The Chase (Isaac Bell 1)

Abner spoke into his speaking tube: “I’ll take care of the matter.”

“When you’re finished, drive into the freight-and-service entrance at the rear of the bank. Let yourself in the back door—you have the key. I’ll need you to help carry several trunks to the automobile.”

“Yes, sir.”

As the Rolls-Royce reached the corner of Sutter and Market Streets and Cromwell saw the approaching inferno and the magnitude of the destruction, he began to feel apprehensive about what he would find when they drove up to his bank. His growing fear quickly turned to elation when the building came into view.

The Cromwell National Bank had withstood the earthquake nearly unscathed. The unyielding stone structure had lived up to Cromwell’s boast that it would last a thousand years. None of the walls or the great fluted columns had fallen. The only apparent damage was the shattered stained-glass windows, whose shards turned the sidewalk around the bank into a kaleidoscope of colors.

Abner pulled the Rolls to a stop and opened the rear door. Several bank employees were milling around the front entrance, having come to work out of habit, not knowing how else to deal with the tragic interruption of their lives. Cromwell got out and was only halfway up the steps when they surrounded him, all talking at once, bombarding him with questions. He held up his hands for silence and reassured them: “Please, please, go home and stay with your families. You can do nothing here. I promise your salaries will continue to be paid until this terrible calamity has ended and normal business can resume.”

It was an empty promise. Not only did Cromwell have no intention of continuing their salaries while the bank was shut down; he could see that the flames sweeping through the business district of the city were only a few hours away from consuming the bank building. Though the walls were stone and unyielding, the wooden roof beams were highly susceptible to fire, which would quickly gut the building to an empty shell.

As soon as his employees were walking away from the bank, Cromwell took a set of large brass keys from his coat pocket and unlocked the massive bronze front door. He didn’t bother to lock it after him, knowing the fire soon would consume any records inside. He headed straight for the vault. The time lock was set to engage the combination at eight o’clock. It was now seven forty-five. Cromwell calmly walked over to a leather chair at the loan officer’s desk, brushed off the dust, sat down, and produced a cigar from a case in his breast pocket.

Feeling as if he were in full command of the situation, he leaned back, lit the cigar, and blew a cloud of blue smoke toward the ornate ceiling of the lobby. The earthquake, he thought, could not have come at a more-opportune time. He might lose a few million, but the insurance would cover any damage to the bank building itself. His competitors tied up their assets in loans, but Cromwell always kept his assets in cash and invested on paper. Once it became known he had fled town, bank examiners would land on the Cromwell National Bank like vultures. With luck, his depositors might get ten cents on their invested dollar.

At precisely eight, the vault mechanism made a chiming sound as the locks clicked off one by one. Cromwell walked over to the vault and turned the huge wheel, which had spokes like a ship’s helm, turned it, and released the bars from their shafts. Then he pulled the giant door open on its gigantic well-oiled hinges as easily as if it were attached to a kitchen cupboard and entered.

It took him two hours to finish loading four million dollars in large-denomination gold certificate bills into five large leather trunks. Abner arrived, after hiding the body of the policeman under the collapsed floor of a hardware store, and carried the trunks out to the Rolls. Cromwell was always impressed with the Irishman’s brute strength. He himself could barely lift one end of a filled trunk off the floor, but Abner hoisted it onto one shoulder with barely a grunt.

The Rolls was parked in the underground freight entrance used by armored trucks and wagons that delivered currency or coins from the nearby San Francisco Mint. Cromwell helped Abner load the trunks in the spacious rear compartment before covering them with blankets he’d brought from his mansion. Under the blankets, he placed cushions from the chairs in the lobby of the bank, positioning them so that it looked as if they were dead bodies.

Cromwell went back inside and left the vault door open so the contents would be destroyed. Then he walked out and climbed in the open driver’s section of the Rolls and sat beside Abner. “Drive to our warehouse at the railyard,” he instructed.

