California Gold (102 page)

Fairbanks pulled his hands down slowly. “What a consolation. “ He knew the little rodent was probably scurrying around kissing the asses of all those presumed to be in line for his job.

Ludlow nervously offered a yellow flimsy. “At least I have one piece of good news.”

Fairbanks looked at the clerk blankly.

“One of those queer cults down south threw out its leader over the weekend. The man returned and burned the headquarters. A bookkeeper died of a heart seizure trying to prevent the arson, and a young gardener named Jim David received a head injury. The gardener is recuperating in a local hospital. We received all the details from the Pasadena police. They were interviewing the gardener, and one of the officers recalled the description we circulated. It was still lying on his desk…”

Fairbanks continued to stare at him. Ludlow desperately rattled the flimsy.

“Sir, the young man in the hospital fits the description. Blond hair, blue eyes, a crippled left foot—he fits it exactly.”

Fairbanks sat motionless for some fifteen seconds, then snatched the flimsy and smoothed it with both hands. He read it twice. Grabbing the telephone, he clicked the hook up and down. “Eunice? Eunice? Dammit, answer.”

He kept clicking the hook. Ludlow almost interrupted to add something else Pasadena had told him on the telephone, when he called to verify after receiving the hospital’s address. Pasadena told him that the officer who made the connection between the boy and the SP description also recalled a similar inquiry, and a similar description, from Pinkerton’s detective agency, months before. But the point didn’t seem that significant, so he decided to drop it.

“Eunice? Where the devil were you? This is Mr. Fairbanks. Telephone the main ticket office. I want a reservation on the Daylight Limited to Los Angeles tomorrow.”

The coastal range shone blue and white to the west of the speeding Limited. Fairbanks leaned his forehead against the cool glass and watched the mountains. Long ago, he’d studied Darwin, and more recently, the superman theories of the socialist Jack London. Out of such reading, his upbringing, and his long association with important and powerful Californians, he’d evolved a theory of how he should live and behave. This place, California, called on a man to dominate it. The sheer overwhelming natural beauty inspired some, but others, like him, it taunted. Its very bigness challenged him to a contest for mastery. He understood a man like Cholly Crocker, who had torn down trees, plowed up the earth, drilled and blasted through mountain rock to build the CP line and prove to everyone that he was mightier than God’s own handiwork. Fairbanks shared Crocker’s need to prove he was the master of his time, his place. But in that effort, he had lately failed on a scale unimaginable in any previous season of his life. He’d failed and been kicked aside like a street cur. Dreaming in the sunshine, his brow on the cool glass, Fairbanks felt he had but one great opportunity left, one opportunity to recoup the enormous loss, vindicate himself, win.

One opportunity.

“T
HERE, SIR.”

The matron pointed down the aisle of the sunny ward to the farthest bed on the right. Fairbanks tipped his hat and walked quickly. Although the walls were whitewashed and large arched windows admitted fresh air, he disliked the odors: the staleness of dressings, blood, strong cleaning solution.

He stopped suddenly, and an orderly with a tray of medicine cups almost ran into him. Muttering an apology, Fairbanks thought he’d lost his mind.

It was Carla in the last bed. A younger Carla, with less flesh on the face, but the same features, the same cap of bright-gold hair.

From a high window opposite his bed, sunlight fell on the boy, and the gently moving shadow of a palm. The boy was supposed to be twelve, but the size of his shoulders and the maturity of his face suggested fourteen or fifteen. A bandage bulged on the back of his head, fastened with sticking plaster, the hair around it shaved.

Fairbanks tapped his gold-headed stick on the bed’s metal foot rail. “Good morning. You’re Jim David, aren’t you?”

The boy put down his dime novel and pulled the sheet higher over his coarse cotton gown. His eyes were large, and as blue as Carla’s. Fairbanks was unmanned by emotion. In a rush of excitement before leaving the City, he’d told Carla the boy’s assumed name and mentioned Pasadena. To his astonishment, Carla broke down completely. Crying, she begged him to telephone the moment he found out whether or not it was their son. This touched him in a way he’d not been touched for a long time. He patted and soothed her, and promised he’d call.

The boy didn’t directly answer the question. “Who are you?”

“Allow me to introduce myself. Walter Fairbanks the Third. I’m an attorney.” The identification was automatic; he was incomplete without it. “I came down from San Francisco to see you on a personal matter.” He pointed his stick at a stool pushed under the bed. “Might I sit down?”

