Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [64]
She looked at him as if a block of plaster had just fallen on his head. She had things to do. There were lunch dishes to clear. Plaster littered the floor and plaster dust filmed the once-gleaming tops of all the tables in the house. Music, Henry?
Still smiling, he gave a slight nod in the direction of the children.
Mollie saw the smile; a heartbeat later she realized it did not include his eyes.
He whispered, “I don’t want them to see the water rising.”
She went to the piano and opened the first book she saw, a collection of Gilbert and Sullivan songs. She turned to Patience, one of the rabbi’s favorites.
Her fingers shook.
DOWNTOWN NO ONE paid much attention to the storm. As the lunch hour approached, men set out as usual for their favorite restaurants. One of the most popular was Ritter’s Café and Saloon on Mechanic Street, at the heart of the city’s most vibrant commercial quarter. It was a large, high-ceilinged chamber in the ground floor of a building that also housed a second-floor printing shop with several heavy presses. The café was well known even among out-of-town businessmen, who arranged to meet customers and associates at its bright, broad tables.
Saturday morning, Stanley G. Spencer, a steamship agent who represented the Elder-Dempster and North German Lloyd lines, arranged a lunch meeting with Richard Lord, traffic manager for George H. McFadden and Brother, a cotton exporter. The two met, exchanged greetings, and took a table.
It was a pleasure to be inside in the warm, dry restaurant. Waiters in white jackets and black pants raced from table to table, bringing cocktails and towering pints of beer and huge platters of oysters and shrimp and steaks the size of bricks. The room contained a cross-section of Galveston’s commercial men, including Charles Kellner, a cotton buyer from England; Henry Dreckschmidt, an agent for the Germania Life Insurance Company; and a young man named Walter M. Dailey, a clerk with Mildenberg’s Wholesale Notions.
Now and then a powerful gust of wind shook the front windows with enough force to draw the attention of the diners. Each time a customer came through the front door, the wind muscled past and threatened to strip the tablecloths from under every meal. Between gusts, the diners continued talking business with a nonchalance that had to be contrived. They were aware of the storm, and knew it was getting stronger.
“Hey, Spencer!” one man shouted, from across the room. “I’ve just counted and there are thirteen men in this room.”
Spencer laughed. Other diners joined in, glad for the relief the laughter provided. “You can’t frighten me,” Spencer shouted. “I’m not superstitious.”
Moments later a powerful gust of wind tore off the building’s roof. The “blast effect” caused by the wind’s sudden entry into the enclosed space of the second floor apparently bowed the walls to the point where the beams supporting the ceiling of Ritter’s slipped from their moorings. The ceiling collapsed into the dining room, amid a cascade from the second floor of desks, chairs, and the brutally heavy printing presses.
There must have been warning. A shriek of steel, perhaps, or the pistol-crack of a beam. Some men had time to dive under the big oak bar along one wall of the room.
Spencer and Lord died instantly. Three others died with them—Kellner, Dreckschmidt, and young Dailey. Five other men were badly hurt. Ritter dispatched a waiter to find a doctor.
The waiter drowned.
Word of the collapse spread quickly. No one believed it. Crowds of businessmen converged on Mechanic Street to see for themselves. Isaac came, no doubt—his office was a block and a half away. Witnesses took the story back to their offices. Messenger boys from Western Union carried the news on their rounds. Ritter’s Café was gone. Men were dead.
It was the thing that at last brought fear to Galveston.
BOLIVAR POINT
The Lost Train