Mendoza in Hollywood (42 page)

I
WANTED TO ASK HIM
about himself, to find out where he’d been born, who those highborn relations were who had hushed up his birth but evidently found him some back entrance into the corridors of power. The secret child grew up into a secret man, terrifically useful but never to be publicly acknowledged. And when his usefulness ended? When he finally failed to accomplish a task that had been set for him, or began to question the wisdom of the masters who paid him, as I think he must already have begun to do? How did any secret service reward an agent who couldn’t do the job, whether through his fault or through the folly of his superiors? Silence and abandonment, disappearance without a trace. I knew that much. Within our own Company there were always rumors that certain operatives had been retired, though nobody knew what that involved exactly. . . . It’s unsafe to inquire after fellow immortals one hasn’t seen in a while. I guess I’m going to find out where bad cyborgs go, eh, señors?

But I couldn’t ask Edward anything, about his personal life or our plans once we got to Catalina, for a number of reasons. The most immediate reason being that we were trying to cross a dangerous place quickly and in silence.

I could access the historical record, though.

It was so easy, it never occurred to me. All I had to do was access the files I was given codes for when I came to California. I was given
whole libraries full of stuff on its history, its future, much more detailed information than I ever bothered to use. When you spend most of your time in a coastal mountain range miles from the nearest mortal soul, you don’t need to know who will run for third mayor of Pasadena. But was Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax mentioned in the history of California? Perhaps in some connection with Catalina Island? There would be no mention of me, of course. No Dr. Zeus operative is ever given information about his or her own future, so if I appeared in any footnote in the historical record, it would have been carefully excised from my files.

But I might find references to Edward. 1 set my primary consciousness to automatic scan and focused on the material behind my eyes.

California, Channel Islands, Santa Catalina Island. One of eight channel islands. Geology: crystalline metamorphic rock, principally quartzite, also steatite, lead, silver—only traces of gold. Botany: several rare endemics (how fascinating, why hadn’t I ever been sent there?). Zoology: biggest predator a small fox; goats introduced by the Spanish doing very well. Ornithology, archaeology . . . nothing I wanted here.

Any record of British involvement? I scanned the records of ownership.

The Indians first, obviously, for about 30,000 years. Thirty
thousand
? Wasn’t that a little early? And what was this nonsense about sunken continents, reports of white Indians, and seven-foot-tall skeletons found in the oldest burial mounds? Then assorted Spanish galleons stopping by for souvenirs over the next couple of centuries, doing no harm for once. Russian fur hunters, Yankee sea captains, meddling Franciscans finally causing the place to be abandoned by its native population, who went over to the mission communities on the mainland, where they all died of smallpox.

First owner to hold any kind of title, thanks to Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo: King Charles of Aragon and Castile, later the Emperor Charles, father of my old acquaintance Philip II of Spain, husband of
that very same Mary Tudor who had my Nicholas burned at the stake. Small world. And then subsequent kings of Spain, until the Revolution in 1822, when Mexico claimed it. Modern times, now: when Pio Pico was dodging the invading Yankees, he granted title to the island to his friend Thomas M. Robbins. That was in 1846.

Robbins sold the island to José Maria Covarrubias in 1850, and in 1853 it passed out of his hands, sold to one Albert Packard of San Francisco, who had it now and would keep it until at least 1864.

But here the records grew confusing, incomplete. Somebody named Eugene L. Sullivan was claiming part title as early as 1858. And who was this James H. Ray claiming to be Packard’s agent, traveling back east
now
, 1863, and bragging to potential investors that he “about had a deal with John Bull”? British parties were interested in buying the property, if clear title could be established. And here was Ray buying out Packard’s interest in the island and immediately selling shares in the title to a consortium of men with fairly British-sounding names. Were they the Britons Ray had boasted about? Good Lord, by next year they would own Catalina Island.

