Lovers and Lawyers

by Lia Matera

  “Yes. Three children. Children I loved dearly—more than I knew.” That was a fact, too. “And others in the household. Servants who were my friends. And so now I’m forced to go home. I had a job in a shirt factory there, and I suppose they’ll take me back.” She detested the false sympathy in his eyes. He knew all of this already, she was sure of it. “And so if you’d rather not join me … You were thinking I’m of a higher social class than I truly am.”

  Suspicion crackled across his face. But when he glanced again at the other marshals, it was to shake his head slightly.

  “It’s my pleasure to dine with you,” he said, “whether or not you’re a schoolgirl.”

  She brushed away a few tears of stress. “Thank you,” she said. “If you’re sure. But … I don’t suppose you know of someplace else we could eat? Just a week ago I was in bed with fever. And the stink of fish from the luncheonette doesn’t agree with me. If there’s anyplace nearby?”

  “Why yes, I know a spot, Miss—” He leaned so close they were nearly forehead to forehead. She could smell cinnamon gum on his breath. “What’s your name, then?”

  She tilted her face so her lips were close to his, closer than was decent. The hairs stood up on her neck, but she smiled. “Antonella Gualtieri.”

  She could see on his face that he knew it. That was good; he’d expect to get more honesty from her in the course of a long meal.

  “Well, Miss Gualtieri, I’m Matthias Killy. There’s a good little place just a block from here. Let me offer you dinner there,” he said. “I hope you’ll be warm enough walking to it? I don’t know if you care for spirits, but you look as if you could do with a hot toddy.”

  She nodded. Let him hope he’d loosen her tongue with alcohol.

  The marshal’s face, still close to hers, seemed particularly sharp against the blur of movement behind him. He looked well pleased. He was clever and handsome, and it seemed to be bringing dividends. And if it didn’t, he had two armed men to back him up. That’s how marshals are.

  Ella spotted a group of soldiers in tattered uniforms. Some were limping, others were bandaged or scarred. As they pushed close, she pretended to be jostled. The marshal let go of her hand on his arm and put it on her waist to steady her. She felt her loathing for him like insects crawling up her back.

  As if she didn’t see the soldiers edging by, she stepped into their path. A boy around her age had been moving awkwardly, leaning on a stick. Ella made sure to hook his foot with hers so that he fell, crying out from the pain to his leg wound. Gushing sincere apologies for hurting him, she turned as if to help. The marshal shunted her aside to get a grip on the soldier and bring him to his feet. Ella took a step back, letting others bend to assist.

  She turned to a white-masked couple. “It’s armistice!” She spoke in a husky whisper, as if overcome. She didn’t want the marshal to hear. “The soldiers say so. The war’s ended!”

  Their eyes went round. The man pulled down his mask as if one salvation meant every salvation.

  Ella could feel the marshal searching for her, and she turned to catch his eye and smile at him.

  “Armistice?” a man near her repeated. His voice had the deep blare of a tuba.

  Others crowded closer, and Ella heard the word posed again as a question and then as an answer. The marshal finished helping the lame soldier to one foot. He saw that Ella was a few people away from him now, but he didn’t seem anxious. The mask on the back of her head was fooling him, it seemed. And he was distracted: around them, the word ‘armistice’ flew from lip to lip, changing in tone from doubtful to certain. A man shouted it. Another whistled.

  Ella joined in when some began to cheer. “Armistice!” ricocheted back from other parts of the terminal. People were screaming it, laughing it. They’d been praying to hear it, expecting the news at any moment. Strangers embraced. A cotton mask fell to Ella’s feet as a couples shed them to kiss.

  She was farther from the marshal now, but waved to show she was keeping track of him, staying close while he found the soldier’s walking stick. He looked hopeful, wanting as much as anyone to believe the war was over. She grinned as merrily as a person would if it were real news. She put out her hand as if to reach for his, but as she did, she opened a path for people to step in between them.

  When they cut off the marshal’s view of her, she bent to pick up the white mask. Near it was a man’s tweed cap, flung into the air but not caught. She jerked it on and held the mask up over her mouth. She took another step backward, shedding her coat and letting it fall to be trampled. She couldn’t use the ticket in the pocket, anyway. The marshals would look for her on that train.

