The Cold Millions

by Jess Walter

  “And no idea where he might have gone?” Mrs. Tursi asked.

  “No,” Rye said.

  But then he realized he did have one idea.

  And the next day, after work, he took the streetcar downtown and walked to the Comique Theater.

  Rye stood beneath the dark marquee: HELD OVER—THIRD FABULOUS MONTH—URSULA THE GREAT.

  The show ran Tuesday through Saturday nights, meaning Monday was her day off. The theater doors were closed and locked, but Rye walked around to the side door, which was propped open with a garbage can. The big security guard was nowhere to be found, but when Rye looked inside, a janitor was in the dark hallway, emptying smaller trash cans into the big one.

  “I’m looking for Ursula the Great,” Rye said.

  “No show on Monday,” the janitor said without looking up.

  “I was wondering if you know where she’s staying?”

  “I know it ain’t this broom closet.”

  “It’s just . . . I think my brother might be with her.”

  The janitor looked back. He was sixty or so, bald with drooping brown eyes. “Oh yeah, I saw him. Few weeks back. Looked like a big drunk you.” He straightened up. “Tall raggedy bum, pissed as a fish in gin. Our doorman was about to kill him when Ursula came and took him back to her dressing room, I think to sober him up.”

  “Do you know where they might have gone after that?”

  “Maybe she fed him to the cougar?”

  “Please,” Rye said. “I need to find him.”

  The janitor looked him up and down. He chewed on his cheek and sighed. “She stays over the Savoy.”

  It was only a couple of blocks away, a nice hotel above the Inland Bar. Rye asked at the front desk for Ursula the Great. The clerk didn’t even pretend to look in his book. “Nobody under that name.”

  “I don’t know her real name,” Rye said.

  “You’re looking for Ursula?”

  Rye turned. The woman in front of him was older than Ursula, maybe fifty, dressed in a black coat over a red dress and a yellow and red scarf tied around her head, a shock of gray hair visible in the front.

  “I’m Edith,” the woman said. “I was just bringing Ursula some soup.”

  “Could you tell her Ryan Dolan is here?”

  She smiled. “Of course.”

  A few minutes later, the woman returned with Ursula the Great, in a long mustard-colored coat and a fine feathered-and-bowed hat, dressed in the dead of winter as if she had just come back from a picnic. She reached out and took his hand. “Ryan. How are you?”

  “I’m fine. I’ve been looking for Gig.”

  “I haven’t seen him in . . .” Ursula looked at Edith.

  “Three weeks?” Edith suggested.

  “Yes, thank you, Ursula.” And with that, Ursula turned back to Rye. “He came to see me one night. He was quite . . .”

  Edith helped again. “Skimished.”

  “Yes. I put him up at my hotel for a couple of nights.”

  Rye was confused, not least by Ursula calling this other woman Ursula. “Your hotel?”

  “The old Bailey Hotel. Edith here manages it for me.”

  Rye remembered the Bailey as one of the worst flops in town, a five-dollar-a-month SRO and a row of whore cribs on the second floor.

  “Gig stayed there a couple of nights, maybe three?” She looked back at Edith, who nodded. “But I haven’t seen him since then, Ryan.”

  “Do you know where he went?”

  “He just said he wanted to get back out on the road.”

  “Without me.”

  Ursula looked at Edith again and then back to Rye. “He doesn’t want to ruin the life you’ve made for yourself. He’s proud of you.”

  Rye scoffed.

  “Ryan,” she said, “your brother has always felt a great deal of responsibility for you. It was difficult having to take care of you after your parents died.”

  “Take care of me?” Rye’s face flushed. “He ran off! I pulled him out of bars and cleaned him up. I take care of him!”

  “I’m sorry, Ryan,” Ursula said calmly. “And you’re right. You do take care of him. Imagine for a moment how much worse that is for him.”

  Rye’s chin fell to his chest. She was right. He didn’t want to go back out on the skid. And he knew Gig couldn’t stay away from it. Rye wondered if loving another person was a trap—that eventually you had to either lose them or lose yourself.

  He cleared his throat and looked up. There was nothing else to say. “Thanks.”

