The Legacy (27 page)

I heard Marissa's voice, though I could not make out the words. I wondered whether I should try to open my eyes or think of something to say. There did not seem to be any hurry to decide. Then I felt on my forehead the warm touch of her fingers.

“What exactly do you propose to do with him?”

I sat up and looked around. Reclining in the canvas deck chair, Albert Craven balanced on his ample stomach a paper plate heaped with food.

“You can't just put him on the stand like he was any other witness, can you?”

“The hell I can't,”I grumbled, winking at Marissa as she handed me a plate of my own.

Albert Craven liked having people around him. He especially liked having women around him. Their company seemed to heighten his sensibilities and inspire his more generous impulses. He was an inveterate tease and a harmless flirt.

“This is Antonelli's case,”he said, glancing first at Marissa then at Laura. “But I end up doing all the work. All he has to do is go to court, while I have to take all the telephone calls from really important people that your friend Joseph here doesn't seem to have time to talk to.”

Craven's pinkish face glowed with pretended self-pity. He took a bite of a sandwich and then wiped his mouth.

“It's about all I do anymore,”he said with a long sigh. “I'm beginning to feel like a receptionist—or a press agent.”

“Take long lunches,”said Bobby with a wry grin.

Craven dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “This case is all anyone wants to talk about at lunch. It has the whole city by its ears. Especially now that you've gone and subpoenaed the governor,”he added with a shrewd glance. “His people, by the way, are very upset about it.”

“Those are probably the same people who wouldn't return my phone calls. The governor and his people seem to think that a murder trial is some kind of personal inconvenience,”I objected.

Craven nodded. “More like a political inconvenience, I should say.”

The boat rose and fell in the long gentle swells. Albert Craven sipped on his wine, then held the long-stemmed glass upright in the palm of his hand, watching pensively as the surface level inside traced the undulating movement of the bay below.

“You wanted to know what that was,”said Craven suddenly, looking up at Marissa. He waved his hand lazily toward the shore and the dreary grime-covered building about which she had earlier asked.

“It looks like something you might expect to find in the valleys of Manchester or the hills of Pennsylvania, doesn't it—one of those factories built at the beginning of the industrial age: brick-walled prisons for the wage-earning poor, places where whole families—whole generations, men, women, and children—spent all their waking hours, working for nothing more than enough to keep them alive long enough to work again the next day, and the next, and the day after that. But it's not a factory at all.”

Sitting at an angle, one leg crossed over the other, Marissa gazed across to a part of the island hidden from every land-bound perspective. “I've been out on the bay, and this isn't the first time I've sailed around this side of Angel Island, but if I ever saw it before, I don't remember it.”

Craven was intrigued. “How far do you think it is from where you live?”

“In a straight line—across the water? Less than a mile, I suppose.”

“And you didn't know it was here; though when you look at it now, you must wonder how anything this massive, this substantial, could have been here all this time, less than a mile away, just out of view, and you never knew anything about it.”

Bobby took a swig from a can of Coca-Cola. “What's your point, Albert? I didn't know it was here, either.”

“Point? I don't know if there is a point,”drawled Craven amiably. “I just find things like this curious—how little we notice things that are around us, how different things are from the way we imagine them to be, how much goes on right in front of our eyes that we know nothing about.”

“From the look of it,”said Bobby as he surveyed the stark rectangular lines of that dismal forgotten place, “not much has gone on there in a very long time.”

“What is it?”asked Laura shyly. “Or, rather, what was it?”

“It was Ellis Island,”replied Craven. “It was the western version of Ellis Island. It was where a generation of immigrants had their first introduction to America. Instead of the Irish and the Italians and the Germans and the Russians and the Poles, the immigrants who entered here were Asian—Chinese, mainly— and instead of heading for homes on the lower east side of Manhattan and work in the sweatshops of New York, they were herded into camps and then sent off to help build the railroads.”

Pointing vaguely toward a spot farther up the shore, he added, “The ships used to come in every day.”

