FIRE AND FOG

FIRE AND FOG

Fremont Jones Book 02

Dianne Day

1.

The Bells at Thor's Funeral

I was dreaming that I was Little Nell tied to the railroad
track, and a huge locomotive was roaring down on me. Struggling to
get free, I woke myself up-but the roar continued. The roar was
real, not a dream.

I confess I am rather slow in the mornings. It did not occur to
me right away that I should be alarmed. I turned my cheek upon the
pillow so that I might see the clock, which read ten minutes past
five. The roar continued, building to a crescendo, and in the midst
of it church bells began to ring.

How odd,
I thought, for I knew it was not Sunday, and
five o'clock is too early for a funeral. A great boom sounded
beneath the high descant of discordant bells, and I thought:
This must be Thor's funeral, and they are sending the Thunder
God off appropriately, with a bang.

At that moment I was physically jolted wide awake and realized
that we were having an earthquake. Later I would learn that my
clock was slow, for it was actually twelve minutes past five on
Wednesday, April 18, 1906, when the Great Earthquake began.

I was more excited than scared. I had been through one
earthquake during the previous year, my first in San Francisco, and
had found it an interesting experience. Thisearthquake, however,
was something else. When I tried to get out of bed, thinking that I
should like to look out of the window, I could not stand. The whole
room was moving!

So I crept to the foot of the bed, as I should also be able to
see out the window from there. I live on the third floor of a house
on Vallejo Street belonging to Mrs. O'Leary, and I have an
excellent view over that part of the city called the Western
Addition. I knelt upright, holding onto the foot rail, and looked
out. The house bumped and lurched; I tightened my grip. The
windowpane cracked and fell out, leaving a jagged frame through
which I saw the hills, and all the houses upon them, undulate in
shuddering waves. It was a heart-stopping sight, the land heaving
like a heavy sea.

Behind me a tall mirror slid from its place on the wall with a
thump and a tinkling splatter. I jerked around to find shining
shards dashed over the bedclothes and the oval bedside rug. The
heavy old oak wardrobe against the adjoining wall swayed, its doors
yawned open and spewed my clothes out in a many-hued heap on the
floor at the foot of the bed.

Still the shaking went on, and now to the great voice of the
quake were added loud creaks and groans from the house. I have
sensitive ears; the degree of noise was almost physically painful.
A deafening clatter overhead drew my eyes up, and I surmised that
the chimney had toppled to the roof, or through it. Cracks charged
crazily across the ceiling but it held, raining down plaster dust
and flakes of plaster on my head.

Suddenly, eerily, all was still. No noise, no motion. I drew in
a deep breath and coughed, for the air was dust-laden. I thought,
It is over.
But I was wrong. I had just loosed my
white-knuckled fingers from the foot rail when the quake resumed
with even greater force.

"Really, this is too much!" I exclaimed, as I was caught off
guard and tossed out of bed. I landed on my bottom on the rug among
sharp bits of mirror. I was more startled than hurt, my anatomy
being well protected by a thick flannel nightgown. Nevertheless it
occurred to me for the first time that I could be injured in the
course of this thing. (I admit I am not too clever on the subject
of personal safety.)

In that same moment an alarming sort of groan from the wardrobe
made me glance in its direction. With wide eyes I watched the huge,
heavy piece of furniture tilt out from the wall. For the space of a
heartbeat it leaned at an impossible angle, its open doors creaking
and dangling, then it toppled and fell heavily onto the foot of the
bed. The very place I had been only a moment before!

Whomp! The bed collapsed. I yelped and rolled up into a ball on
the rug. It seemed that I lay there shaking and shaken for hours,
but it was probably only moments before I realized that the motion,
and the noise, had ceased again. I kept my arms wrapped around my
head and my knees pulled to my chest, remembering that I'd been
fooled once before. But nothing happened. Stillness prevailed.

"Fremont!" a masculine voice yelled from below. "Fremont, are
you all right?" It was Michael Archer, who lives on the second
floor.

"Yes." I uncurled, and my voice came out in a squeak. Clearing
my throat, I tried again, more loudly: "Yes, I'm all right! Don't
bother with me. See about Mrs. O'Leary!"

