The Daredevils (40 page)

Charles set his bags down. “Charles Minot.”

“Pair in the front door, pair in the back. Must be a raid.”

“Ray John Howell,” said Rejean Houle.

“All right for starters,” said the man. “What do you do, Charles?”

“Friends call me Chick.”

“What do you do, Chick?”

“I have done many things.”

“You sound like an Indian, but you don't look like one.”

“Long train ride,” said Charles, alarmingly in the manner of a vaudeville Indian. He could act and lie as recklessly as he wished. The stage was wide open. There was absolutely nothing at stake beyond the preservation of Vera's well-being, if and when Daisy was arrested for her speech, and if and when Vera took her place. “Thirsty. We not ourselves yet.”

The woman sniffed a kind of laugh and the man smiled what appeared to all concerned to be an acknowledgement—one not lost on Charles, who heard it as applause.

“One of the many episodes of great interest and excitement in my life has been the racing of motorcycles. I was associated with a shop in San Francisco, Beveridge's, which is where I . . . hail from.”

“The racing of motorcycles? You don't say. What's that like?”

“It get old, like everything,” said Jules.

Vera was concerned at the continuing attempt at comedy, so concerned she turned fully around and stared at him.

“What bring you here, chief?” asked the man, adopting the tone.

Charles, glancing at Vera, stepped sideways into the light. “We are inspecting the weights that the millers and the elevator people and the railroads are using.”

The woman sighed and Charles looked closely at her. Her face was more clearly lit now and his eyes had adjusted: it was the woman with the sack and she looked like Vera.

“You're not a Kolessina, are you?” he asked, coming closer. “Family down around Muscatine, Iowa?”

“No,” said the woman incredulously. “Why?”

“You look like my associate here, don't you agree?”

Charles tugged gently on Vera's arm, and she came into the cone of light.

“I don't see it,” said the woman.

“Nor do I,” said Vera.

Charles chose that moment to try a character. “We're subcontracting with Pinkerton's.”

The woman looked at him as if to say,
I do not look like you or your associate, and you know I do not.
But this was not necessarily a hostile or even a guarded look—rather a recognition that a gamble had been taken the stakes of which would not be completely and immediately reckoned, much less lost.

“Miss Kolessina is a Russian,” said Charles. “Allow me to pause provocatively here, and then put quote marks around that ‘Russian,' for even more emphasis. She's a RUSSIAN,” he shouted,
“and
she works for Pinkerton's! What do you think about
that
?”

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

Because he was an actor, and only because he was an actor, Charles did not flinch, or in any way betray the salience of her phrase. “What,” he asked, “have you got something against Pinkerton subcontractors?”

“What,” countered the woman, “you got something
for
'em?”

“Last time I checked,” drawled Charles, “they were tracking down the godless animals who are throwing bombs into crowds of innocent people.”

The woman laughed derisively.

“Into crowds of innocent people I happened to know!” Charles was all but laughing back at the woman—or rather, with her.

“I suppose it never occurred to you that the Pinkerton gang was doing the actual throwing . . .?”

Now Charles laughed out loud. “Oh, it occurred to me, all right!”

He and the woman engaged in what seemed to be genuine mirth.

The man cleared his throat and returned to the subject of weights. “Better get rid of 'em all. They're all bad, Charles.”

“Call me Chick.”

“Take my word for it, Chick. Save yourself a lot of time and money and effort and I know all about time and money and effort going down the drain. Just go down to the foundry and say, ‘Hey, I need new accurate weights for every elevator in the state of Minnesota! It's either that or every farmer in the whole goddamned Midwest dries up and blows away!'”

“Well, sir, that's the way we heard it too,” said Charles.

“Only way there is
to
hear it.”

“Can I get a drink? Big glass of water and a shot, and for—”

“Fraid not. As a representative of the state government, you ought to know better than to ask.”

“I hear you. But if I could convince you that there's more to me than meets the eye, and that the part of me you can't see is 100 percent in favor of your running your business twenty-four hours a day and seven days a week or however it is you feel like running it, what would you say then?”

“I would say no soap, stranger. But in the friendliest way possible.”

“Not even a glass of water and—”

The woman poured four glasses of water from a bucket and set two of them on the bar. Charles and Vera drank thirstily, even noisily. The woman took the other two into the darkness for the Wobblies. Passing Ray, she asked if he wanted one too. He said he did, and thanked her. When everybody was done, the woman filled their glasses again, spilling water from each glass onto the bar, laughing and saying “ooops” each time, picking the glass up, mopping the bar, setting the glass back down.