  He turned to leave, and was a few steps down the hall when Ursula called after him.

  He turned back. She looked pained. This wasn’t the Ursula who had squeezed his arm and taken him to see Lem Brand. He couldn’t place the look on her face.

  “It’s easy to be disappointed in people,” she said, “but we do our best. And maybe what a person is and what they do—is not always the same.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But maybe it is.”

  32

  The newspapers were filled with the upcoming trial of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and her explosive allegations against the city. Each day after work, Rye brought home copies of the Press, the Chronicle, and the Spokesman-Review, sat by Mrs. Ricci’s fire, and followed the latest developments. At the shop, Dominic would see Rye grab the newspaper and ask, “How’s your girl doing today, Ryan?” On Sundays, Rye would tell Dominic and Gemma stories about what Gurley had done on the road, talking them out of trouble in Taft and telling an angry priest that, “um, female parts” should be emancipated.

  Her case had become the biggest story in the west after her exposé was published by the Agitator and in a special edition of the Industrial Worker, distributed in western Washington and over the border in Idaho. The story, in turn, was picked up by progressive newspapers, and then by mainstream papers all over the country, which hinted at her “bestial and barbaric accusations.”

  Still, within weeks of her arrest, the whole country knew that a pregnant nineteen-year-old labor agitator was accusing Spokane police and jailers of misusing women, extorting madams, pimps, and saloon owners, and then, if they didn’t pay the cops, jailing prostitutes and making them “work off” their fines.

  Chief Sullivan insisted that her charges were “scurrilous lies” and that there “has never been a single complaint” filed against the women’s jail. And when the Press unearthed two earlier complaints similar to Gurley’s, Sullivan said those were scurrilous lies, too. When the Chronicle followed up with a story that, for two years, Sullivan had resisted appointing a jail matron, and that he’d rejected women’s groups who had offered volunteers to do the job, the mayor said he had no alternative but to promise a thorough investigation.

  Gurley’s corruption story also began to shift the city’s sympathies. Religious groups and temperance reformers picketed the courthouse, demanding action. They showed up, too, at the home where Gurley Flynn was under house arrest, and with the police unsure what to do, she came out and gave an impromptu rally from her front porch. By early February, as her trial was opening, both the Spokane Garden Society and the Spokane Women’s Club had offered to testify on her behalf, saying that they’d found nothing untoward in her message.

  When the trial started, reporters, portraitists, and photographers came from as far away as New York and Washington, D.C., to do drawings and hand-colored photos of her striking, youthful face and her hood of black hair—this pretty young martyr fighting alone against an entire corrupt Old West town. They drew her from the shoulders up, tastefully, as she had entered her eighth month of pregnancy.

  As the story spread throughout the country, Spokane’s boosters complained in letters to the editor that the city’s reputation was suffering, that Spokane was in danger of becoming known as a backwoods outpost where the police traded in vice and harassed young women who objected. Prominent businessmen suggested replacing Acting Chief Sullivan and launching a full review of police practices.

  What
was bad for the city was good for the IWW, and it attracted new volunteers and donations, although, because the union had been banned in Spokane, new members were routed to the closest IWW office, thirty-five miles over the border in Coeur d’Alene. Emboldened, Gurley announced that the next Free Speech Day in Spokane would be March 15, no matter the outcome of her trial or her pregnancy. “If I’m in jail, I will exercise my right to speak there, and I will listen at the bars for the cries of freedom coming from the streets outside.”

  Hobos even began venturing back to town, the Press running a story about two floaters from the Taft, Montana, labor camp who had walked all the way to Spokane to donate sixty dollars they’d raised for Gurley Flynn’s defense.

  All of this made the conspiracy trial of Elizabeth G. F. Jones and Charles L. Filigno the biggest spectacle in the west. By the time she took the stand to testify on her own behalf, in late February, Gurley was startlingly pregnant, her lawyer helping support her as she rose in the courtroom. She made the most of her two days on the stand, delivering lectures to simple yes-no questions like “Where were you born?”

