The Daredevils (27 page)

The NPL man sat back in his chair and blew his cheeks out. He looked back and forth at Vera and Charles for a while—not with incredulity or suspicion or irritation, but as if it were all just then becoming too much to bear. Then he seemed to give up, or to come to terms with it.

“Why is it,” he asked, drawing his great thick eyebrows together, “that a single company can control line elevators, terminal elevators, commission houses and mills, have tidy arrangements with the railroads
and
tell a farmer how much he will get for his produce?”

He was the kind of salesman who seemed to want answers to rhetorical questions, so Charles said he didn't know, at least in specific terms, and neither did Vera, who nodded.

“Tell me,” he continued, “where else a consumer tells a producer what the price of the product will be! Tell me why a farmer can't tell the railroads how much he'll pay to get his wheat to Minneapolis. Tell me why there are no terminal elevators in the entire state of North Dakota. Tell me why it is—” he waved off Charles's reply, “—why it is that of all the farms in North Dakota in the year 1890—” he consulted his figures, “—6.9 percent of them were operated by tenant farmers, in 1900 8.5 percent, and in 1910 nearly
double
that. Tell me why every newspaper in the country will run stories with huge headlines of how ‘European' orders for two million bushels of
wheat have suddenly and mysteriously been cancelled, driving the market into a crash, and not a one of them will run the story that states unequivocally that the first story was a goddamn hoax! Tell me why the price of a bushel of wheat always drops at harvest time and rises once the millers own it. Tell me why we are supposed to believe that ‘our leading citizens' would never ‘stoop so low as to use false weights' at their elevators, while farmers will lie, slander, cheat, steal—even murder, I suppose!—to continue their profligate lifestyles, anything to continue to live like the corrupt prairie barons they are denounced as. Can you? Tell me?”

“Darkness,” said Charles, “is on the face of the waters.”

The NPL agent narrowed his eyes.

“I'm not sure that the farmer you idealize is anything but another kind of businessman,” suggested Charles.

The NPL man said, “Let us talk for a moment about wheat grades.”

“All right,” said Vera, licking the point of her pencil. “The less talk of murder the better, you ask me.”

Again the man gave her the same dark look he'd just given Charles. He was confused, and angry because he didn't think he was there to be confused. “There's #1 Hard, #1 Northern, #2, #3, and #4. There's also No Grade and Rejected. Have you got that? It's pretty confusing. You've got to have a good hand with grain, a good eye, and a telephone number of another fellow with similar attributes and a like mind who will back you up when you are accused of downgrading at the elevator, he can confirm your grade instead of upgrading like he would normally. Everybody in the NPL has had that happen to them: you sell and it's #2 or #3, but when it gets to Minneapolis, the train ride has miraculously transformed it into #1. Well, that's just what a broker does, that's what they tell me anyway, and we ought to keep our heads down and our mouths closed and let the man do his fucking
job,
but first tell me how it is we get docked for ‘impurities, dirt, and other seed' in our wheat, have to pay the freight on this exceedingly heavy pile of impurity, only to learn later that these impurities have been screened out and sold as stock feed for twenty dollars a ton by the very
folks who said it was worthless, and an inconvenience to them for which
we
should have to pay?”

Vera and Charles smiled and shook their heads.

“‘Darkness on the face of the waters'?” The man's eyes were small and black beneath shaggy graying brows. “Kinda crack is that?”

“Means the same thing as a smile and a nod,” Charles said evenly. “Don't get your underwear in a bundle. It's a good story and you tell it well, but it's not like I haven't heard it before. VERA HERE GREW UP IN A BUTTON FACTORY, YOU GODDAMN BONEHEAD!”

The man merely glowered and sunk deeper in his chair. Vera apologized for Charles's rude behavior. She felt sorry for the man, in truth, because it was believed he was playing fast and loose with NPL funds, and things were only getting faster and looser; he was an ideal target for Justice agents, easily turned when things finally got out of hand, and Vera had been asked to establish a relationship with him of simple goodwill and trust in the hope that he would not turn when the opportunity to do so came around. Some of the men she knew thought it was women's work, and some thought it was shit work, but Vera liked it, and everybody recognized it was something she did naturally well. She said, somewhat deprecatingly, that she thought it “suited her personality,” and it reminded her of her duties at the
Passaic Weekly,
the job she'd found when they left Lawrence after the fiasco of the Children's Crusade, and moved down to the even bigger strike in Paterson in 1912. That paper's editor was now doing time in prison, and Vera believed she might lend some kind of attenuated moral support by practicing reportorial skills, talking to people, and taking notes on a little pad.

