King of the Golden Gate
Chapter 1
Death watched the bark Lorraine Marie.
Death, lurking in the dark lee of Yerba Buena, glided effortlessly through the inky stillness of the fog-wrapped bay.
Death was a man dressed in black, and armed with a pair of razor-sharp, double-edged knives. Dragon knives.
“Now, it may be deep everywhere else in this bay, boy, but here by Yerba Buena it shelves a bit, and you can’t let your mind wander. You got to learn to keep track of them damn knots in any case. Can’t miss if you keep good count, and kind of tick ’em off while they slip through your fingers. Learned that from Mark Twain hisself, on the great Mississippi.”
“You didn’t never riverboat with Mark Twain. Least not the way you told it last week, and the week before that.”
“Don’t you sass me, boy. I’ve broke my share of heads.”
“Had yours broke too, to listen to you talk.”
Hudson Hastings grinned despite himself. Young Dan’l was a smart aleck, sure enough, but he’d taken to deepwater sailing like a young rooster to hens. One voyage to Hong Kong and back didn’t make a sailor, though. It was all well and good to know how to handle yourself on the deep ocean, but until a man learned the principles and rules of shallow work he couldn’t call himself a sailor. “A man’s got to know not only where he’s going, but how to get there as well. And to do that, you got to learn how to take soundings in your sleep, learn to count them knots, take into account the speed of your ship, and see how deep the water is.”
“And just where are we going?” Daniel Rosenthal asked, letting the sounding line slip through his fingers.
Hastings squinted at the scattered lights off the starboard side of the Lorraine Marie. In the wispy fog, they looked like distant fireflies on a summer’s night. “See them three lights in a row? Next to a triangle of red lights? Right there. Safe harbor at Drake’s warehouse. We’ll keep on our present course, run with the wind as far south as Mission Rock, then come about and cross the wind until we’re close enough to spill it and coast in, I suspect. Another couple of hours and we’ll be on our way to Spanish Kitty’s and a hot berth for that stick of yours. Mine too, gray as I am. I’ll tell you, there ain’t nothin’ better under heaven than the first woman after a long voyage.”
Daniel laughed shortly. “You seadogs are all alike. Let you ashore and you drink and rut yourselves unconscious and wake without a cent.”
“You right about that, boy.” Hastings’ cackle was dulled against the fog. “But can you think of a better way? Hell, beats grubbing in a mine with no sky over you. Beats gettin’ crushed by rock, or gettin’ the lung disease. Or”—he spat over the side—“workin’ in a store, dolin’ out flour or nails or what-have-you for landlubbers. You had any sense, you’d think the same way.” Hastings sighed, shook his head dolefully. “I guess that won’t happen, though. Too much of the Jew boy in you. You’ll probably put your pay in a damn bank.”
“And get married,” Daniel agreed, finishing the lecture the same way Hastings had the last three times he had delivered it. Crissy had adamantly proclaimed that she would not wait for a man who sailed on a ship, but Daniel knew better. The wages were good, a single voyage’s pay more than enough to start married life. And if the money was tainted with illegality, the risk of being caught and punished was minimal. The understaffed San Francisco police force turned a blind eye to the Barbary Coast, that hellish district of dives and music halls and brothels and smuggling and gambling and Lord knew what else. As long as the district, several blocks square, didn’t attempt to encroach on the better areas of the city, a truce was in effect. Daniel Rosenthal wasn’t worried. Within twenty-four hours he would have his money and be gone, find his way to Crissy’s parlor with gold in one hand and an offer of marriage in the other. He glanced over his shoulder. All the fore and mainmast sails were furled. Only the large fore-and-aft sail on the mizzenmast and a steadying jib forward were rigged, and they pushed along the old bark smartly enough.
The weighted rope touched bottom and dragged. “She’s down,” he announced.
“Good,” Hastings replied. “What’s she read?”
“Eight fathoms, I make it, counting drag. That sound right?”
Hastings nodded. “Call it out.”
“Eight fathoms, shelving slowly,” Daniel yelled aft, feeling a little foolish. The captain and the pilot both knew the bay like the palms of their hands, and practicing, under the circumstances, made him feel like an idiot. “Suit you?” he asked Hastings. The older man was staring into the dark as if he’d heard something. “What is it?” he whispered.
Hastings shook his head. “Nothin’. I guess someone just walked on my grave.”
“That’s a hell of a thing to say.”
Hastings grinned at Daniel. The voyage hadn’t been a total loss. The boy had learned to cuss. Hastings laughed and called out, “Reel it in and drop her again.”
“I thought you were supposed to be helping,” Daniel said.
“Well, I am. I’m the teacher. Anyway, thought I heard an oar. If it’s the boardinghouse runners, Miss Liberty’ll need someone to keep an eye on her if she comes on deck.”
Daniel arranged the sounding line in neat coils in his left hand as he pulled it aboard. “This close to home, Miss Liberty’s probably safer than she has been the whole trip,” he said. “And not just from boardinghouse runners.”
“A woman like that ain’t never safe,” Hastings said with a leer. “Hell, if I was half my age, I’d have had my way with her long ago. By damn, what a woman! I’ll bet she’s got teats to touch a tongue to, and below is sweet and warm as ever a man dipped into.”
“Miss Liberty comes from one of the foremost families in the bay area. She is a lady.”
A dreamy smile crossed Hasting’s face. “The best kind, a lady like that. The very best, when they get hot.”
