Red Jacket

by Joseph Heywood

  Zakov pushed a stick against the stumbling drunk’s back and ordered him inside. The house was unexpectedly clean and well-furnished. Lammie was a stocky, wide-shouldered man with squinty, puffed eyes, his brain soaked in alcohol, not quite connecting.

  Harju smacked him hard in the back of the head with a weighty sap and ordered him to lean forward and place his hands flat on the kitchen wall. Harju then slipped a hood over the man’s head.

  Bapcat tried to pull off the hood, but Harju grabbed his arm. “Trust me with this.”

  Zakov began to talk in Russian.

  “What’re youse spoutin’, ya heathen foreign mongrel bastards!” Lammie shouted.

  “You are killing the state’s deer for money,” Bapcat said, slapping the man’s head again to get his attention. The slaps were not hard, only meant to frighten and disorient.

  “I got nothin’ to say to heathen scum.”

  Harju kissed him with the sap, buckled the man’s legs, and ripped off the hood. He soaked his hair with forty-rod, and lit a match.

  Lammie sputtered. “Go ahead, ya dunna have it in ya, laddie.”

  Harju touched the match to the man’s wet hair and a plume of fire erupted. Harju immediately smothered the flame with the hood.

  “Next time,” he said, “your whole head goes. Who pays you?”

  “I say a name I’m a dead man. I don’t, I’m dead. It’s Hobson’s bloody choice.”

  “Now is now,” Harju said. “I think you know that if we want the information, you’ll give it up. The only issue is, how much pain and permanent injury you can absorb. And in the long run, if you don’t talk, we can damn well convince your bosses you did, which would put you right back into the whole pickle brine again.”

  Lammie sighed, breathed deeply. “If youse’re already knowin’ the name, why do I have to say it?”

  Harju sapped the man again and growled. “You don’t get to ask the questions.”

  Silence from Lammie, now on the floor trying to lift his head. “We get out of here, I find you, youse’re dead men,” Lammie threatened.

  Harju struck the man again. There was blood now. Two trickles threatening to become more.

  “The name,” Bapcat said, grabbing Harju’s wrist.

  “Hedyn,” Lammie said. “You already know he’s the boss.”

  Zakov pressed close to the man on the floor. “Norma Polo—if you threaten her, I will cut off your head like a deer.”

  Moments later they were outside the house and running. Zakov gimping along with his crutch, a combination of ineffective running and desperate hopping.

  “Hedyn,” Bapcat said, when they were a half-mile away.

  “You know the man?” Harju asked, breathing heavily.

  “We met once.”

  “You propose we go after him now?”

  “What do you think?” Bapcat said.

  “One of the operator’s big men, is he?”

  “That’s how it seems.”

  “Best gather multiple witnesses and evidence to put together enough of a case that his employers will cut him loose to cut their losses. They always do when it’s the survival of the organization against that of an individual.”

  Bapcat said, “Okay,” but he was not so sure Hedyn would ever capitulate. “Can we find Hannula?”

  “Is he even alive?” Harju asked the obvious question.

  “Gentlemen,” Zakov said dramatically. “Assume the most severe actions on the part of your foes. Your country is founded on ordinary people, narodny, and your system controls government excess on behalf of all. This is not so? You have corruption for a long time, collusion, deception, greed. People must decide who is the least evil. No mistake, these enemies we face will do whatever they think necessary to keep what they possess. Capitalists are fueled only by greed.”

  Bapcat looked at the Russian. “You think Hannula’s dead?”

  “Nyet, but I would assume so and look for his body.”

  Harju said, “This Russian’s got a good head on his shoulders.”

  Zakov continued, “What exists here is not your ballyhooed democracy, but mass entrapment of foreigners serving the capitalistic monopoly and its greedy stockholders in defiance of law and fair play.”

  Bapcat admonished quietly, “We have the picture,” and then he pushed Harju against a tree. “You ever treat a prisoner like that again, you’ll get the same from me. You told me when we started out to avoid unnecessary harshness in making arrests.”

