Darlene recognized that the man was in full flow and made no attempt to divert him.
“Back in 1942 they dredged a three hundred feet wide deep water channel in Richardson Bay so that big ships — really big ships — could be floated out into San Francisco Bay. Then W.A. Bechtel — that’s the Bechtel Corporation, as in the Bechtel Corporation set up by the current Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a dude called John McCone — created a division called Marinship, built a temporary township called Marin City on the spoil dredged from the Bay which eventually housed about six thousand of the twenty thousand Sausalito shipyard workers, converted the old Northwestern Pacific Railroad repair yard into a shipyard and started building ships. They originally planned to build six slipways but by the end of the war the yards had taken over most of the waterfront. People in Sausalito still complain about the compulsory purchases and the bulldozing of their homes to set up the yards and to expand them as the war went on. In three years Marinship built fifteen Liberty ships, sixteen fleet oilers and 62 other tankers; and then, almost overnight, it all went away again. Except not everything went away because by the end of the war a lot of the workers in Marin City had brought their families to the town; nearly twenty years later I’m teaching the kids of men, and women — there were a lot of women working in the Marinship yards during the war — who came to work in the Bay Area in those years. Obviously, after the war the jobs went away, Sausalito got to be a place to ‘weekend’ from the city, and logging, fishing and yachting came back. Sausalito go to be a nice place to live again. Funnily enough about the time we met I was looking around trying to find a boat to live on. How would you feel about that, living on a boat?”
Darlene contemplated the question.
“I’ve never been on a boat. I don’t know.”
Chapter 46
They came through the smashed front and back doors of the old house at five minutes past four in the morning; National Guardsmen, FBI special agents and San Francisco PD detectives, every man carrying a carbine or a pump action shotgun. There were screams from the kids crashed in the ground floor rooms, and from the buxom black woman lying naked on the bed beside Johnny Seiffert in the big first floor ‘master’ bedroom overlooking the street.
The lights came on but the intruders kept on shining their torches in the face of the hysterical woman who was desperately grabbing for sheets in a hopeless attempt to protect her modesty, and in the face of the man who had known he was living on borrowed time ever since the fuck up at The Troubadour back in December.
Between them the hoodlums he had paid off to put the ‘frighteners’ on that arsehole Doug Weston and Sam fucking Brenckmann — the disloyal, ungrateful little turd — and that fat, greasy, greedy, incompetent shit Reggie O’Connell had fucked up so badly that even now, nearly seven weeks later he still did not begin to understand how things could possibly have gone so wrong.
Fuck it, he had only wanted a piece of Sam Brenckmann — the piece that was rightfully his — he had not wanted the stupid schmuck burned alive, or The Troubadour burned down and he certainly had not wanted Sam locked up in some Hell hole jail looking at five to twenty-five for accessory to murder. Jesus H. Christ! He was even a little — albeit only a very little — sorry about what had happened to Doug Weston. What the fuck was the guy supposed to do when a couple of brain dead bikers on the run from half the gangs in the Valley come at you swinging chains?
However, as strong hands turned him onto his belly, the cold muzzle of an M-1 carbine pressed hard against his neck and the hand cuffs were painfully clicked onto his wrists, the person he was really feeling sorry for was Johnny Seiffert.
He soon realized that the cops had already taken Leila, the pneumatic black dancer he had been fucking the last few days, out of the room. Nobody was screaming any more, that was something. Not that it helped him; he was naked, face down on his ‘love altar’ with his hands cuffed behind his back.
“They’re just kids downstairs,” somebody said gruffly.
“They high?” Another man asked tersely.
“No. Not too bad. Mostly just spooked.”
“Take them downtown. ID them, if the San Francisco PD haven’t got anything outstanding on the books for them let them go in the morning. Just make sure they understand that if they come back here they’ll be arrested and they won’t like what happens next.”
Nobody wanted to talk to Johnny Seiffert.
He listened as people moved around the old house.
Then the breaking began.
The Feds and the cops were going from room to room, turning out cupboards, pulling up carpets, looking under floorboards, methodically breaking as they went.
They were not really searching although sooner or later they would find his guns, his dope, and the pills and the rolls of cash stashed in hidey holes old and new, many of which he had forgotten about months or years ago.
“According to city records this house is owned by a Margery Carol Seiffert?” Somebody shouted in his ear.
“That’s my half-sister,” the man face down on the bed admitted.
“Where is she?”
“Dunno. She was in the Navy. Never came back stateside after the war. The forty-five war, I mean.”
“She give you the house?”
The question bewildered Johnny Seiffert for some seconds.
“No. I think she just,” he tried to shrug his shoulders but his interrogator probably did not notice, “well, forgot about it.”
“What? A big old house on Haight?”
“That’s Margo for you…”
The last time he had seen his half-sister Margo she had told him she did not want anything more to do with him. That was in the summer of 1943. ‘Doctor’ Margo had been shipping out for Hawaii having just bankrolled the weasel attorney who had bust him out of a rap for handling stolen US Army medical supplies.
That was over twenty years ago.
Margo was a hard bitch; they had never liked each other. After the Pacific War was she had been posted to Sixth Fleet in Naples, or someplace around there. Johnny had never travelled outside California, why would he? Geography was not his thing. Margo had ended up on some pissant little island in the Mediterranean. Malta? She could have made a fortune ‘doctoring’ if she had come back to the West Coast; there was no accounting for some people. He had wired her asking for a loan a few years back. She had given him the ‘return to sender’ treatment. If you don’t ask you don’t get, he had lived his whole life looking for the next soft touch to exploit; it was not leeching, it was simply taking what you could get.
“I’m getting cold here!” He protested.
His captors ignored him although one man left the room after they had had a short sotto voce chat amongst themselves.
Johnny took a scintilla of satisfaction from this miniscule triumph, or rather, what he mistakenly interpreted as having been a tiny psychological point scored. He was distracting himself recollecting Leila swallowing his cock — more or less whole, the kid had a real talent — when he suddenly convulsed in shock and rage.
Somebody had poured a bucket of ice cold water on him.
He had pissed himself.
The men in the room were laughing.
“Shut the fuck up!” Barked an angry voice and something smashed down across his cold, wet skinny buttocks.