  From a distance of fifteen or twenty feet, she saw the marshal’s panicked face. His head turned from side to side as he searched for her in a crowd gone delirious. His eyes slid over her, in her hat and mask. She hurried toward the exits, hoping he’d keep looking for the wrapover she no longer wore. He raised his hand and pointed to the row of doors. Not, Ella thought, because he saw her near them. It was because his men would get there sooner than he did.

  But not before Ella slipped through.

  Part Two

  The man onstage finally quelled the shouts of Strike! Strike! Strike! Ella, standing on a bench against the back wall, watched him wave today’s Seattle Star. She’d seen the headline, Under Which Flag? The general strike was, the paper warned, “a test of YOUR Americanism.”

  The speaker slapped the front page. “Oh, he’s a fine one, our Mayor Ole Hanson. Says any man uses the word ‘workers’ is quoting Lenin. But Ole didn’t mind the word so much when he courted the working man’s vote, did he? Then, he was a friend of the workers. Grand things he said about us then. Is there a union hall he didn’t come to, a pancake breakfast that he missed? But votes are votes, and money’s money. And what they saved by cutting our pay all through the war? By breaking their promises to us after? It gave ‘em plenty extra to stuff into politicians’ pockets. Case you wonder what’s that bulge in Ole’s pants. No, it ain’t that!” There was a roar of laughter. “It’s the raise they swore to give you.”

  Ella looked over the sea of caps and rough jackets. A hundred and ten unions had voted aye to strike. Over a hundred thousand workers went out tomorrow.

  “We’d get ours, they said, when the war ends. But Armistice was in November, and by my calendar now it’s February. And that money they promised? They’re giving it to the Minute Men of Seattle and the American Protective League. Thugs to round up union men. Jails from Ellensburg to Walla Walla filled with our boys—three months inside now, some of them, and no charges. And the Star asks us, which flag? Us?” He tossed the paper down, made a face like it had filth on it. “And see what else it says, there over the headline? Mayor Hanson to Deputize 10,000. Pictures every day of marshals boarding trains to come here. Because our strike, they tell us, was organized by Leon Trotsky himself.” He waved his arm. “Well, I don’t see Leon in here anyplace, do you, boys?”

  The room roared with laughter. Someone shouted, “Where are you, Leon?”

  “Maybe he’s in one of our kitchens? Twenty-one labor halls ready to serve thirty thousand meals a day. Or maybe Leon’s out collecting donations from bakers and grocers and butchers and dairymen? Maybe he’s loading trucks with chickens and vegetables, or getting ready to deliver milk and diapers, or shining up his car to use as a free taxi tomorrow.”

  Ella’s cheer was lost in the din. She’d worn out the soles of her boots, going to shops and farms and warehouses and garages to get those commitments. And as long as the general strike lasted, she’d be on her feet, cooking and serving at the union halls.

  She’d had few moments of perfect happiness in her life. But she knew, as she walked out into a soft wall of drizzle, that this was one of them.

  The streets of Pioneer Square were a carnival of covered carts selling hot dogs and roasted chestnuts. Two fidd
lers, keeping dry under an awning, played a lively version of Oh How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning. As she neared the King Street Station, the fiddles warred with a frenetic banjo and a woman’s brassy rendition of How You Gonna Keep ‘Em Down on the Farm? The streetlights were just coming on when Ella wiped the wet glass of a shop window to see a fringed sheath, barely below the knee. Imagining herself in it, she didn’t notice her friend Mario behind her.

  “Mannagia! Antoné’!” When she turned, he kissed both her cheeks.

  “Am I late?” she asked him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know which train to meet. I thought probably the next one—”

  “Macchè late, no no. I walk around little bit, I come back. No trouble. You good girl, let me stay with you.” More kisses on the cheek, then he held her at arm’s length, grinning.

  He wasn’t much taller than Ella, a wiry bandy-legged man whose hairline had receded farther since she’d last seen him, a few years ago. As a child, she’d adored Mario because he was one of the men who brought Nicky, then eleven, to town. She knew Nicky and Mario parted ways in Mexico. Nicky wrote to her a while after he got there, to say Mario and others were already going home. A worldwide revolution was starting—they wouldn’t sit on its sidelines. But Nicky said the point and burden of pacifism was to defend peace, not to find a better war.

