The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

“Are the ten-dollar gloves warm?” Rye asked.

  “They are very warm,” the salesman said, “but really, I think—”

  “I’ll take two pairs. One for me and one for my brother.”

  The salesman smiled but did not budge.

  “And can you wrap his pair?” Rye said. “I’d like it to be a gift.”

  The man hesitated. “Son, you should know, these gloves are not going to be nine dollars warmer than the gloves at the Emporium.”

  “Yeah,” Rye said, “maybe they will be to me.”

  26

  It was after five, and outside it was tunnel dark. Just two hours before Gurley’s speech, and Rye rushed to get back to the union hall.

  As he walked, he looked down at his hands, almost stunned to see the rich brown gloves, a band of white fur at the wrist like a bird’s plumage.

  How would he explain this? A month’s wages for two pairs of gloves? Gig’s pair was in a slender box with a bowed ribbon. He’d be in jail for six months, and then, what, Rye gives him a pair of white-fur-lined gloves? In July? I’ve lost my mind, he thought. He wondered if Bradley & Graham’s would take the gloves back.

  He turned down Stevens Street and saw one of Lidle’s newsboys, a skinny black kid already hawking the Worker. “Second Wobbly action!” the boy was yelling. “Free pies tonight at the IWW Hall!”

  Rye felt an auto on his left. It was driving slowly next to him. He glanced back and saw the big headlight eyes of a Model T grille. Then the car pulled around him and onto the curb, curls of smoke from the exhaust, the red ash of a cigarette glowing in the window. The driver’s-side door creaked open and a man rose above the car’s roof. It was Brand’s thick security goon, Willard. He tossed the cigarette butt. “Get in.”

  Rye stood still. “I can’t. I have to be at the hall.”

  Willard sighed and, as if thinking, This job, reached into his coat pocket and set something on the roof of the Model T. Rye couldn’t see it but guessed by the heavy clank it was a pistol. “Get in,” Willard said. “It’s goddamned freezing out here.”

  It was barely warmer inside than out. Willard sat back in the driver’s seat, his breath coming in heavy bursts of steam. They rumbled along in silence until he finally looked over. “Nice gloves.”

  Rye looked down. “They’re weasel.”

  “And the box?”

  “A second pair.”

  “In case you lose those?”

  “Something like that.”

  There was almost no traffic. Willard offered Rye a cigarette from a box he pulled from his coat, but Rye shook it off. Willard stuck one in his own mouth, popped a match across his thumbnail, and lit it. He sighed again, a sound that Rye took to mean: Sorry for this business.

  “I have to be at the hall in an hour,” Rye said.

  Willard said nothing. They motored up the South Hill, the snow getting heavier and the wind through the open side window stinging Rye’s face. This was nothing like the first trip to Alhambra. No hats or scarves, no soft Ursula to hold his arm, just Rye and Willard in an icy automobile.

  The gate to Brand’s driveway was closed, guarded by two men in long coats and earflapped hats. One of them was holding a rifle against his chest, the other had his gun strapped over his shoulder. They were standing around a burning ashcan in front of the gatehouse. The one with the strapped rifle walked over.

  “How’s he doing?” Willard asked.

  “Birdshot,” the man said, and wiggled his fingers.

  “He alone?” Willard asked.

  “She left an hour ago.”

  Rye wondered which she. Ursula? Brand’s wife?

  They were waved through. One man watched from the window of the carriage house gate. Another man guarded the front door of the house. “What’s going on?” Rye asked.

  Willard parked the T, killed the motor, and opened his door.

  There was no tour this time, no doors thrown open, no Amazonian redwood or African onyx. Willard led Rye into the house, the front-door security man nodding them through. Down a long hallway, past a dark dining room, they went through a pantry and into a plain room behind the kitchen.

  At the servants’ table sat Lem Brand, a glass of something dark and a half-eaten meat pie in front of him. He was on a stool, facing a leaded-glass window, coat off, suspenders over an undershirt, reading what looked like a stack of letters.

  “Mr. Brand,” Willard said, but he didn’t answer. “Mr. Brand,” he said, louder.

