Thankfully, the stairway was still standing, winding its way to the floor below. Bell and Marion made it past the main entrance and found a high mountain of debris piled outside the apartment house, thrown there when the front wall crashed and buried the street. The front section of the structure looked as if it had been sliced clean by a giant cleaver.
Marion stopped, her eyes welling with tears at the sight of her mother’s piano sitting smashed on the crest of the rubble. Bell spotted two men making their way down the street through the wreckage on a wagon drawn by two horses. He left Marion for a few moments, walked over and conversed with the two men as if striking a deal. They nodded and he came back.
“What was that about?” asked Marion.
“I offered to pay them five hundred dollars to take your mother’s piano to Cromwell’s warehouse by the railyard. When things get back to normal, I’ll see that it’s rebuilt.”
“Thank you, Isaac.” Marion stood on her toes as she kissed Bell on the cheek, stunned that a man could be so thoughtful about such a little thing in the midst of such disaster.
The army of people crowding the middle of the street was strangely subdued. There were no wails or cries, no hysteria. Everyone talked in whispers, glad they were alive, but not knowing what to do next or where to go or whether the earthquake would strike again. Many were still in their nightclothes. Mothers cuddled young children or clutched babies while men talked among themselves studying the damage to their homes.
A lull settled over the ruined city. The worst, everyone thought, had to be over. And yet the greatest tragedy was yet to come.
Bell and Marion walked to the intersection of Hyde and Lombard, seeing the cable car rails that now snaked like a meandering silver stream to the streets below Russian Hill. The cloud of dust hung tenaciously over the devastation, slowly dissipating as it was carried toward the east by the offshore breeze. From the docks protruding into the water around the Ferry Building west to Fillmore Street, and from the north bay far to the south, the once-great city was a vast sea of ruin and devastation.
Scores of hotels and lodging houses had collapsed, killing hundreds who had been sleeping soundly when the quake struck. The screams and cries of those trapped under the rubble and the badly injured carried up to the hill.
Hundreds of electrical poles had toppled, their high-tension wires snapping apart, whipping back and forth like desert sidewinders, sparks shooting from the tattered ends. At the same time, pipes carrying the city’s gas had split apart and now unleashed their deadly fumes. Tanks in the basements of manufacturing plants holding kerosene and fuel oil ran toward the fiery arcs thrown from the electrical wires where they met and burst in an explosion of orange flame. In destroyed houses, coals from the fallen chimneys ignited furniture and wooden frameworks.
Soon the wind helped merge the big and small fires into one massive holocaust. Within minutes, the city was blanketed by smoke from fires erupting across San Francisco that would take three days and hundreds of lives before they were contained. Many of the injured and trapped who could not be rescued in time would go unidentified, their bodies incinerated and turned to ashes by the intense heat.
“It’s going to get worse, much worse,” said Bell slowly. He turned to Marion. “I want you to go to Golden Gate Park; you’ll be safe there. I’ll come and find you later.”
“Where are you going?” she whispered, shuddering at the thought that she would be alone.
“To the Van Dorn office. The city is going to need every law enforcement agent available to help control the chaos.”
“Why can’t I stay here, near my apartment?”
He took another look at the growing conflagration. “It’s only a matter of a few hours before the fire reaches Russian Hill. You can’t stay here. Do you think you can make it on foot to the park?”
“I’ll make it,” she said, nodding gamely. Then she reached up and circled her arms around his neck. “I love you, Isaac Bell. I love you so much I hurt.”
He slipped his arms around her slim waist and kissed her. “I love you, too, Marion Morgan.” He hesitated before pushing her back. “Now, be a good girl and get a move on.”
“I’ll wait for you at the bridge over the pond.”
He held her hand a moment before turning away and moving through the mass of people who were crowded in the center of the street as far away as they could get from the buildings as a series of light aftershocks rippled through the city.
Bell took one of the long stairways leading from Russian Hill. It was split apart in several places but did not block his way down to Union Street. Then he cut over to Stockton and then to Market Street. The scene of destruction went far beyond anything his mind could have created.
There were no streetcars running, and all automobiles, many of them new models commandeered from dealer showrooms, as well as horse-drawn vehicles, were being pressed into service as ambulances to carry the injured to makeshift hospitals that were springing up in the city squares. The bodies of the dead, those who could be retrieved, were carried to warehouses that had been turned into temporary morgues.
The falling walls had not only crushed unlucky humans walking the sidewalks but also horses pulling the city’s huge fleet of freight wagons. They were felled by the dozens under tons of bricks. Bell saw a driver and horse that had been smashed to pulp by an electrical pole that had fallen on their milk wagon.
Reaching Market Street, Bell
