Part 27 (1/2)

”Australia or New Zealand, perhaps,” she said thoughtfully. ”But I've learned over the years in his employ that Jacob doesn't think like most men.”

”My experience with the man has led me to the same conclusion,” Bell said.

Marion went quiet as she pa.s.sed him more helpings of the pot roast, potatoes, and vegetables. ”Why don't you give your brain a rest and enjoy the fruits of my my labors?” she said, smiling. labors?” she said, smiling.

”Forgive me,” he said honestly. ”I've been a bore as a dinner companion.”

”I hope you like lemon meringue pie for dessert.”

He laughed. ”I adore lemon meringue pie.”

”You'd better. I baked enough for a small army.”

They finished the main course and Isaac stood up to help clear the table. She pushed him back down in his chair.

”Where do you think you're going?” she demanded.

He looked like a young boy startled by his mother. ”I wanted to help.”

”Sit down and finish your wine,” Marion said smartly. ”Guests don't work in my house, especially male guests.”

He looked at her slyly. ”And if I wasn't a guest?”

She turned away from him for fear her inner emotions might show. ”Then I'd make you fix a plumbing leak, a squeaky door hinge, and a broken table leg.”

”I could do that,” he said staunchly. ”I happen to be very handy.”

She looked at him disbelieving. ”A banker's son who is handy?”

He feigned a hurt look. ”I didn't always work in my father's bank. I ran away from home when I was fourteen and joined the Barnum and Bailey Circus. I helped put up and take down the tents, fed the elephants, and made repairs on the circus train.” He paused and a sad expression came across his face. ”After eight months, my father found me, hauled me home, and sent me back to school.”

”So you're a college man.”

”Harvard. Phi Beta Kappa, in economics.”

”And smart,” she added, properly impressed.

”And you?” he probed. ”Where did you go to school?”

”I was in the first graduating cla.s.s of Stanford University. My degree was in law, but I soon found that law firms were not in the habit of hiring women lawyers, so I went into banking.”

”Now it's my turn to be impressed,” said Bell honestly. ”It seems I've met my match.”

Suddenly, Marion went silent and a strange look came over her face. Bell thought something was wrong. He rushed to her side and slid his arm around her.

”Are you ill?”

She looked up at him from her coral green eyes. They seemed dark in thought. Then she gasped. ”Montreal!”

He leaned toward her. ”What did you say?”

”Montreal...Jacob and Margaret are going to make a run across the Canadian border to Montreal, where he can open another bank.”

”How do you know that?” asked Bell, bewildered at Marion's strange att.i.tude.

”I just remembered seeing the city Montreal scrawled on a notepad beside his telephone,” she explained. ”I didn't think it meant anything of importance and dismissed it from my mind. Now it all makes sense. The last place authorities would look for the Cromwells is in Canada. They can easily take on new ident.i.ties and buy off the right people to become upstanding citizens who start up a solvent financial inst.i.tution.”

The look of confusion faded from Bell's face. ”The piece fits,” he said slowly. ”Canada is probably the last place we'd think to look. The obvious escape route used by felons over the years is over the southern border into Mexico, using that as a springboard to travel farther south.”

Then, slowly, his thoughts of the Cromwells evaporated and he became quiet, gentle, and loving as he picked her up in his arms. ”I knew there was a reason I fell in love with you,” he said, his voice becoming low and husky. ”You're smarter than I am.”

Her whole body trembled as she entwined her arms around his neck. ”Oh, G.o.d, Isaac. I love you, too.”

He gently touched his lips to hers as he carried her from the living room into the bedroom. She pulled away and looked up, her eyes now mischievous. ”What about the lemon meringue pie?”

He gazed down at her lovely features and laughed. ”We can always eat it for breakfast.”

Bell could not have predicted nor much less have known that within a few hours the pie would become but a dim memory.

37.

CALLED THE HALLMARK OF THE WEST, THE SAN FRANCISCO of 1906 was a maze of contradictions. One writer described the city as the Babylon of grandiloquence, the Paris of romance, and the Hong Kong of adventure. Another went so far as to portray it as the gateway to paradise.

It may have been dynamic and exciting, but, in truth, San Francisco was a sprawling, filthy, soot-ridden, foul-smelling, brawling, corrupt, vulgar city with less charm than London in the seventeen hundreds. It intermingled incredible wealth with sordid poverty. Coal smoke from steamboats, locomotives, foundries, house furnaces and stoves enveloped streets already blanketed by the dung of thousands of horses. There were no sewage-treatment plants to be found and the blackened skies reeked of foul odors.

Most all the houses were built of wood. From the nice homes on Telegraph Hill to the stylish mansions of n.o.b Hill to the shacks and hovels in the outlying districts, it was described by the city's fire chief as a sea of tinderboxes waiting to be lit.

The image and the myth were to change dramatically within two and a half minutes.

At 5:12 A.M., on the morning of April 18th, the sun was beginning to lighten the eastern sky. The gas streetlights had been shut off and the cable cars began to clatter from their barns for their runs up and down the many hills of the city. Early workers began walking to their job as those who worked during the late-night hours headed home. Bakers were already at their ovens. Police on the early-morning s.h.i.+ft still patrolled their beats, expecting another quiet day, as a light wind without the prevailing fog blew in from the west.

But at 5:12, the peaceful world of San Francisco and its surrounding towns was shattered by an ominous, rumbling roar that came from the depths of the earth a few miles under the sea beyond the Golden Gate.

h.e.l.l had come to San Francisco.

The foreshock shook the surrounding countryside and was felt throughout the Bay Area. Twenty-five seconds later, terrifying, undulating shock waves from the ma.s.sive earthquake surged across the city like a monstrous hand sweeping stacks of books off a table.

The rock of the San Andreas Fault, whose walls had been grinding against each other for millions of years, abruptly split apart as the North American Plate under the land and the Pacific Plate beneath the sea unleashed their grip on each other and s.h.i.+fted in opposite directions, one to the north, the other to the south.

The unimaginable force raged toward the helpless city at seven thousand miles an hour in a disastrous spree that would leave monumental death and destruction in its wake.

The shock wave struck with savage swiftness. The pavement of the streets running east and west began to rise and crest before falling into troughs, as the quake rolled relentlessly forward and sent block upon block of tall buildings rocking and swaying like willow trees in a hurricane. Wood, mortar, and brick were never meant to withstand such an onslaught. One by one, the buildings began to crumble, their walls falling and avalanching into the streets under a cloud of dust and debris. Every window in the stores along the avenues burst and shattered onto the sidewalks in a shower of jagged shards.

Huge five-and ten-story buildings in the downtown business section toppled in a horrendous crash that sounded like a cannon barrage. Chasms opened and closed on the streets, some filling with groundwater and spilling into the gutters. The rails of streetcars and cable cars were twisted and bent like strands of spaghetti. The most violent shocks lasted for slightly more than a minute before diminis.h.i.+ng, although smaller aftershocks continued off and on for several days.