A Race to Splendor (8 page)

By now, he was practically speaking to her in code. “Careful… more ceiling… collapse… other… shocks. Watch out.”

“I will,” she assured him. “Now go!”

“I’ll come back.”

“Good! Hurry!”

She was holding her left forearm as if it pained her. Blood had dried on her pale skin and soiled the sleeves and front of her shirtwaist. Additional strands of her dark chestnut hair had escaped her topknot and hung limply against her flushed cheeks. She gave a brief nod to indicate that she would be all right, despite his leaving her in the midst of such terrifying chaos.

He wondered suddenly if he would ever see her again. Would this courageous woman survive the terrible Act of God that had befallen San Francisco?

Or would he?

Should he tell her about last night, he wondered suddenly.

Tell her what?
said a voice in his head. He wasn’t completely sure, himself, what happened. Exactly. It was all such a jumble.

“Please!” he said, infused with a sudden surge of energy. “Get in the car. At least save your own life if we can’t save your father’s!”

Amelia glanced at the darkening skies. Flames and funnels of smoke dotted the landscape at scores of locations near the waterfront. In the distance, a series of loud concussions punctuated the air.

“Explosions,” she murmured. “Gas boilers, do you suppose?”

“Dynamite. Army work. Creates firebreaks.”

“It looks as if it also starts fires.” She pointed to a puff of smoke rising in the area of the latest explosion. “I
have
to stay with my father,” she said, holding his glance. “Send us help if you can.” And they both knew how slim the chances of that would be.

Then she added, “Godspeed, Mr. Thayer.”

For a split second, as he stared into the depths of her brown eyes, J.D. suddenly felt a kind of intimacy more potent than anything he had ever experienced. It was as if they’d been lovers and he’d never played her father for the fool while her admirable grandfather lay upstairs in the resplendent Bay View Hotel, dying of a thrombosis.

Then the moment shifted back to the harsh reality bearing down on Nob Hill. “I’ll bring the doctor,” he wheezed, barely able to speak for the pain in his chest.

“Or just send him to us. You need to lie still as soon as possible.”

Grimacing again, he shifted gears, applied the gas, and the Winton sputtered away.

Chapter 7

Amelia stared at the cloud of dust kicked up by the retreating automobile. Then she turned toward the phalanx of flames converging from several directions at the bottom of the hill and advancing northwest. Where were the fire brigades? Surely Mayor Schmitz and his City Hall cronies would mount a defense of Nob Hill.

By now, she began to wonder what she would do if she were J.D. Thayer. Wouldn’t she simply drive that fancy automobile as far away from San Francisco as the fuel in the tank would take it? The question was: would
he
?

By the time she returned to her father’s side, he was groaning in agony. The numbing affects of the alcohol from the previous night were fast wearing off.

“My hand…” he moaned. “My hand…”

“Your hand pains you, yes?” She gently covered him with a blanket that she’d found in the housekeeper’s closet in the main part of the hotel.

“My
hand
!” he grunted. “A flush…”

“It’s been crushed by the table. It’s bound to hurt quite a lot and turn red.”

“Noooo!” He pursed his lips in frustration. “A
royal
flush. I won! I won it back! Look at my hand!”

Startled, Amelia lifted a corner of the blanket and gently slipped three playing cards from between his palm and thumb. On the backs of each card, the words “Bay View Hotel” were etched in bold script. The initials “JDT
”
were also stamped in a corner.

“There are three cards here, Father.” She turned them face up. “An ace, queen, and ten. All diamonds. J.D. Thayer’s initials are on the backs.”

“Jack… king too…” he murmured. “Had all five of ’em. I won the Bay View back. Fair and square. Just as I lay down the last card… hot damn! All hell broke loose.”

“You mean the quake hit? Where are the other two cards?”

“I grabbed all of ’em when I dove for cover,” Henry said with sudden strength. “Look around, damn you!”

Amelia scanned the chaos and shrugged helplessly. “We’ll never find two playing cards in this rubble, Father.”

“I bet it all… and won it all back!
Find
them!”

“Oh, Father…” She shook her head in disgust. “Mr. Kemp wasn’t exaggerating. You wagered your last
sou
last night… and for
what
!?”

“For you! And I won! Everything’s ours again! You tell that J.D. your pappy’s a rich man again.”

So Thayer and Kemp had once again competed to divest their favorite pigeon of his last cent in another winner-take-all poker fest. And she had just helped Thayer escape from the fate that was certain to overtake her father and her in the next few hours if the fire lines didn’t hold.

She scanned the jumble of debris where Ling Lee’s lifeless arm made her wonder if there were other women buried in the rubble piled on top of several additional sofas and chairs.

