California Gold (103 page)

“I’m prepared to pay you a very considerable sum in return for…” Fairbanks licked his lips. “A service.”

“That’s nice. How much?”

“Enough to buy a lot of these.” Fairbanks indicated the pipe. “For a long time to come.”

“That’s nice,” Wyatt murmured again. “What do you want?”

“I want someone…”

As he’d done at the hospital, he faltered. The magnitude of the step brought to mind the platitudinous pronouncements of his law-school professors. It gave him pause, until he remembered all the wrongs done to him.

“I want someone—taken out. Is that the phrase? Removed. Is that clearer?”

Wyatt swung his legs off the bunk and sat up. He pushed his fingers through his white-winged hair, smoothing it back from his temples. Sickle moons of dirt showed under his fingernails. Now that Fairbanks had adjusted to the cellar’s pervasive opium smell, he could pick up another, more offensive one. Wyatt’s clothing was foul as a privy.

“You mean killed.”

Fairbanks swallowed. “Yes.”

“Lovely. Why not?”

Quickly Fairbanks parted the rattling bead curtain. The dark cellar was still empty. He went back to the bunk.

“If you do the service, my name must never be connected with it. Never.”

“It’s possible,” Wyatt said. “Anything’s possible for a price.” He smiled at his caller. “Who is it?”

If he answered, he couldn’t go back. Well, what of it? The deed first contemplated in anger could be done handily, because this piece of human refuse was desperate, and there would be no witnesses to a bargain. The morality of it didn’t trouble Fairbanks, only personal safety after the fact.

“I said, who is it?”

“I’ll tell you. When you hear, I believe you’ll be eager to help me.”

In 1905, in Chicago, a new and different kind of labor union arose. The old A.F. of L. was an alliance of craft workers, men who clung to their pride and skills and wanted no part of common, untrained laborers. But Eugene Debs, “Big Bill” Haywood, and other socialists decided that exclusionary pride was dangerous and wrong. Trade unionism, and the new century, demanded something better, the International Workers of the World.

The new union planned to organize the skilled and unskilled alike, industry by industry, not craft by craft. The IWW pushed first into the lumbering regions of the Pacific Northwest. Soon, shocked citizens and outraged owners were hearing a new rhetoric, one that called for the “pie in the sky” of a worker’s paradise, brought about, if need be, through sabotage and the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism.

Reaction was predictable. General Otis called IWW men “criminal syndicalist scum,” and sneered at them as “Wobblies.” The name caught on.

As the first decade of the century ended, the Wobblies eyed the golden fields of California, the Valley towns, where rich crops were harvested and large migrant populations could be recruited for the union. From Missoula, Spokane, Denver, and elsewhere, Wobblies began riding the rods into the Valley. They jumped off at places like Bakersfield, Brawley, Stockton, and Visalia.

Always their technique was the same: agitate, heighten class awareness, promote worker solidarity through mass meetings and street-corner oratory. Rarely did they talk specifically of union organization. Instead, they railed against local “bourgeois” agents who manipulated and cheated field-workers through their “slave labor marts.” Of course the unspoken antidote was organization, but in the Wobbly master plan that came later.

To make sure they wouldn’t be run out of a town too soon, the Wobblies raised a second cry—“Free speech!” It was a shrewd strategy, because free speech was exactly what the Wobbly-hating authorities had to suppress in order to suppress the union. The harder that police and civil authorities pushed on this issue, however, the harder the Wobblies fought back. Every time they were seriously threatened they sent pleas to union members around the nation.

In the fall of 1910, Wobblies were riding west in response to the latest war cry in their newspaper:
FREE SPEECH FIGHT IS ON
!

And so it was. The Wobblies were campaigning in Fresno. For a couple of months, the police there merely harassed them sporadically, but then, in December, the town stepped up the fight. The Fresno board of trustees unanimously passed an ordinance that said in part:

It shall be and is hereby made unlawful for any person to hold, conduct, or address any assemblage, meeting or gathering of persons, or to make or deliver any public speech, lecture, discourse, or to conduct or take part in any public debate, in or upon any public park, public street or alley within the 48-block area bounded by Tuolumne, M, Inyo and D Streets.