Daniel tugged on the sounding line. “What the hell?”
“What?” Hastings peered over the side.
“The damned thing’s caught on something.”
“Snared something from the bottom, like as not. Hung up on a popped rivet, maybe.” Hastings looked behind him, back over the railing. “Can’t see a damned thing. Best drop another line and shinny down to free her.”
“Me?” Daniel asked, not at all liking the dark water rushing past below him. “Why me? No. Never mind. ’Cause you’re the teacher.”
“Why, not at all,” Hastings said, the very soul of innocence. “It’s just that someone’s got to show the boardinghouse runners aboard.” He winked before turning away. “And keep an eye out in case her ladyship decides to take a stroll.”
Daniel shook his head, tied the end of a line around a belaying pin. Clerking in Crissy’s father’s store would be a delight, after this. He swung a leg over the rail and began to lower himself hand over hand to the waterline.
Angelica Liberty loved to travel. New sights, new sounds, new smells fascinated her. She had seen virtually all of Europe, as any well-educated young lady should. More daring than most, she had visited hospitable ports along the African Coast, testing the dangerous fringe of the dark continent. Her latest excursion, a year’s journey through the far and exotic East, had been her most adventurous. Accompanied by James and Ilene Sponde and their daughter, Catherine, of Hong Kong, she had visited Burma and sailed through the Straits of Mandalay. She had toured Japan, its magic cities of Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and, most beautiful of all, the mystical Kobe. The idyllic journey came to an abrupt and jarring halt when her party returned to Hong Kong and she received the three letters that had been waiting for her at the Amanda Lines office. The first had been from her father and was dated in late January. The second was from her brother, Nathan. Both had been originally addressed to her in Japan but had missed her there and been forwarded to Hong Kong. Both were innocuous and chatty. The third letter, also from Nathan, dated in March and sent directly to Hong Kong, was ominously sober. “The end result is, Angelica,” it had read in part, “Father is desperately ill with a cancer and the doctors fear for his life. We all trust you will secure the quickest possible passage home. If no Liberty ship is available, take what you can, but hurry.”
Her tour of the Orient was over. No Amanda Lines—the line named after her mother, who died when Angelica was three years old—vessel was in port, and no other major ship with room for a woman was available. The Spondes and the manager of the Hong Kong Amanda Lines office did their best, though, and two days later located a minuscule cabin in an old but seaworthy all-wood bark out of San Francisco. Miss Liberty could not expect luxury, the manager explained after booking her passage aboard the Lorraine Marie, but with her father and his employer on his deathbed, perhaps she wouldn’t mind. Because Angelica might already be too late, she didn’t.
The Lorraine Marie wasn’t due to sail for another three days, and the wait was maddening. Angelica stayed at the Spondes’ home and visited family friends. She tried to shop, but her mind wandered. All she could do was send a message ahead on a steamer bound for Vancouver and trust the captain would remember to relay her message via the wires to her brother in San Francisco. At least Nathan would know she was on the way, and could have someone available to meet her. With the Lorraine Marie provisioned and made ready for the high seas, her crew rounded up from shoreside dives, and the wind and tide right, they had sailed. Many weeks later Angelica learned that a passing ship carried yet a fourth letter that she never saw.
The voyage was uneventful and, save for a brief stop to take on water and fresh food in Hawaii, marked by sheer boredom and utter frustration. Finally, that afternoon, they neared Point Reyes and waited off the Golden Gate until the pilot schooner Lady Mine laid alongside and transferred a pilot from one deck to the other. Angelica had used the slow hours from that time to pack and make ready to go ashore. Now, her few bags piled on the tiny bunk behind her, she stared into the mirror and regarded with dismay how sleeplessness and lack of exercise and a diet so dull as to drive her to distraction had transformed her patrician features into a haggard mask. She attempted to brush her hair, but the bristles caught at the knotted auburn tangles curling over her shoulders. Exasperated, she threw the brush into her vanity case and, wrapping a cloak over her traveling gown, decided time would pass more quickly on deck.
The amber light spilling past her as she opened the door to the passageway colored the bulkheads a ghastly, murky yellow. When she closed the door behind her, the single coal-oil lamp that hung outside the captain’s cabin barely dispelled the shrouded shadows in the short passageway that led to the deck. Though she proceeded carefully, as much by feel and memory, she stubbed her toe and muttered an oath unfit for society’s ears—at least the society to which she was accustomed.
And then she was outside and surprised by the fog. Shapes drifted past the Lorraine Marie. The shadowy crucifixes of the masts were illuminated by intermittent, shimmering moonlight that just as quickly faded as the mist swirled about her. The bulk of Yerba Buena loomed behind them. They were passing other ships. Off to her right, she could make out lights. That was good. She had sailed the bay before at night, and recognized the Amanda Lines docks. They would be anchoring before long, and if she wasn’t the first ashore, her name wasn’t Angelica Liberty.
“’Bout clears Yerba Beuna, cap’n,” the pilot said laconically. “You’ll want to hold your course a little further than usual. A wheat ship sunk between there and the usual turnin’ point ’bout two weeks after you left. Way the wind is, you’ll want to be sure to clear downwind of her and the coal hulks they been tyin’ to her since then.”
