Lovers and Lawyers

by Lia Matera

  So it was the jewels, then. Ella stood very still. She felt the danger as if it breathed down her neck. The marshal had Kingston’s word that the gems were missing. She’d left no address or request for wages from the estate. And she’d lied to someone she knew was a law man. They’d need no more than that to convict her. She’d get years in prison, or at best, deportation to a country she’d left as an infant. A country where she knew no one. Where girls like her starved or sold their bodies on the street.

  She suddenly understood what Killy was trying to draw from her. But did he consider it a defense? Or was he just looking for a reason to feel disgust? Justification for what he knew she’d find in prison?

  “You think you’ve guessed it,” she said. “Why I didn’t stay to collect a reference. Well, you’re right. Yes, I was just a factory girl. And no, Mr. K would never have hired me if I hadn’t … Well, he called it an ‘accommodation.’ You’ll say I should have stayed at the factory, I’m sure, to preserve my precious honor. But my lungs were already hot with cotton dust. My honor would have left me begging in an alley, one more coughing girl.”

  She felt hot tears spill down her cold cheeks. It was misty out here, though, and she kept her face still. Maybe he wouldn’t notice.

  “I don’t judge you.”

  “Your Quaker tenets, I suppose?” She saw him wince, as if the words hurt him.

  “To be clear: you left the Kingstons’ that morning … to avoid a similar bargain? What he might ask in exchange for a letter and a ticket home?”

  He became a blur to her in the lamplight and mist. She couldn’t pretend she wasn’t crying now.

  “Can’t you let me walk away?” she said. “You weren’t sent to Seattle to find me. You’re here for the strike. You don’t have to say you saw me.”

  Would this sound to him like an admission that she took the jewels? Nothing she’d said before described a crime. But this, begging for mercy, told a different story.

  She tried to steady herself. To remember what was at stake. Mario was watching this display. That wound things more tightly. If she could persuade the marshal, if he let her go, it would save his own scalp. And if Mario suspected betrayal? She might have to find a way to save her own.

  “Many times I’ve thought back on our conversation in Chicago,” Killy said.

  He gripped her hands more tightly. She sensed something delicate and complicated was going on. If she could only understand it, maybe this would end here, after all.

  “I’d have liked to buy you dinner then,” he continued. “And I’m of two minds what to do now, in all honesty. Given that I’ve wished more than once …”

  She stared up at him, stunned. “You’re not…? Are you inviting me—?”

  “I believe I am.”

  She could feel the warmth from his face, he’d bent so close.

  It was absurd and horrible. If she accepted the invitation, walked with him away from the crowd, Mario would be right behind.

  She looked over her shoulder, wishing she could spot him. If only she could shake her head—do something—to keep him back.

  But there was no sign of him in the ebb and flow around the trolley. Except for people bustling to or from it, there was only one man, leaning against a building. He was smoking, his face was turned so he appeared to be looking across the street. But he wasn’t, she could see him watching her in the glow of his cigarette.

  Another law men. She could spot them a mile away. And so could Killy, no doubt.

  The second lion. If she said no to the marshal, he had only to beckon.

  She caught the scent of Killy’s bay rum, felt the warmth of his fingers laced with hers. She tried to summon a smile. She couldn’t at first.

  Then she said, “I know a place we could go. A café on Elliott Bay, near Pike Place Market.”

  The streets were dark and narrow there.

  Part Three

  Marshals were a common sight on trains now. At each transfer, Ella saw a pair board and walk through the cars. Sometimes they ordered porters to load mail or even luggage onto government trucks. Occasionally they asked passengers for identification. (Ella had false papers, but wasn’t asked to show them.) Passengers sighed patiently, knowing it was no use objecting to delays. There was no mystery about the cause. In the eight months since Ella’s last trip, there had been wave after wave of bombings, including one in her old neighborhood. A. Mitchell Palmer was Wilson’s Attorney General now, and he’d been targeted twice. In April, a package bomb was intercepted before reaching him. In June—just seven weeks ago—a hand-carried parcel of dynamite blew the façade from his fine rowhouse. Newspapers blamed Anarchists, of course. Ella didn’t know if she believed it. She didn’t trust a word she read, especially after Seattle.