"Will do!" Michael agreed heartily. He sounded quite his normal
self, for which I was of course glad, but I did wonder if anything
could faze the man.

Still stunned by the good fortune that had saved me from certain
death-by-wardrobe, I got slowly to my feet. My balance was
unsteady, as if the room still moved. I found my slippers, shook
splinters of mirror from them, and put them on. My robe was on the
chair, where I always leave it at night-unaccountably, the chair
was the only item in the room that remained in its usual place. I
put the robe on and belted it with quivering hands. Then I tried to
shake some of the dust out of my hair, sneezing a good bit in the
process. I was sure I must look a fright with my hair all
night-tangled, but I did not much care. Instinct was telling me,
"Get out of the house, get out, get out!" and I was quite ready to
comply.

I picked my way across the hall and down the two flights of
stairs. The front door's lovely panel of etched glass was
completely gone. With my hand on the doorknob, I hesitated. Where
were Michael and Mrs. O.? All her doors were shut. The front hall
looked deceptively normal-that is, until one noted the small
chandelier gone splat! in the middle of the floor.

"Michael? Mrs. O.? I'll be outside," I called loudly, and
without awaiting a reply, hastened to take myself there.

Up and down Vallejo Street, people were coming out from their
houses. All in various kinds of nightdress, we made a most peculiar
sight. No one spoke; people turned their heads this way and that,
looking bewildered. Instinctively we all wandered into the middle
of the street and stood there silently taking in the cracked
pavement, the heaved and broken sidewalks, the welter of scattered
brick and glass.

Following such an excess of violence, the stillness felt
strange, all the more so because of the unusual clarity of the
early morning sky. We are not given many clear blue mornings in San
Francisco; why today, of all days? One of Mother Nature's little
ironies, I presumed. I was not amused.

I shook off negative thoughts in favor of more objective
observation. As far up and down the street as I could see, not a
single chimney remained upon a single roof, and many blank
rectangles yawned where windows formerly gleamed. Yet the houses
themselves stood tall and looked solid.

This is really not so bad after all,
I thought. Many
people thought the same at that early hour. Of course we were
wrong, but we had no way then of knowing that the worst was yet to
come.

From the corner of my eye I glimpsed Michael Archer, and so
turned toward him. He was coming down the front steps with our
large landlady on his arm. They made such an incongruous pair that
I had to smile: Michael was his slim, elegant, neatly bearded self,
in a dressing gown of black and olive-green silk paisley-except
that his usually sleek dark hair stood up in spikes at the crown of
his head; Mrs. O'Leary had on a ruffled sleeping cap and a pink
chenille robe that did not quite meet in the front, revealing a
flowered flannel nightdress with flounces that made her appear even
plumper than she was. I pulled my own narrow robe of dark green
wool more closely together, feeling very plain by comparison with
either of them.

Typically, Mrs. O'Leary had no compunction about breaking the
silence in the street. "Wot a horrible shakin' that was! Thought
it'd never stop!"

"I quite agree!" I said fervently.

Michael looked around, one hand rubbing the silver streaks in
his dark beard, the way he does when he is thinking hard. He said,
"Urn."

"The damage seems not as great as one might have assumed it
would be," I ventured. "At least, the houses appear basically
sound. Chimneys can be rebuilt, glass replaced."

"Hah! Not on my front door!" Mrs. O'Leary chimed in. "Cost a
pretty penny, them etchin's. It's a shame, that's wot it is. Not to
mention all my nice dishes-"

Michael's grave voice cut in. "A quake of such magnitude
will have done greater damage in other parts of the city. Here on
the hills the houses are solidly built and anchored in rock. But
elsewhere it is not the same. Particularly in the poorer sections.
We should consider ourselves fortunate."

"Fortunate?" wailed Mrs. O. "You show me fortunate and I'll show
you a load of cracked china, not to mention-"

In my turn, I interrupted her lament; it is often necessary to
interrupt Mrs. O'Leary if one wants to get a word in edgewise, and
she doesn't take offense. I said, "I was most fortunate not to have
been crushed under my wardrobe when it fell onto my bed."

