Marion did not stand on protocol. She was waiting out front, on the top step of her building. As the Rolls eased to the curb, she descended and then stopped as Abner opened the door for her. She was dressed in a short jacket over a blue blouse with a matching skirt that had a simple elegance about it. Her blond hair was drawn back and twisted into a long braid with a bow at the back of her long neck.

Cromwell stepped out and gallantly helped her into the backseat. The chauffeur pulled down the other jump seat in which Cromwell, in a courtly manner, seated himself. “Miss Marion Morgan, may I present Mr. Eugene Butler. And you’ve met my sister Margaret,” he said, using her proper name.

“Miss Cromwell, a pleasure to see you again.” Marion’s tone was gracious but not exactly filled with warmth. “Likewise, Eugene,” Marion acknowledged sweetly with familiarity.

“You know each other?” asked Margaret in surprise.

“Eugene…Mr. Butler…took me to dinner some time ago.”

“Two years,” Butler said good-naturedly. “I failed to impress her. She spurned all my later invitations.”

“And advances,” Marion added, smiling.

“Ready for a hot night on the Barbary Coast?” asked Cromwell.

“It will be a new experience for me,” said Marion. “I’ve never had the courage to go there.”

“Remember the old song,” said Margaret:

“The miners came in ’forty-nine,

the whores in ’fifty-one.

And when they got together,

they produced the native son.”

Marion blushed and looked demurely at the carpet on the floor as the men laughed.

A few minutes later, Abner turned onto Pacific Street and drove through the heart of the Barbary Coast, named after the lair of the Barbary pirates of Morocco and Tunisia. Here was the home of gamblers, prostitutes, burglars, con men, drunks, derelicts, cutthroats, and murderers. It was all there, debauchery and degradation, poverty and wealth, misery and death.

The infamous coast boasted more than three hundred saloons, wall-to-wall, within six city blocks, fifty of them on Pacific Street alone. It existed because of crooked politicians who were bribed by the saloon, gambling house, and brothel owners. The reputable citizens of the city complained publicly about the den of iniquity but averted their eyes because they were secretly proud of the distinction that their fair city of San Francisco more than equaled Paris, which bore the enviable reputation as the wickedest city in the Western Hemisphere, as a carnival of vice and corruption.

And yet the Barbary Coast was glitzy and glamorous, with loads of ballyhoo and skulduggery, a veritable paradise for people of honest means to go slumming. The unsavory who ran the dens of sin—in most cases, men—relished seeing the swells from Nob Hill enter their establishments because they had no scruples charging them exorbitant prices for admission and liquor, usually thirty dollars for a bottle of champagne rather than the going rate of six to eight. Mixed drinks in most saloons were twenty-five cents and beer a dime.