UNION SQUARE
APRIL 18, 1906. 12:18 P.M.
In the dining room of the St. Francis Hotel, where he had gone to escape the pandemonium at the Palace, Enrico Caruso used the last wedge of toast to wipe the last smear of egg from the corners of his plate, washing it down with his third glass of orange juice. A stifled belch signaled the finale of an enormous breakfast.
The other guests had switched from discreetly watching Caruso to staring at him in disbelief. Even Kaitlin, whose three brothers would devour a horse if given the liberty, sat transfixed.
Caruso patted his stomach, slid back his chair and wobbled across the dining room. He shoved his way through the kitchen's swinging doors and promptly found the headwaiter, who was quietly relating Caruso's gastronomic feat to the chef. "Is wonderful prima colazione. I am thanking you very much," the smiling tenor declared, handing over a five-dollar bill.
They stared at the biggest gratuity they had ever received and nodded politely to the tenor, who wore a smear of jam across his mustache. Caruso bowed politely and exited.
He was halfway across the dining room when an aftershock sent him to his knees. Cups and dishes crashed and moans echoed across the cavernous room. When it stopped, Kaitlin ran to the tenor's side and helped him to his feet.
"'Ell of a place," Caruso said hoarsely as Kaitlin helped him to his feet. "I never sing here again."
They stepped outside the St. Francis, where the sight of the fire arching above Market Street added to their malaise. Caruso took Kaitlin's hand and pulled her through the crowd gathering around Union Square.
They crossed Market; the faces of those in flight toward the waterfront grew more anguished each minute. A mother, father, and two young boys struggled to shove a piano over the tracks and cobblestones, the motionless body of an elderly woman sprawled atop. A legless man on a wheeled board clung to a rope trailing from a manure truck now loaded with antiques.
They entered the Palace lobby, where Alexander Sharon made a beeline to Caruso.
"Signor Caruso, Mr. Hertz is in your room having your belongings packed. We are evacuating the hotel as a precaution. The fire has shifted directions. I am so sorry."
"What is thees, escavazione?"
"Evacuation, Mr. Caruso. They want us to leave," Kaitlin replied.
"The Grand Opera House has just surrendered to the flames," Sharon added apologetically. "Everything was lost. Your costumes, instruments. Everything."
On the Palace roof, a mismatched crew of security guards, bellmen, and waiters braced as the fire reached Mission Street a block away. A janitor beckoned them to the edge of the building, where they watched soldiers moving the crowd away from the unfinished Monadnock Building next door. A sapper ran out from the steel girders as his comrades scattered. Seconds later, a dynamite charge exploded and sent the Palace shaking from foundation to roof.
The men on the hotel roof staggered away, holding their ears as a storm of sparks and cinders showered down on them. Scores of tiny fires sprung up on the expansive, black pitch roof. A burly waiter turned a brass wheel and three hoses bulged with water, the streams so powerful the force almost ripped the nozzles from the men's hands. They quickly extinguished the flames.
On the west side of the hotel below, crews on each floor ran the hallways, kicking in doors where the explosion had shattered windows and set curtains and carpeting ablaze. They doused the flames, cursing Funston and the Army.
In his suite at the opposite end of the Palace, Caruso finished dressing in a blue striped suit and entered the parlor where Kaitlin and Hertz awaited him. The calm that ushered him through breakfast had disappeared. He clutched his most prized belonging, the photograph with President Roosevelt.
"My voice," he croaked, "my voice ees died."
"Enrico," Kaitlin soothed, "your voice is fine. Have you tried to sing?" She looked at Hertz, busy directing bellboys struggling with Caruso's trunks.
"Yes," Hertz called, "why don't you try? Sing something, Enrico." Caruso's eyes darted fitfully between Hertz and Kaitlin.
"Please, Enrico," Kaitlin said with a touch of her alluring smile. "For me."
He handed her the Roosevelt photo and walked to the window. Hertz ripped back the curtains and shoved open the broken sash, offering Caruso a smile.
"See, Enrico, there is no fire here," Hertz declared. The statement was a hollow one. The light of the fire behind the Palace danced eerily off the buildings before them. It sent Caruso's spirits plummeting.
"You are the greatest voice in the world," Kaitlin said, "sing something." Quickly.
"What are you like me to sing, Kaitlin?"
"The one about Mimi and Rodolfo, the poor seamstress and the poet who falls in love with her. From La Bohème. I love it because I'm a seamstress who loves poetry."
