Authors: David Downing
“Nice place you have here,” he told the barman, who didn’t bother to reply. “But a bit on the quiet side,” McColl added. “Does it ever liven up?”
“There’s a crowd on Saturdays,” the barman conceded.
“Maybe I’ll come back then.”
Back on the street, he realized how much walking he’d done when his wound—which he’d hardly noticed since Honolulu—suddenly began to throb. A cab, he decided, and stood leaning against a convenient stop sign until one came along. The driver’s license bore the name O’Leary, but the man himself had no trace of an accent and no apparent interest in his homeland’s affairs. Instead, he spent the entire drive railing against the city’s politicians and developers and the profits they had made from reconstruction. “At least
some
of the bastards are in jail,” was his parting remark as he dropped McColl off at the corner of Lafayette Park.
The German consulate was easy to spot, the black, white, and red tricolor of the imperial flag floating above a tall mansion on the northern side. Any comings and goings could be observed from the comfort of a nearby park bench, but the observer would be visible to anyone watching from the consulate’s windows, which wouldn’t do at all. There were several automobiles parked on each side of the road, so another wouldn’t look out of place, and a motorized watcher could follow anyone leaving.
At least McColl knew where everything was, where the various kingpins held their courts. Now he needed helpers, to follow the courtiers home and start the process of sifting through their lives
for a point of weakness, a point of entry. Helpers who could take photographs and get all these people’s faces on file, which was half the battle when it came to foiling their plots. Cumming liked photographs and didn’t mind paying for them.
A light went on in one of the consulate’s upstairs rooms, and a woman briefly appeared in silhouette as she pulled the curtains together. Night had fallen with almost tropical swiftness, McColl realized; he felt both hungry and tired, and unusually reluctant to spend the evening with Jed and Mac. But he needn’t have worried—arriving back at the hotel, he was handed a note in Jed’s childlike writing: The two of them had tired of waiting and gone out “gallivanting” without him.
Feeling relieved, he ate in the hotel restaurant, retired to his room with a pint of whiskey, and spent an hour encrypting a request for additional funds, which he planned to send off the following morning. After completing that task, he found himself revisiting the two issues of
Ghadar
that Fairholme had loaned him. One statement in particular attracted his attention: That Englishmen were never punished for killing Indian men or dishonoring Indian women. He remembered Caitlin angrily mentioning her recent discovery that Europeans enjoyed a similar immunity in China during their day trip out to Longhua.
It never paid to demonize an enemy, McColl thought. People like Har Dayal—people like Caitlin—had every right to demand change. It was the former’s penchant for bombings that rendered him fair game.
McColl drained the last of the whiskey and tried not to feel sorry for himself. His side was still aching, and he really missed her. He was lonely, in a way that he hadn’t been before she danced into his life.
A boisterous knock on the door snapped him out of his reverie and heralded the return of his companions. They had been to the nickelodeon, watched two comedies and a dramatic short called
The Mothering Heart
, and Jed had fallen in love with an actress
called Lillian Gish. They had also imbibed a large quantity of alcohol and taken a walk through Chinatown. “It’s not China,” was Mac’s considered opinion. His report on their workday was almost as succinct—after adding three hundred miles to the Maia’s clock and suffering a badly scratched head lamp, they had added no new entries to the order book.
“How was your day?” Jed asked his brother.
“I walked up more hills than I could count,” McColl told him. And I watched another man die, he thought.
Thursday morning McColl picked up a copy of the
Bulletin
on his way to the Chicago & North Western freight office and stopped to read it over a coffee. He was glancing through the pages in search of Har Dayal’s friend John Barry when he noticed a more familiar name above a feature piece titled “The Changes in China”—one Caitlin Hanley. He had never doubted her journalistic credentials, but seeing her name in print was still a bit of a shock. So, to his shame, was the high quality of her writing, which somehow balanced an enthusiasm bordering on passion with a cool command of the facts. McColl was absurdly pleased to see that a couple of his own observations had been included and credited to “a friend with long experience of the Orient.”
