Chapter 5


Ed had worked at the Foghorn for four years, but had never ascended
to the paper’s fifth floor, the rarefied realm of publisher Chester Worthington Gilchrist III. He’d heard about it, of course. The reporters called it “Gilville,” and the few who’d visited said it made Versailles look like a Sixth Street welfare shelter.

They were right. The lobby reminded Ed of the fabled Redwood Room at the Clift Hotel, only more opulent—dark, floor-to-ceiling, redwood paneling polished to a jewel-like luster, deep wall-to-wall, and on top of that, antique Persian and Chinese carpets, with groups of potted palms arranged just so, and soft indirect lighting except for tiny spots that illuminated a half-dozen framed Foghorn front pages: GOLDEN GATE BRIDGE OPENS: Thousands Walk Magnificent New Span. MOSCONE, MILK KILLED IN CITY HALL SHOOTINGS: Dan White Charged with Murder. N.Y. GIANTS COMING TO S.F.: Dodgers to L.A.

The receptionist buzzed Ed through a security door, and into a wide hall like the lobby: richly paneled, deeply carpeted, and decorated with more spotlit front pages: DOW FALLS 508: Worst Crash Since 1929. SNEAK ATTACK: Japanese Planes Sink Fleet at Pearl Harbor. VICTORY: Dazzling 49er’s Win First Super Bowl.

A uniformed guard acknowledged Ed’s arrival with a subtle nod and escorted him past various suits’ offices to Gilchrist’s private secretary, a middle-aged gay man impeccably dressed in a gray suit, lavender shirt, and matching tie, who presided regally over his domain. The secretary pressed a button: “Mr. Rosenberg to see you, sir.” Ed heard a faint click from the direction of carved redwood burl double doors. The guard ushered him into the Sanctum Sanctorum.

Chester Worthington Gilchrist, III, known to his friends as Worth—as in “net”—was a tad shorter than his son, but still taller than Ed. Decades earlier at Stanford, he’d been a nationally ranked tennis player, and even in his late sixties still exuded tanned, sinewy vitality. He was exquisitely dressed in a charcoal suit Ed guessed came from Wilkes Bashford. Gilchrist rose from behind his huge desk crafted from a gold-flecked burgundy wood Ed didn’t recognize and held out his hand. He looked the way Ed imagined President Kennedy might have if he’d lived and his hair had turned silver. Gilchrist looked more like an investment banker than a newspaperman. Considering all the media companies and property he owned through Gilcorp, he was more of a banker. He shook Ed’s hand firmly and gestured to a leather chair Ed guessed cost more than the combined total of all of his home furnishings.

“I just saw your son in the newsroom,” Ed ventured, the commoner reaching for an ice-breaker during his first audience with the King. “Chet and I were friends at Cal.”

“Really.” Gilchrist’s tone was more polite than cordial.

“In the graduate History program. You must be very proud of his Pulitzer.”

Gilchrist pursed his lips. “Yes. Let’s hope his … problems are behind him.”

The office was larger than Ed’s Mission District cottage. It was decorated as exquisitely as everything else in Gilville. In addition to Gilchrist’s kidney-shaped desk, crafted, Ed presumed, from some impossibly rare Amazonian wood, there was a large conference table, more spotlit front pages, and a leather sofa group surrounding a rustic flagstone fireplace. Behind Gilchrist, floor-to-ceiling windows looked across Mission Street to the Old Mint, decommissioned in the 1950’s, then resurrected in the ’60’s as a museum of the Gold Rush and Comstock Lode, and the coinage struck because of them.

Ed felt a deep affection for the Old Mint. Compared with the new one out Market Street above the Safeway, it was small and seedy. But he didn’t care. He grew up as a change-sifting coin collector in the suburbs of New York City. Coins bearing San Francisco’s “S” mint mark rarely made it that far East. He saved every one he found. The summer after Ed completed eighth grade, his family took a cross-country motor trip and when they arrived in San Francisco, all he wanted to see was the Granite Lady and its coin collection. Forget Fisherman’s Wharf, the Golden Gate Bridge, and the cable cars, he told his parents. Just drop me off at the Old Mint and pick me up when it closes. His parents argued, but Ed was adamant. Eventually, they caved and spent the day showing the other kids the sights, wondering how much they should worry about their weird, coin-obsessed eldest. Ed reverentially climbed the granite stairs and entered numismatic heaven. The Old Mint’s collection consisted of uncirculated or proof specimens of every coin that had ever been struck there—except, of course, for the 1906-SS Double Eagle, the most storied coin in U.S. history. There were only two Reilly Double Eagles known, one at the Smithsonian, the other in the private collection of Chester Worthington Gilchrist III. Now, Ed’s memories of that trip were dim, except for Zion National Park and the day he spent at the Old Mint, in Stamp I and Stamp II, the enormous halls where the coins were struck.