Captain Ep Holmes’s practiced fingers gripped the spokes of the bark’s wheel. To the uninitiated, he appeared mesmerized by the broken fog. Not so. His eyes were roving the harbor, picking out the misty shapes that cluttered the choppy waters. Each vessel he identified, if not by name then by purpose, before entering it in the encyclopedia he carried in his head. Most he saw were made of steel and carried engines as well as sails. Practically every one was newer by far than his. Holmes smiled. It was good to feel pure wood underneath his feet. Almost the way it had been when he first shipped before the mast. The Lorraine Marie was an old and creaky lady to be sure, but made for the Pacific. Few other ships, to his knowledge, were faster or more seaworthy.
And few captains afloat knew more than Holmes. At sixty-five, he had sailed every sea the world had to offer, and had seen more sights than most men could have had they been given three lifetimes. Not too long before he had been master of his own ship, but that had ended when he had hove to alongside a burning steamer to take off the crew and it blew up. At the time, he had decided to take his insurance money and savings and retire, but a month of enforced inactivity had driven him to near distraction.
Then he had met Jeremy Drake. Holmes never thought about that meeting without a warm feeling. It was the first day of the new year. Depressed, Ep had been wandering the waterfront, and stopped to watch a lone man working on a wooden-hulled bark. Whoever he was, he had taken on a job and a half, for he was single-handedly replacing stay lines. The more Ep watched, the more fascinated the old captain became with the dogged determination with which the young man worked. Finally, unable to stand idly by any longer, he had gone aboard and offered a hand.
Jeremy Drake was the young man’s name, and the two hit it off right at the start. Worked well together with only an occasional word. When they finished replacing the foremast lines, they shared dinner and talked until three in the morning. Drake’s problem, it turned out, was that he had had enough money to buy the ship, but not enough to outfit or man her. He was a tenacious cuss, though, and was determined to ready her if it took his last ounce of strength. The next day when they met on the deck, Ep decided to buy in, and retirement be damned. After they shook hands on the deal, both of them grinning like schoolboys who had got away with putting a tack on the teacher’s chair, Ep had gone to his boardinghouse for his clothes and sextant, and to the bank. He slept aboard the Lorraine Marie from that day on, and hadn’t regretted the decision for so much as a second.
He let go the wheel with his right hand and rubbed his eyes. No regrets, he thought sourly, just fatigue. This would be his last trip. Oh, not that he would quit entirely. He had learned his lesson. Maybe talk to Drake about going partners on a riverboat venture so he could keep his hand in without the long, hard deepwater trips. He shook his head wistfully. Drake. A heller of a lad, one he looked forward to seeing again. Four decades younger than Holmes, but his kind of man. Strong, opinionated, willful. A sense of humor, of course. Damn! To have a son like that to carry on a man’s name! The one thing he had missed in life, as far as he knew. Holmes chuckled. When Drake found out the Lorraine Marie had carried a woman passenger, he would be furious. However, the Liberty girl had paid with a draft in her father’s name, which was as good as gold itself. A thousand dollars was a thousand dollars. Even with the cargo he carried, no man sneered at that.
O’Keefe, the first mate, snorted. Holmes sniffed the air, cleared his throat, and heard the stealthy sound of a cap being screwed on a bottle. “Steady as she goes, Mr. O’Keefe.”
“Aye, sir,” the Irishman muttered through a strangled cough.
“Celebrations will be carried on ashore.”
“Aye, sir. Sorry, sir. Bein’ the Fourth and all, I let the suggestion run away with my better judgment,” O’Keefe explained.
“The matter is closed.”
“Thank you, captain.”
Holmes rubbed his eyes again. They burned from the added fatigue of peering into the mist. Generally he conned his own ships in, but he decided to let the tradition pass for the night. “Take over, seaman,” he said to the man standing at his side. “Hold her steady as she goes.” He stepped away from the wheel, glanced upward at the rigging. “We’ll be changing course in about two minutes, O’Keefe,” he said. “Prepare to come about, if you please. Any comments, pilot?”
“You’re on the mark, captain. What I’d do myself, saving for bearing a point to port.”
“Done,” Holmes answered unhesitatingly. “A point to port, please.”
“Aye, sir. A point to port,” the new man on the wheel repeated.
O’Keefe started his rounds, making sure the men were at their posts and ready for the maneuver that would bring them about and send them toward the winking lights lining the Embarcadero. The Irishman liked Holmes. A man couldn’t ask for a better captain. He knew men and tides, where the wind lay, and where fresh water, meat, and fruit were to be had. And if he required a bit of forehead knuckling from time to time, it was a small price to pay for a successful run. There was no other man O’Keefe respected as much.
“Eyes open, Newby,” he said, kneeing the man responsible for the foremast jib lines. “We’ll be coming about in a minute or so, now,” he added, moving on without waiting for a response.
They were running smoothly. O’Keefe headed aft. His thoughts followed. It would be good to see Drake again. The young man was a bit of a mystery to him, but what little he’d heard and seen around the docks was good. O’Keefe had sailed with Holmes before, and had never seen him take so warmly to a youngster. Almost like a father to a son. Young Drake was reportedly cut from the same cloth as Holmes, but as yet untempered and too brash for his own good. Some claimed that an easier-going rascal never prowled the streets, but O’Keefe wasn’t fooled for a moment by Drake’s fancy clothes and uptown manners. He had seen the man’s unhesitating, almost instantaneous transformation from gentleman to brutal street fighter when two of the rough-and-tumble crew Holmes had picked had tried to test him the night before they sailed. Both were still spitting teeth two days out.