  “No arrest made here; we’re just talking plain to the man. Belligerents like this, you have to calm them down to get their attention.”

  “I don’t like it,” Bapcat said.

  “Your approval ain’t my concern,” Harju said.

  55

  Bumbletown Hill

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 2, 1913

  Deer continued to be killed and found headless, the meat left to rot. Bapcat, Zakov, and the two state deputies staked out likely areas and some nights chased after shots, but they caught no violators and made no arrests. The hours were long and sour, the payoff nil, prospects for success never high.

  A weary and concerned Sheriff John Hepting dropped by the house on the hill and railed under stress. Citizens of Keweenaw County, he insisted, sympathized with the strikers, including his worthless force of goddamn deputies, all of whom had relatives on the strike lines.

  “I told Cruse when he asked the governor to send the Guard, not to send them here, that we would be just fine, that bivouacs close to the county line would suffice, but some of the county board forged my signature and requested our mousy governor send troops into Ahmeek, Mohawk, and Allouez. I’ll be goddamned if this is not going to blow up on us. I told the bastards! The air’s full of blind hatred now. I’ve got locals and soldiers yelling at each other and making fists and threats, all that schoolboy crap, and the Finns and Italians are by damn far the most militant.”

  “Such behavior in these circumstances is de rigueur,” Zakov observed, and the others stared at him.

  A meat market at Centennial had been burned, and there was daily violence in Wolverine, arrests made. Two groups of businessmen had petitioned Governor Ferris, one group demanding guardsmen be removed, the opposing groups insisting they remain, despite the army deployment costing Michigan citizens more than ten thousand dollars a day.

  Some stability from the army’s presence had made it possible for the mines to deploy small workforces. Pumps were going again, water levels dropping, and the tens of thousands of rats first driven aboveground by rising water and no human food scraps to sustain them had begun to disappear back into the deep holes in the earth. It was also being whispered that at least two thousand miners and their families had fled the Keweenaw for safer pastures.

  Hepting’s opinion: The fighting and rock-throwing would turn to shooting, and then the real massacres would begin. Hepting had no word on Hannula, but promised to visit his wife again to check on her.

  Early that day George Gipp showed up, smoking a cigarette and looking for coffee.

  “You lost, George?” Bapcat asked.

  “No, sir.” He handed a small envelope to Bapcat. It read, “The Widow Frei requests the presence of Trapper Bapcat’s company, Noon, August 2, 1913.”

  “You read the note, George?”

  “No, sir. She called the cab company, asked for me, and told me to hand you that note personally. She’s at the Hotel Perrault on the top floor.”

  The note inside also said, “Make a payment; ask for me by name.”

  Gipp said, “I drove all the way up here from Lake Linden on her orders, my meter running the whole way. She said she’ll double it if I fetch you back by noon. She said to fetch you right back, Deputy Bapcat,” he said, holding open the door.

  The Russian said, “The f
lamboyant wood tick Norma Polo, who resides in a railcar, rejects Pinkhus Sergeyevich Zakov, and the stunning Widow Frei summons you, and you wonder why I doubt the existence of a supreme being?”

  “Maybe he’s got a good sense of humor,” Bapcat said, picking up his coat and .30-40 Krag. “Or maybe it’s simply justice for former colonials.”

  “Mr. Zakov doesn’t believe in God?” Gipp asked, his mouth agape.

  56

  Lake Linden

  SATURDAY, AUGUST 2, 1913

  The Hotel Perrault was a solid brick building on a corner from which you could see Lake Linden, which was no more than the upper end of Torch Lake, itself connected to Portage Lake, which led past the Dreamland Resort to Torch Bay. A turn south from there took you into Keweenaw Bay and Lake Superior.

  “How’s your team doing?” Bapcat had asked Gipp as they drove.

  “Deputy, sir, I need to concentrate on driving if we’re going to make it by noon,” his young driver said. “No offense.”