  Well, Mario would sing a different song now. Seattle’s general strike would be the first of dozens, maybe hundreds, across America. It would change everything, and do it without violence. Unions would be too strong to break and too beloved to lie about.

  In the glitter of shop lights, she saw nostalgic tears in Mario’s eyes. “Sei fatta più bella, Antoné’, sai? You more beautiful.” He was as swarthy and beetle-browed as ever, and the origin of his nickname, Nasone, or big-nose, was just as clear.

  “No one came with you?” She’d been nursing a small hope that Nicky would be on the train.

  “Nessuno.” No one. “Troppo da temere. Sai com’ è.”

  Other Anarchists were too afraid to come? The government had stepped up deportations and arrests, she knew that. The entire leadership of the I.W.W. was in prison, five to twenty-five years at hard labor. Eugene Debs got ten years, Emma Goldman two.

  “But you mayor he calls in goons to bust open the heads, and I do nothing? No no. Me and Sacco, we been go all over, back east. Organize the strikes, or give a little bit more muscles, eh? You see the magazine say three thousand strike last year? This year, more.” He stopped to look her up and down again. “Ma, Antonella, maybe you marry somebody rich? You looking like a girl on top a wedding cake. Look what a dress.”

  “I made it,” she said. “Cheaper than you think.” She knew better than to tell him about the jewels she’d taken. He’d want money for the cause, and she wasn’t sure what he’d do with it. People were so desperate lately, so furious. They needed Seattle to remind them to hope. “Have you seen Nicky? Any of you? Talked to him?”

  “Nicolino mio, no. I know somebody sees him, maybe October, maybe November. In Mexico. Nicky says he’s going right away, Washington, D.C. Looking for you, Antoné’.”

  “Not October. He wouldn’t have come before Armistice.”

  Mario shrugged. “Why not? People they know is close. Week, two weeks, before? What’s a difference?”

  A week before Armistice, the marshals had stopped her in Chicago. Ella felt a little sick. Worried again that they’d arrested Nicky at the Kingstons’. That they’d come after her as (to their minds) a fellow Red. “You haven’t heard from him since? Would you know it if he … if he got picked up?”

  “You no worry.” Mario patted her cheek. “Nicky, he’s a smart boy. Eleven years old, already he’s work two years in the coal mine. Me and that crazy Wobblie—you remember him, no front teeth and the red hair?—we grab him, dirty like a dog, no parents, gonna get himself shot in the strike. We put him on the soap box, this town, that town. He tells everybody. Breaker boys they don’t never see the day, they sitting twelve, fourteen hours pick the rocks from the coal. The chutes they overflowing, the boys they bury alive. People they no believe me, I tell them. But Nicky, he makes them cry. What a boy, eh? Already then, he’s a man. Don’t forget—Nicky, he good to take care himself. You no worry ‘bout Nicky, Antoné’.”

  “But no one knows where he is?” Her world contracted to Mario’s face while up the block, the banjo player and singer went into The Bells are Ringing for Me and My Gal.

  “You lonesome, bella mia? Always together, you and Nicolino.” He crossed his fingers to demonstrate. “But now you got a new boyfriend? You no make such a pretty dress for nobody?”

  She laughed away the question. “So I’ve got an attic apartment,” she told him, “small but all to myself. I’ll show you where it is. Then you can come and go.”

  They pushed through hundreds, maybe thousands, of people listening to music, buying street food, speaking in excited bursts about the strike. The Star claimed the populace shivered in terror of being without streetlights and transport, without food and necessities. But people here knew the unions wouldn’t let them suffer. The mood was festive, full of anticipation and optimism.

  The streetcars, though, were jammed full. Not just with celebrants. The drivers walked off tomorrow, and people were rushing their errands. A throng waited at the first stop they approached, so they backtracked to an earlier one, and then to a third. Even there, it was a while before a trolley didn’t fill before she and Mario reached the door.

  They were finally just steps from boarding when Ella heard muttering behind her. A man, a lumberjack judging from the slivers in his cap, spat out, “That Teamster.” Someone else said, “Union voted nay—no friend of ours.”