Ed’s parents put his bar mitzvah gift money away for his college education, but using ten years of old Blue Books, the wholesale price guide to U.S. coins, he pitched them on investing some of it in rounding out his collection of Lincoln cents. When it came time for college, he vowed, he would sell at a tidy profit. His parents were dubious, but eventually allowed him to acquire extra-fine specimens of the four rarest coins in the set: 1909-S, 1909-VDB (because the initials of the designer, Victor D. Brenner, appear prominently on the reverse), 1914-D, and 1922 plain (minted in Denver, but because of an error, without the “D”). For a while, the collection was his most prized possession.

Ed stopped collecting coins at sixteen when he began collecting girlfriends. But as he prepared to depart for Ann Arbor, he couldn’t bring himself to sell. Fortunately, his parents never raised the issue. He still had his collection squirreled away in a dresser drawer. And he still religiously searched his change for pennies carrying “S” mint marks, increasingly rare even in San Francisco since the Mint closed. When Ed found an “S” coin, he deposited it in a mayonnaise jar on his mantel. Now the government was talking about closing the Old Mint Museum and moving its coin collection to the Smithsonian. But even if that happened, the combined government collections wouldn’t equal the one Gilchrist was about to donate to the California Museum. His was the nation’s largest, most complete collection of U.S. coins, from colonial times to the present.

“I have to tell you, sir,” Ed explained, flipping open his reporter’s notebook, “I pulled strings to get this assignment. I collected coins as a kid. And I’ve actually seen your collection, or at least the small fraction that you displayed a dozen years ago in Hillsborough.”

“You have?” Gilchrist cocked his head. He hadn’t expected to hear that the plebeian before him had visited the castle. “Do tell.”

“I forget how the subject came up, but shortly after I met Chet, we discovered a shared interest in numismatics. He’d written a paper on the search for the lost 1906-SS Double Eagles—”

“His senior thesis at Stanford. It won the Truman Prize.”

“Yes. Chet offered to take me to the house and show me the rarities you displayed in that little room off the library. I couldn’t believe you had one of the five known 1943 copper pennies—”

Gilchrist smiled. “Actually, it’s one of four known.”

“—or one of the seven 1804 proof silver dollars, or one of the two known 1841-O Half Eagles. But my favorite was the Reilly.”

Gilchrist’s smile broadened. “Yes, it’s always been my favorite, too. Sometimes I look over at the Old Mint and try to imagine what it was like there right after the earthquake—the chaos, the smoke, the heat from the fires, the pressure Herb Walther must have felt to protect the $200 million in his vault. He risked his life to save the building. God knows what he was thinking when he decided to run the double-S misstrikes up to the Presidio. In his thesis, Chet did a wonderful job tracing the search for Bohman and the Lost Gold. Have you read it?”

“Uh, no, but now that Chet’s back, maybe he can dig it out for me.” Ed flipped open his notebook. It was time to get down to business. “I know you’re busy. I don’t want to take too much of your time. …”

Media people are the toughest interviews. They know how frequently quotes got mangled, how routinely stories get botched. But Gilchrist clearly enjoyed Ed’s knowledge of coins. He leaned back in his Starship Enterprise captain’s chair, relaxed and ready to expound.

“You’ve spent a lifetime building the Gilchrist Collection of U.S. Coins. Why are you giving it away? And why now?”

Gilchrist pressed his fingertips together, making a pyramid with his hands. “Because I love it, and I’d like others to experience the pleasure of seeing it, as you have, and you saw only a tiny fraction of it. As I’ve grown older—I’m almost seventy now—it’s seemed increasingly silly to keep something so magnificent largely locked away in a vault. Chet saw that years before I did. From the time he was a boy, he always wanted the collection displayed in the Museum. But back then, it was a work in progress. It was incomplete, and I felt it wasn’t ready to be displayed. By the time I filled most of the gaps, Chet was … gone. When he contacted me, and the governor pardoned him, and he returned to us, it felt like the right time to grant his wish, a way of honoring his homecoming, his new beginning. Beyond Chet’s return, at my age you start to think about how little time you have left and what you’d like to do with it. California has given me so much. I’d like to give something back. Donating the collection is one realization of that desire. Another is my work as chair of the Handgun Control Initiative on the November ballot.”