Sipping slowly on his wine, Craven stared at the quiet vacant place, which had once been filled with the ruthless movement of sailing ships and steam ships, teeming with masses of huddled Chinese blinking under the assault of sounds they had never heard before and sights they had never seen.

“It's all part of the great illusion—or, if you prefer, the great mystery—of San Francisco. People who come here now think they can become whatever they want; they think everything is possible. The Chinese came here because it was the only way they could survive. They could not blend in, pass unnoticed the way white people could; they were treated like foreigners and they lived that way, separate and apart. Some of them still live that way. Chinatown is part of San Francisco, but I'm not at all sure San Francisco is any real part of Chinatown.”

The spreading wake of a fast-moving ferry rolled under the boat. A little of the wine that had just been added to Craven's glass sloshed over the top and onto his hand. Laughing, he switched the glass to his other hand and licked his thumb.

“Oh, I know,”said Craven, returning to his subject, “things are different now. The Chinese aren't treated like indentured servants. But for a long time they were, and in those days the city belonged to people like my good friend Lawrence Goldman, people who spent their lives pretending they were someone they were not.”

Craven's eyes were fixed on the dreary brick complex where every Asian immigrant was quarantined to protect against the invasion of exotic diseases from the Orient.

“Can you imagine? The Chinese talk about—or at least they used to talk about—their ancestors, a line going back thousands of years. I don't know half a dozen people who can tell me the names of all four of their great-grandfathers, and Lawrence Goldman certainly isn't one of them. Lawrence claims to be 'old San Francisco.' He isn't just someone with a lot of money. No, Lawrence had to be part of a tradition. And he is, though it isn't the one that gets told in the newspapers.”

“Wasn't his grandfather the chief of police?”asked Marissa alertly.

Craven took another sip of wine. A shrewd, knowing smile creased his small round mouth.

“Yes,”he replied, peering down into the glass, “and that is so to speak the respectable core of Lawrence's achievement; the basis, if you will, of his claim to inclusion among the established families of San Francisco. Of course,”he went on, raising his eyes, “none of the families that considered themselves established at the time would have been caught dead having a police chief in their homes. But leave that aside. Lawrence's grandfather was the police chief of San Francisco, and every time he attends some ground-breaking ceremony for a new hospital, or a new museum, or a new gallery, or anything else that benefits the city, he dismisses the importance of his own contribution by insisting that he is only trying to follow the example of public service first established by his grandfather.”

That same shrewd smile appeared again on Craven's mouth as he looked at each one of us in turn.

“What that does, of course,”he explained, “is to give Lawrence a status he could never have achieved with money alone.

“Lawrence Goldman's grandfather was Dan O'Brien, who became police chief in l920 after twelve years on the force. The interesting thing is that when he first became a cop—in l908—he was already thirty-three years old. Where he came from, what he did for the first thirty-two years of his life—no one knows. He was chief of police for about a dozen years. He had one child, a daughter, Kate, a fiery, headstrong girl who always did exactly what she wanted. What she wanted more than anything else was to become an actress, a movie star.

“She went to Hollywood, became a bit player, and then, after a while, began to get better parts. She starred in a dozen or so silent movies, but her career only really took off with the arrival of sound. She had a voice you could never forget: silky, sensual, it slipped into your mind and stayed there, playing over and over again like a record you can't stop, don't want to stop. She was in the first all-talking picture.
The Jazz Singer
was the first talkie, and Al Jolson spoke the first words a movie audience ever heard, but the first full-length picture in which talking was a regular, normal part of the story was made a few months later that same year—1927, I think it was. Kate O'Brien was in it, and so was Lawrence Goldman's father.

“That's how they met, Lawrence's parents, on the set of the first real movie.”Craven caught himself. “Real movie!”he exclaimed, laughing quietly.

“Tim Cassidy. Ever heard of him?”he asked, looking at Bobby and then at me. “He was a restless, earnest sort. He grew up in New York. Cassidy was his stage name. His movie name, I should say. His real name was Goldman.”

“Why did he change it?”asked Marissa, carefully refilling his glass.