“We’ll have to detour to the north docks and come around behind the fires if we want to reach the railyard,” said Abner, shifting the car into first gear. As he skirted the huge fire consuming Chinatown, he headed toward Black Point, to the north. Already, wooden buildings were disintegrating into beds of smoldering ashes as broken chimneys stood like blackened tombstones.

Some streets were clear enough to drive through, Abner avoiding those that were impassable because they were buried under collapsed walls. The Rolls was stopped twice by police, demanding the car be used as an ambulance, but Cromwell merely pointed to the makeshift bodies under the blankets and said they were on their way to the morgue. The police duly stepped back and waved them on.

Abner had to weave his way around crowds of refugees from the burned-out areas, carrying their meager belongings.

There was no panic; people moved slowly, as if they were out for a Sunday stroll. There was little conversation, and few looked back at what had been their homes before the calamity.

Cromwell was stunned at the intensity and swiftness of the fire as it consumed a nearby building. The towering blaze sent a shower of flaming sparks and debris onto the roof, which became a flaming torch within two or three minutes. Then a firestorm enveloped the entire building and consumed it in less time than it takes to boil water.

Regular army troops from the surrounding military installations began arriving to maintain order and help the city firemen fight the flames. Ten companies of artillery, infantry, cavalry, and the Hospital Corps—seventeen hundred men in all—marched into the city with guns and cartridge belts, prepared to guard the ruins, the bank and store vaults and safes, the post office, and the Mint from looters. Their orders were to shoot any man caught stealing.

They passed a caravan of soldiers in four automobiles whose backseats were stacked with boxes of dynamite from the California Powder Works. Within minutes, explosions rocked the already-devastated city, as homes and stores were detonated and leveled to slow the rage of the fire. Losing the battle, the army quickly began to dynamite entire blocks in a last-ditch attempt to stop the onslaught of the conflagration.

A sickly pale yellow light crept through the growing pall of smoke. There was no sun falling on the ruins except around the outskirts of the city. The dull ball of the sun appeared red and seemed smaller than its usual size. The army troops, firemen, and police retreated from the flames, herding the homeless to the west away from the approaching holocaust.

Abner twisted the wheel of the Rolls as he evaded the rubble in the streets and the crowd of people struggling to reach the ferry terminal in the hope of crossing the bay to Oakland. At last, he came across a railroad track and followed it into the main Southern Pacific railyard until he reached Cromwell’s warehouse. He drove up a ramp and parked next to the boxcar sitting at the loading dock. He noted the serial number painted on the side: 16455.

Cromwell did not know that Bell was aware the boxcar was not what it appeared to be. But the agent who was assigned to observe it had been called away by Bronson for other duties after the quake. All looked secure. Cromwell studied the padlock on the big sliding door of the boxcar to make sure it had not been tampered with. Satisfied, he inserted a key and removed the lock, which was more for show than for protection. Then he crouched under the car and came up though the trapdoor into the interior of the car. Once inside, he turned the heavy latches that sealed the door from within and slid it open.

Without instructions, Abner began carrying the heavy trunks filled with currency from the Rolls, hoisting them up to the floor of the boxcar, where Cromwell dragged them inside. When the last of the four million dollars was removed from the limousine, Cromwell looked down at Abner and said, “Return to the house, gather up my sister and her luggage, then return here.”

“You’re staying, Mr. Cromwell?” asked Abner.

Cromwell nodded. “I have business to conduct across the yard at the dispatcher’s office.”

Abner knew that making a round-trip from the warehouse to the mansion on Nob Hill was a near-impossible task, but he gave Cromwell a casual salute and said, “I’ll do my best to bring your sister here safe and sound.”

“If anyone can do it, you can, Abner,” said Cromwell. “I have complete faith in you.”

Then Cromwell closed the sliding door of the boxcar and dropped down through the trapdoor. As Abner drove the Rolls down the ramp, he saw Cromwell making his way across the tracks toward the dispatcher’s shack.

39