Caruso stared at Kaitlin's earnest face and his spirits revived. "Che gelida manina. Is 'ow you say?" patting his head to dislodge the words. "Froze little hand. Is Rodolfo sing to his poor Mimi while 'e is a' try to warm hand. Is aria I was sing tonight."
Kaitlin nodded, choking back tears. She wanted to tell him how many times she had fallen asleep, her ear pressed against the horn on her Gramophone, dreaming of Rodolfo. Caruso squeezed her hand and the gesture steadied them.
He cleared his throat and faced the window, Kaitlin on one side, Hertz on the other.
"Che gelida manina/se la lasci riscaldar/cercar che giova?/Al buio non si trova/ma per fortuna è una notte di luna/ e qui la luna l'abbiamo vicina."
Kaitlin mouthed "How cold your tiny hand is/let me warm it/what's the use of looking/we won't find it in the dark/but with good fortune it is a moonlit night/and here we have the moon so close." They were the words that Lincoln had translated and she had written in her diary. A tear ran down Kaitlin's face. The stoic Hertz succumbed as well.
On Market Street below, Hunter and I rode through the torrent of refugees struggling toward the waterfront. Fearful and exhausted by their efforts, many left sewing machines and bassinets, hope chests and hand baskets, rocking chairs and coat racks, family portraits, bicycles, a sidewalk bazaar of personal memoirs.
Hunter slalomed over and between piles of the debris. He slowed as we stared up at the Palace Hotel, crowned by the flame and smoke a block behind it. Streams of water played across the fiery backdrop as desperate men fought to keep the jewel of the city from the encroaching holocaust. All around us, people were stopping to gaze upward.
I tapped Hunter's shoulder and pointed to the fifth floor.
Through a shattered window frame, Caruso appeared, his miraculous tenor drifting down, piercing the thunder and the fear. "Chi son/Chi son/Sono un poeta/Che cosa faccio?/ Scrivo!/E come vivo?/Vivo!"
"Who am I? Who am I? I am a poet. What do I do? I write," I whispered in Hunter's ear, hugging him from behind, "And how do I live? I live!"
Caruso's voice soared, reaching ever deeper into his storied baritone, soaring to lyrical heights that once again seemed impossible. The horror faded and an eerie feeling of peace swept through the crowd.
"In povertà mia lieta/Scialo da gran signore/Rime ed inni d'amore /Per sogni e per chimere/E per castelli in aria."
"In my carefree poverty/I indulge like a rich man/in rhymes and poems of love/by dream and fantasy/by castles in the air," Hunter called back to me.
I noticed streams of people pouring from the Palace. "Hunter, they're abandoning the hotel. We can't leave Caruso on his own."
"He has a manager, a valet . ."
"Who don't know anything about the city. They can't get to the railroad station and the Ferry Building must be overwhelmed. That's Enrico Caruso, we can't leave him here like this."
"All right," Hunter said. "Take him to my house and get some rest before you collapse. Telegraph Hill is the safest place in the city right now. I'll come back for you. Go, I have work to do."
I climbed from the Waltham and quickly kissed Hunter's dirty face, momentarily struck by the fear that I might not see him again.
"Ma il furto non m'accora/poiché v'ha preso stanza/la speranza!" Caruso soared to the airiest heights on “speranza” and held it effortlessly as a shiver went through the crowd.
"But the loss does not bother me/because its place has been taken/by hope," I said softly as Hunter powered up Market Street, Caruso's voice fading behind him.
On the fifth floor, Kaitlin wiped her tears."You see, Enrico," she said, "your voice is fine."
I sprinted across Market and up the littered stairwells of the Palace as the last of Caruso's trunks were being removed. Exhausted by the effort, I burst into his room, almost butting heads with him.
"Enrico" I called, "You must come with me. Please."
"Annalisa! Where must we go?"
"My fiancé has a house on top of Telegraph Hill where you should be safe. It is too difficult to leave the city now."
Caruso looked at Hertz and Kaitlin. "They are come with me?" he pleaded.
"No," Hertz replied, "I must look after the others. Go, Enrico. Take Kaitlin. I will be relieved to know that you are safe."
"If you see my father," Kaitlin said to Hertz, "please tell him where I am."
"Telegraph Hill. I will tell him. Now go, all of you."
Halfway down the hall, we passed a soot-covered Alexander Sharon as he hurried from the roof.
"Mr. Sharon," Kaitlin called. "Have you seen Mr. Barrymore? He was still in my room when I left."