This was, of course, an abrogation of the First Amendment to the Constitution. The Wobblies advertised again:
FREE SPEECH FIGHT NEEDS YOUR HELP
!
RALLY AROUND
!
ALL ABOARD FOR FRESNO
!

W
INTER RAINS. ALL DAY
and all night, they poured over the red tiles of Villa Mediterranean. Mack heard them in his dreams.

The days of January marched by in gray procession. He tired of working an hour after he began, and his hands hurt constantly. He spread them on his desk. The knuckles were enlarged—the hands of an old man. In every mirror, that old man mocked him: white hair, lackluster eyes behind the round schoolmaster glasses. Something had died—maybe just the energy to pursue dreams.

T. Fowler Haines remained on his corner of the desk. One afternoon, Mack idly opened to the Foreword: “I have never beheld a place where I would so gladly fix my permanent abode as in this Paradise of sunshine.”

“Liar,” Mack sighed, and shut the guidebook. The rains of January 1911 poured down. He was forty-two years old.

The detective Bill Burns called at Riverside.

“The mayor of the city of Los Angeles hired me for the
Times
case. We’re going to unravel it and hang those dynamiters. I’ll tell you where I’m looking, Mack: Indianapolis, Indiana. It’s the home office of the Bridge and Structural Iron Workers Union. I know you feel strongly for union men—well, not union men who do murder; I’d not accuse you of that—but you’re partial to the movement as a whole, you can’t deny it. That’s why I wanted to be square with you. Square and in the open. We’re on opposite sides this time, boyo.”

They shook hands and Mack wished Bill Burns well.

On a blowy day of large clouds and cool sunshine, there came to the pretty little town of San Solaro one Yacob Steinweis of the Kalem Studios (for the founders Kleine, Long, and Marion) of Twenty-first Street, New York. He found Mack examining some construction blueprints in the cool shade of the bandstand in San Solaro Park.

Steinweis introduced himself with a business card instead of verbally. He was, at best, twenty-five years old, a studious but starved-looking fellow with a lot of white teeth and a smile of radiant innocence. Mack presumed you didn’t get by in the picture business, as you didn’t get by in any other, on innocence. Steinweis had to have something more.

One readily apparent trait was enthusiasm. He shook his head when Mack offered him a seat on a bandstand bench, bobbing up and down on his brown calfskin shoes. Though he probably couldn’t afford it, Steinweis dressed himself like an Englishman, in a walking suit of tan worsted, a figured brown four-in-hand, tan derby, gloves, and spats. Somehow his energy amused Mack, while saddening him a little too. He remembered when he’d felt the same way about opportunities.

“Sir,” Steinweis began, “I am quite experienced in moving pictures—three years as Sid Olcott’s right hand. I worked on many Westerns shot on the Jersey Palisades. I was Sid’s assistant director on the one-reel—” He stopped, unable to continue; no sound came from his mouth.

“Mr. Steinweis, what’s wrong?”

The young man reddened, seeming to tense and tremble all over. He made queer gargling sounds. At last he burst out, “N-nothing.” The color rushed from his face. “I have a certain slight problem with—” Another long choked silence. “Stammering. The p-picture to which I referred is—” Finally the name exploded.
“Ben-Hur.”

“I saw that,” Mack told him. “It was good.”

Steinweis slumped, too overcome with embarrassment to care about the compliment. Mack liked him for admitting his problem. He asked him again to be seated and, this time, Steinweis sank gratefully onto a bench.

“It isn’t easy being a moving-picture man, and a—” Another painful pause. “A Jew, and a stammerer too. Three strikes, as the ballplayers say. On the other hand, the more obstacles a man confronts, the more he’s challenged to stretch himself and achieve, wouldn’t you say?”

“Yes, definitely. But what brings you here?”

“I came to California originally because I saw more opportunity. But I refuse to work for others the rest of my life. I am looking for—property, land on which to start the Emory Stone Studio. A more euphonious name than Steinweis, don’t you think?” He was relaxed now, and having less trouble with his speech. “I have the promise of a loan if I locate s-suitable land. I found a hundred acres in the foothills of Hollywood. Ideal. Please sell them to me, Mr. Chance.”

“What property is it, exactly?”