There was no question about it. The combination of Holmes and Drake was hard to beat. A good thing, too, considering the cargo they carried. It was packed in iron-strapped wooden boxes marked “Silk,” but O’Keefe knew better. The boxes were too heavy, for one thing, and had been loaded in, secret for another. More than once he had been tempted to break one open just to find out, but temptation and action were two different things. With the stakes high enough, a man just might dare take on Holmes, but then what would he do? The minute he landed, he would have to face Drake and his two friends, a crazy old mountain man and a Mexican who followed him wherever he went. O’Keefe had heard those two together could take on an army and come out winners, to say nothing of a first mate with a wooden leg. All told, the sack of gold waiting in the pay office of Drake’s warehouse would be heavy enough for the Irishman. Content with his lot, and satisfied that all was ready to come about, he stumped forward in time to hear Hastings call. And then an unfamiliar whirring noise, followed by a woman’s scream.
There were any number of ways for a man to die in San Francisco in 1890. He could be run down by a trolley or venture into the wrong shadowy alley, conclude an affair with a temperamental mistress or drop a fortune in an unproducing silver mine. He could be ousted from the board in a company power play or get caught cheating at cards or a cockfight. He could lie to the wrong man or woman, snore too loudly, laugh not loudly enough, look too influential or of too little consequence, die of the good life or the bad. Whatever the method and course taken, the result was the same.
Daniel Rosenthal died trying to free a sounding line. His feet braced against the side of the schooner, his left arm firmly gripping the line, he gave three sharp tugs. When nothing happened, he leaned down to feel where the knots were caught. He didn’t see the broad gleaming thirteen-inch steel blade that leaped like a fish from the water and skewered his neck. Daniel’s blood exploded past the hilt and splashed into the lapping blackness. When the hand extending from the water withdrew the knife, Daniel’s grip relaxed and he slipped silently into the cold salt water. The grimace of disbelief that twisted his face faded rapidly beneath the surface of the bay. No sooner had he sunk out of sight than his killer, an Oriental garbed in a black breechcloth, shinnied effortlessly up the rope.
Something bumped against the opposite side of the ship. “Boardinghouse runners coming aboard on the starboard side, boy,” Hastings called. “Best loose that line and get back for your free whiskey before someone else drinks it.” He leaned forward. “Danny?” A silver flash stabbed toward him out of the murk, and what felt like a monstrous wasp stung his neck. Hastings stumbled backward into the light from the lantern hung on the mast. The pain passed. Incredulous, not wanting to know, he patted his chest with his hands. They came away wet. When he looked down, his shirt was covered with a bib of crimson. His throat had been slit.
Feet landed on the deck by the port railing where Danny had disappeared. Amazingly alive still, propelled by horror, Hastings ran. He had to find help. He had to warn the others before … before he … His legs felt like lead. He tried to breath, but only choked and gagged on his own blood. Silent shapes scurrying over the railing padded stealthily, quickly, across the deck. Somewhere forward there was a scuffle and muted cry. Something was terribly wrong. They weren’t boarding-house runners come to pass out free whiskey and solicit the crew’s trade ashore. Hastings tried to think, but his body wanted air too badly and wouldn’t let him. His chest heaved, sucked in more blood. He stumbled on a piece of line, regained his footing. In his mind, he screamed his captain’s name, yelled for his shipmates to beware. Desperate, he clawed at his throat and ran doubled over toward the first figure he recognized.
He had to make her understand! If he could only reach her, tell her what had happened. His face twisted with uncontrollable agony and his lips curled in supplication. Why was she backing away from him?
“Yaa-rr-ahh!” he said, grabbing for her shoulders.
“Sir!” Angelica ordered, twisting free. The gaping wound in his throat flowed unstaunched, spurted on the white cotton bodice of her gown. “Oh!” she said. Momentarily thinking he had spat on her, she flushed angrily.
Hastings’ mouth worked soundlessly. Why wouldn’t she listen? His strength was fading. He caught one of her arms and pulled her toward him as she tried to back away. “Yccchh …” A hissing noise rose from his throat, and blood sprayed her hand.
“My God!” Angelica gasped. “You … you’re … you’ve been … Someone!” Her voice rose to a scream. “Captain Holmes! Captain Holmes!”
“Yaa-rr-ahhhh!”
Blood flew into her face and onto her neck. Blood soaked her breasts and warmed her hands. She smelled the salty fluid and knew what it was. Knew and screamed again and again as the seaman’s full weight fell against her. Revolted and more frightened than she had ever been in her life, she leaped backward from his dying embrace. The railing struck her buttocks, her feet slipped on Hastings’ blood, and the quiet dead weight that pushed on her torso propelled her backward and, with a final scream, over the side and into the black waters of the bay.
O’Keefe heard the first scream. The whirring noise that preceded it came from a delicately balanced, razor-sharp hatchet that struck his chest, bit deep, and clung there like a newly sprouted appendage. As the pain blossomed, he saw the first fireworks erupt from the nightbound sky. Confused, a dull roar filling his head, he sat back abruptly on the steps, and died.
Captain Holmes saw the first lantern explode at the bow of the ship. A second and third, followed by a gunshot, sent him racing toward his cabin to get the twin Navy Colt .45 revolvers he kept there. As he passed the mainmast, he saw the mizzenmast sail, blazing and lines cut, float to the deck. At the same time, the ship heeled to starboard and started to come about into the wind. Glass splinters from the starboard running light showered the top of his cap. Behind him, the pilot and the seaman at the wheel groaned, clutched their chests, and slumped over onto the deck.
