A Storm in the Blood

by Jon Stephen Fink

  “London finally settled down in the summer. After Tottenham. Peter’s got the ideas, I thought. Talk to him. He’s the only one who can help you. Peter, let’s work on a plan together. Collaborate on an exe.”

  “Why?” Peter asked flatly.

  “You know. To raise money. To make a splash.”

  “I don’t have any ideas, Karl. No clear ones.”

  “That’s all right. Neither do I. My mind’s been a lumpy stew for months. Let’s get on our feet again.”

  “I’m on my feet,” he said. “Can’t see straight, but…”

  Peter’s mulishness rankled Karl. “You wanted to talk, you said. About this.”

  “Exes? No.” Peter laughed. “I was thinking about you. I wanted to find out,” he said, “if you were going to repeat Salnish’s mistakes.”

  “Only my own.” Karl lit Peter’s cigarette, refused the offer of one for himself. “Don’t blame Salnish for that bloody mess in Tottenham. He was a good leader, he planned it all right. The men he got to do it, though…They were undependable. You can’t predict, sometimes.”

  “Men are the worst danger, don’t you think? If you can count on them or not.”

  A frown, a slight shrug. “There was nothing wrong with the Tottenham plan.”

  “Except it ended up in a massacre.”

  “Don’t exaggerate.”

  “Four dead? A little boy. One policeman. Two of Salnish’s men. Is that progress?” Peter asked. “Have you made any progress you can measure since last year?”

  “Pressure is building up.”

  “In the boiler.”

  “Yes.”

  “The one in Russia or England?”

  “History’s boiler,” Karl suggested. “Guaranteed, Liesma’s still the flame underneath it—last year, this year, next year.”

  “No recruitment speech, please, Karl.”

  Peter had become a student of history, specializing in lives of the revolutionaries over the last decade. Latvian freedom from Russian occupation was the first cause of the armed robberies, assassinations, minor atrocities, and public outrages, calculated to be warnings to authority and shocks to complacent lackeys. Throw them out and fill their vacant places with liberty, fraternity, equality. These actions weren’t crimes done by criminals, but acts of self-defense carried out by and for human beings against talking apes whose habits and ideas proved that they didn’t deserve the consideration one human gives to another. Imperialist pigs. Tsarist sheep. Russian cattle. Born for the slaughterhouse. Were the others born to be slaughtermen? Peter’s conscience ached, not over the killed (they were gone), but for the rip in the world’s fabric their killing left to be repaired.

  He held a strange picture in his mind: of a mantrap, laid in the future, that catches men today.

  “New ideas are breaking in on me,” he told his friend. “In the middle of the day, not long ago, I was sitting by a canal, looking at the water—but I couldn’t see it. The water or the canal, whatever was there, I couldn’t hold anything in focus. I felt sick.” Peter dragged on his cigarette, then let the smoke seep out through his nostrils. “When I try to remember…this happened because I did that…I’m here now because I was there then…everything’s a smudge.”

  “Yes,” Karl said.

  “Yes?”

  “You can’t say, ‘Here’s success,’” he said, opening his right hand, “and here’s failure,’” opening his left.

  “Sure, yes. Maybe. I get dizzy when I realize we’ve gone on for ten years.”

  Karl said, “After Salnish got out of London and went back to Russia my head was spinning, too. Then I thought about it. What’s troubling my thinking? Why can’t I tell a clear thought from the other kind? Where did these ideas come from?”

  “Where?” Peter tensed to hear.

  “Boredom. For me. For you maybe it’s something else. A mood. You cave in to a mood and—” Karl slapped his hand down on the table in flat defeat. “You can’t move forward.”

  The vibration of Karl’s slap on the table passed into Peter’s chest. “No. Not a mood. It’s—whatever I’ve done seems…” The hand with the cigarette in it made a little circle in front of him. He stopped short of uttering the word useless.

