons, beating gongs and drums, began an acrobatic dance on the sidewalk.

Clearly, Bert's loss had defined his life in a way that was not healthy—it had deflected him into an outward trajectory, away from other people, into a dark view of humanity, into the anaesthetic succor of booze, into a lonely little house at the end of a very long stairway. Her immediate impulse was to reach out to him, to give him some small respite from his isolation.

But now she began to doubt she could manage it. Maybe her predicament was too similar: She had been deflected on an outbound path, too, when Mike died. She was a perpetual outsider, too, with a worldview that was incomprehensible or offensive to most people, with habits and preoccupations that were arguably morbid, with a complicated love-life defined by distance. Cree felt her shoulders slump as it caught up with her. She strove to be a complete person, an integrated person, an honest person. Yet in so many ways her outward, daily life was an act—a parody of normal that allowed her to live in the world with minimal friction.
Tell nobody,
Bert had insisted. She'd heard it before in one form or another: Tell nobody what you do for a living, what you believe, what you've seen and done, what matters most to you, who you really are. Even Paul Fitzpatrick, at gatherings with his psychiatrist friends, had asked her not to be too specific about her work lest his own professional credibility suffer.

Over the years, she'd learned the lesson:
Look ordinary. Don't advertise the
fact that you creep around in the middle of the night communing with dead people.
Society doesn't understand people like you.
Three hundred years ago, she'd have been burned as a witch.

"Why the sad face?"

The voice jolted her out of her thoughts. She looked over to see the man she'd met at Skobold's lab, the radiologist. He was coming from the direction of the library and stopped just short of the bench with a cautious smile.

"Cam Raymond—Ray," he reminded her.

"Ray, of course."

He stood strategically so his good side was toward her. From this angle, she thought, you'd never know: handsome profile, a tan that set off startlingly pale blue eyes, dark eyebrows with a graceful lift at the end. His khakis, blue shirt, and tweed jacket were worn casually yet were well cut to a nicely proportioned frame.

He noticed her little stack of books and picked one up to inspect it. "Reading up on our beloved city? Not from here?"

"From Seattle right now. From back east originally. How about you?"

"San Francisco born and raised."

"Lucky man—I totally and completely adore this place."

Ray glanced at the fracas across the street, then back at her, smiling. "Yet just now you had the look of a stranger in a strange land."

"I suppose that's what it was. At that moment, it was, what . . . the sense of being one thing on the outside, the person you wear for the world to see, and a very different thing on the inside." She smiled quickly, surprised at his perceptiveness and her own candor, wanting to lighten it up. "And wishing the two could be . . . you know. Formally introduced."