“O’Keefe, what the …!” The Irishman was sitting propped against a cable reel. He fell over onto his left side as a soot-streaked, nearly naked figure leaped across the deck toward him. Holmes jumped over O’Keefe’s inert body and ran into his cabin, slammed the door shut, and locked it. His mind raced furiously as he tried to decipher the mystery. They were being attacked! In San Francisco harbor. “Oh, Jesus!” he cursed. “Goddam!”
Footsteps sounded outside. Unpronounceable rage mottled his features. Quickly Holmes unlocked the gun cabinet and grabbed the loaded Navy Colts. Behind him, the door exploded inward. Holmes spun and caught a glimpse of the Oriental he had seen on the deck a moment earlier. The man’s flesh appeared waxen and black. He wore a black girdle of cloth around his waist and genitals. His head was completely shaved. His eyes were glittering.
Without warning, the Oriental rose halfway across the room from where Holmes had last seen him. Two gleaming knives twinkled in the soft cabin light. Holmes fired. The noise was deafening in the enclosed place. The Oriental blurred to his left, then his right. Holmes fired again, missed again, tried to fire once more but his hands were empty. Dully, Holmes realized that both his forearms had been slashed, leaving his fingers useless. He heard the thud of metal on wood as the guns dropped to the deck.
Holmes backed away slowly, stopped against the bulkhead. The point of one of the blades barely punctured the flesh over his Adam’s apple. He pressed the back of his neck against the wall, held perfectly still.
“I am Shang-ti.” The voice from beyond the blades was soft and deadly. “That is all you need know. Where is the girl?”
“What?”
“That is not the answer. A dog that is fed its own tongue does not bark. Shall I give you that excuse?”
Holmes almost tried to shake his head, but the pressure of the knife increased until the skin over his Adam’s apply bent inward. “No,” he whispered painfully, trying not to swallow.
“Then I ask for the last time. The girl is aboard?”
“Miss Liberty?”
The point twisted quickly, like an awl. A trickle of blood ran down the captain’s neck and stained the top of his shirt.
“Yes,” he said, weighing his honor against the girl’s, his passenger’s, life. His only chance to help her was to stay alive, if possible. “She is below.”
Outside the cabin, a commotion raged as the last members of the crew struggled against Shang-ti’s men. Taken by surprise, the sailors were no match for the Chinese. One by one, they fell. Fires sprang up around them. Behind the crackle of flames, the warning horns of fireboats sounded from the shore.
A third man entered the cabin. “What is it, Kuan Lo?” Shang-ti asked in Chinese.
Kuan Lo, a squat youth with massive shoulders, cast a wary glance back toward the deck. Flames were feasting on the rigging, lapping at the furled sails. “We cannot find her. She is not here.”
Shang-ti’s eyes glittered. His smile revealed a row of even teeth. Though he was smaller than the captain, his presence filled the room with overpowering menace. He moved with reptilian grace, the deadly energy of a dragon posed for flight. The two thirteen-inch-long blades he held looked like vicious fangs. “You dared to lie to Shang-ti, dog?” he asked, reverting to English. “You will tell me now. Where is she?”
Holmes paled. “She is on board. She has to be. For God’s sake, man!”
“She might be hiding somewhere below,” Kuan Lo admitted in a low grumble. “We did not have much time.”
Shang-ti silenced him with a glance. “Gather our men, Brother Sun,” he answered in his native tongue. “She hides, no doubt. Let her drown with the dying.”
The knives pulled back, tilted straight up by black, leather-strapped wrists. Holmes could see a jade dragon curled into a circle and swallowing its own tail on the hilt of each one. In that moment, he knew he was going to die with the rest of his crew. No one and nothing could stop it. He breathed deeply, smelled the salty air. He remembered his first voyage. He had been a cabin boy on a ship that had anchored off Pago Pago, and its pristine beaches had introduced him to beauty. He wanted desperately to be a boy once more—a boy becoming a man on that pearl of the sea, or to feel the thrill of exploring the treasures of a woman’s body for the first time.
But chronometers and sand glasses ran only one way. Forward. He was Captain Epaniah Methuselah Holmes, an old and frightened man about to die. He sucked saliva into his mouth, ready for one last defiant gesture. The warlord Shang-ti read his intentions. He roared savagely and his arms moved forward, crossed and crossed again. The dragon knives did their butcher’s work. The slicing blades severed arteries and veins four times, and Captain Holmes appeared to explode, shooting streamers of scarlet in every direction.
The Lorraine Marie lay dead in the water. Shang-ti ran out of the cabin, easily leaped the collapsed and huddled forms littering the deck. His men had already hung kegs of gunpowder near the offshore waterline of the ship. Wormlike fuses protruded from the tops of each barrel. The tong leader passed rapidly, hand over hand, into one of the black boats tethered alongside.
“Light them,” Shang-ti ordered, touching a piece of glowing punk to the nearest fuse.
Silently, the two longboats moved along the hull, then quickly pulled toward Yerba Buena. There concealed, they would part, strike out for different destinations, and elude the inevitable fire and police boats. Shang-ti stood alone in the prow of his longboat. If he listened carefully, he could hear the sizzle and smell the sulfurous vapors of the burning fuses. His men began to row in earnest. Shang-ti allowed no leeway for laggards. The bright, winking sparkles they were running from would not last long.