  Brand finally turned. His face was pale, shiny with sweat.

  “I’ll be in the study,” Willard said.

  Brand pointed with the papers to a stool on his left. Rye remained standing. “How are you, Ryan?” Brand asked. “None too worse for wear, I hope?”

  And if Rye hadn’t known before, he knew then: Lem Brand was behind what had happened in Taft, what had almost happened.

  “I’m not a man who apologizes very often,” Brand said. “But things occasionally get beyond my control.” He took and let go a deep breath, as if that had been the apology. “Where’s Early Reston?”

  “I don’t know,” Rye said. He cleared his throat. “And I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”

  Brand flinched. He held out the pages he’d been reading. Rye hesitated, then took what looked to be some kind of report. The first page featured a photograph of a young man with the words: “Ennis R. Cooper. Pinkerton Agency. San Francisco, California. May 1, 1894.” There were other names listed below that one: William Baines. Ennis Crane. Thomas Baines. William Crane. Ennis David Baines. Ennis Thomas. Thomas Reston. Ennis Reston. And the last one. Early Reston.

  Rye’s thoughts came together like badly shuffled cards. “Wait.” He looked up from the pages. “This is Early?”

  Brand took a drink of the whiskey.

  Rye looked back at the photo. Could it really be him? Suddenly, he was having trouble remembering Early’s features. He could recall his hat, his clothes, a certain look in his eyes. But was this his face? It seemed close, sure, but it made Rye realize how strangely similar all faces were—nose, mouth, eyebrows—really, what made a person himself?

  “I hired him two months ago. I was told he could go deeper than most agency men. Rile things up, get the union throwing bombs and the public turned against them, keep the police from going easy like they did in Missoula. We agreed to a price, half up front, half to be paid later.” Brand swirled his drink. “He told me, ‘When it’s anarchy you need, best to hire an anarchist.’ ”

  Rye flipped through the pages—interviews, newspaper clippings, an arrest report.

  “He went too far, though, and I came to regret it. So I sent my man Willard to figure out what, exactly, I’d hired: a detective posing as an anarchist or an anarchist posing as a detective. The stories you hear: that he’s an agent who got in so deep he forgot which side he was on. Or that he was never on a side. The Pinkertons won’t even acknowledge that he worked for them. And the rumors? That he planted bombs. Caused a cave-in that killed six miners. Blew up a town marshal. Killed a labor man’s pregnant wife.”

  Rye looked up from the report.

  “And some say it was his wife who was killed. Or that there was no wife, it’s just a story he tells. That he’s killed scabs and millionaires and loggers and bounty hunters and children. The stories are like his names—every possibility and combination. Or he’s just a thief who doesn’t care about anything. That’s Willard’s thinking—that he’s in it for the sport. Or the money.”

  Rye recalled his conversation with Early on the train—Everyone does everything for a little bit of money—

  “This was delivered to my house this evening.” Brand handed Rye what appeared to be an identification card from a decade earlier. It read: “Dalveaux, Delbert, Allied Detective Agency.” It was the old detective Rye had met in Seattle.

  “Del was last seen downtown this afternoon. Being helped out of a café by his brother.” Brand laughed bitterly. “Of course, he doesn’t have a brother.”
r />   Rye handed the pages back. He tried to be firm, “Doesn’t have anything to do with me,” but his voice cracked.

  “Sure it does,” Brand said.

  “I don’t work for you!” Rye sputtered. “It was a mistake.” He felt frantic. He pressed the box of gloves into Brand’s hands.

  “What’s this?” Brand opened the box.

  “It’s half of your twenty dollars. I’ll get the rest, but I’m done.”

  “I don’t think a pair of gloves gets you out of this, Ryan.” Brand tossed the box on the table. “What if your union friends knew that I had you on retainer, that you were the one who told Del about Montana?”

  Rye felt sick.

  “Or if your brother knew? Imagine if Ursula were to mention our meeting. How would Gregory feel about it?”

  “You said you’d get him out of jail.”

  “I said I’d try. And I will.” Brand reached in his coat, took out an envelope, and set it on the table. “But I need you to get this message to Early Reston. Or Ennis Cooper, or whatever his name is.”