I scanned further, fascinated. No—they wouldn’t hold the place long. Here was the American government stepping in and seizing the island, ordering everybody off. They’d build a Union Army barracks over there. When would this happen?

January 1, 1864. Nine months from now. A General West would arrive with Union troops, forcibly remove all settlers—including the Albion Mining Syndicate, who had developed an area on a defensible bay and named it Queen City—and build a Union Army barracks at the narrow isthmus that connected the two halves of the island. Under government orders, West would name the two opposing bays Catalina Harbor and Union Harbor. The schooner
Jessup
would be outfitted with a pivot gun and put into service as an armed supply vessel for the Union troops there. In short, Civil War or no Civil War, Abraham Lincoln would find the time and resources to come down on any funny business on Catalina Island like a ton of bricks. Why?

I sped through document titles and froze on one: “Winfield Scott
Hancock’s Threat Evaluation. Survey Performed on Orders of Edwin M. Stanton, Secretary of War, November 26, 1863.” Eight months from now.

So something that happened within the next eight months would cause the secretary of war in far-off Washington to order a survey of Catalina Island with national defense in mind. I scanned the report. What had Hancock found?

That the population of the island consisted of a few squatter families who had been there since the 1850s, sheepherders and fishermen only—and approximately one hundred miners (most of whom were British nationals), who arrived abruptly, proceeded to fortify a little crescent-shaped harbor, and engaged in no observable mining activity.

That the island’s coast was rife with small, accessible harbors, many of which had adequate capacity for vessels of war. Hancock felt the island had dangerous potential for a military base: “any major maritime power” could, with minimal ordnance, control the entire coastline of California from a base on that island, preferably one located in the two-square-mile area around the isthmus. What major maritime power? The Confederacy, desperately dodging blockades or busy hunting Union ships in the Atlantic? It hadn’t the wherewithal to send a fleet around Cape Horn. Britain, though, had ships all over the Pacific, and as recently as 1842 the U.S. was so afraid that Britain was going to make a play for California that they’d rushed ashore and prematurely raised the Stars and Stripes at Monterey, which, by an inconvenient little quirk of international law, still happened to belong to Mexico.

What a sharp-eyed fellow he’d been, this Winfield Scott Hancock, and how quickly the secretary of war had acted on his request. Whatever tipped off the secretary of war to order the survey in the first place (doubtless something relating to Mr. Rubery’s big mouth, or possibly even Mr. James H. Ray’s), in less than a year the whole British plot would come unraveled, and Catalina Island would be firmly under the control of the U.S. government. What a shame, though
at least it seemed to have happened without any bloodshed. No mention of any Edward Alton Bell-Fairfax.

Quite an interesting little episode in local history. Imarte had been right: it was all utterly fascinating. So that was the end of British attempts on Catalina . . .

Wait a minute: what was this? The U.S. government would pull out its forces in September 1864. None of the miners would ever return to the island to press their claims (not surprising, since no substantial amount of gold had ever been located), and a man named James Lick would seek out the consortium members and purchase their titles to the island. There was a lot of correspondence from certain parties in the Department of Indian Affairs, who thought the island would be a great place to dump the unwanted Indian population of Humboldt County, but this would never come to anything, because of the fact (or perhaps in spite of the fact) that Catalina Island had almost no fresh water or arable land, and also because James Lick would be by this time the sole and legal owner, with a clear title.

And here was Lick, in 1872, the Army long out of the picture, offering an option on the island to a Major Max von Stroble. The major would go to London to form an English syndicate to take up the option. Curiously, on the morning he was to sign the papers and collect the money, he would be found dead in his hotel room.

What the hell? And next? Here was George Shatto, the developer, buying the island from Lick in 1887 and selling an option to an
English mining syndicate
. With the money he would receive, Shatto would busy himself laying out the little resort town of Avalon. But there would be problems: the English were supposedly mining silver this time, but then they would leave suddenly, and Shatto would default on payments and lose the island. Shortly afterward, he would reportedly fall from the back of a moving train.