  When Mario picked her up at the last stop in Virginia, not ten miles from Union Station, Seattle was the first thing they discussed. He was in a 1914 Oakland, a roomy if battered car. Even before he bragged about it—only five years old, a bargain for someone like him who could fix anything—he said, “Be’, Antonella, che bellezza, Seattle. Everybody still happy, eh, from the strike? È vero?”

  “Happy during the strike—you saw that.” He’d seen more than Ella, in fact—she’d been too afraid of running into Marshal Killy again. But no one, not even a shut-in, could have missed the crowds singing, strangers hugging, people calling each other brother and sister. “Not after. You saw the papers?”

  “Giornali—lying all a time. Wilson, he shuts down the giornali don’t lie.”

  “We laughed about it at first.” Headlines crowed that workers broke like spoiled children under Mayor Hanson’s rod. They went slinking back to their jobs after just a few days, defying union bosses who’d steal food from their tables. “Why would people believe propaganda instead of their own eyes?”

  But the papers kept insisting it was so, and Ole Hanson lectured all across the country, bragging that he’d broken labor’s back. The elation in Seattle soon faded, replaced by a sense of futility. There had been no more general strikes, not anywhere.

  Ella couldn’t stand to think about it anymore.

  She changed the subject. “Why can’t Nicky meet us at your new place?”

  “I don’t have this house when I talk to Nicolino, bella. For you, we find. Close where Nicolino says. We stay just for now, leave it after.”

  “You did all this for me?”

  “Antoné, we happy to do. Little break for us. Someplace police they no come all a time, ‘What you know about this, what you know about that?’“

  On the phone, Mario said he’d found an abandoned farmhouse. It belonged to a soldier who didn’t make it back from the war. It was private, at the end of a dirt lane half overgrown with hedges. But its old-fashioned gaslights still worked, and it had furniture. “Little dirty, not so bad. Maybe a few mouse.” Some of the old faces would be there, he’d promised, glad to lie low after weeks of roustings over the bombs. The Saccos got questioned in Stroughton, Coacci in Cohasset, Salsedo in Brooklyn.

  “Do I have to go to the Westfields’, though, to see Nicky?” she asked. Mario couldn’t fob her off now, claiming a faulty phone connection. “Why would he be going there? He can’t have an invitation to their party. I’ve seen their DuPont Circle house—it’s five stories tall. Imagine what their country house is like.”

  “I don’t know, Antonelluccia mia.” Mario’s voice, as ever, was kind, gentle. But Ella felt wary—she knew after Seattle that there was another side to him. “Nicky, he no calls again. I know only what I say you already. He tells me, ‘You see my Antonella, you send her this party. I want to see my Antonella again.’“

  “He didn’t know I’d left D.C.?”

  “He says, ‘I gonna be at this party. Want to see my bella.’ More than this, ‘Nellucia, I don’t know.”

  “But this farmhouse you found? You said it’s on
ly fifteen miles from the party? Maybe we could get him to come there.”

  “He calls again, we tell him. Just two minutes we talking, me and Nicolí. Cost too much, the long distance. Operator she wants more money, he no has it, I no have. But is okay, you no want to go. He’s calling again, someday. We got your new address now, we tell him, eh?” He cast her a reproachful look.

  She’d moved from her attic apartment after seeing the marshal in Seattle. She hadn’t told her friends in common with Mario. It had disgusted her, what he did to Killy that night. It was her own fault, she’d asked him to help. And maybe he’d saved her, she wasn’t sure. But for weeks she couldn’t get it out of her thoughts. Even now it cost her sleepless nights.

  Then last week she ran into someone who told her Mario was urgently asking for her. She shuddered to think that her half hour with Killy might have cost her this chance to see Nicky again.

  “I just don’t know, Mario. How can this possibly work? Me sneaking in? People know who their servants are, I won’t fool them.”

  “Antoné’, you nervous, you no do it. But you wanna do, we got Assunta Valdinoci with us. Remember, the dressmaker? Carlo sister? She makes you the maid suit, the apron. You gonna look just right. They got lots extra servants, no? Big party like that?”