"Oh, God," he said. Sharon banged through the fire door. After running frantically down three flights of stairs, he burst into Kaitlin's room. Barrymore had just begun to stir.
"Ahh, Mr. Sharon," Barrymore inquired through his fog, "is it me, or is it warm in here?"
A mile west, in the cavernous interior of the Mechanics' Pavilion, Christian and Carlo used a blanket to carry an old woman, her broken arm still unset, toward the street.
"Save me, dear God. Somebody please save me," she begged, her cries lost in the nightmarish dirge of moans and shrieks from a thousand other victims. In the rafters overhead, papier mâché masks, remnants of the previous night's Mardi Gras, twisted in the sinister red glow streaming through the windows, adding a Luciferian quality to the already grisly scene.
Christian stared at Carlo, who had been mumbling periodically since Max was killed. They struggled toward the exit, stepping over bodies, bumping into desperate rescuers.
On the sidewalk outside, Francis and Patrick hog-tied a sandy-haired young man who had gone mad, trampling the wounded and flailing at anyone who got in his way.
Carlo and Christian spotted a bakery truck on Grove Street and outran the other rescuers to secure a place for the wounded woman. Within seconds, a dozen more injured were piled around her.
A few feet away, two soldiers carried the body of a teenage boy who had succumbed to head injuries. He was covered with red dust and particles of brick, the obvious result of a wall falling on him. They placed him in the gutter. No sooner had they released him than several more bodies were piled atop like cordwood. The wagons were only for the living.
Christian seized Carlo's arm and pulled him through the jostling crowd to Francis and Patrick. A motorcycle roared toward them.
"Where you been, Hunter?" Francis asked. "We need all the hands we can get!"
"I took Chief Sullivan's disaster plan to Mayor Schmitz to try to stop the dynamiting." As if on cue, a volley of explosions thundered through the air. "Instead of looking for water," Hunter continued, "those idiots are going to let Funston blow up the whole damn city."
Hunter looked over Christian's shoulder and spotted a woman clutching at rescuers, pleading for attention. "Mrs. Feeney," Hunter yelled, "Mrs. Feeney!"
Hunter pushed through the crowd and seized her arm. "Mrs. Feeney. It's me, Hunter Fallon. Inspector Fallon's son, remember?"
"They killed him, they killed him," she babbled repeatedly. "They blew up our house. They just blew it up. He went back for his papers and they blew it up with him inside." She sobbed and her knees buckled.
Hunter caught her as Christian, Francis, and Patrick ran to them.
"Who killed him?" Hunter pleaded. "Mrs. Feeney, listen, please. If someone killed him you have to tell us. Who killed Mr. Feeney?"
"I don't know," she gasped. "They had badges, but they weren't policemen. They were hoodlums."
"Mrs. Feeney," Francis implored. "You have to help us. What did they look like?"
"A scar on his face. Tall. Another man, bald, tattoos all over."
Francis spotted an automobile approaching the curb. He and Hunter grabbed Mrs. Feeney and carried her through the crowd.
"Mr. Howard, Mr. Howard!" Francis yelled to a passing car. Charles Howard, owner of the fledgling automobile dealership on Van Ness, slammed his Buick to a halt.
"Mr. Howard," Francis said as they lifted her onto the seat next to him. "This is Mrs. Feeney, the wife of the Federal Prosecutor. You must get her to the Presidio! Take her to the Duty Officer, tell him she is to stay in his protective custody, do you understand me?"
Soldiers and volunteers loaded more wounded into the Buick's back seat. "I'm going there anyway," Howard called over the fire's roar, "been ferrying people to Letterman Hospital, only one still working!" He offered a half-hearted salute and drove off.
"We got a war on our hands," Francis said. "Scarface and Dumbrowski, the tattooed gorilla. We put him away for beating one of Kelly's whores to death. Bastard. Kelly promoted him to replace the Whale."
"They killed Feeney," Hunter added. "They're using this chaos to go after their enemies. They'll go after Spreckels, Older, every damn one of us."
Francis examined the victims being carried to the sidewalk. Above the carnage, he could see towering St. Ignatius where he had been baptized and married, now being devoured by flames. The embers drifted onto the roof of the Mechanics' Pavilion.
"We can't let them run around the city killing people," Francis said. "Hunter, you go get Annalisa, she's in danger. My guess is they'll go after Spreckels next, he's got all the documents stored in his mansion on Van Ness."