After arranging the Maia’s shipment, he walked back to the hotel, borrowed the telephone directory from reception, and made a list of promising-looking detective agencies. Excluding Pinkerton’s and Mundell’s, there were seven in the downtown area.
Given the nature of his business, auditioning agents and explaining what he required would have to be done in person. And given a choice between walking for miles, relying on trams, and hiring an automobile, his shortness of funds seemed almost incidental. The hotel gave him the name of a reputable firm only a short walk away, and after several minutes spent in reassuring the nervous agent that some Englishmen did know how to drive, he was allowed behind the wheel of a brand-new Model T Touring Car. The vehicle was
certainly lacking in frills but, as he quickly discovered, it ran and handled remarkably well.
He had three requirements when it came to choosing an agency: It shouldn’t be run by Anglophobic Irish- or German-Americans, it should have enough operatives to run a two-person surveillance throughout the daylight hours, and at least one of those operatives had to be well acquainted with the most up-to-date photographic equipment. The first agency failed on the second and third counts, the owner a one-man band who could hardly hide his contempt for gimmicks like the Kodak Brownie. McColl wondered how he got any business, but then again, if the state of his office was anything to go by, he probably didn’t.
The second and third agencies were too busy to take on the sort of work McColl required, the fourth was run by an Austrian Jew with an anglicized name. When the fifth turned out to be defunct, McColl began to lose heart, but salvation was soon at hand. The sixth address was on the eastern side of Nob Hill, the agency run by a hook-nosed Hispanic named Juan Palóu, who claimed that his great-great-grandfather had led the first Spanish expedition to reach the site of the present city overland. He worked with his two sons and was a photography enthusiast. “Though not like my older son,” the detective added. “He has all the latest equipment. He calls each camera an investment, but if he doesn’t stop spending money, there’ll be nothing left to invest in.”
When McColl explained what he wanted, Palóu’s first reaction—that he needed to see the house on Valencia for himself—was exactly what McColl wanted to hear. They drove there together in the Model T, Palóu lamenting the fact that his younger son was demanding one of his own, and parked in a convenient side street. From the same booth in the coffee shop, McColl pointed out the windows of the Ghadar center. “Any white man seen in there, I’d like his picture, name, and address—or as many of them as you can get. I’m particularly interested in Catholic priests.”
Palóu raised an eyebrow at that but only asked how long McColl wanted the surveillance to last.
“Let’s say five days to begin with.”
“That won’t be cheap. I’m going to have to rent one of the rooms across the street, and none of them look empty—someone will need paying off.”
“So how much?”
“Ten dollars a day, plus expenses.”
It didn’t seem extortionate to McColl, and Cumming would just have to pay up. “I’ll have half for you on Monday,” he promised, hoping he’d be able to deliver.
The detective shrugged his acceptance, as if money were the least of his worries. Perhaps, like Sherlock Holmes, he had a private income. “We’ll start as soon as we can,” he said. “Do you want a daily report?”
“No,” McColl decided. “I’ll come and see you on Monday. Say nine in the morning?”
“Okay. I don’t suppose you want to tell me what this is all about.”
“The office you’ll be watching is the headquarters of an Indian political group—”
“Not Red Indians?”
“Indian Indians. And you should know that they’re fond of violence, at least in theory. If you find you need to know more, then you’ll just have to get in touch with me.”
Palóu took that in his stride. “An Englishman watching Indians—I think I can guess most of the rest. We Spanish are experts when it comes to losing empires,” he added. He seemed faintly amused by it all, a trait McColl had always considered a sure sign of sanity.
“One other thing,” McColl said. “Can you recommend somewhere to buy a gun?”
“There’s a gun store on Mason, between O’Farrell and Ellis.”
“Thanks.”
He drove Palóu back to his office and went in search of the
gun store. Being able to walk into a shop and buy a firearm seemed odd to McColl, but the proprietor obviously didn’t find it so. He laid out a selection of small pistols and revolvers on the counter and listed the sterling qualities of each. McColl wavered between the Mauser Broomhandle, which he knew from the South African War, and the Browning M1900, which looked easier to conceal on his person. Opting for the latter, he was provided with a cardboard box containing enough ammunition to mount a small war of his own.