“Good water up here,” said Charles.

“We don't have any trouble with it,” said the man.

“Can you direct me,” Charles continued briskly, “to the sheriff's office and to a doctor?”

“The sheriff's office and a doctor,” repeated the man. “That kinda sounds like trouble, if you don't mind my saying so.”

“I've got a prescription for the latter and some questions for the former,” Charles said. “I must, as per the outline of my duties, visit the sheriff, and I want, more than anything else, to find morphine for Vera here, who is in a great deal of pain from a recent bombing. I fear she will go to pieces on us, and we need her rather desperately to stay together.”

The woman laughed, as if anticipating something the man was about to say. “No, the prescription should be for our poor old sheriff and it would read, ‘Get out of town before they tar and feather you,' and the question would be for the good doctor: ‘Doc, how much you charge to set the broken
bones I aim to come to you with when I suggest those darned old weights aren't quite what they seem to be—or I should say, there's more to 'em than meets the eye!'”

The man and the woman laughed privately and lengthily.

“Not exactly sure what you're saying,” Charles said with a polite smile, “but I guess it won't take long, is that right? For me to get it?”

“BIG DOINGS IN TOWN!” shouted the man.

Charles clapped his hands, feeling altogether upstaged, and said, “HOT DAMN!”

“You're not the first guy,” said the man, shooting an amused look at Vera but speaking to Charles, “that I've ever seen before to come in here wanting a drink to start the day out right. How do I know you're a Pinkerton? How do you know I'm not? How do I know you're not from the NPL pretending to be a Pinkerton for God knows what nasty-ass reason—to decoy another goon from the Justice Department who's actually a militant prohibitionist striking a deal with the Chicago Wobblies to thwart the, uh, the, uh . . .”

“Detroit,” said the woman.

“Detroit Wobblies. How do I know that's true or not true? How do you know that? And while we're at it, who are these other men here? Do you know? Do I know?”

“We're Chicago Wobblies,” said the older man at the table.

“How 'bout you, buddy?” The man at the bar lifted his face to Ray.

“My name is Rejean Houle. I am a hired gun.”

This was inspired stagecraft and Charles brightened.

“Who hired you?”

“Mr. Minot.”

Charles applauded.

“YOU'RE UNDER ARREST!” the woman hollered at the top of her lungs. Then she and the man collapsed in laughter. It was now clear that they were both quite drunk. Charles stepped down the bar to an open bottle of whiskey, picked it up and saluted the two of them with it, then took a long drink.

“Jesus Christ,” said Vera. “Mr. Minot? You're gonna make yourself sick.” He took another long drink. “Charles? Chick?” Vera tried. “You look hypnotized. Come on, let's go. Yes, these people are comrades and they are charming, but let's go.”

“Yes indeedy-do!” said the woman. “Mr. Minot, aka Charles, aka Chick, wants to find that darn doctor and the sheriff before he tips over, which will be in a second or two, because whatever I don't know, I do know who can't hold liquor!”

“Good luck to ya!” the man sputtered.

Charles had begun to make his way to the door, following Vera, but came back to shake the hands of the man and the woman, as he was evidently not going to stop swilling whiskey. Vera let him tug him a step, still drinking, then stopped with a jerk that threw him a little off balance. He reached out and slammed the bottle down on the bar and to the saloonkeepers said, “The blonde is with the NPL, and was with the Wobblies in Paterson and Lawrence. It's possible she met the old man and the young man at the table over there in Paterson, or possibly had a hand in some goings-on in Los Angeles and later in San Francisco, where we all met. I am an heir to one of that city's biggest fortunes. Family owned a theater and it was bombed—by somebody trying to look like somebody else. Then there was this parade. We all left when it got bombed. Some of our friends have been framed for the bombing and some of our friends have been killed in the course of the frame-up. Because I have connections in DC, I'm working way up high, the high wire, don't you know, with the MCPS. And yes, you heard right: I'm a Minot. That's my little town they got out there somewhere in the Dakotas. We're riding along together up here in the dynamic northland, kind of on a little picnic, because we were in the right place at the right time. I don't know why we weren't put in the same all-purpose frame in San Francisco, and I don't know if anybody here knows exactly who we are, if we're on a tether or just the lucky recipients of high-speed bureaucratic incompetence, or if nobody really gives a shit. My father is—was, sorry, just died, hasn't sunk in—an important enough man for the railroad folks in San Francisco
to have tried to kill him. In court! So maybe I'm just a pawn. Maybe I'm a target. Maybe I am being used. Maybe I am being used up. I don't know, and I don't care.”