  Ella blinked tiny points of moisture from her lashes. She looked through the drizzle till she spotted a young man under a streetlamp. He wore a shabby Navy uniform. It was taking months to get the hundreds of thousands of soldiers back from Europe. Skinny men in dirty blues or khaki flooded the streets of Seattle in December, streamed in steadily in January, and were more than a trickle even now.

  “Ought to go teach the skunk a lesson,” someone else said. “Hear him at the strike vote? Says Hanson’ll wait till the sympathy strikers go back, then he’ll brag he whupped us. It’ll hurt unions all ‘round the country.” The crowd at the trolley stop rippled with threats and angry laughter.

  “Never heard of the Teamsters. Won’t be around long if it’s full of cowards. I’m I.W.W. Let’s go show him what it takes to make a union last.”

  “Leave him be.” Ella put out her arm to stop him. “It’s is a new day. Don’t start it with blood on the street.”

  The Wobblie looked at her hand touching his sleeve. For a second she thought he’d bat it off. But Mario said to him, “Soldier boy, he gonna get it, you no worry. You see he’s got a goon follows him?”

  The Teamster was at the end of the block, where it met an alley famous for its Shanghai tunnels. A few steps behind him, entering a circle of lamplight as the other stepped from it, was the goon.

  He was hatless, his hair glowing muted orange in the stippled beam. It was Marshal Killy. Ella was sure of it. The wide shoulders, the square head, the tiger-fur shade of ginger.

  The marshal was here. Close enough that if he turned, he’d spot her.

  Ella had seen the photos in The Star every day, marshals boarding trains west. She’d heard Ole Hanson brag he had hundreds of them coming. She’d even worried one might be Killy. Worried but then reminded herself she had a new name now and false papers.

  With the instinct people show when being watched, the marshal turned toward her. She shifted to hide her face, then jostled her way up the streetcar steps. Had he seen her? Recognized her? There was no seat available, and the aisle was packed, but she elbowed her way to the back window. By now, he’d be following the Teamster into the alley.

  But it wasn’t so: he hadn’t moved,
except to face the trolley. He seemed to be looking right at Ella now. Fog made it impossible to be sure of eye contact, but she felt it like a lightning strike.

  She told herself it didn’t matter—he couldn’t recognize her from this distance (though she recognized him). Her hair was different now, and he wouldn’t be looking for her here. He’d assume she was some other girl. It meant nothing, it was just coincidence that he stood motionless, watching. And in any case, he’d have to hurry away or he’d lose the Teamster.

  She was relieved when the streetcar started to move. As it arced out into the street, she shifted to look through a side window. She hoped to see Killy’s back as he retreated. But no, he was closer now. Close enough that she made out his scowl. She tried to persuade herself he couldn’t see her as well as she could see him, not with the trolley picking up speed. But then he bolted toward it.

  When he reached it, he began pounding the side with a flat hand.

  Another time, the driver might have stopped. People were friendly here. But the car was full, and a crowd waited for the next.

  Within seconds, Killy had to sprint to keep up. His knocking became insistent and closed-fisted. Ella watched the driver list left in his seat for a better look in the long side mirror. She craned for his view, causing a seated passenger to mutter and shift. She saw Killy pull a big nickel star from his pocket and wave it.

  So she’d been right. Not paranoid that night in Chicago. And now the tiger had found her again.

  Someone said, “A marshal wants on.”

  Ella hoped the driver supported his union’s aye to strike. She called out, “Ole Hanson’s got a nerve, bringing these law men here to bust our heads.”

  “I don’t see any marshal out there.” The driver doubled their speed.

  Ella heard the chatter around her, speculation about what had just happened. Mario had pushed his way to her side, and she spoke to him in rusty Italian. “I know that marshal.” Saying it made seem it more real. “The trolley takes too long at the stops—there’s no chance he won’t catch up. I think I have to— If I get off, can you get off, too? Stay back so it doesn’t look like we’re together? If he leads me someplace, follow us. Will you? And then … then lure him away, in some other direction? Give me time to … Or … or I suppose knock him out if you absolutely have to?”