A-Splendid-Ruin(75)
Truthfully, Shin was as much an excuse to go as a reason. I wanted to see the people who had destroyed me. I wanted to revel in their suffering. I needed Shin, yes, but what were the chances that she would still be working for them now, after all this?
A visit to Nob Hill, and then . . . Dante LaRosa, whether or not I found Shin. My plans put into motion at last. Excitement, anticipation, and fear powered my steps as I made my way to my old neighborhood. The landscape was wind-and fog-swept, black, here and there a copse of singed trees and hedges that had somehow eluded the fire. But the mostly destroyed world showed signs of regrowth among the relief lines and soup kitchens and ramshackle huts erected wherever there was space. Signs of burned wood read RESTRANT or HOT COFFEE AND SANWICHES, DONUTS—obviously no one cared much about spelling—and one said, BROWN’S CAFé: CHEER UP! HAVE A CUP OF COFFEE AND REST. WE ARE IN THIS TOGETHER. Work crews labored, soldiers shouted orders, and exhausted and starved-looking horses dragged wagons piled high with refuse or building supplies.
The most direct way to Nob Hill was through Chinatown. It had been strictly forbidden to go there until now, so I hadn’t explored it, and I was surprised at its condition. It looked as if it hadn’t been touched by work crews. The streets were so filled with wreckage that I had to pick my way through. Pools of stagnant water filthy with silt and ash created perilous potholes. It stank, too, and not of its usual fragrant mixture of fish and incense and sandalwood, but of rot and corruption—bodies still in the debris.
Also, there were few Chinese there. I didn’t know whether they had not been allowed back into the city, or whether they’d decided not to come, but the people crowding and digging through the detritus did not look as if they belonged there. Women in shirtwaists and skirts and some in their Sunday best, hatted and cloaked. Men in suits. I was surrounded by white men and women, many who looked to be the kind of people I might have known in society. It was not safe for me to be here.
I drew back as much as I could into the crowds, trying to decipher what I saw. I thought at first they were digging for bodies. But then I realized they were pillaging. People attacked the piles with shovels and rakes. They were too busy to look at or notice me, too focused on digging. Every block was the same. Everyone furiously shoveling and picking while armed guards looked on, now and again calling out things like, “Try over there! No one’s been at that yet!”
The few Chinese who wandered through the streets looked helpless and dazed. Some stood to watch those brazenly looting what had been their homes and businesses. People carried off sacks and baskets of melted bronze and chinaware, and no one stopped them. Only a few days ago, such looters would have been shot.
One young woman scrabbled through a mound, tossing aside bits of rubbish. Her skirt was filthy with soot and ash halfway up its length. She dragged something loose, calling out, “Look, Elsie, look!” She held up a scorched plate.
The woman above her on the mound squealed with excitement. “Oh, lucky you!”
“I can get three dollars for that, don’t you think?”
“I’d say so. It’s the burned bits that are worth the most.”
Behind me, someone called out, “Behold, the Stinking Catacombs of Vice!”
I turned at the horrified gasps and titters to see a group of people snaking their way through the devastation. A tour led by a dirty-faced young man, who gestured dramatically, his voice loud enough to carry through the grasping of the looters.
“The most notorious of the tunnels were just over there. You can see them if you look closely—be careful, miss, not too close! I can’t guarantee your safety. No one knows what’s left down there, but that was once a secret entrance to the Subterranean Hellholes. The Underground City branched out for blocks and blocks. We still don’t know the reach or the depth of them. Some say it went at least three stories down. Now, if you’ll come this way, I’ll show you what was once the most Notorious Opium Den in Chinatown.”
His voice faded as he led the group down another junked corridor that must once have been a street. It was hard to tell.
The place was a mess, and not only that, but crowded, and I hurried through. It was impossible not to think of the last time I’d been here—the gambling house, the opium den—impossible to look at the blocks I passed and not wonder where the place had been. How far up the hill had I come from Coppa’s? Halfway through Chinatown, perhaps. There had been a store on the corner, with silk robes in the windows and embroidered slippers, and next door to that, bins of long beans and big white rounds of some unfamiliar vegetable and gnarled knobs of pungent roots tumbled in a basket.
None of it was there now. I had found Chinatown frightening and foreign, but also interesting, and its absence made me melancholy, and I wondered what Goldie would do now that her opium procurer was gone, and again, did it matter? What had changed in the time I’d been in Blessington? Secrets only mattered if they were still poisonous.
Please let them still matter.
I kept walking.
Nob Hill had been transformed beyond recognition. The only buildings still standing were James Flood’s mansion and the Fairmont Hotel. Flood’s brownstone had been gutted; it was only a skeleton with empty sockets for windows. The Fairmont—which had not been finished when I’d been sent away—loomed in the near distance, its pillars unwarped and its windows glassless, the only obvious effects of the fire the scorching across its facade, stretching black silhouettes of flame. The fire had transformed marble into lime and melted steel and iron into bizarre shapes. Runnels of liquified glass and lead sash weights dripped over sills and pooled in hollows. Granite blocks had turned into boulders, their outer layers crumbling and gritty. A bright green parrot, the only spot of color in a fog of black and white and gray, perched on what remained of a stone gate, squawking raucously. Everything scorched and crumbled, and now the rounded peaks of army tents crowded the ruins, looking no different than any relief camp in any part of the city. Women and children crowded near communal tent kitchens. A line of wooden latrines—a far cry from baths with delft sinks and marble-like commodes—and wash lines were humiliatingly out in the open. How far the rich had come down in the world, that everyone could see their unmentionables. In the middle of the camp, someone had erected a flagpole, and the American flag rippled contentedly over all. The earth giveth, and the earth taketh away. I bit back a smile.