  “Loosen up, George. You’ll get your pay.”

  “I’m not tight, but a man has debts.”

  Man? “You’re how old?”

  “Eighteen,” Gipp said.

  “Stop gambling.”

  Gipp gawked at him like he was crazy, and when they pulled up to the hotel he shadowed Bapcat to the front desk, where a sleazy man with a bow-tie stood, arms crossed.

  “Mrs. Frei,” Bapcat said quietly.

  “Whom may I say is calling?” the man asked.

  “Deputy Bapcat.” He plunked his rifle on the front desk and the man took a step backward. “I doubt you’ll need that in this establishment,” the clerk said.

  “It goes where I go. What room’s she in?”

  “Please just go upstairs, sir.”

  “The fare,” Bapcat said, but the officious desk man said, “Tut-tut,” waved at the stairs, and held an envelope out to Gipp.

  “Want me to wait?” Gipp asked Bapcat.

  “The gentleman will notify your employer if and when your services are needed,” the desk clerk said.

  The last thing Bapcat noticed was a huge grin on Gipp’s youthful face.

  Standing at the top of the stairs was Jaquelle Frei, dressed in a silk frock, open to just above her navel and hanging precipitously at each shoulder, a long necklace of red stones, sparkling in the light, her hair pulled back and glistening, a red ribbon woven into her hair. “How fortunate, Mr. Bapcat. You are one minute early. I like men early in most of life’s endeavors. Cat got your tongue, sir?”

  The widow, he knew, favored plain clothes that covered as much skin as possible and almost reached the floor. Or no clothes at all. He had never before seen her dressed so . . . memorably. Zakov had once called her stunning, but even that word now seemed inadequate.

  “I asked which room,” was the best he managed to say.

  “Not a room, sir. A floor, all of it just for us, each room as long as it pleases us, and pleasing us surely is on the agenda, n’est-ce pas?”

  “I reckon,” he said.

  She smiled. “So quaint, so Western, so cowboy,” she said, holding her hand out to him. “Come hither, sir.”

  Which he did.

  •••

  One of the rooms had been configured as a parlor. The widow lay unclothed on a divan, a glass of red wine in hand, her hair ruffled and disordered, the red ribbon long gone.

  “Ah,” she said, offering him a cheroot, “I swear, you do know how to sink a woman into ecstasy. You have the mystic powers of the great Dionysus himself.”

  He did not like being compared to anyone, especially somebody he’d never heard of. “You were gone a long time,” he noted.

  “Thanks to you, but a settling smoke and my good Madeira will bring me back until we descend into our incandescent coupling fires again.”

  “I just meant you were out of town a long time.”

  “Nineteen days at the Palmer House,” she said, “Not a stinky miner in sight, or smell. Did you miss me?”

  “I was busy.”

  “Yes, the strike has been predictably ugly, and will no doubt be more so in the future, I fear. My God, Lute, were we ever in the Palmer House together, I am certain we would ignite another conflagration sufficient to raze that great city again.”

  He had no idea what she was talking about, other than the tone of her voice, which rarely changed when the mood for love swept over her.

  “Your Russian’s the real thing,” she added, abruptly changing mood, voice, and direction.

  “He told me he was a soldier in some war with the Japanese.”

  “More than a mere soldier, my dear. He was a colonel, a much decorated and celebrated officer with a reputation for high intelligence, refinement, and concern for his men—the latter, I’m told, being a particularly un-Russian viewpoint. Officers above looked down on him with suspicion; those below held him in awe.”

  “Claims he ran away.”

  “Perhaps, but only after his commanding general ordered a needless suicidal frontal attack, and Colonel Zakov calmly walked said general across the field at gunpoint until an enemy bullet killed the general and wounded him. His men then spirited Zakov away from the field to safety, and eventually out of Manchuria. He was known as king of the army.”

  “Our Zakov?”

  “One and the same.”

  “How could you know this, Jaquelle?”

