To the dismay of his family, he sets off for Los Angeles, California to work in his uncle’s pool halls and saloons. Bartender, bouncer, cashier, connoisseur of whisky & cigars & ballroom dancing, and master of several languages (including some Chinese), Emil Harris can hold his own in a fight and becomes an outstanding marksman at the shooting range. On several occasions he breaks up fights in his pool halls between small-time gangsters and hooligans. He develops a close understanding of Los Angeles’s underworld, its gangs, its brothels, its gambling dens, and its corrupt police officers coming in to be paid off for their services. The problem is that he must separate himself from those he wishes to understand, and this is sometimes difficult. The edges tend to blur.

Frequently he assists the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department when there has been a shooting or a robbery, and before long he is asked to join the force as a volunteer. He is shocked when he sees from the inside just how corrupt the other officers are. They are unpaid, of course, and they have to make a living, but as far as Emil is concerned the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Office is a near-criminal organisation. Emil is no angel, for instance he sometimes has to take “a loan” from one of his cigar-manufacturing Chinese friends – but unlike his colleagues he won’t accept a brown envelope from just anyone. This causes friction.

Emil Harris is deeply involved in community-building. He runs a sports club for children, and he is also raising money to build the city’s first synagogue. He knows all of Los Angeles’s important Jewish families and on several occasions he is approached when they wish to marry off their piano-playing daughters. However, Emil Harris can’t see himself in that bourgeois world they come from. He loves the street, he loves the cut-and-thrust of ordinary life. Even worse, Harris has developed deep feelings for Cleo, a singer and performer at his uncle’s pool hall. His uncle disapproves of Emil’s intimacy with Cleo and her Chinese colleague, Yut Ho, and he informs Emil’s family in New York about Emil’s “decline”. They send a “delegation” to amend his ways – including his own mother, but in the end she proves to be his greatest supporter. She forms a close bond with Cleo, believes in her son & fights for his values.

To Emil, the overarching reason for everything he does, is that the injustice of Prussia must not be recreated in America. There has to be a proper system of justice, or persecution will resurface. America is the last chance for a better world. He knows he has his faults, but at least on this score he has a clean conscience.

Harris’s skills as a detective bring him into conflict with the Vigilante Committee of Los Angeles, which lays on summary justice whenever public opinion demands it. To Emil Harris, vigilante justice is a visceral reminder of the anti-Semitic violence he saw in Europe. He instinctively opposes it and he begins to track the Committee’s doings. On a number of occasions he puts himself in danger, but Emil Harris is like a dog once it smells a bone. He keeps pressing regardless of the odds stacked up against him, and he often shows a mysterious indifference to danger. Especially the lead-up to the non-judicial hanging of the French settler Michel Lachenais brings to a head his conflict with the Vigilance Committee – including among its members some of the most powerful men in Los Angeles. Only after the terrifying riot that leads to the death of 19 Chinese residents in the city, do the authorities under pressure from the State Senate have a change of heart. This “evil in their midst” has to be put down, California’s legal system has to be asserted. A large section of the community in Los Angeles have no love for the Union and hanker back to the Confederates and even believe in Californian independence.

Emil Harris is chosen as the man who will apply US law in the midst of turmoil. He is the first police official in Los Angeles’s history to be paid a salary for his work.

He accepts his impossible and dangerous task with relish.