  Karl heard it, though. Brother Peter needed him to rouse his flagging heart. So Liesma’s commander launched into a demonstration of faith. “The cause is Liesma, Liesma is the cause. Peter, it hasn’t been quiet here since last year. From France you can’t see what’s going on in London. I’ll tell you the daily business I do that Salnish never had to. I settle arguments between Fritz and Jacob, between Jacob and Yoska, between Luba and Fritz. I push Leon Beron for better rates and push everybody else to keep going—everybody together, in the same direction. The ones who can’t steal to save their lives have to work in sweatshops ten hours every day. Then they come to me so I can tell them the one certainty I know about our business: we get money to buy guns in Russia to make a revolution.”

  “Does anybody—Fritz or Jacob, Yoska, any of them—ask you if you’ve heard how soon it’s coming?”

  “When we’re ready, I tell them. Right now, we have to stay put.”

  Karl was thinking of the day when news of the idiotic mess in Tottenham reached him—the bungled robbery and the injuries, the murders and suicides that had followed. Afterward, his instinct, like Salnish’s, was to get out of London. That next morning, as he lay in bed, Nina came to him. The coal fire she’d made while he slept warmed the room, and milky daylight strained in through the dust on the window. She tucked herself under his arm, kissed its smooth muscle. Karl’s eyes were open, reading the cracks in the ceiling. One of Nina’s hands clasped his; the other stroked his thick brown hair, gently grooming a tumbled wave of it back from his forehead. She spoke of valor and steadiness. He vowed never to work under Salnish’s command. “History rules us,” she replied.

  If that were true, he said, they should follow Salnish and leave London when he did.

  “He’s already gone,” she said. “I’m sure of it. Who will lead Liesma, then? Jacob Peters? You have to stay.” She kissed him on his mouth, his face, his naked chest. In an existence brittle and fragile as a windowpane, this was the only softness real enough for him to touch. By the afternoon, Karl had seen the situation Nina’s way.

  “You know what you are, Peter?” he joked now. “A dangerous provocateur. It’s dangerous for me to associate with you. You’ll get me in trouble with Nina.”

  “She’s more important to you than Liesma.”

  “No,” he said. “They’re the same.”

  “But you want to be with her. If you had to choose?”

  “Easier to trust her than a gang of men.”

  “Because you can look ahead without making a plan.”

  “‘ Look ahead.’ What does that mean for any of us?”

  “Buying a piece of fish for dinner.”

  “That’s right. That’s all,” Karl said. He tried to end the conversation there. Then he added reflectively, “Nina needs to be with somebody who stays in the fight.”

  “Not against her, though.”

  “Her opinions keep me honest.”

  “You care about what happens to her, too.”

  The slant of this conversation rattled Karl more than he’d expected. Peter’s questions sliced down hard into his thickly armored nerves. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said. “I want to see Fritz.”

  “Luba’s working today, so he’ll want some company.”

  “Good. And no women hanging around to pester us.”

  SEARCHING FOR A route on foot to the Strand, Rivka landed on the wrong side of Parliament Square. She ducked her head and obeyed the stiff instructions of the policeman who blocked her path, pointing her back into the slowly churning commotion. One by one, as the placard-shaking, banner-flapping women folded in among their sisters, men waited on the pavement nearby, tearing the placards and banners out of their hands, smashing and stamping on each message: DOWN WITH THE PREMI
ER’S VETO. THERE’S TIME IF THEY’VE THE WILL.

  “Go home!” a skinny young rough shouted, so close that Rivka smelled his sour breath.

  “Give us the vote and we’ll go home!” a voice shouted from somewhere over Rivka’s shoulder.

  The rough replied by barking at her like a chained dog.

  Something more than a physical force gathered at Rivka’s back and pushed her along. The square was turning into a pen, a bear pit, with hundreds of women caught inside and as many men ringed around them. Older men, young ones, flat caps and top hats, workmen’s jackets and frock coats. The choice English obscenities were lost on Rivka, but not the menace that heated the faces of the circling men—packs of sourly smiling tormentors whose bellies were warmed by the satisfaction of beating down a weak and contemptible enemy. A chilly shock tightened Rivka’s skin; the next few steps she took were nervous and uncontrolled. These policemen weren’t there to defend these women, she realized; their job was to stop them. They were men; never mind their uniforms, they sided with the other men in their plain clothes.