Oh, Christ, Ed thought, here comes gun control. Gilchrist was like every other Major Turd—convinced that the Earth revolved around him, that every cause he championed had God Almighty’s stamp of approval. But downstairs, Ruffen thought differently. He didn’t want Ed even mentioning the initiative. Ed let Gilchrist rattle on for a while about his “sacred duty to stop the carnage,” then gently coaxed him back to the matter at hand.

“About the collection, how big is it exactly?”

“You know,” Gilchrist chuckled, “I’m not even sure. Gregory has had a team of assistants cataloguing it these past few weeks.”

“Gregory?”

“Gregory Murtinson, director of the California Museum. The specimens I displayed at the house—the ones Chet showed you—represent only one or two percent of the collection. For a good ten years, from the 1970s well into the ’80s, I pre-emptively purchased every major collection that came on the market—”

“Pre-emptively?” Ed asked.

“Yes, before they were officially presented for sale, my agents would offer a price well above the appraised value. Lloyd Zemrick never even got close.” Gilchrist’s lips curled into a smug grin. “It annoyed the hell out of him.”

“Zemrick?”

“Curator of the Smithsonian’s coin collection. I could move much faster than he could and offer more money. In fact, when I announced the donation, he called and begged me to donate several key pieces to him.”

“He begged you? As in grovel?”

Gilchrist’s eyes narrowed. “Bad choice of words. Let’s say he asked me, shall we?”

“Right, asked.” Ed scribbled furiously as Gilchrist reminisced about starting the collection when he was eleven by picking Indian Head pennies out of the change the Foghorn’s street vendors brought back to the old building on Kearny Street. From there, he described how he created a syndicate of dealers around the country to acquire his many rarities, and concluded with the afternoon at Sotheby’s in New York where he netted his Reilly, paying a then-record amount for a U.S. coin. “Everyone said I was crazy,” he sniffed. “But with the way the investment market in rare coins has appreciated since then, that ‘crazy’ investment now looks quite shrewd.”

“How valuable is the collection? I know pieces like the Reilly are ‘priceless,’ but even priceless treasures have a price.”

“Frankly, I have no idea. I stopped keeping track after it was appraised at five million some years ago. But that was before I acquired some of the most valuable pieces, and before the market in rare coins took off.”

“But, pardon me, sir,” Ed feigned deference before plunging the knife. “Presumably, you’ll deduct the donation as a charitable contribution …”

Gilchrist eyed him as though he were a cockroach on a slice of cheesecake. “I really haven’t given that a thought,” he declared with an imperious wave of a hand. “You’d have to discuss it with my tax attorney.”

“And who might that be?”

Gilchrist was about to answer when a chime sounded. “Excuse me. My high-priority line.” He picked up a handset built into the arm of his chair. “Yes? I see. All right. Put him through.” Ed rose to leave, but Gilchrist waved him back into his chair. “Some detail about the ceremony tonight. I’ll only be a moment.”

Ed noticed that Gilchrist’s fingers showed no ink stains. The man didn’t read his own newspaper. He probably had little gnomes read it for him and present daily summaries like the ones the CIA gives the President.

“What?!” Gilchrist spat. His chair snapped upright. His free hand grasped his forehead as if to keep it from exploding. “When?! My God! Hold on.” He motioned for Ed to pick up the extension on his desk. It was Walter French, the Foghorn’s executive editor. The new kid on the police beat just called in saying that California Museum director Gregory Murtinson had been found shot to death in his home in Seacliff. When he didn’t show up at the Museum that morning, someone called. The maid found him in the study. There was no weapon at the scene, so it couldn’t have been suicide. The police were running the usual tests on the slugs found in his chest, but from the look of the wounds, they guessed the weapon was a handgun.

Gilchrist, ashen-faced, dropped the receiver into its cradle. “Goddamn those handguns,” he hissed in a shaky whisper.

“What about the ceremony tonight?” Ed asked softly. “Will it be canceled?”

“Yes,” Gilchrist replied vacantly, staring across the room into the fireplace. Then, as if hypnotized, he snapped out of it. “I don’t know. I suppose I’ll have to find out …” He closed his eyes, fighting back tears.

Ed rose and thanked his publisher for the interview. He didn’t have a moment to lose. He had to scurry back down to the newsroom and lay claim to this new wrinkle in the story before any of the cop-chasers jumped on it.

Gilchrist dismissed him with a curt nod. He swiveled his chair toward the window and gazed across the street at the Old Mint.

As Ed withdrew, he noticed that the blood had drained from Gilchrist’s face. But he did not look grief-stricken. He looked … angry. Under his breath, but loud enough for Ed to hear, the Old Man said, “Just like that son of a bitch to upstage me at my own party.” Then he shot Ed an acid look that said: Print that and you’re fired.