Vera by Carol Edgarian (year 7 reading list TXT) 📕

“What’d you find?” Ruef called, hurrying once more from the kitchen. He went as far as the front door and paused, there, at the rim of his cage.

“What’d you get?” He gestured at the valise.

Damn, I thought, the jig is up.

“Keepsakes,” I said. “This and that.”

“Ah, you ladies with your treasures.” Ruef squinted, accustoming his eyes to the bright sun. With his middle finger, he pushed back the bridge of his wire-rimmed glasses. They were always slipping down his nose.

“That’s right,” I agreed.

The cop holding the valise glanced at its worn brass clasps and I feared he had an inkling to cast his eye on what was inside. He set the heavy bag on the walk.

“Vera Johnson!” Ruef exclaimed, laughing.

“What’s this,” the cop said. “Who?”

“Vera goddamn Johnson, Rose’s kid,” he bellowed, and he knocked his fist on the mayor’s door.

“Right,” I agreed. “You got me.”

How pleased Ruef was with himself! To have so cleverly knit the pieces, to have pulled from his capacious memory bank, where the city pols and hookers and saloonkeepers resided, among the upstanding Jews and goys, and those who owed the monthly or weekly or every-so-often payola, and the supervisors of easy virtue and the ones who balked, and his lawyers, his bankers, and Joey, the ruthless, who ran the cribs at the Standard, to Teddy Roosevelt himself, who, on the morning of their meeting, ordered his coffee sweet with seven spoons of sugar, and this was just a fraction of what Abe Ruef kept in that noggin of his, all this and my name.

“See that.” He wagged his finger at the cop, who was still eyeballing my bag, and the other cops in the Ford—reminding them, those sons of bitches, who would sooner see him in jail, that he was the smart guy, the one and only Abe Ruef.

I suppose I looked properly impressed and even embarrassed.

“Give Eugenie my regards,” Ruef said, waving me on. “Tell her I hope she’s praying for me.”

“I expect she’s praying for her father,” I said as I picked up the bag.

“Have you seen him?” Ruef asked. “Have you seen Gene?”

“Not recently,” I said, thinking, Sweet almighty, just ten more steps and I’m free.

But Ruef wasn’t done. The cops were eyeing him, and he wasn’t done. “I told you to go to college, didn’t I, Vera?”

“Yes. Yes, you did.”

“And I was right: you should. Don’t let them hold you back just ’cause you’re a girl.”

She was a girl too, my city. How perfect that her official seal is that of a phoenix rising. After she burned that sixth time, she was born again—headstrong and whimsical, careless as ever. Her trembling, her desire as elemental as her bedrock and curves.

Ruef’s trial was the sensation of the spring of ’07. The men behind the prosecution included Francis Heney, U.S. district attorney; Fremont Older, editor of the San Francisco Bulletin; and Claus Spreckels, father of Alma’s AB.

During the proceedings, Francis Heney discovered that one of the jurors, a Morris Haas, was a convicted felon. Heney accused Haas of being on Ruef’s payroll. Haas answered the accusation by shooting the district attorney in the face—right there in the courtroom. Incredibly, Heney survived.

The next morning, Morris Haas was found dead in his cell. Everyone suspected Ruef of being the mastermind of a perfectly, audaciously planned execution. The newspapers accused William Biggy, the city sheriff, of negligence. After all, Biggy had allowed a murder to take place in the city jail. Biggy was hounded in the press and on the streets. It was suggested that he too must be on Ruef’s payroll. The stench of corruption was everywhere, as was the outcry that the new San Francisco was proving to be just as dirty as the old.

When Sheriff Biggy’s body was found floating in the bay, it was yet one more seismic shock. It seemed Biggy had fallen off his boat late one night and drowned. An improbable death that had all the markings of Ruef, who was soon sentenced to fourteen years in San Quentin.

Mayor Schmitz’s trial was more straightforward.

On June 13, 1907, fourteen months after the quake, Eugene Schmitz was convicted for extorting twenty-seven hundred dollars from Tony Bloney, proprietor of the Poodle Dog. Schmitz was sentenced to the maximum of five years in San Quentin.

A thousand people gathered in the street to hear the verdict. As it was read, a roar went up. Schmitz turned to his lawyers and said, “What? What happened?”

The mayor’s lawyers appealed immediately, based on lack of evidence. Where was the twenty-seven hundred dollars? they demanded. When Schmitz’s bank accounts were shown to have negligible balances—when the prosecution discovered that the boodle box, hidden in the floor of a bedroom in the mayor’s former house, was empty—his conviction was overturned. The grand house up the hill, yes, the cars, the trips to Europe on a mayor’s modest salary all pointed to obvious corruption, but without a cash trail, there was no real proof.

I hoped I’d never run into Schmitz. But San Francisco has always been a small town. The folks you wish to avoid inevitably are the ones you see.

“Vera!” Schmitz called, laughing like a man who didn’t have the slightest dent in his conscience. “How well you look. Are you still a pagan?” Schmitz was on his way out of church, the granite steps just behind him; he kept glancing over his shoulder to see who was watching him. He had ash on his forehead. Of course, I realized, it was Ash Wednesday.

“It’s the music I love,” he said, as if I’d asked, Why church? He spoke as he always did with me, one step too familiar. I suppose that’s what I was to him, familiar. “Say, I’ll send you an invitation to our premiere. You must have heard from your sister: Eugenie and I have written an opera. Isn’t that something? It isn’t Carmen, of course, but it isn’t half bad.”

“What’s it about?” I asked.

“What’s that? The opera? Oh, I