“Here, I’ll show you, I brought along a surveyor’s drawing.” Steinweis unfolded it and Mack put on his spectacles. “I have studied you, Mr. Chance. For weeks now I have been doing it. You have huge holdings. You’ll never miss this hundred acres. Please, set any fair price and I’ll pay it. Just sell me the land for my studio. Give me my dream in—” After the strained silence: “California.”

Mack ended the meeting without committing himself. “I’ll think about it and let you know,” he said. Steinweis smiled, shook his hand, and uttered a perfectly articulated thank-you. But he looked heartbroken.

A week later, two gentlemen from the town of Hollywood arranged an appointment through Alex, and visited Mack in San Solaro. They represented something called the Committee of Conscientious Citizens. They were pale, forgettable sorts. Mr. Silas Ribner didn’t mention his occupation; Mr. Joe Hughes sold real estate.

“We’re Christians and Protestants, Mr. Chance,” said Hughes. “We understand you are too. Hollywood is a Christian community—up-and-coming, full of boosters. But we don’t like this movie crowd from the East. We don’t like them renting rooms, and we especially don’t want them settling permanently. That’s why we organized. Our committee got wind of this little New York Jew who wants to buy a piece of your land. We ask you to help us keep Hollywood a safe, clean residential community of Christian people. Don’t sell to him.”

“You came all the way out here to speak against a man because he’s a Jew?”

Mr. Ribner’s ire was roused. “A motion-picture Jew. Doubly undesirable. You can see that, surely.”

“I can see that you’re a pair of bigots.”

“Mr. Chance,” cried Hughes, jumping up.

“Out of this house before I throw you down the stairs myself.”

They left in a huff.

Two nights later, at half past eleven, Mack received a telephone call from Alex down in Riverside.

“I was just contacted by the authorities in Hollywood. You know the old abandoned barn on the property Steinweis wants to buy? Someone torched it this afternoon.”

The next night, after supper, Mack took another call.

“Jew lover,” said a distant unfamiliar voice, and hung up.

“God, I don’t need this,” Mack said.

In other days, in better times, he would have leaped into a fight with Hughes, Ribner, and the Hollywood burghers they represented. He loathed such men. They reminded him of Fairbanks, and of all the others who wanted to slam doors when he first trudged down from the mountains in ’87.

Now, though, things were different. His mood had been darkened by recent events, and the winter, and a persistent sense of failure. He’d lost Jim, he’d lost Nellie long ago—he seemed to have lost his grip on life itself. Were it not for the stewardship of good trustworthy helpers like Alex Muller, Enrique Potter, and Rhett Haverstick, God knew that he might have lost his millions too.

Steinweis telephoned at least once a day, pressing for a decision. As Mack stared at the little message chits, his antagonism focused on Steinweis rather than the self-professed Hollywood Christians.
Get out of California, Steinweis. Go home. I don’t need your money. I don’t need your trouble.

The short letter that went to Steinweis early in February said in part:

I have considered your offer. I can’t at this time see my way clear…

One gray afternoon in the February of what seemed an endless winter, Mack quit work at two-thirty and went for a drive alone. The Packard bumped down the foothill drive, which the rains had rutted badly. At the bottom, turning into the main road to Riverside, he heard a loud report.

Backfire, he thought. But he’d felt the left side of the auto vibrate. He parked and got out to study the Packard’s yellow paint. What he saw made the hair on the back of his neck crawl. Round and black, a hole was punched through the passenger door.

Scanning the groves across the road, he saw some men at work, but they were too far away to be clearly visible. He also heard a horseman somewhere but couldn’t see him.

He stuck his finger in the hole, all the way through to the inside of the auto. Then he spied something gray and flat on the floor rug: the spent bullet.

He thought of the Committee of Conscientious Citizens from Hollywood. “My God, surely not.”

“But what other explanation is there?” he said to Hellburner Johnson at supper that evening. Johnson had stepped off the 5
P.M.
local. He had a week’s vacation from Essanay while Anderson rushed to Chicago to confer with Spoor about broadening distribution of the stupendously successful Broncho Billy pictures. In the next, Johnson was to be promoted to town marshal, a major character part.

“Dunno, Mack,” Johnson said. “You’ve made a passel of enemies in your time. Could be any one of ’em. Does it make a hell of a lot of difference who’s on the givin’ end, so long as you don’t get caught receivin’?”