  Rye stared at the thick envelope.

  “It’s five hundred dollars,” Brand said, “the second half of what I agreed to pay him. It might not be enough, after what happened, but tell that I’m willing to reopen our contract, settle our differences. Tell him to give me a number.”

  A number. Rye thought about the armed men outside. Early’s fake names, the stories, it must be unbearable for a man like Brand, so used to being in control. “You’re afraid of him,” Rye said. “You’re scared to death.”

  “Of death,” Brand said, “yes, like any man.”

  Rye looked from the envelope to the stack of pages to Del Dalveaux’s ID card. He remembered the questions Brand had asked, and then Del’s questions—how many of them had been about Early. “It was him you were after—Early? In Taft?”

  Brand muttered something into his drink.

  “So it wasn’t even about Elizabeth or the union?”

  “It was both,” Brand admitted. “She is a problem. My partners certainly thought so. And I wouldn’t have minded solving that, too.” He shrugged as if they were talking about mice in his barn. “But I got greedy, two birds . . .”

  “And me?”

  Brand shrugged again, which Rye took to mean, You? You were nothing.

  Rye’s arms went slack against his sides. He looked down the long hallway. Then he turned back to Brand. “No,” he said. “I’m not going to do it. I’m done with all of this.” He started to walk away.

  “That’s not really a choice you can make,” Brand said to his back. Then: “What if I get your brother out two days from now?”

  Rye turned again.

  Brand was holding the envelope out. “Take this message to Early Reston, I’ll get Gregory released, and you and I are done forever. No one will ever know what you did.”

  Rye stood in the hall, breathing heavily. “I don’t even know if I’ll see Early again.”

  “I’m willing to bet you will.”

  Rye stood staring at an envelope with five hundred dollars in it. He just needed time, to think. “I have to get back to the union hall.”

  Brand turned and looked at the grandfather clock behind him. “I’m afraid it’s too late for that. The raid will have already started by now.”

  Gurley

  LISTEN: I come for the fight. I come from rebels, from blood nationalists, Molly Maguires, fiery socialists. I come from a New York suffragist and a New England quarryman, Irish parents who saved me the humiliation and hypocrisy of Our Blessed Church so that I might see the world clearly and burn with other fires. I have sought a paradise in this life, from the window of a train traversing a starkly beautiful land where a man’s skin is still criminalized and a woman’s body enslaved, where workers are thrown away like coal slag.

  Injustice burns in me like a fever. Take away the Catholicism, and a little Gaelic heart like mine still beats martyr’s blood.

  From the first days of grammar school, I was haunted by an adage the nuns had us copy on our slate boards: There but for the grace of God go I. The sixteenth-century reformer John Bradford was said to have uttered those words upon seeing a criminal led to his execution. Bradford was clearly on to something, because he did go eventually, burned at the stake for a crime that is my own, stirring up a mob, although I’d propose his real offense was another of mine: first-degree aggravated empathy.

  I was thinking of Bradford as I sat in the Spokane IWW office that cold winter night, an hour before I was to speak. Two loud crashing sounds came from outside, yelling in the main hall, the sound of doors being bashed in.

  Charlie Filigno and I stood and looked at each other.

  “Raid,” he said simply.

  I thought for a moment of those five hundred already in jail in Spokane, and the millions fighting every day around the world for fairness and justice, risking limb and life, and I repeated Bradford’s words like a prayer (There but for the grace . . . ) as the yelling drew closer and an ax cleaved our office door with a great cracking sound, the wood exploding in chips and splinters.

  The broken door was flung from the hinges, and I could see in the great hall that cops were smashing windows and having at our printing press, and another man was taking a splitting maul to the small piano. I put an arm out to keep Charlie from moving, from getting beaten.

  And then that awful Sergeant Clegg stepped through the broken doorway into our office. He smiled. “You’re under arrest for conspiracy, you fat labor cunt.”

  “I assume you’re addressing me,” I said, and smiled calmly, in my mind editing the devout Bradford with a brevity and clarity he would have had to admire as those first flames licked his feet: There—go I.