Chapter 2
“You’re too young to look so old. It’s the life he leads that ages a man.”
Spanish Kitty ran her long fingers through the sun-bleached shaggy mop of hair Jeremy Drake wore like a crown. His flesh was still as brown as if he had stepped off a ship fresh from around the Horn the day before. Jeremy laughed deep in his throat and pulled the woman’s hand away, kissing her palm and brushing his thick mustache across her wrist. Spanish Kitty unbuttoned two buttons of his shirt and placed her hand on the straw-colored curls covering his chest. Jeremy adjusted his position on the overstuffed purple divan, the better to see the lower floor and stage.
The Bella Union, under Spanish Kitty’s iron rule, had become a first-class music hall, a grand, glittering palace of revelry. The stage was fully a hundred feet across. An intricately carved and gilded proscenium arch was the gaudiest money could buy. New electrical lighting fixtures direct from New York City, luxurious velvet curtains, and painted backdrops all combined to make even the most mundane act appear first-rate.
The main floor held tables and chairs up front for five hundred guests and, behind them on a second level, accommodations for a thousand more carousing, swaggering, guzzling, and jostling celebrants. Above it all and ringing the circumference of the auditorium were private boxes. Each box was separated from its neighbor by a foot-thick masonry wall and so constructed that while its occupants enjoyed a full view of everything happening below, they themselves could not be seen. Each box, too, was sumptuously decorated. The management supplied, with a written annual contract, a plush divan, wicker chairs, and a heavy, usually carved table in addition to a single potted palm and a cage with a pair of cooing doves. Hanging baskets of cut flowers, liquor to please any taste, complete meals, and an arrangement of chocolate candies that slowly softened into a single globby mass by late evening were all available according to the wishes of the box owner. Anything else a patron wanted could also be supplied by a willing management, provided the price was right.
Friday nights at the Bella Union were usually louder and more unrestrained than other weeknights, but on this, the Fourth of July, the tumult was deafening. Huge chandeliers, great wooden wheels ablaze with coal-oil lamps, dangled from the rafters. Below them and created especially for the occasion, the numerals 1776 had been fashioned out of timbers large enough to support five fetching young ladies garbed in flowers and nothing else. The numbers swung back and forth with the motions of the ladies, and as they swung, the petals fell.
On stage and trying to compete with the slow, revealing rain of petals, the orchestra, safely positioned upstage against a backdrop of the London skyline, played “A London Promenade.” A middle-aged male vocalist with an acceptable—as long as no one listened too closely—basso profundo gave an earnest rendition of the lyrics. Behind him, a chorus line of exuberant, if ponderous, dancing beauties hoofed their way back and forth across the stage. Overweight and overrouged, the Bovine Beauties, as Drake had dubbed them, carried pale-pink parasols to cover their tops and wore floor-length hoopskirts that, with a flip of the hips, rose to reveal bare calves and lace pantaloons.
Scantily clad waitresses, bosoms and buttocks sore from pinches and slaps, carried bottle after bottle of spirits ranging from raw whiskey to champagne through the overflow crowd. Now and then a hardy soul eager to prove his virility or win a bet ordered a tankard of a particularly uninviting brew, perfumed to kill its bold odor, called Spanish Kitty’s Sweet Cider. Such fellows were usually comatose before they finished half the drink, and were carried to a side room and thrown on a stack of equally adventuresome and unconscious patrons. The management couldn’t have cared less; for every man who departed, there were three new ones to take his place.
Drake watched from Spanish Kitty’s private box as one such man, a brutish fellow humbled by less than half a tankard, was carried past his hooting friends, who rifled his pockets and ordered a round of safer drinks. “The lions are restless,” Drake said, standing to light a cigar. Below him, in the center of the lower floor, a buckskin-dressed, grizzled old-timer was delighting the crowd. He carried a basket of tomatoes. Each time one of the beauties on stage raised her hoop-skirt, the uncannily accurate marksman scored a direct hit with a ripe tomato dead center on the chorus member’s plump derrière. “Bearclaw is enjoying himself, too.”
“At his age, he should,” Spanish Kitty said. She leaned forward and pulled Drake back from the balcony rail, arched up to kiss his stomach. Her fingers deftly handled the buttons of his trousers. “You should too,” she added, with a little nip for emphasis.
Drake dropped his cigar into a glass tray on the table, shoved Kitty back onto the divan, and kissed her mouth as he rolled on top of her. Below, on the stage, all dignity vanished, the jiggling promenade ended and the girls, flush with embarrassment and tomato stains, retreated to the wings. The orchestra, knowing a slow transition might prove fatal with such a restless crowd, struck up a rousing version of “Yankee Doodle.”
A cheer rose from almost two thousand throats. Drake came up for air and glanced over the rail. Red, white, and blue streamers thrown from the catwalks above the stage sailed over the crowd. At the same time, the side doors were flung open and a line of fresh waiters pushed tables covered with platters of sizzling beef steaks and loaves of fresh bread into the hall. The aroma of meat and bread mingled with the odor of sweaty bodies and spilled liquor. Drake sagged back onto the divan as Spanish Kitty tugged on him in disapproval, finally managed to stroke him erect. He blinked, tried to bring her into focus. “Did you spike my champagne?” he asked, his voice slurring.