“Mr. Thayer isn’t here anymore,” she said dully. “Neither are the two cards.”

“You don’t believe me?” her father demanded.

Amelia had reached beyond her ability to cope with her belligerent parent.

What difference does it make now?
she wanted to scream, but closed her eyes instead and whispered “Seven times four… seven times three…”

Amelia could not count the number of times her father had sworn that he would have nothing more to do with gambling, spirits, or whores. Neither could she, her mother, nor her aunt tally the occasions when Henry Bradshaw claimed he’d triumphed in some great endeavor—save for an untoward event that was never his responsibility. And each time, her father’s excuses proved to be an endless series of lies and self-deceptions. No wonder Mother had finally fled to Europe, filing for divorce before she left. At least she’d saved herself, which was a great deal more than Amelia could say for her own plight.

Again, she searched in the immediate vicinity for the two other cards, but to no avail. Once again, her father had lied to excuse his outrageous behavior. Numb with exhaustion, she tucked the three crumpled cards into the pocket of her skirt and curled up in the rubble near her father. Under a second hotel blanket, she wrapped her arms around her torso to keep warm as overwhelming fatigue pulled her into unconsciousness, oblivious to the distant sound of clanging fire bells and the acrid smell of smoke.

***

Sometime later, Amelia was shaken awake by the rapid, jolting motion of another aftershock. The temblor rattled the debris beneath her, forcing her to her feet, her heart racing. Forgetting even her father, sheer instinct for survival propelled her up a mountain of bricks and onto the sidewalk on Jackson Street. By the time she found herself in the road, the tremors had stopped. She gulped for air and tried to calm her racing pulse.

In the lot adjacent to the wrecked gambling club, a gray-haired woman stood beside a pit dug in her back garden. She clung to a shovel while howling an unearthly series of cries. Grandfather Hunter had written Amelia in Paris that a fabulously wealthy, reclusive widow had purchased the three-story house next door and made it abundantly clear to everyone in the neighborhood that she wished to be left alone. Even so, her emotional outburst cried out for attention, and Amelia stepped over a gate toppled by the latest tremor.

At that moment, a Chinese man clad in black, pajama-like attire came around the corner of the house in a dead run. When the old woman saw that he was carrying a lifeless small dog in his arms, she began to shriek with despair. She pitched down her shovel and threw her arms around both the dog and the servant, clinging to them fiercely.

Amelia drew near, exchanging looks with the Chinese servant.

“I’m so sorry,” she began. “Is there anything I can—?”

She hesitated at a look of warning that flashed in the servant’s eye. Before she could say anything further, the old woman reared her head and screeched, “Get away! Off with you! Chung, make her
leave
!”

The distraught woman bore down on Amelia, wailing like a banshee. From the a pocket in her skirt she withdrew a revolver and pointed it at her would-be savior.

“I told you to leave us alone!” the woman shrieked.

“But the fire is—” Amelia protested.

“Get away, missy!” the Chinese house servant cried. “She no like—”

At the sound of the pistol being cocked, Amelia flattened herself on the sidewalk. A split second later, a bullet smashed into the crumbled fence near where she’d been standing.

“Come, Missy Lolly… come, come,” the servant demanded with surprising authority. “I take care… I take care of everything. No worries… come.”

Amelia’s heartbeat thundered in her ears while the crunch of steps receded toward the center of the woman’s garden. On hands and knees, she crawled thirty feet uphill, reaching the gaping hole where she had initially discovered J.D. Thayer. Sticking out of the rubble, Ling Lee’s lifeless limb was now the color of slate.

“Please…” Amelia called weakly, her knees beginning to fold, “somebody help me!” Her lungs strained against the smoke-filled air and in her ears, the incessant clanging of the fire brigades’ bells began to fade. For the first time in Amelia’s life, the world went gray as she collapsed on the buckled sidewalk in a heap of cotton petticoats and a stained serge skirt.

“Someone just tried to kill me,” she muttered to the corpse buried under five feet of debris, “and I don’t even know why.”

***

Amelia awoke to find herself slung over the bony shoulder of a redheaded man struggling up the steep incline of Jackson Street en route to Taylor. He deposited her unceremoniously on the Winton’s running board, propping her against the driver’s side door. About the same age as J.D. Thayer, he leaned close and squinted at her, his russet whiskers practically brushing her face.

“Let’s see what’s wrong with you now.” He pulled down one of her lower eyelids and then the other. Then he extracted an amber vial from his medical bag and gave her a whiff of smelling salts that made her cough and sputter.