Jim remained suspicious. “I guess.”

The stool was low and Fairbanks felt awkward, less authoritative, on it. His eye was on a level with the boy’s hip.

A patient in another bed called plaintively, “Matron. Matron, may I have the—ah—receptacle? Hurry please, matron.”

Fairbanks concentrated on his son. “I’m familiar in a general way with the tabernacle in Pasadena, the fire set by the man who ran it. I’m sorry you were injured—”

Jim shrugged it away. “My head hurt like the devil for three days. It doesn’t now. They’ll take the stitching out Monday, they said. Then I can go home with Jocker.”

“Who’s Jocker?”

“A friend. He takes care of me, like.” Jim stared at the visitor, awaiting some better explanation than he’d received so far.

The boy’s deep-blue eyes fascinated Fairbanks. They were a man’s eyes, experienced, wary. How remarkable—and strange—that this was the offspring of his own loins.

“The admitting records show your name is James David, but it isn’t, is it? You’re really James O. Chance.”

A curtain closed behind the boy’s eyes. “Who are you? What’s this about?”

“Please, it…” Fairbanks extended a gray-gloved hand, a supplicant. Tiny sapphires of sweat popped out in his trimmed mustache. “It’s very hard for me to answer that. You see…” He faltered again. He had no skill in personal dealings, no charm like that bastard Chance had. He felt especially inadequate dealing with a son.

All at once Jim’s face showed hostility. “Then just answer.”

“I am…” Fairbanks cleared his throat like a public speaker. “I’m your real father.”

There was a long, long silence.

“Oh, matron. I’m finished with the—ah—receptacle.”

Jim rolled up the dime novel and held it in both hands, his knuckles white. “What are you saying to me?”

“I know it’s probably difficult for you to comprehend that assertion…”

Angry tears appeared. “Use words I can understand, will you?”

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Fairbanks blurted, his voice pitching high. He made nervous gestures, little quirky attempts at a smile. “I’m a lawyer, you see—accustomed to a certain formal—”
Christ, I’m botching it.
“Yes. Well. What I said is true. I’ll take all the time necessary to explain the circumstances, but I’m telling you the truth. Please believe me. Your mother is Carla Hellman. When you were born, she was married to James Macklin Chance of San Francisco and Riverside. But Chance is not really—that is…” Jim’s incredulous expression undermined him and he faltered again, his voice weakening. “Please give me the opportunity to prove what I’m saying. Can you get out of bed? Walk down to the superintendent’s office with me? I’ll telephone your mother. You can speak to her and she’ll corroborate everything…”

That sentence died too. It was no good. The boy stared at him with open disbelief, and even fright. Fairbanks reached out to touch him.

“Jim, you’re my son—”

Jim pulled away from the pleading hand. “I don’t understand this. But I don’t think I want to, mister.” Fairbanks heard something new in the boy’s voice—a deep underground river of emotion rushing to the surface. “My father is the man who brought me up, J. M. Chance. He was rotten to me sometimes, but he’s my father. I can’t change that, and you can’t either.”

Fairbanks jumped up so fast the stool fell over. A man with his foot in traction called, “I’m trying to rest here.”

“You ran away from him, Jim.”

“What’s that to you? Maybe there were reasons.”

“But you’ve never gone back to him—” Fairbanks grabbed his wrist. “You’re
my
son. Macklin Chance has beaten me every other way—he isn’t going to beat me with my own flesh and—”

“Let go. Get away.”

Fairbanks held on, control crumbling. The boy twisted his strong tanned wrist but Fairbanks held on.

“Dammit, let go, mister—you’re crazy.”

The lawyer’s gray-metal eyes had a strange frantic light in them. “Oh, Jim, I beg you—”

“Matron?” Jim shouted over Fairbanks’s shoulder. “Matron!”

My own son’s frightened of me. Look at him, terrified. Chance did this.

Fairbanks let go of Jim’s wrist and stepped back all the way to the aisle. His hand flew to his cravat. It didn’t need straightening but he straightened it. A swift look revealed the matron bearing down, skirts flying, a bull-necked orderly close behind.

“Sir, you are not permitted to come in here and disrupt—”

“Excuse me,” Walter Fairbanks said. He shoved the matron, then rushed by her, avoiding the orderly’s grasping hand, and ran out of the ward.