Michael raised his eyebrows, and a shadow of concern deepened
the blue of his eyes in a most gratifying way.

"Why, Fremont, I'd no idea!" Mrs. O. patted my arm. "Thank the
good Lord you wasn't hurt!"

"Indeed," Michael agreed with a nod.

Mrs. O'Leary fussed with her cap, whose ruffles drooped over one
eye. "Well, seein' as how we're all in one piece here, I can't tell
the use of us standing around in the street. The rumbles is over
and there's work to be done. Weeks, that's wot it'll take to set
things right, not to mention things that's broke and can't be
mended! It's a shame, a pure rotten shame!"

How a shame, or anything else, could be both pure and rotten at
the same time I did not know, but I said, "You are right, so, shall
we go in?" I took Mrs. O'Leary's arm, which trembled with her
indignation, and steered her back toward the house. Other people
were also returning to their houses. We left Michael standing
there, lost in unfathomable thought.

Two or so hours later, as I was walking down Van Ness Avenue
toward Sacramento Street, headed for my office, I saw plumes of
black smoke to the southeast. Somewhere on the far side of Market
Street a fire burned.

Though the smoke looked ominous I was not particularly worried.
San Francisco had an excellent fire department, as I knew from Mrs.
O'Leary's frequent extolling of their virtues. Her deceased husband
had been a high-ranking police officer, and in truth I sometimes
thought I detected a note of jealousy when she told me of the
firemen's feats.

I had learned a good deal of San Francisco history from my
landlady, including the fact that half a century earlier the city
had burned to the ground twice in a single decade and been rebuilt.
For this reason the Great Seal of the City featured a phoenix
rising from the ashes; also for this reason much emphasis was put
on firefighting and prevention, and firemen were generally regarded
as heroes.

Traversing on foot the route I generally took by cable car, I
continued on my way. The cable cars were not running, and I missed
their clacking and clanging. The streets were full of people
anxious to see what damage had occurred to their places of
business, plus a share of out-and-out gawkers. There was a good
deal of bustle, but again-as on Vallejo Street earlier-no one
spoke. An aftermath of the shock, I supposed. Hard leather soles
slapped pavement, carriage wheels rumbled, horses' hoofs clopped,
but even the horses were strangely quiet. I heard not a single
whinny.

The newsboy from whom I purchased the
Chronicle
each
morning was on his corner even though he had no papers to sell.
Enterprisingly, he had made himself a town crier. "Chinatown in
shambles!" he yelled. "New dome of City Hall demolished! Fires
break out South of the Slot!" He stuck out his hand for pennies in
return for these bits of information.

"South of the Slot" meant the area south of Market Street, so
called because of the slotlike streetcar track down Market's
center. Well, that accounted for the smoke I'd seen earlier. The
fate of City Hall's new dome, while a pity, was of no immediate
concern to me; but Chinatown was the home of my friend Meiling Li.
I stopped and dropped a nickel in the newsboy's hand and asked,
"How bad is it really in Chinatown?"

He recognized me and grinned. "It's bad, miss. I seen it m'self
down t'other end of Sacramento. All the Chinee buildings done
tumbled down, nothin' left but a mess of bricks and boards." He
stuck out his hand toward another pedestrian, saying, " 'Scuse me,
miss, but I gotta make a livin'."

I thought of the House of Li, so grand and secretive. Gone?
Impossible to imagine! I hoped Meiling was all right, and promised
myself that I would find out soon.
Michael will know,
I
thought, as I continued on my way. Michael always seemed to know
everything. Or almost everything; I had managed to keep him in the
dark as to my own activities a time or two. Michael's ways were
mysterious, and the extent of his knowledge on diverse matters no
longer surprised me.

My office was in the next block. Already I could tell that
Sacramento Street was in worse shape than Vallejo. I looked away
down the street and saw a curl-a mere wisp, really-of smoke rising
from somewhere on the other side of Nob Hill. I walked on.

I had been trying not to come down with a case of the What Ifs,
but the closer I got to my office, the harder it was to stave off
that dread disease. I stopped trying and immediately the awful
thought broke out:
What If my
typewriter was damaged in the
earthquake, damaged beyond repair?