  “All of my life, from my early childhood in New York and near Boston, where my father worked, to my more recent travels in the glorious west, I have seen my people, my family and my class, suffer under the inequalities of a system that produces paupers at one extreme and multimillionaires at the other, and nothing in the middle but space. That’s why I am in this work.”

  The judge interrupted her speeches and argued with her and on the second day demanded, “What makes you think you can say whatever you want about anyone?”

  She gave her shortest answer yet: “The Bill of Rights, sir.”

  Someone applauded, and the judge rapped his gavel and asked where had she gotten the law degree that allowed her to do his job, interpreting the legal application of constitutional amendments, and Gurley responded not to him but to the jury and the courtroom: “They are written in plain English, anyone can understand them. They were written not for lawyers but for the people.”

  The prosecutor, Pugh, worked hard to remind the jury that the IWW was made up not of young, charming Elizabeth Gurley Flynns but of suspicious foreigners like Charlie Filigno. Soon Pugh was stretching out Filigno’s name to four syllables in every question he asked: “On January eleventh, Mrs. Jones, did you and Mr. Fil-ig-i-no send this telegraph to the Butte office of the WFM?” and “Does this article accurately reflect the radical views of Mr. Fil-ig-i-no and yourself?”

  “Well, you should ask Charlie his views,” she said, “but if calling for fairness and justice is radical, then I am about the radicalest woman in the world.”

  Pugh tried everything to shake the witness, one day asking if her husband was in the courtroom, and when she began to answer, “No—” he interrupted with “And what do you suppose Mr. Jones thinks of his wife traveling to labor camps and mining towns in the company of such unsavory men?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said, “but if he doesn’t like it, I doubt he’d like it any better if I traveled with savory men such as yourself.” Over the laughter, Pugh asked if her husband would find it so humorous, “you summoning every foreign scoundrel and savage to Spokane to harass our poor citizenry.”

  Gurley didn’t answer right away. “I guess I’m wondering how you arrived at this theory that I can summon men from all over the world yet can’t seem to convince my own husband to catch a train and come here?”

  Pugh was more effective cross-examining grim Charlie Filigno, mostly by asking forty different ways where Filigno was from. “Sicily,” he’d answer each time. “And your country of origin, then, Mr. Fil-ig-i-no?” “Sicily.” “So you arrived here in 1906 from—” “Sicily.” Pugh asked long, involved questions meant to confuse the union secretary and expose his weak command of English. “Are there not, in fact, criminal elements of the Industrial Workers of the World in this very city who have resorted to violence, beating up police officers, threatening public figures, committing untold numbers of crimes to further the cause of your radical agenda—in fact, wouldn’t you say, Mr. Filigno, that as secretary of the Spokane IWW, that despite your union’s repeated claims of nonviolence, you personally have done nothing to deter these individuals and, in fact, have expressed only the utmost respect and sympathy for your vile compatriots and countrymen?”

  Fred Moore rose in objection: “Your Honor, if the prosecutor is done testifying, perhaps he could ask a question.” While Moore’s objections were never sustained, Pugh agreed to rephrase that particular question: “Remind this court again where you are from, Mr. Fil-ig-i-no.”

  Rye followed the trial in the city’s dailies, his view of who was winning depending on which paper he’d just read, as if each were covering only one boxer in a match, the establishment Chronicle and Spokesman-Review cheering the hits that Pugh got in, the labor Press making it seem that Fred Moore and Gurley Flynn were mopping the floor with him. Still, Rye became increasingly nervous as the trial wore on, as countless union flyers, newspapers, and telegrams were entered as evidence that Gurley Flynn and Filigno were trying to cause a riot in the city. In an editorial, the Spokesman-Review vaguely referred to her pregnancy by noting that jurors are “clearly scandalized by this brash woman wearing the bustle wrong” and that the city, “having achieved eighteen straight convictions against union leadership, appears headed for nos. nineteen and twenty.”

  Finally, on a Friday in late February, both sides rested, and the judge announced that on Monday, the case would go to the jury.

  As Joe closed up the machine shop that Saturday, Rye nervously asked if he might have Monday off to go down to the courthouse to be there for the verdict. By then, the whole shop knew Rye had been involved in the Wobbly riot back in November, and while Dom and Paul were union machinists and expressed support, Joe was uneasy about having hired a kid from an outfit as rough as the IWW.

