Below the headline was a narrow photograph: behind Lotta’s Fountain, once the gathering place of Earthquake survivors, was a sixty-foot turret, a crimson “Liberty Tower,” upon which was written in words a full story tall:

CRUSH
THE
KAISER
WITH
CASH!

At the top was a clock face that, instead of telling time, showed how many millions had been collected. High noon was the San Francisco quota of $210 million.

But the light of the bacchanalia was now bent by a lens that no one much noticed. The remainder of the Chronicle’s page one consisted of the weather (high of sixty-two degrees); advertisements for Hart, Schaffner & Marx (specializing in officers’ wear); a notification of the latest Chaplin film, A Dog’s Life, opening at the New California on Market; a list of slackers; and two articles.

One article was just a sentence long: John Cowper Powys, critic and orator, had changed his evening’s lecture on “Shaw and Swinburne” to “Wicked German Kultur.”

The other article was several capital inches, dead center of the page, running above and below the fold lines. It explained why a tired old academic was now cowering in the train station, uncertain of who was watching him, or where his enemies might be. The article’s diction and shorthand suggested it was the latest development in a case with which even the casual reader was familiar. In the smooth, authoritarian font that suggested avuncular calm, it read: MUNSTERBERG PAID AS SPY MASTER WHILE AT HARVARD. The subtitle read “Noted psychologist advised rapprochement at Kaiser’s pleasure.”

This was a lie, unbelievable—if one thought it through. But careful thought was hardly the background tone of today. Energetic newsboys were handing out the Chronicle for free. It was being read with high spirits.

4

Münsterberg was not the only man whose story was going far and wide. As mentioned, the Chronicle’s front page listed the slackers, men who had chosen the worst week to sprint from registration, their names distributed on the day when San Francisco’s population had doubled. In the final column, his name near enough the end to stand out from the pack, was a man turned from lighthouse assistant to fugitive: Leland Wheeler.

He was at the prow of the midnight ferry, cap pulled down over his blue eyes, lapels turned up to hide his distinctive jaw, weathered fist clutching together the front of his coat, slab of torso leaning into the mists spilling up from the Bay. He looked exactly like someone who had broken the law.

This appealed to approximately three-quarters of the women who were also on board. For instance: Miss Andrea Pike, a San Franciscan returning from a visit to her maiden aunt in Oakland. Pike, who went by “Andy” when she was with her set, wore a blue georgette-crêpe beaded dress— something Lee wasn’t sure he’d seen before—and a man’s bowler hat, which he had certainly never seen a woman wear.