“The woman next door… tried to kill me,” Amelia choked. Her terror came back in a rush and she reached for the man’s arm to steady her. “I was just trying to—”

“It took awhile to find you after we pulled up. I’m Dr. Angus McClure.”

Amelia clung tighter to the physician’s arm as he waved the bottle under her nose a second time, soothed somewhat by his Scottish accent that reminded her of her grandfather’s burr.

“The old woman next door shot a pistol at me when I offered to help her.”

“The veneer of civilization gets mighty thin when disasters strike,” he said.

“Why was that old crone shooting?” wheezed J.D. from the passenger seat.

Amelia was startled to hear his voice, for in the hours she dozed fitfully next to her father in the ruins of J.D.’s gambling club, she came to the conclusion that, like Kemp, he’d save his own skin.

“When I first found your lady friend, J.D., I saw that the old woman next door and her Chinese houseboy were burying a trunk,” McClure reported. “Must’ve had something in it she considered valuable.”

Amelia shook her head, her eyes still watering from the contents of McClure’s vial. “No. The woman was very upset because her dog was killed in the quake. Her houseboy was about to put the poor beast in the trunk for burial. When I urged them to escape the fire and come with me, she grew hysterical, pointed her pistol, and shot right at me.”

“And how are you feeling now?” the doctor asked.

“Better.” She sat up abruptly. “My father! Oh, thank God you’re here!”

“I’m here because this maniac forced me to come,” McClure said, meaning J.D. “I told him to stay put, but he wouldna lie on his cot.”

Amelia rose unsteadily to her feet, peered across the open-air motorcar, and judged her rescuer in worse shape than before. “Thank you for returning,” she said, “but anyone who stays here much longer will be burned alive.” She pointed down the street at flames marching up the hillside. “My father’s in the back annex with rubble everywhere. I have no idea how we’re going to move him.”

“J.D., you stay right where you are,” ordered Dr. McClure, “and don’t budge, or you’ll make matters worse.” He groped in the backseat for two poles rolled in a length of canvas—an army stretcher, guessed Amelia. “If you’re feeling up to it, come with me,” ordered McClure. “We’ll try to recruit some of these hotel guests to help us.” He leaned forward and peered closely at her forehead. “Those cuts have scabbed over but they look nasty, miss. I’ll attend to them once we see what we can do about your father.”

McClure collared two men wandering dazedly down the deserted street and ordered them “under martial law,” he barked, to assist in the removal of Amelia’s father from the debris.

Henry Bradshaw’s eyes were closed when they found him, his dress woolen trousers covered with a new layer of rubble from the recent aftershock.

The doctor pulled a smaller mirror out of his pocket and held it within an inch of the injured man’s lip.

“Barely breathing,” he muttered. He glanced at Amelia. “He won’t last the night, you know. He’ll be taking a place in that car out there that might better be—”

“Take him or leave
me
!” Amelia cried, her voice rising shrilly.

McClure hesitated for an instant, and then ordered the two men he’d commandeered on the street to put Henry Bradshaw on the stretcher and removed him to the backseat of the Winton.

Meanwhile, Thayer lifted his head from the passenger seat’s backrest and said in a weak voice, “Look… the fire.” Amelia spotted Barbary curled up on the Winton’s floor.

The others turned to gaze at flames that were now consuming the shanties and lean-tos and collapsed brick hovels along the waterfront and racing uphill toward them, burning large sections of Chinatown to the ground in the process.

“Oh my God!” Amelia cried, pointing south. “The Fairmont!”

The beautiful
beaux-arts
hotel that had survived the quake admirably and was three days away from opening its doors to the public was about to be enveloped by flames advancing in a wall of orange and black. Even where buildings still remained, the heat had grown more intense and Amelia and the others began coughing convulsively as the smoke began to fill the air near them.

“We’ve got to get out of here,” McClure said. “Climb onto the running board, lassie, and hold on tight.”

He vaulted into the driver’s seat as J.D. suddenly struggled to sit up. “My safe! I just thought of it, Angus! The property deeds… some gold… everything I have—”

The doctor glanced over his shoulder. Behind him, the growing conflagration had devoured upper Chinatown, just below where their motorcar stood on Taylor Street. Another explosion rattled the windows of the Bay View and showered the sidewalk with glass shards.

“Sorry, laddie. There’s no time. The tires on this automobile will be exploding in a moment. We’re
going!
”

Amelia turned to Thayer. “About an hour after you left, an aftershock dumped tons of debris on top of the safe behind the stairwell. You’d never get near it now.” She felt sorry for the man but was relieved there would be no more delays in getting her father to the field hospital McClure said had been set up at the Army Presidio.