Geologists had been warning everyone for years that the New Madrid fault was not a myth, that it was a loaded gun with its hammer cocked back, and their grim predictions were supported by history. In 1811, a superquake estimated at 8.2 on the then-nonexistent Richter scale had devastated the Mississippi River Valley, destroying pioneer settlements from Illinois to Kansas; legend told of the Mississippi River itself flowing backward during the quake, and simultaneous tremors were reported as far away as New York and Philadelphia while church bells rang in Charleston, South Carolina.
And there were other historical harbingers of disaster, major and minor quakes ranging between 5.0 and 6.2 on the Richter scale during the years between 1838 and 1976, all caused by a 130-mile seismic rift between Arkansas and Missouri, centered near the little Missouri town of New Madrid. Sometimes the quakes occurred away from the Missouri bootheel, such as the 1909 quake on the Wabash River between Illinois and Indiana, but most of the temblors happened in the region near the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, and during even the most minor quakes chimneys crumbled, roofs collapsed, and people occasionally died.
Despite geologic and historical evidence that the city was living on borrowed time, though, most people in St. Louis managed to forget that they lived just north of a bull’s-eye.
In August 1990 a New Mexico pseudoscientist named Iben Browning caused a panic by predicting that there was a fifty-fifty chance that a major earthquake would occur between the first and fifth days of December of that year. His prediction, based upon flimsy conjecture involving sunspots and lunar motion, was made during a speech to a group of St. Louis businessmen, and the sensation-hungry local media blared it to the public. By coincidence, Browning’s prediction was followed in late September by a minor 4.6 quake epicentered near Cape Giradeau. The quake did little damage, but the general public, already unnerved by war in the Middle East and a shaky national economy, went apeshit.
During a three-month silly season, St. Louis prepared itself for imminent disaster, climaxing on a Wednesday when the city’s public schools were shut down, its fire departments mobilized, and scores of citizens left town for vacation. When the prediction proved to be false-as was bound to happen, since earthquake prediction ranks with Rhine card ESP tests for unreliability-St. Louis ruefully laughed at itself and promptly began to forget everything it had learned about earthquake preparedness.
Iben Browning died a short time afterward without ever having made public comment about his apocalyptic predictions. In doing so, he gave the, city renewed overconfidence. Earthquake drills were canceled as the 1990 scare settled into the back of everyone’s mind, and the people of St. Louis once more settled into the safe, conservative mind-set that Nothing Ever Changes In Our Town. Even the 1994 Los Angeles earthquake did little to shake the city’s complacent sense of false security.
And so it went for the next two decades. Our local pundits have often observed, sometimes with barely concealed pride, that St. Louis consistently remains about five years behind the times. Nonetheless, the city was dragged kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century. New buildings were erected, old ones were torn down, and the downtown skyline began to rival Chicago for brightness. The city’s building codes were revised to imitate the earthquake-preparedness standards institutionalized in California, but they didn’t affect thousands of older buildings or private residences. Electric cars replaced the old gashogs on the highways as new federal laws phased out the use of internal combustion engines in automobiles. A new light-rail system was erected, effectively replacing the old bus lines. The local aerospace industry gradually regeared itself from making warplanes to building spacecraft components. Hemlines rose, fell, and briefly became nonexistent with the short-lived barebuns look of 2000, which contributed to yet another moral revival that lasted until most women decided they really didn’t want to wear neck-to-toe chastity gowns in 100-degree summer weather. Extrophy, smart drugs, isometrics, minimalistic education, and at least a half-dozen sociopolitical theories came and went as fads. Two economic recessions were suffered and were survived, the last one finally forcing the county and city governments to merge after more than a century of squabbling; their uneasy shotgun-marriage formed Metro St. Louis, the seventh largest city in the United States.
And there were two or three minor quakes, the largest one being a 5.2 temblor in 2006 that enabled the city to save a few dollars from having to tear down some condemned buildings in the central west end. Nothing serious. But the gun was still cocked and one day in early summer, when no one was paying attention, the hammer finally came down.
That was the day my son was taken from me.
My reverie ended as the train lurched to a halt at another station. The doors slid open and the skinny black guy, the strange fat lady, and a few others stood up to shuffle off the train. No one got on; except for the old dude who continued to stare at me with doleful contempt, the strung-out teenager, and the guy who was reading, I was alone in the car.
As the train got moving again, the old codger rose from his seat and walked unsteadily down the aisle.
He ignored the admonition until he found the seat next to mine and lowered himself into it. He watched me for another moment, then leaned across the aisle, bracing his chapped hands on the edge of my seat.
“Repent your sins,” he hissed at me. “Jesus is coming.”
I stared back at him. “I know,” I said very softly, “because I
Okay, so maybe it was a little blasphemous. I was worn out and pissed off. But I’m Jewish and Jesus was Jewish, and that made us closer kin than with some crazy old dink with a grudge against anyone who didn’t share his hateful beliefs. At any rate, it worked; his eyes widened and his chin trembled with inchoate rage, then he glared at me and, without another word, got up and made his way to the front of the train, putting as much distance between us as possible.
Good riddance. “Go forth, be fruitful and multiply,” I added, but I don’t think he got that old Woody Allen joke. Alone again, I recalled my conversation with the nameless black woman at the Muny.
I was supposed to tell John to meet her at eight o’clock tomorrow night at Clancy’s; that would be Clancy’s Bar and Grill, a bar just down the street from the paper’s offices. Since she didn’t bother to tell me her name, she must already be known to John … but certainly not by sight, considering how she had mistaken me for my colleague.
Therefore, how was John to recognize her? Not only that, but why didn’t she simply call him herself, instead of relying on a near-total stranger to pass the word?
I recalled the terrified look in her eyes when she discovered that the message
What had started?
There was only one clue, those two words she had whispered to me before she fled from the ERA troopers. “Ruby fulcrum,” I repeated aloud. It sounded like a code phrase, although for all I knew it could be the name of a laundry detergent or a cocktail-hour drink. New, improved Ruby Fulcrum, with hexachloride. Yeah, bartender, I’ll take a ruby fulcrum with a twist of lemon. Make it a double, it’s been a bitch of a night …
I pulled Joker out of my inside pocket and opened it on my knee, exposing its card-size screen and miniature keypad. After switching to video mode, I typed, Logon data search, please.
Certainly, Gerry, Joker responded. What are you looking for?
314 search mode: ruby fulcrum, I typed.
An hourglass appeared briefly on the screen; after a few moments it was replaced by a tiny pixelized image of the Joker from the Batman comic books cavorting across the screen, maniacally hurling gas bombs in either direction. I smiled when I saw that. Bailey’s son, Craig-who was now going through a Rastafarian phase and insisted that we call him Jah instead-had recently swiped my PT while I was out to lunch and had reprogrammed it to display this Screensaver during downtime. For a while, the gag had gone even further; Joker had spoken to me in a voice resembling Jack Nicholson’s until I had forced Jah to ditch the audio gimmick, although I allowed him to leave Batman’s arch-nemesis intact. It could have been worse; Jah had done the same to Tiernan’s PT, and Dingbat had spoken like Lucille Ball until John had threatened to wring his neck.
After a while the Joker began turning cartwheels for my amusement. Behind the scenes, though, I knew that