  As Rivka sidestepped and wrestled her way through the crush, she saw a police constable yank an elderly woman by her arm with such strength that he twirled her off balance and onto the ground. The woman sprawled on the grass, her gloved hands over her face; with his knee, the policeman pressed his whole weight on her chest. Left and right, in front and behind Rivka, women stood captured by roughs who squeezed the breath out of them. Some of the women fainted and were left where they fell; others, limp and crying, found themselves tossed into the welcoming arms of policemen.

  The violent tide shoved Rivka backward, to the very edge of the square. Some of the women fought back and made for the street to reach St. Stephen’s Gate. Two steps away from her, a girl no older than Rivka calmly opened her handbag, pulled out a belt with a buckle, swung it over her head, and slashed it down a policeman’s face. It drew blood but the attack didn’t slow him down. He lunged at her, lost his footing, and she bolted into the road.

  In ones and twos, the women broke out of the square and dashed through the traffic of horse carriages and motor cars. One of them got to the iron railings on the other side and started to climb. Her skirts tangled underneath her. Two men hauled her onto the pavement but she twisted free, got up and ran a few feet, then fell, tackled by a constable who watched while both men kicked her till she lay quiet.

  Still they rushed toward the Commons entrance. “It’s my intention to speak to Mr. Asquith or die trying,” insisted a woman in a dark blue dress.

  “Die, then.” The policeman’s truncheon cracked the side of her head. He clubbed her again when she tried to sit up. She looked to be about the age of Rivka’s mother.

  Crazy as Cossacks, a dozen or more police charged the square and swept the women, Rivka included, toward the Abbey. For a fraction of a second, she saw an opening and ran for it. In the next half second, it was gone, closed off by the broad chest of a PC who’d lost his helmet and taken a wound to his face. The blood from it had dried in a jagged fork on his cheek. He looked directly at Rivka. “That’s the one gave me this!” he called to his sergeant.

  She stumbled around them and ran—another broken dash, like her chase through the woods by the Talsen road. A hundred yards ahead, Rivka saw an open street. She didn’t look behind her but heard the chase of footsteps, the rasping breath and shouts of the policemen and, closer, the other women they were hunting. Her shoes slipped and skidded on the pavement.

  First Rivka felt a blow land on the back of her neck. Then a web of dull pain spread over her skull and she dropped to the ground. She didn’t see the boot that kicked her in the ribs, or if it was the same boot or another one that pounded her even harder in the stomach. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move without sending shards of pain to every organ in her body.

  A cry broke over her head. A man’s cry. Rivka felt a pair of hands under her arms lift her to her feet. She saw soft blond hair, tangled and damp with sweat, framing a middle-aged face. “Winston’s ordered police from Whitechapel to come down here and deal with us,” she said. “The ones who’re used to rough work. Can you run?”

  “Please…To go home back for Wellesley Street…Brick Lane, Brick Lane…” Her English gone now, hounded out of her.

  The woman pulled Rivka along the flank of the Abbey. “This way. Quick. You understand?”

  Rivka understood she had to keep running. She followed as close as the pain in her chest and stomach let her, but fell behind. Her friend rounded the corner of the side street, which gave Rivka a clear view of an omnibus just pulling up to the curb. Then she heard a shriek—a woman’s cry this time. A man grabbed a fistful of the woman’s blond hair and twisted it till he’d forced her onto her knees. Then his other fist cracked her in the face. He raised it again, bloodied.

  Rivka stumbled past him, past the alarm of his shouts, in sight of the bus, in reach of it, she thought. The sharp blow across her shoulders knocked her down. Another one lashed her lower back. On the ground, on all fours, she was a rabbit savaged by dogs. The next kick to her stomach rolled her into a black pit deeper and further from waking than any sleep.

  “A PIECE OF CARROT,” Karl said, without pointing. “It’s stuck to your beard. No—above your chin.” Peter raked the orange crumb away and spooned another helping of the root vegetable casserole from the serving bowl onto his plate. Six o’clock was early for dinner at the Warsaw; several of the tables were waiting for evening customers. “I don’t recognize anybody in here,” he said. “Except Beron.”