The island would revert to the Lick trustees, who would sell it in 1892 to the Banning brothers. And who were they? The sons of our present staunch pro-Union stagecoach tycoon Phineas Banning, the little boys who’d grow to manhood in that nice mansion being built
above San Pedro even now. William, Joseph, and Hancock Banning, the youngest having been named for his father’s good friend Winfield Scott Hancock, who’d written the threat estimate fingering the British. Very small world.

So the island would remain firmly in American hands from then on, though the Bannings would experience some trouble: fighting on the waterfront, mysterious sabotage attempts, and arson in 1915 that would destroy the Hotel Metropole (where Harry Houdini stayed) and most of the resort buildings. In the end, the brothers would be bought out by the millionaire Wrigley, of chewing gum fame, who would rebuild Avalon along grander lines. Oh, look: here was a reference to a visit by the Chronos Photo-Play Company, for the purposes of shooting a movie. Chronos Photo-Play was an early alias for Dr. Zeus’s entertainment division. I wondered if Einar would be involved in that.

Decades of peace and prosperity for Avalon, then, a pretty little resort town dreaming in the island sun, all its bizarre history long forgotten. No more mysterious deaths, no more British strangers lurking around. The only bit of trivia to stand out of the record was that Wrigley would pay to have an extensive geologic survey done and then suppress the results . . .

What was going on here
?

For half a century, in absolute silence and in deadly earnest, two world powers would wrestle for control of this tiny island. At the beginning, its strategic importance was undeniable. But why would the British keep coming back, long after they’d lost any chance of adding it to their empire? What would they be looking for that required engineering and mining teams? What would Wrigley’s geologic survey reveal? Not gold, which had never been found in enough quantity to merit attention of this kind. Not the various buried treasures reported to be there: every island had its tales of buried treasure. What were the British after? What had Imarte told me, something about letters referring to an astonishing technological discovery, made at a place designated
only by code. Was the place Catalina? Had they unearthed something there they wanted to study?

Did Edward know?

I remembered his face above me by firelight, shining with the sweat of passion, while he said something about a remarkable discovery, one that might enable men to defeat death. What did Edward know?

I scanned forward through the records. With the Second World War, the strangeness would begin again. The island would be closed to the public once more, and the OSS, forerunner of the CIA, would be quartered there. Oh my. There would be rumors of visits by Allied scientists, particularly the British, and of classified projects at science bases in the island’s interior. From that time onward, access to the island’s interior would be strictly controlled, even after the war, when the resort areas reopened. A conservancy would be formed in 1972, closing off most of the island to anyone but authorized residents. Access to certain areas was completely restricted, the reason given being that these were rare ecosystems where endemic plants thrived.

I noticed something interesting in the successive editions of the island’s history. The earlier works said the Union Army barracks were built to discourage Confederate sympathizers who might try to turn privateer, which doubtless related to whatever Mr. Rubery had been involved in. But later editions began to change the story: the barracks were built to patrol the Indian reservation that had been planned for the island. Still later, the story was that the barracks were built to guard against opium smugglers, and later still (by which point mortals were clearly losing their grasp of history) that they were built to prevent bootleggers from bringing in cases of whiskey.

The same thing happened with the successive maps. Here was one from 1912, nicely detailed, showing a lot of the interior features: the old mine adits and in particular Silver Canyon, where the English would work until their swift departure in 1887. Perhaps they got what they were after. But here was a map from 1938—where were the
mines? And here was one from 1976, with interior roads and hiking trails but few other features. Silver Canyon was not marked. Over this I superimposed a map published by the conservancy in 1982. There was
nothing
on the map in that section of the island, not even topographical lines to show ridges or streams, though they appeared everywhere else. The Silver Canyon region was white, blank, featureless. Who was taking such pains to obliterate its memory?

Ah, but a cross-reference in the text indicated the conservancy’s involvement with a twentieth-century holding company for Dr. Zeus.