She wanted only to leave San Francisco and never return, because to either stay or return would be to confront how little she mattered in the big fraudulent scheme of things as they were apparently playing out. She knew everybody from one end of the investigation to the other, but her associations were not deemed criminal or even of interest, and neither the team of prosecutors nor the team of defense lawyers had required her testimony. The only way such exclusion made sense was to see that the trials had their
own special trajectories already plotted out, as if by artillery engineers, and these flights were taking place in their own special place, in their own special space and time, ironically free of the laws of space and time, in a kind of air-that-was-not-air, air so rarefied it was often—in effect, in a subtly theatrical effect that only occurred to the players and the observers deep in the backs of their minds and only when they were thinking unguardedly—nearly impossible to breathe.

She could not keep her mind, her “mind” as she increasingly thought of it, a thing that could not be explained with words—or did she mean to put quote marks around “her,” as if that were the thing that could not be explained, owner and proprietor of an organ of meat, of pudding, designed to carry traces of suffering and horror balanced by traces of peace and pleasure, simply so that
it could go on
even if she could not—she could not keep away from vivid recreations in her brain of the theater bombing, the understudy who had died in her place—someone who had died for her because she was not available—the parade bombing and the murder of three of her friends and the framing of at least three others, and so she had decided she wanted to die. Understudy be damned: it was her job to die.

But in the end she had been persuaded to go to the Wobblies in Chicago, hearing the repeated advice from friends who seemed so far away, and then so near, and then so far again, and coming to think that she ought to work again, slowly and steadily at something deemed to be of use by somebody who claimed to know, willing to do anything, but making clear a preference, without resort to emotional violence, for activity that would not result in bloodshed. The unhappiness of railroad people, short of bloodshed, would be an ideal goal, she said—any railroad and any people associated with any railroad—as they were convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that URR, that thugs in the employ of Durwood Keogh or Keogh's security chief, the marble-like mercenary Rudy Swanson, had not only helped frame Warren Farnsworth and Tom Moody for the murders and the bombings, but actually killed Jules Beveridge, Amado Fernández, and Lucille Brown, for no readily recognizable reason. It was possible too that they had organized and staged the bombing,
rather than simply availing themselves of it. The Chicago Wobblies believed that worse things were happening, or were about to happen, in Minnesota, the flour capital of the universe, than anyplace else that came readily to mind, but Jules Beveridge, no more than a month before he was murdered, had met his old friend from Philadelphia days and the Point Breeze board track, a Swedish engineer, Stringberry, who was developing a new motorcycle with a Chicago businessman named Tom Peacock, and these men had unqualifiedly endorsed her. Why? Charles wanted simultaneously to know and not know. The possibility of decisive, consequential action seemed greater the greater the knowledge the actor possessed—until the actor thought about it a little longer and came to the conclusion that less knowledge made for purer acts. Greater knowledge could easily become a burden, an increasing weight that would slow and eventually stop an actor in his tracks. But purity . . .! Ruthlessness and horror surely rose up in the shadow of purity, did they not? Charles could see Father so clearly, eating breakfast, saying just that.

But there was a kind of purity in Vera, something like purity, that partook nothing at all of ruthlessness, of certainty, hatred, violence. There was in fact something in Vera's character as Charles had observed it—and that was an extremely rigorous distinction he was well aware of—that dismissed those elements entirely from sullied political ideas of purity—in fact purified it. He could, alas, only see its shape. Its nature was obscure.

From Saint Paul, Charles had written to her in Chicago at least once a week. They were not exactly love letters, but contained evidence of what she was prepared to accept as a kind of energetic devotion to her well-being. It was foolish, she told herself, to pretend she didn't care for this devotion. And she wondered too where the harm was, given that her days and the days of everybody she cared about were numbered, if she were not at least a little in love with Charles Minot, the millionaire playboy? She had wanted to kill herself in San Francisco, and what she was doing in Chicago did seem very much to be only the work the men didn't want to do, work the men thought women therefore ought to do.