“Just a little something to trick you into proposing.” She lifted her long white dress—Spanish Kitty wore only white—to permit her naked thigh to lie across him, and guided him into her.
She was warm, familiar. Jeremy grinned, at ease with the comfortable desire he felt for her. Her long black hair came undone as he slipped off its binding ribbons. He undid the velvet tie holding her low-cut bodice together and freed her breasts. “Marry me,” he said, blowing lightly in her ear and then jerking back when she nipped him on the neck. “Ouch. Why’d you do that?”
“Because you don’t mean it.”
“Of course I do. By the way, one of the box seats is open, isn’t it?”
“No. Someone has taken it for the summer.” Her eyes narrowed. “Damn you, Jeremy. Why do you have to ask something like that at a time like—”
“It’s how I survive,” he interrupted, leaning down and covering her broad nipple with his mouth, at the same time trying to peer over the railing to see who else was present among the moneyed audience.
“If you have to know, Huntington paid for … for …” She squirmed with delight, pressing him deeper inside her. “Bastard! You know how I love that.”
“That’s why I do it,” Drake mumbled, moving to her other breast. He calculated quickly. At least eight of San Francisco’s finest had boxes at the notorious Bella Union. Four in silver, three in railroads, and one, Huntington, in everything. Very interesting. With luck, he could make a quick, very large profit on his ship’s whole cargo with a half-dozen transactions within a hundred feet of where he lay. Smuggled jade and antiquities were readily movable items among the excessively wealthy, not a one of whom was above a touch of larceny now and then, especially when they knew they could resell at a high profit themselves if need be. His first ship had proved that beyond a doubt. The wealthy personages who enjoyed occasional sinful interludes in the privacy of their Bella Union boxes, despite their lofty stations at the moment, had a reputation for being accessible. Most of them had risen by hook or crook from the same common stock as Drake, which only made them the more arrogant. But Drake was young enough and cocksure enough to believe he understood them completely and could handle them. As for profits, he never begrudged another’s as long as he made his.
“Ouch! Those buttons,” Spanish Kitty muttered.
“Too late now,” Jeremy said, his attention returning to more pressing matters.
Downstairs, the celebration was getting completely out of hand. The flowers covering the naked girls on the swinging numbers had long since fallen. A pyramid of balanced tables and chairs had sprung from the floor, and a half-dozen of the most daring patrons were scrambling up the precarious mountain. One gained the top and, arms outstretched, leaped toward the 1776 sign, and missed completely. Eyes wide, a grimace on his face, he sailed into the jeering, shouting crowd. A second man almost succeeded. He waited for the girls to swing close before leaping, but a diminutive, well-placed foot caught him on the side of the head and misdirected his aim. He crashed head first into a table, scattering food and drink over a dozen hooting men. Finally, the bearded, bedraggled Bearclaw Bates began his climb. Cries of “Hooray for Bearclaw!” and “What the hell you gonna do if you do get aboard!” rang through the hall.
Bearclaw ignored everything but the climb. At last, straddling a chair that threatened to tip at any moment, he gauged his leap. One of the girls kicked. He caught her leg, then a part of the sign, and, as it swung away from the pile of tables and chairs, he dislodged the girl who had kicked at him. She screamed and dropped into a hundred waiting arms. As Bearclaw climbed aboard, the fallen girl was given a champagne bath and paraded around the room, passed from embrace to embrace until she wiggled free and escaped through a side door. Bearclaw waved to his cheering audience and, leaping forward, wrapped his arms around his prize, a laughing, buxom, thoroughly naked girl of seventeen.
“You won it, now let’s see you do somethin’ with it!” a voice shouted.
Everyone laughed even louder when the second girl gave Bearclaw’s silver whiskers a hearty tug and planted a ferocious kiss on his leathery lips. Pandemonium reigned. Bearclaw’s bald head turned as red as a beet. The next act refused to venture on stage, so the orchestra continued to play “Yankee Doodle” over and over.
Drake lifted his head from Spanish Kitty’s breast and gulped for air as the woman undulated beneath him. “Mm. Maybe we should,” he groaned.
“What?”
“Get married.”
Spanish Kitty hitched up one knee, ground her heel in the small of Drake’s back, and held him to her. “Don’t be absurd. You always say that about this time.”
“I know.” He nipped the end of her chin, worked his way down her throat. “It’s because I always decide, right about now, that you taste good.” He came up for air again, looked around. “Did you hear something?”
“Did I hear … my God, Jeremy!” The racket, “Yankee Doodle,” the shouts and howls of laughter from the lower floor, were almost deafening, but behind it all she could hear someone beating on her door. “Go away!” she yelled.
Loud thumps of a fist or a boot rattled the door again. “I am not to be disturbed!” Spanish Kitty shrieked. Her private booth, when the door was shut, was sacrosanct, and woe to any of her employees who opened it. “I’m busy, damn you!”
The bolt shattered and the door opened, slamming against the wall with enough force to loosen the hinges. A short, square young Mexican man burst into the confined space. His flesh was the color of lightly roasted coffee, almost the same color as his tight fitting brown suit and set off by a white satin vest. “Boss!”
“Goddammit, Gabe!” Drake groaned, rolling off Spanish Kitty and fumbling at his trousers. “What the hell—”
“The Lorraine Marie is burning in the bay!”
Drake jerked upright. He grabbed his waistcoat from the floor, struggled into it. At the same time, he peered over the balcony and searched the floor below. “Bearclaw!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Bearclaw!”