  Karl, a refined eater, touched the corners of his mouth with the border of his napkin. His whitefish, dumplings, and boiled cabbage held more interest for him than the possibility of unknown informers infiltrating the Warsaw. Leon Beron, doing business with Steinie Morrison at his regular table, wasn’t worth a glance. “Leon only says hello when he knows we’ve got merchandise for him. There’s nothing from us lately, not even Yoska, so he ignores me.”

  “Can you afford to pay for this dinner?”

  “The owner owes me a favor,” Karl said. “Favors. More than one. How much can your carrots and potatoes cost?”

  Most of their meal passed in silence. The Warsaw served good food, and for an hour or two the Eastern odors—salty steam and onions, fatty meat broiling, fish frying in oil, dumplings boiling in chicken broth—turned England into more an idea than a place beyond the Warsaw’s door. Relaxed by the comforts of the place, or by the aftertaste of tea on his tongue, Karl thought back to his earliest interest in chemistry. “Lemon juice. Fourteen years old, in love with Natalia. I wrote out my heart, in lemon juice on a piece of paper. Very passionate and secret. At the very top of the page I also wrote out for her, ‘Hold the letter over a candle flame, the invisible will be visible.’ Natalia’s father read it, and nearly killed me.” Karl cocked his head at the memory. “Our secret messages are different now, aren’t they? Now there’s less at stake.”

  Peter had suspected, even hoped, to find that Karl shared a melancholy like his own, laced with the same doubts. To get him to admit as much, that was another thing. Karl waved off doubt as if he were shooing away the waiter who kept returning to refill their teapot.

  Karl spoke to Peter confidentially, in Lettish. “Seen Rocker yet?”

  “Does he know I’m in London?”

  Ah, Karl thought. So Peter’s relationship with the German anarchist has changed. “No, I don’t think he does.”

  “What, is Rudolph trying to get the Club started again?”

  Karl flicked the question aside with his cigarette ash. “He told me something last week, very disturbing.”

  “So you want to disturb me with it,” Peter said. “All right.”

  “Last summer two boys came to him for a helping hand. These were young kids—seventeen, eighteen. They asked Rudolph to help them with an action.”

  “If they knew him, didn’t they know Rudolph wouldn’t—”

  “He’d never met them befor
e. ‘Malatesta told us where to find you…’” Karl buzzed his lips at the thought. “They were Russians, both of them. Their idea was to plant a bomb at the Lord Mayor’s show. Blow up the Lord Mayor of London. And bystanders. As many as they could kill.”

  “Citizens? Visiting the show?”

  “They say it’s something new, Peter. A new kind of action. They decide on their own what’s a legitimate target. Rocker was furious. But he was also clever: he didn’t throw them out, he discussed it with them. Assassinate the Lord Mayor? All right, one in the eye. But how could they justify murdering innocent citizens?”

  “What did they say?”

  “Those Russian boys played it smart. ‘If people come there worshipping the Lord Mayor, then they aren’t innocent.’ There’s an argument that can’t lose! The bombers decide who’s innocent.”

  “Well, I didn’t read anything about it in the newspapers. So the Lord Mayor must still be in good health.”

  “Rocker made them give up the idea,” Karl said. He smoothed the ends of his mustache, pausing for a moment in thought. “We think they were okhrana. Or okhrana was running them. Look at the sense it makes: they send foreigners to commit such an atrocity, blowing up the Lord Mayor and a hundred Londoners. The okhrana hands over two Russian anarchist bombers to Special Branch and says, ‘You think that’s something? In Russia this happens seven days a week!’ The only solution, they tell the English, is to close your borders to political refugees.’” He gave Peter a few seconds to absorb the point. “This is the conspiracy against us.”

  “Jacob talks like those boys,” Peter said. “Russians. Zeal on the outside, wildness in.”

  “Give Jacob the chance and he’d build a bomb factory in your bedroom and put Fritz to work,” Karl had to agree. “It’d be another Tottenham every day.”

  “Onward, onward,” was Peter’s bitter joke.

  “The organization was looser over there,” Karl allowed.

  “An action was an action. We had to advance, right?”