The next week it began to snow. Vera, who was living in a room in a house, at 130 Virginia street, that Charles had found for her near the Saint Paul Cathedral and Father's cousin's castle-like structure on Summit Avenue, cried out with delight and fond memories, while he, though he had seen snow, a good deal of it, in the mountains, was fascinated as only a boy from San Francisco could be. But it didn't stop snowing until the new year had come. The average was nearly a foot a week. On a Thursday or a Friday or a Saturday—always, it seemed, at the end of a week—a blizzard would come howling down from Alberta, they were told, Alberta clippers, drop a foot of powdery dry snow, and depart for Chicago. The winds piled up immense drifts, and the below-zero air that followed like a swelling sea the crashing waves of the storm, froze the drifts solid as iron. People walked on them to the tops of their houses. To the west, on the Dakota borders, herds of cattle, sheltering in coulees, were buried alive. A train, too, was buried, near Minot, though no one died. Warren Farnsworth was tried and found guilty of the murders of Lucille Olivet Brown, Jules Beveridge, and Amado Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi—these in addition to the ten people killed in the Preparedness Day Parade bombing and the six in the theater bombing. He was sentenced to hang for the former, and life imprisonment for the latter—the idea being that he was a pipsqueak of a boy (he was twenty-two but looked sixteen) and a natural rat (he only, unfortunately, looked like one) who would likely tell investigators a great deal more about his anarchist and labor radical masters once he was in prison with certain death approaching. Tom Moody was found guilty, largely on the strength of the ball bearings and .31- and .32-caliber bullets found in his apartment—items similar but not identical to the shrapnel in both suitcase bombs—of masterminding the bombing and was sentenced to hang. His wife, Minnie, and Israel Minkowski were acquitted—largely, it was believed, because the public's distaste for what was increasingly seen as shoddy prosecution was rising like bile in the back of the throat. A threatened indictment of Alexander Berkman, the most well known of the more than twenty suspects in the theater bombing, never materialized, never for any of them, for possibly the same reason. A
great deal of perjury was reported in the newspapers, but nothing came of it. Meanwhile, in Saint Louis, Missouri, in the thriving Mexican expatriate community there, Amado's brother, Julio, was found bound and gagged with a bullet hole drilled through his brain, and Vera began to wonder if it was the Fernández de Lizardi brothers who had been the killer's targets; that Lucy had been killed out of obvious necessity, being in bed with Amado, Beveridge surprising the killer as the killer made his way up from the basement and Beveridge down to find his lover with his friend; and that the killer was not in any way connected with PG&E or URR detectives, but was a mercenary, perhaps associated with the Pinkertons—who certainly, according to the Chicago Wobblies, felt they had carte blanche from the Mexican-hating Wilson administration to act covertly, preemptively, and outside the law—in the employ of the psychotically unstable Mexican government of Huerta. And indeed, once the two brothers in exile had been assassinated, the third, in a Mexico City prison, was promptly executed. Then there was another big bombing, on Wall Street in New York. Italian anarchists were blamed, thirty people died, and it was only a prelude.

Vera sobbed, mostly for Warren, whom she had loved, for what seemed like days and nights, then laughed for days and nights, and finally settled into a routine of sudden laughter and sudden weeping. To live was to suffer, she would say earnestly in between these fits: there was no getting around it, and she had always known it. Now perhaps she could articulate it for herself and stop worrying about it. Suffering was not merely central to life, it was essential. Suffering did not
happen to
life, it
was
life. She did not like to equate evil with suffering, or suffering with darkness, because evil was an effect of suffering, not a cause and because darkness was often a great solace—it was one of the reasons why she had always cherished a secret love of the theater—but the idea of a life as a point of light falling into darkness was the easiest way to put it. Life was a kind of ignorance of something real but insensible and unreachable—and how could one fail to be ignorant of that sort of reality! Well, however one managed it, one was not ignorant. One saw life for what it was, a kind of sleep, a drunkenness, an entanglement
in the senses and emotions and consciousness, an entanglement in limbs that secreted a poison or a drug that numbed and addled and made one homesick . . . for the place or the condition or whatever you wanted to call it where people did not go to the theater to throw bombs on the stage, where the guilty did not put the innocent in prisons to rot or be hung, where children . . . oh, she could not bear to think of it. But it was where the moth would go to the light and not be destroyed, but rather become the fire.