  They aimed to finish us. I don’t know how else to say it. Ten stick-wielding police thugs sent to arrest a pregnant girl and glum Charlie Filigno, a handful of newsboys and an old cook making pies. They meant to shutter us forever. Less than an hour after we sent newsboys out to announce my speech and the second labor action, the police were ready with a full raid. I suppose they’d been waiting for it, having weathered our first attack, jailing five hundred, scuttling our attempts to raise funds and recruit. Now came the death blow.

  After Clegg, that brute police chief, Sullivan, came inside. “Afternoon, sister.” He held up a newspaper with a story of a speech I had given to the Women’s Club of Spokane. “You’re under arrest for furthering a conspiracy inside the city limits.”

  “Speaking is an act of conspiracy?”

  “Calling for violence against the city is.”

  “I have called only for peaceful protest. You’re the ones beating men and breaking down doors, Acting Chief Sullivan.”

  He had two cops drag us outside in the swirling dry snow. We stood on the sidewalk, Charlie, me, and our old cook, Alan. Across the street, they were arresting newsboys, three twelve-year-olds led by an older boy named Lidle, the cops treating them like a gang of criminals.

  A crowd was gathering on the street. “Are you seeing this?” I yelled as the cops broke windows and threw pie pans in the street. “These are your police! Arresting children!” Two cops dragged our printing press out into the street, where they resumed beating it to scrap. They carried out chairs and pots and pans, coffee cups and plates, and smashed them on the sidewalk. They confiscated posters, newspapers, and threw everything into a smoking burn barrel.

  Fred Moore had arrived and was pacing in the snow, cease-and-desisting, but the cops weren’t paying him any attention until Clegg pointed with his stick and said that if he didn’t shut up, he’d be charged, too, with resisting arrest.

  “Am I under arrest?” Fred asked.

  “Not yet,” Clegg said.

  “Then how can I be resisting?”

  The riddle was too much for Clegg, who turned back to the newsboys.

  Finally, to keep me from jawing on the street, Sullivan had a cop load me in the back of a wagon, onto a hard bloodstained bench. I put my he
ad in my hands. There were rings for shackling hands, and the wagon smelled of horse and sweat and piss. I thought of my mother back in New York and what she would think, her pride and disgust and fear always mixed up. And I thought of Jack, in Butte, sitting at our table, waiting for me to bring him his dinner, and for just a moment, I wished—

  It was freezing in that wagon, and through the frosted back window, I could see them leading newsboys away while cops battered the last of our doors and chairs. A small cop with a red beard climbed in and sat next to me. A moment later, Chief Sullivan stuck his head in and smiled.

  “Well, look at this,” Sullivan said to the other police officer. “We’ve managed to do the impossible: We’ve shut up Elizabeth Gurley Flynn.”

  The bearded patrolman laughed. I’ve always been surprised at how it stings, the laughter of small men. The smaller the man, the more the laughter hurts, as if saying, I may be nothing, but you are less.

  The wagon rumbled over streetcar tracks, and they took me to the women’s jail, where I was unloaded and booked on a charge of “conspiracy to incite men to violate the law.” I asked to see my lawyer, but the clerk stared as if I’d asked for a cannon. “You’ll see him tomorrow,” he said, “when you’re arraigned.”

  A pigeon-toed jailer led me down a long, dark hallway. He turned once and looked me up and down, as if considering a purchase, and I felt a wave of disgust. Unlike most cities, Spokane did not employ a jail matron, Chief Sullivan saying jail was no place for a decent woman to work. This sloth led me to a heavy iron door, a single electric bulb illuminating it. “Back up!” he called through the door. Then he keyed it open. A few socialist ladies had spent the night in the women’s cell in Spokane for our cause, and I’d heard them describe it as a cold, dark dungeon, filled with prostitutes arrested on late-night raids for not having the twenty-five-dollar fine ready.

  True to form, two tavern girls were lying on cots when I came in. One of the women was facing the wall, skirts bunched, her back to me. The other was younger and sat up when I came in. “You’re that Elizabeth Gurley,” she said with a heavy Austro-Hungarian accent. “No, I seen you speak one day.”