“Everyone changed their names for the movies,”he replied. “It was all part of the illusion, part of being something else. And if you were Jewish,”he said, patting her hand as they exchanged a meaningful glance, “well, America wasn't ready for a Jewish cowboy.

“Nathan Goldman—that was his real name—grew up in New York and dreamed of becoming a surgeon. But he spent two years in the army during the First World War, saw active duty in France, and when he came back no longer knew what he wanted to do. The war had changed him, unsettled him, made it impossible for him to get back into the routine of everyday life. The war—that war—seemed to do that to a lot of people. He left New York and went to Los Angeles. He made dozens of silent movies, and then, when sound came, he became a star. From that first all-talking picture until the beginning of the Second World War, Tim Cassidy guaranteed the success of any movie he was in. They were all westerns, and of course he was always the hero.

“He married Kate O'Brien in l928 or l929—I've forgotten which. For a few years—really into the mid-l930s—they were one of the best-known couples in America. The San Francisco papers were full of stories about them, stories that always mentioned she was the daughter of police chief Daniel O'Brien. It seemed they were here almost every weekend. In those days, there was very little nightlife in Los Angeles. Everyone from Hollywood came here. There was a train—the Starlight—that left L.A. every Friday afternoon and returned Sunday night. San Francisco was filled with nightclubs, and on weekend nights they were filled with Hollywood stars. That's when Errol Flynn and Melvin Belli became such good friends, on two-day drunks, when they did things that today would put them in jail or worse. But everybody loved it: the glamour, the celebrity, the harmless escapades of famous people who mixed with everybody else and, like everybody else, just wanted to have a good time.

“You see, that's really the point: Everybody wanted to have a good time, and you could have it here. San Francisco was a wide-open town. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you had the money to pay for it. The cops looked the other way— for a price. Everybody was great friends, as long as the police got their share. Everybody understood the game, and everybody followed the rules. One of the rules was that no one ever publicly questioned the integrity of the police.”

Rising slowly, Craven balanced himself on wobbly legs and stood next to me at the side of the boat, watching the light move up the side of the island and disappear into the deepening shadows of the dark green trees.

“The great illusion of civic duty was perpetuated right to the end and even beyond. When O'Brien died, the newspapers called him 'the most beloved policeman the city has ever known.' Everyone attended his funeral, and everyone believed— or pretended to believe—the astonishing story of how on a policeman's salary he happened to die with an estate worth nearly a million dollars.”

Taking a deep breath, Craven filled his lungs with the brisk salt air. Stretching out his arms, he twisted his small round head from side to side. With an affable grin, he looked down at the two women.

“A million dollars, mind you, in l934. Do you have any idea what that would be worth today? Neither do I, but I wouldn't think ten or twenty million would be out of the question.”

I spread my feet apart and let go of the side of the boat. “That's where Lawrence Goldman's money started?”I asked. “Police corruption?”

Craven stared at me with owlish eyes. “Oh, no. There was no corruption. The police chief accumulated all that money as an act of 'unselfish devotion.' Yes, that was the phrase the newspapers used: the 'unselfish devotion' of a father to his daughter and her husband. You see,”said Craven, reaching for the glass Marissa had just refilled, “the good chief had become terribly concerned about the lavish spending habits of his daughter and her husband, and he was afraid that they might find themselves penniless when their careers came to an end. So he began to borrow money from them, large amounts of money: money for a new car, money for a new house, money for this investment, that investment, whatever excuse he could invent at the moment. And of course,”he added, raising his wispy eyebrows, “they always said yes, because, after all, what did money mean to them?”

With a puckish grin, Craven settled back into the canvas deck chair. He crossed one leg over the other, trying to hide the purplish varicose veins that ran behind his knee.

“According to the story,”said Craven with a sly glance, “Dan O'Brien borrowed a prodigious amount of money over the years. And because the chief was really a saint in policeman's clothing, he never spent a dime of it on any of the things for which he had supposedly borrowed it. No, he saved it, all of it. He put it in a trust fund, nearly a million dollars, and the beneficiary was his only grandchild, Lawrence Goldman.