Bearclaw Bates, damp with sweat and spilled liquor, heard Drake and shouted a reply that was lost in the din. Looking up toward the box where he knew his employer was spending the evening, he saw Drake leaning over the balcony and pointing to the back of the hall. The party forgotten, Bates unhesitatingly swung down from the 1776 sign and began to batter his way through the press of bodies.
“You’re not leaving, Drake?” Spanish Kitty asked, flushed and straining to be heard above the tumult.
Drake turned in the doorway. Spanish Kitty, her massive breasts wet from his kisses, her dress waist-high, her legs lying limply apart, her flesh pink and glistening, was hopelessly inviting. The orchestra finished with a blare of trumpets and a clash of cymbals. Drake stared at Spanish Kitty, sighed sadly, and said, “That was a damn fine Yankee Doodle.” Then he disappeared.
The exploding lanterns had not been seen, but the coal-oil-fed flames that raced up the mizzenmast sail were. The fire watch ashore saw the blaze within seconds and rang the warning bells.
At the same moment the fireships were casting off their lines and Gabe was racing to Spanish Kitty’s to get Drake, the blaze was being remarked upon in far more luxurious quarters on Nob Hill.
“Pretty,” Nathan Liberty drawled. “In an awful sort of way,” he added hurriedly. His cheeks were round and smooth-shaven. The flesh on his limbs jiggled beneath layers of boyish fat. Favoring the portraits of his mother that were hung about the house, Winthrop Liberty’s only son sipped Napoleon brandy and made a wry face. He hated the stuff but dutifully drank it because everyone else drank it too. Nathan Liberty was not one to stand out in a crowd.
The women had withdrawn to the parlor for sherry and gossip. The men had stayed in the dining room to puff clouds of gray-blue cigar smoke, drink brandy, and discuss business in a roundabout, after-dinner way. Parker, a man bent on filling part of the vacuum left in the wake of Winthrop Liberty’s death, joined Nathan on the deck. He rubbed his flattened nose, sipped his drink through his teeth, and made a gurgling sound that never failed to annoy those around him. “Wonder whose it is?” he rasped.
A massive shape overshadowed the two men. Dacus Ormesby, long-nosed, a bramble of black beard covering his square jaw, climbed the whitewashed steps and looked out to the bay. Standing in the shadows, in his black frock coat, Ormesby was a veritable mountain of granite-hard sinew, flesh, and bone. His face was as dry as if he had ordered his pores to close in spite of the warm night and the thick garments he wore. His beard continued into a fringe of hair that circled an otherwise bald skull. The word “formidable” had been created for a man such as this. “An accident in the harbor. Too damn crowded. Like the narrow-guage running up to the Sierra Mines. Three accidents in a week. Now, if a new line were built over Grant’s Pass …” he mused in a low, rumbling tone.
“You’re talking to the wrong man, Dacus. I’m a boatman,” Parker said, “with a love for the sea.”
“Rot love for the sea,” Ormesby snapped. “I’m talking about unnecessary losses. I’m talking about profits. Which is one thing the sea and the mountains have in common.”
“Agreed.” Parker puffed on his cigar, contemplated the burning ship. “But you’ve yet to convince me you’ll manage a return on my money.”
“All in good time. But I assure you—” Nathan Liberty started to move away from the railing.
“Don’t leave, Nathan,” Ormesby said. “This concerns you, too.”
“You handled my father’s affairs,” Nathan sniffed. “I’m sure Angelica and I will want you to continue to do so for us.” He nodded to Andrew Parker and descended onto the garden path, where he was met by a petite young woman who emerged from the shadows and accompanied him down the path.
“It appears Nathan has more urgent, or should I say pressing, matters to attend to,” Parker said with a scowl. “A hell of a thing. Winthrop Liberty’s son!” He shook his head sadly. “A good reason not to die. Let your sons piss everything away.”
Ormesby’s voice was syrup-smooth. “Nathan was unprepared for Winthrop’s death.”
“As were we all,” Parker went on hurriedly. He wasn’t in the habit of alienating a man who might in the course of events be useful to him. “Still, Nathan is the type of man who will always be unprepared. He’ll need a strong hand to guide him. Can’t think of a better one than you, really.”
Ormesby was amused, but didn’t show it. In no way did Parker fear him, but he did respect him. Such deference was what power—such power as he had never had before Liberty’s death—was all about, and he liked it. “I try,” he said modestly, in keeping with the game they were playing. “And hope you are right.”
The light laughter of a woman drifted out from the parlor. Parker winked broadly. “In truth, I should rise to Deirdre Patterson’s occasion myself, if I were a few years younger. Or thought it would do any good. Nathan’s a lucky boy, in that respect.”
Dacus Ormesby fished in his pocket and found a cigar.
Parker watched Ormesby clip the ends and roll the cigar in his hand. He sniffed the air. “Winthrop’s private stock?” he asked drily.
“He doesn’t need them in hell,” Ormesby said, matter-of-factly, deciding to let Parker know exactly how he felt. He lit a match, held it a discreet half inch under the tip of the cigar, and, while it heated and finally caught, looked past the flame to the larger one in the harbor.
Parker watched Ormesby’s reflection in the window. “Of course, Angelica is a different story, cut from different, stronger cloth. Everyone agrees that she’s like her father.”
“Do they?”
she