He ran down the noisy wooden stairs, the heat of humiliation fevering his face. He ran past puzzled employees peering from doorways and a cashier’s wicket. He ran out of the hospital, beaten.

T
HREE NIGHTS LATER, AT
dark, Fairbanks walked into Three Dog Alley in the squalid Chinese section on upper Broadway.

Fairbanks was usually a controlled man, but for three days and nights he’d been out of control, drinking recklessly, yet staying sober enough to, first, conceive the idea and, second, make his inquiries. He’d cashed a large draft at a correspondent bank of Fairbanks Trust, and with that money he loosened tongues.

Yes, one saloon keeper said, that man had been seen around town. Another informant said the man had a liking for the poppy. A third sent him to a tea parlor controlled by the Hong Chow Company, the largest criminal tong in Los Angeles. An enormous oily Chinese with a dropsical eyelid and a diamond-studded ring in his left ear grinned and wriggled his fingers for more money—$50 wasn’t enough. He pocketed another $50, shrugged, and said Fairbanks might try Mr. Tom Sun Luck’s in Three Dog Alley. No guarantees.

Sometime during this rolling binge, Fairbanks remembered his wife’s plea and telephoned San Francisco. He didn’t reveal any details of his defeat at the hospital, but simply told Carla the boy had a new life in Southern California and didn’t want to return to his old one.

“Oh, tell me—how did he look?” she asked.

“Fine,” he said, and hung up. He leaned his head against the wall by the telephone. “Goddamn you, Chance.”

So he’d not told his wife everything. Not said a word about his drunken binge—a necessary purging of his pain, and a purifying and focusing of his intent. He certainly would never utter a word about this expedition into a filthy little corner of hell called Three Dog Alley.

Though it was warm in Los Angeles, he’d put on his overcoat to hide his fine clothes. You didn’t advertise your station or prosperity in this kind of criminous sewer. Strange foreign eyes blinked at him from windows in dim hovels. By the light of pretty paper lanterns on a porch, a girl of twelve or thirteen opened her blouse and showed him breasts like small pears. An old woman with an idiot grin and no teeth fondled his arm. “You like a boy, gen’man?”

Fairbanks walked on. A short-haired dog with scaly flanks squatted in front of him, shitting. Fairbanks kicked at the dog and it snapped back at him.

He walked perhaps a block but it seemed like miles. Finally, following the directions on a crumpled scrap, he located the establishment of Mr. Tom Sun Luck by means of Arabic numerals painted under Chinese characters on the door post.

Mr. Tom Sun Luck was a curious hybrid: white skin, Oriental features. Quite old, he was unctuously accommodating. In his round cap and threadbare silk gown, he conducted Fairbanks to his cellar, a dirt-floored corridor with curtained doorways on both sides. Heavy white smoke with a fruity odor drifted the length of it. Mr. Tom Sun Luck led him to a beaded curtain at the end, which he rattled by brushing it with his four-inch fingernails.

“Right there. You pay me now.”

Fairbanks jammed $10 into the queer creature’s hand and the ringers shut like a spring trap.

“Leave me alone with him.”

“Sure, OK, mister bigshot.” Tom Sun Luck shuffled away into the dark.

Fairbanks parted the curtain and stepped through. A wick shimmered in a small shallow bowl of oil standing on a crate. It was the only illumination in the dirt-walled cubicle.

Eyes closed, Wyatt lay on his side in a wood bunk covered with sheets of a Chinese newspaper. He wore a filthy dark sweater and pants. His right hand dangled over the edge of the bunk, near a crate littered with paraphernalia: a small clam shell that held a long steel needle and a small brown ball of opium; a spirit lamp, extinguished at the moment; a pipe with an ivory-banded bamboo stem, ivory mouthpiece, and large four-sided Happiness bowl.

He approached the foul bunk, his soles crunching on something that might have been dried rodent droppings. Wyatt’s eyes opened.

“Hello, Brother Paul. Do you remember me?”

Wyatt’s white-spiked hair had a dull greasy shine and his once-handsome face was dirty and wasted. Blinking, he lifted his head a few inches. “I remember.” Grunting, he worked his left elbow under his side and raised himself a little higher. “No more donations. I’m not Brother Paul now.”

What a pathetic joke. What a pathetic man. “I know. It took me a long time to find you in this hole. I imagine you’re extremely short on money.”

Wyatt’s enlarged eyes showed a sleepy interest. “I have money. Money comes in. But it isn’t enough anymore. Never enough.”