The man and the woman ceased their nearly hysterical laughter and watched neutrally as Charles made his speech. Vera looked thoroughly disoriented. The old Wobbly took her by the hand and started to lead her out the door. The man behind the bar repeated his wish for generalized good luck, this time without the irony and snickering. The woman looked at Charles, because he had picked the bottle up again and was drinking from it as if it were a teacup, pinky extended. He told her she was right, he wasn't finished, that the main thing for an actor to do was
be clear in his action.
The audience had to know why he was doing what he was doing.

He said, “It's really true that I am a rich young man from San Francisco who is doing special work for the government because it seems like that's what a guy whose Father once thought he might be president someday ought to be doing—until a proper outfit is located for me . . .
over there
.”

He sang the last words and repeated them. “And it's also true that Ray John works with me, for a group you know very well, the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety. It's true that Daisy, who isn't here, is on a speaking tour on behalf of the Nonpartisan League, and that Vera, over there—where'd she go, is she gone . . .?—is going along with her because it appears the NPL was just going to, you know, let Daisy do her thing and hope for the best. And it's true that the IWW is aiding and abetting her because she's kinda like the only card they got to play right now, up in this game anyway, if I understand correctly—and please understand that I myself am not a Wobbly. No ma'am. No sir. My brother is chief of staff for the governor of California, and my other brother ran the goddamn Bull Moose campaign in that state. My father was nicknamed “The Regenerator” when he and some likeminded fellows tried to clean up the graft in San Francisco. He ran afoul, as we all do eventually, of the railroad people—And here now is where it gets complicated because I can no longer speak of things I know to be true, only things I suspect to be true: I think the MCPS gang knows that I have
been living with Vera. I'm not sure if they think it's because I'm in love with her or because I'm in league with her. I can tell you folks it because I'm in love with her,” he whispered. “I also think they know that Ray John here is an old specialist in dirty work who has come out of his narcotics-addicted retirement in Chicago at the behest of old friends in the IWW, the Chicago Wobblies now, not the Detroit Wobblies. At their behest because they know he is a tried-and-true daredevil who will gladly sacrifice his life to keep Vera safe. They thought they were slipping me into the MCPS via the usual kind of ridiculous deal-making that goes on all the time, the Socialist mayor of Minneapolis demanding that the MCPS, you know, open itself up and be a real governmental operation, not a secret one. But the MCPS boys didn't believe that for a second. They suddenly, and without really planning such a thing or even dreaming of it, had me and Vera riding in the same train together, regrouping after the San Francisco Preparedness Day Parade and Minot Theater bombings, knowing there would be fireworks and hoping, thinking on their feet, that they could do a very great favor for some real friends of theirs, railroad men out west. Fellow by the name of Durwood Keogh: My father caused his uncle—to whom he was devotedly close! Never were uncle and nephew so spiritually matched!—to flee the country. My father was so hated by the United Railroad men that they tried to kill him in court. And yet here in what they persist in calling the Great Northwest but which they're going to have to start calling the Great Midwest a Minot is a railroad man! I'm repeating myself, I'm so excited. The Western railroad men hired some idiot to waltz into court with a six-gun and fire a few rounds! And they so loathe and detest the spirit of progressive reform, of Christian soldiers, of honest devotion to the commonwealth, of temperate and wise men of business—of the principles of an enlightened and democratic—excuse me, a Platonic republic, of higher good, of common good, of decency, of compassion—that the idea of a Minot running not just a railroad but the country drives them to murder. Relentless, remorseless murder. Smart thing for me to do would be to take my beloved Vera and get the hell out of Dodge, wait for things to blow over, and then be a decent chap and citizen, or say to hell with it all and
move to Alexandria. Not the one here! The one in Egypt! But I'm not smart. I'm a daredevil. I'm an anarchist. Not like you hear about in the news, but like this: if no one is ruling, all are ruling. I can't obey and I can't command. I see things as they are, too clearly, for any of that.”