  “The goob only had eight fingers, but at least I never had to worry that he’d dynamite the place,” Joe said.

  “I would never do something like that,” Rye said. “And anyway, Wobblies don’t dynamite things. That’s more the anarchists you’re thinking of, Joe.”

  “You aren’t one of them, are you?”

  “No, Joe!” Rye said. “I don’t know what I am.” He thought of his brother and of Early Reston, out there somewhere. “Except the shop boy at North Hill Fittings and Machine.”

  Paul and Dominic watched from behind the counter. Finally, Joe said, “Well, you can’t wear that to court.”

  Rye looked down at his worn work shirt and dungarees. That afternoon he took the streetcar downtown to look for a new shirt. He was in an unprecedented position in regard to money. With Gig gone, and Marco insisting that their six-dollar down payment on the orchard be applied to room and board, Rye was paid up at the boardinghouse until May. Mrs. Ricci had even let him move inside to the warmer first-floor bedroom. Since he was earning nearly ten dollars a week at the machine shop, and Mrs. Ricci provided his breakfasts and dinners, and Gemma Tursi sent his lunches to work with Dominic, Rye had money for the first time in his life. He’d even opened a bank account.

  He stood on the corner of Post and Riverside, hands in his pockets, staring into the window at Murgittroyd’s. The all-everything drugstore had a single row of stiff, boxy suit coats in between the pocket watches and fishing boots. A white $4 sign was pinned to the first jacket. A streetcar rattled past, and Rye left the window to walk down to the Crescent. He looked in that window at a rack of $13 sack-coat suits, gray, with a fine crosshatching of blue thread. A card on the floor of the window display read: THE HOME OF DIGNIFIED CREDIT. Had any phrase ever sounded better than dignified credit? Still, more than a week’s salary for something he might wear once? He glanced up the street and kept moving, eventually finding himself back on Sprague, at the window of Bradley and Graham’s, the corner shop where he’d bought his fancy gloves. He stared through the glass at swaths of fabric and pieces of vests and pants, a coat wit
h tails that didn’t have a price on it. These suits weren’t even built yet. What would they cost? Fifty dollars? A hundred? The levels between people.

  “Well, hello there. Ryan, was it?”

  Rye turned and saw the old salesman who had helped him. He was putting his hat on as he came out of the shop.

  “Sorry,” Rye said, “I was just looking.” He started to move along.

  “It’s all right,” the salesman said. “How are those gloves holding up?”

  Rye looked down at his bare hands. He’d left the gloves at home. “Fine.”

  “What are you looking for now?”

  “Nothing,” Rye said, then added quickly, “I wanted a new shirt, but then I started looking at suits.”

  “A suit! Well, yes!” He looked Rye up and down. “Every young man should own a suit.” He gestured to his store. “But honestly, you shouldn’t go here for that. Enough I sold you those gloves. We can get you a nice suit for much less.”

  The man’s name was Chester, and he talked the whole time as they walked down Sprague. “Normally, I’d suggest having a bespoke coat made, something distinctive yet classic, and build the components around it. But you’re a young man, thin and active, your body’s still growing. I think we can find something on the rack for much less. I’m thinking high neck, shorter lapels, to display your height. I’d go narrower than a morning coat. Single-breasted vest. A tailor will try to talk you into better wool, but it’s a working suit, for God’s sake, we don’t need to strangle a merino lamb for you to look swell on the streetcar!”

  They went to a midlevel men’s clothier called Burks and Feyn where Chester knew the salesman. “Kid’s had a rough go, Dale,” he said. “Give him your discount.”

  “Give him your discount!” Dale said.

  “Come on! I’ll owe you. I know you have something good back there.”

  Finally, the salesman sighed, measured Rye’s arms and chest, and emerged with five coats. The salesman and Chester talked about them, Rye trying to follow. Even the words sounded rich to Rye—the Regent, the Winston? Worsted? Tweed? Herringbone or houndstooth? Berrycorn or birdseye? Rye found it dizzying, embarrassed by how much he liked all of it. He nodded. He blushed. He listened.