  “But why would Nicky be there?”

  “Sacco says maybe he delivers the booze.”

  “We could watch for him on the road then, couldn’t we? Where it meets the driveway?” She ran her fingers through her chin-length tangles, damp from humidity and dirty from travel.

  “You want to take a chance, I wait with you. Wait together, eh?” He picked up speed on the dirt and gravel of the country lane. “But if already he’s inside, Antoné? Maybe ‘nother servant? From the road, you no gonna see him.”

  “I’m supposed to walk in … just walk in?”

  “Sacco, he used to be a baker. Him and his wife, Rosina, they make for you the dolci. We find you nice tray, like the rich people using. You carry inside, you gonna look fine. You English, perfetto. You know how the servants they act, how they talk. Maybe that’s why Nicky says this. Send Antonella. Only she can do such a thing, eh?” He patted her knee. “You see Nicky there, you bring to us. We want to see again our Nicolino. ‘Nother reason we do this, see Nicky. Then we have a party, too. Not so fancy like the rich people.” He smiled. “But could be a wedding, eh bella?”

  Ella couldn’t shake the feeling, though, that there was something Mario wasn’t mentioning.

  Whatever it was, it still nagged at her in the morning, as she climbed into the ill-fitting maid’s outfit Assunta Valdinoci made for her. Assunta seemed very upset, and everyone tip-toed around her. No one offered to tell Ella why. They’d been marvelously kind to her last night. Sensing her frayed nerves? They’d kept Assunta away from her, and just as well. She had enough on her mind.

  She couldn’t seem to pull air from the wet heat as she walked the long driveway to the Westfields’ pillared porch. She carried a metal tray, as big as an occasional table, with a huge domed top to keep the gnats off Rosina’s pastries. A voice in her head kept screaming turn around, go back. She visualized Mario’s car, beside the road in the shade of a giant willow.

  She made it up the steps, past pillars worthy of a temple. She wasn’t sure which way to turn on the wraparound porch. The two front doors, at least fifteen feet tall, were open. She knew she shouldn’t go in this way, but she heard someone coming toward her, an imperious voice saying, “Fetch more ice.” And so Ella slipped into an entryway as grand as a cathedral, with windows rising three stories. Her heart hammered in her ears as she skirted a few men in summer suits. She was thankful their eyes slid off her when they saw the uniform. She entered a room whose floor was polished to a brilliance that nearly left her snow-blind. A vast mirror reflected more men, standing near marble tables or sitting on striped silk chairs. It angled to frame a ceiling quadratura of gold rays through clouds in a turquoise sky. At the far end, three sets of French doors opened onto a broad circle of screened veranda.

  She heard the tinkle of cutlery and tea cups outside, and threaded through more men in seersucker and light worsted. One of them was saying, “Hell’s bells, we could probably write the platform for the next ten conventions right here and now. One, our soldiers are heroes. Two, we can’t afford to become isolationist. Three, we support … what’s the phrase … ‘honest labor and progressive industry’? And put in something about lowering taxes in case voters realize they have to pay for roads if they want them. The platform’s a waste of time. What we need to do is to stop these strikes and race riots.”

  It wasn’t like any party chat she’d ever heard at the Kingstons’. Ella wasn’t sure why that troubled her.

  She stepped out onto the ballroom-sized veranda. Another twenty or thirty men sat or stood in clusters in the deep shade. Odd that there were no women here. It looked more like a meeting than a party.

  Jasmine and sweet peas flanked wide stairs down to the lawn, adding a floral overlay to the tempting scent of food on silver carts. Ella saw eggs and sausages and grits and gravy in chafing dishes, platters of biscuits and rolls, rows of chilled goblets with a rainbow of juices, samovars of tea and coffee. The dazzle of sunlight made silhouettes of the men filling their plates.

  “My money’s on Harding,” someone a few feet from her said. “They’ll choose him for his ability—no, let’s be fair and call it a gift—of doing absolutely nothing. But you know why we might lose to him?”

  “Negligent press and dishonest opposition?”

  Laughter. “When is that not true?”