  “I know a certain charming Russian chargé d’affaires in the Chicago consulate, who shared information with me.” She took his chin in her hand. “Look at me, Lute. I am not that simple widow of Copper Harbor. I have connections, know things, can make many things happen.”

  “I see,” he said.

  “But you surely don’t, dear Lute. The WFM didn’t want the locals to strike. Not enough money in the national treasury, wrong time of year, nothing was right about it. They wanted to wait for a year to build the union war chest, but the locals had no patience. Fools! Calumet and Hecla by itself has more than a million dollars in ready cash, not to mention other deep and easily disposable assets. The owners wanted this strike, Lute. They schemed for it, had inside information and sources, urged it forward. They wanted it, and now they have it.”

  A million dollars? His mind couldn’t process that many zeros. “Sources here?”

  She nodded solemnly. “Here, Denver, everywhere. The miners can’t make a move the operators don’t know about before it happens.”

  “You mean they have paid . . . spies?”

  She smiled. “What’s money for if not to advantage one in life’s great struggles. The mining scene looks crude and messy, but it’s a money factory for a small number of East Coast investors, and everyone involved plays to win.”

  Bapcat considered what he’d heard and thought a long time before speaking. “And you have your own sources.”

  Her answer was a come-hither smile. “I tire so quickly of commercial banter,” she whispered. “A woman of means requires diversions. Care to divert me, Trapper?”

  Bapcat wasn’t entirely sure what divert meant, but her look and tone of voice were unmistakable. “I’m looking for someone,” he ventured, wanting to tell her his feelings for her were deepening, but unable to find the right words. Their relationship had begun as a convenience, but it was changing in ways he could not explain.

  “You’ve found me, dearest Lute. Now shush and come hither.”

  57

  >Bumbletown Hill

  MONDAY, AUGUST 4, 1913

  “All hell’s loosed,” Zakov exclaimed when Bapcat returned from Lake Linden, depleted, certain that one more call to action by Jaquelle Frei would have crippled him. During one of the interludes between their spells of ardor he explained what was going on: Hannula missing, the link of Arven Lammie to Ca
ptain Hedyn, Jerko Skander the rat killer, how they’d roughed up Lammie in the night, the Italians and their birds, the attack on the house—everything.

  Despite all this, Frei had evinced little interest in his business until he was dressing to leave. “Enock Hannula?”

  “Yes.”

  She then dismissed him without further comment or discussion, and he had no idea what she was thinking.

  Harju and Sandheim were with Zakov when he returned.

  “Deputies had a hellacious fight at a Hunky boardinghouse,” Zakov reported. “One General Abbey summoned operators to a meeting with union representatives, but they refused to come; said they wouldn’t meet with the WFM under any circumstances. MacNaughton is supposed to have told a newspaperman he’d see grass growing in the streets before he’d meet anyone from the WFM, but you know how your newspapermen are with hyperbole.”

  Hyperbole. How can someone foreign-born know so many words in English?

  Harju said, “Army patrols go out every two hours in Red Jacket, but from what we hear, the real frictions and troubles are here in the far north, and down in the far south ends of the copper range. Hell, the union’s got some old woman named Mother Jones coming in today to stir the cesspool. Calumet and Laurium and Red Jacket have all put commercial enterprises on half-days, and local businessmen are in evil moods. Yesterday there was an anonymous threat that the Calumet Dam would be dynamited. The Guard deployed troops, but nothing happened except some rifle and pistol shots.”

  “You heard shots?” Bapcat asked.

  “Me and Sandheim sat on different fields,” said Harju. “The shots were mostly in daylight, and pretty much all around us. The Russian stayed here.”

  “I heard shots as well,” Zakov said. “It’s better, I think, to hear gunshots by day than by night.”

  “A bullet’s a bullet,” Sandheim countered.

  “But in daylight you can intentionally hit or miss your target. At night, without light, every shot becomes random, and therefore uncontrolled.”

  Bapcat understood. “I would think most daytime shots are meant to scare.”