After a late lunch in a department store on Market, he walked on to the hotel where von Schön had said he would be staying. The desk clerk failed to recognize the name, and his search through the register proved unavailing. Nor was there any record of an advance booking. McColl decided he must have misheard—or perhaps the German had changed his mind. He asked the desk clerk for a list of San Francisco’s better hotels and phoned them one by one from the booth in the lobby. Von Schön was not staying at any of them.
Which was annoying. Had the German run across friends and gone to stay with them? Or had a message arrived calling him home to Germany? McColl hoped that nothing had happened to the man’s wife or daughter back home.
He worked his way through the second tier of hotels the following morning, driven as much by curiosity as by any real hope that von Schön could help him with his task. But there was no trace of the German. Stymied, he spent the afternoon at the showroom, where the owner was loudly regretting waiving a flat fee in favor of a percentage. His pretty blonde secretary was much friendlier, having persuaded Jed to take her out dancing that evening. She had already found a partner for Mac and offered, somewhat doubtfully, to seek one out for the ancient McColl. He let her off the hook, claiming he had paperwork to do.
Once they’d called it a day, he ate alone at an Italian restaurant,
then read the evening edition in an almost empty bar on Geary. Stepping out into the night several beers later, he decided on impulse to visit the Shamrock and eavesdrop on plots against the empire. He hailed a cab and opened a window to sober himself up. It had rained on and off all day, and the lights of the city were reflected in myriad puddles as his taciturn driver motored south.
The Shamrock was much busier than on his previous visit, but the clientele was still overwhelmingly male. One table in the corner was empty, and he made a beeline for the stool at the bar that lay closest to it. An hour and two beers later, he was rewarded for his foresight—a group of men in suits threading their way through the tables with many a raised hand, rather in the manner of rulers acknowledging their subjects. McColl recognized Larry de Lacey from the photographs that Fairholme had given him. San Francisco’s republican boss looked barely out of school, wiry, dark-haired and -eyed, with an almost impish face. As one of the barmen hurried over to take their order, de Lacey sat packing tobacco into his pipe, occasionally smiling at what seemed a private joke.
McColl ordered another drink and spent the next hour trying to disentangle that table’s conversation from the others swirling noisily around him. Watching the speakers in the mirror behind the bar was some help and made him wish he’d added lipreading to his list of accomplishments.
They were talking, predictably enough, about the Dublin workers’ lockout, which had been dominating the Irish situation since the previous summer, when McColl was still in England. Caitlin, of course, supported Jim Larkin and his followers—it was a scandal, she said, that workers should be denied the right to unionize in this day and age. But the last news she’d heard had been of families starving, and now it seemed that the lockout was over. The workers had been defeated.
The men at de Lacey’s table were divided over this outcome. Some thought the lockout had been a dangerous distraction from
the real business of Ireland’s liberation and plainly distrusted what they considered Larkin’s communistic leanings. Others were clearly in awe of the man and insisted that it was all part of the same battle. As one man put it, “The English don’t just rule our country—they own it. An independent Ireland that leaves them still running our business … well, that would be worse than useless.”
De Lacey smiled at that but offered little support for either side. The different points of view were obviously held seriously enough, but there was a lot of good-natured banter and laughter, and no one grew visibly angry. All in all, McColl thought, it was a thoroughly reasonable discussion and possible only because everyone involved agreed on one basic premise: that Ireland should cast itself free of its English overlord. As he listened to the conversation, McColl had to remind himself that the latest surveys showed that 90 percent of the Irish back home were happy with the Home Rule now on the table.
In the mirror he noticed another large group entering the saloon, this one half composed of women. Caitlin had told him she was going out to dinner with friends, but what if they turned up here afterward? The prospect both thrilled and worried him. How would he explain his presence here, not to mention his broad Scottish accent?