  Another said, “Don’t take this wrong, Franklin. But we emptied the damn treasury over there in Europe, and what do we have to show for it?”

  “We did win, old fellow.”

  Ella tensed. It was her former neighbor, Assistant Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt.

  She turned her face away, didn’t see who was replying, “—said it would help our industries. Instead it’s nothing but strikes since armistice.”

  “—race riots,” another said. “Charleston, Scranton, Philly, Macon, Baltimore. Washington last week, Chicago next. If they take a torch to New York—”

  Ella struggled to keep hold of her heavy tray. Would Roosevelt spot her, recognize her? She and the children had occasionally encountered him strolling. He’d always given them nickels for ice cream.

  A high-pitched voice with drawn-out vowels reached her: “—make sure they know we’ll keep the country safe.” Another voice she’d heard on R Street. Attorney General Palmer.

  How could this be? It was as if she’d walked into a dark fairy tale. She didn’t dare look around. Would she see John Kingston here, too? As she hurried on, face still averted, she heard Palmer add, “But you ought to mend your fences with Hearst, Al. Keep the papers behind us when we go after the Reds.”

  Ella felt sick. Mario said this was a fancy party. He didn’t tell her—presumably didn’t know—that top Democrats would be here.

  Why would Nicky come to an affair like this? Surely not to deliver whiskey. This was a dry state. Of course people drank anyway, as they surely would when Prohibition went national in January. But these particular men wouldn’t break state law so conspicuously, would they?

  These particular men … powerful, rich, leaders of the country’s ruling party. She took a few deep breaths. This would be a tempting target for a bomber.

  She pushed the thought away. Nicky would never do such a thing, he’d never plot to kill. He was a pacifist, that’s why he’d gone to Mexico.

  At some distance from the breakfast-laden tables, Ella spotted a rolling cart that was bare. She set the tray down on it and turned to walk out onto the lawn. She’d make a circuit of the house, peer through windows looking for Nicky. Then she’d go back to Mario’s car. Explain about her neighbors being here. Maybe she and Mario could keep wa
tch, spot Nicky arriving or leaving?

  Then she heard Palmer say, “Ah, Killy, there you are.”

  She stopped moving.

  She hadn’t believed the marshal, not really, when he claimed to be Palmer’s campaign manager. She’d thought it a ploy to make her talk politics. On the train west, he kept pressing her to run afoul of the Sedition Act. And in Seattle, from some obscure motive, he insisted they shared some goals. But she’d assumed he was manipulating her.

  Now here he was at Palmer’s side. Here he was, in the same place as Ella for a third time. How was it possible? Had he followed her? Had someone, knowing her history with him, purposely put her in his line of sight again?

  Only Mario knew about Killy.

  Mario, who’d asked her to come across country—lured her, really—to this party. Who’d dressed her up as a maid and sent her in with a tray of sweets.

  Did he want Killy to spot her? Why should he? As a distraction? So something else would go unnoticed?

  She felt as if she’d gone mad. Mario would never purposely send her into a den of men who might recognize her, arrest her. Why should he? He’d been friends with her mamma, he’d known Ella most of her life. So what if he thought her naïve? He thought that about Nicky, too.

  Last night Mario said Nicky was a fool to stay so long in Mexico. What he get for his sweat and fleas? Utopia? Macchè—he get nothing. Sacco agreed. You enemies they no hear you, they no fear you. But it didn’t change their fondness for Nicky. Or for her. Did it?

  Hadn’t Sacco and Rosina baked her these sweets? They’d gorged on them last night, leaving just enough for her to carry here today. To be another prop for her, along with Assunta Valdinoci’s maid’s uniform.

  Ella turned back to the tray. In that moment, Killy wasn’t forgotten, exactly. But another thought overwhelmed her.

  This morning, the covered platter was waiting on the back seat of Mario’s Oakland. On the drive, Mario told her more than once to wait until she was inside to expose the dolci. If they drew gnats and flies, he said, it would make her conspicuous. So she hadn’t actually seen these cannoli and cantucci, these millefoglie and slices of baba. Now, her hand shook as she took the handle and prepared to lift off the dome.