"Carlo, you have to snap out of it," Francis said. "Carlo, do you hear me? Are you with us?" Carlo put his head down and looked away.
"This is war," Christian said. "No prisoners this time. They get in our way, they're dead men."
A mile north, on flooded Van Ness, a soot-covered Ford zigzagged between columns of rifle-wielding troops and made a sharp turn onto Sacramento. It swerved into the driveway of the corner mansion and stopped near the stables. A frantic Rudolph Spreckels jumped out and ran inside, his face a mask of worry.
He bounded up the winding staircase to the second floor and slipped into the bedroom, where Mrs. Flaherty, the plump Irish housekeeper, attended to his wife. He sat on the edge of the bed and pressed Eleanor's hands as her breath came in quick, short gasps.
"I tried t' telephone the midwife, Mr. Spreckels, but none a' the bloody things was working. Ain't a doctor in the city not tendin' the wounded and dyin' somewheres."
"I know," Spreckels said, "it's just the three of us."
"It'll be the four of us in a few minutes here," Eleanor smiled, her face covered in sweat. "This baby is not waiting for anyone."
Spreckels placed his hand on her belly and felt the child move. Through the window he could see City Hall burning a mile away, the peak of the fire waving in his direction. He was jarred by pounding and shouts of "open up" coming from his front door.
"Stay with her, Mrs. Flaherty."
He ran down the wide stairway and jerked open the front door. A tall man with a scar on his face and a badge in his left hand stared down at him.
"We're clearing out these houses," Scarface said. "We got orders from the city."
"The fire is a mile from here," Spreckels argued. "It might not even make it this far."
Scarface stepped aside, revealing a bald, tattooed Dumbrowski and three other men, all sporting ominous scowls and the badges of the Citizens Police. "We got our orders," Scarface said threateningly. "Now git."
"I'm Rudolph Spreckels. You have no right to order me from my own home. You can tell Mayor Schmitz I said so."
"We'll be sure to let him know," Scarface replied, fingering the Colt in his waistband. Scarface looked over his shoulder and spotted a detachment of soldiers. They stopped in the middle of Van Ness, fifty feet away. Several of them stared back at him.
He turned and glared at Spreckels. "Let's get moving," he hissed.
"Look," Spreckels said, "my wife is about to deliver her child. I'm not moving her."
"If your missus is about to drop a foal, you better get her the hell out before things get burned up. Now get movin'. And don't plan on cartin' anything with you."
Spreckels slammed the door and hurried outside to the stables, where two Chilean grooms were trying desperately to calm the horses.
"We have to move Mrs. Spreckels," he yelled.
They followed Spreckels back into the house and dashed to the bedroom.
"Rudolph, what's happening?"
"We're going to move you Eleanor."
"Oh, God. No."
"We have no choice. We're being ordered to evacuate."
"Can't they wait? Please!"
"We can't."
Spreckels nodded to Mrs. Flaherty and the two nervous grooms. They hoisted the corners of the bed sheets and struggled down the hallway. "Rudolph. Rudolph! Put me down."
Near the back door, Spreckels saw the tattooed man and several others staring at his car and examining his stables. "Let's take her out the side door toward Clay Street," he said softly.
Halfway to the street Mrs. Spreckels gasped and her breathing quickened.
"She's not going to make another meter," Mrs. Flaherty warned him. They set her gently on the lawn. Mrs. Flaherty knelt and pulled the blanket up. "This little one's got a mind all its own," she said. "It ain't waitin' for no one."
Spreckels looked at the throng hustling down Van Ness toward the bay. "Let's raise one of the bed sheets and at least give her some privacy," he ordered.
"All right," Mrs. Flaherty said, "the head's comin' through, we need you to push, ma'am. Push!"
Spreckels looked toward the attic, where he often had met with Fremont Older, Byron Fallon, and Charles Feeney. Documents crucial to the investigation were stacked about the room. A figure scampered past the dormer window: moments later, flames raced up the curtains, through the dormer window, and began climbing up the bone-dry roof.
Spreckels looked toward the rear of his home, where the scar-faced man leapt from the back porch and hurried toward his surly companions near the stables.
The flames spread rapidly, fanned by the hot wind. By the time Mrs. Flaherty tied the umbilical cord with a shoestring, the house was engulfed in flames.
Eleanor Spreckels clutched her daughter to her chest and squeezed her husband's hand.
"We'll call her Eleanor, after you," he said. "The bravest woman I know."
She looked into her husband's damp eyes and saw the reflection of the flames devouring her home.