Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012
- Автор: Макдермид Вэл, Манфредо Лу
- Год: 2012
- Язык: английский
- Год: Dell Magazines
- ISBN: 0013-6328
- Жанр: Другие детективы
Электронная книга - «Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 140, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 853 & 854, September/October 2012». Краткое содержание книги:
She managed a “No.”
“Having run Palmer’s political campaigns, that’s my orientation. But your professors, they influence the next generation of voters. We Democrats need them on our side. That’s why I asked.”
She smiled as if flattered he’d posed the question.
“And forming a civil liberties league...” He leaned closer. “It implies people get dragged away just for thinking the wrong thoughts. But you’ve never been made to feel shy, have you, about expressing a view in the classroom?”
“No.”
If she didn’t know he was a marshal, if she hadn’t seen him still wearing his star, would she be goaded into arguing? Would she be fool enough to let her true opinions slip?
“You have to weigh the extent to which a tool serves the common good,” he went on. Determined to draw Ella out? “The Sedition Act may pull in a few it shouldn’t. But the courts can sort that out. And in times of war, you have to judge value by percentages, don’t you think? Weigh the inconvenience to a few against the harm to innocents? Like the servant who lost her hands opening a package bomb meant for a senator. They say it was built from a manual, bought for twenty-five cents mail order.”
Ella felt a cold sweat glue stray curls to her hairline. Luigi Galleani’s newspaper sold tracts full of threats and bluster. It was his style of rhetoric, but no one at the Hall took it seriously. When Galleani lectured, he was fiery but he stayed inside the law. Mr. Shelstein, who booked their speakers, insisted on it. Then the laws changed. Galleani’s paper was shut down along with a hundred others. Like Emma Goldman and Eugene Debs, Galleani was in prison now.
Was the marshal looking for an admission that Ella knew him? Did he mean to learn where she was going in case she was joining a conspiracy there?
But no one in Washington knew Ella once called herself an Anarchist. She’d never even mentioned Nicky.
Nicky. Had he come back now that the war was ending? Had the marshals been following him? Maybe he’d gone looking for Ella at the Kingstons’?
She barely mastered the impulse to grab her coat and lurch over the marshal’s knees into the aisle. She could bear anything but that. Anything but Nicky arrested, lost to her.
A tiger has to chase you if you try to get away from it, Ella. Nicky had been breathless, his eyes bright. It will stalk you patiently for hours and hours if you don’t run. But the second you do, it has to come after you. It’s like a machine, and you’ve pulled a lever. It has to chase you because that’s how a tiger is. He’d been poring over newspaper accounts of the Champawat tiger. It had eaten 430 humans by then, and hunters were willing to try anything. They heard about this village where people wear masks on the backs of their heads. Because if a tiger sees your face, it doesn’t understand you’re running away. It knows humans don’t run backwards. And if it doesn’t know you’re running, maybe you can get someplace safe. He’d said it solemnly, and she could see him imagining it all. She remembered the cut on his chin — he hadn’t been shaving long, hadn’t been good at it yet. Even at that age, she’d wanted to kiss it. Even then, she’d been in love with him. That’s how you get away from a tiger, Ella. And she’d nodded as if there were tigers all over Seattle.
She forced herself to rest her head against the seat back, to try to overcome her panic. As long as this marshal was still stalking her, not yet detaining her, she had a chance. She turned toward him and mustered a smile. She didn’t know yet how to get away, but she could show a false face in the meantime. Fool him into thinking she wouldn’t run.
“I’m told there’s a luncheonette inside the terminal. Do you know it?” She managed a slight laugh. “I don’t believe I can face the dining car again. Every meal is smothered in gravy and stinks of canned peas.”
“Why yes, I know the luncheonette.” She could see his puzzlement. See him making new calculations.
“I don’t want you to feel obliged,” she said. “But... if you mean to take your supper too? I’d enjoy...” She couldn’t quite make herself say she’d enjoy his company.
“Certainly.” His face relaxed. “Yes, I’d be glad to join you.”
He stood and extended a hand to help her up. He looked smug, flattered. The mask on the back of her head seemed to be fooling him.
Putting herself on the arm of a marshal was one of the hardest things Ella had ever done. As he walked her through the train’s mustard and burgundy cars, she saw two men outside following along. She recognized them as the other marshals. They were looking through the windows to see where their boss led.
How could she have thought this was about Mrs. Kingston’s jewelry? She was barely five feet tall — it wouldn’t take three armed men to arrest a small and ailing thief. But a “radical”? Someone who’d seen Galleani speak, who knew a draft dodger in Mexico? These days, a connection to any Anarchist was seen as “intended to provoke, incite, or encourage resistance to the United States.” Did they think Ella was traveling with dynamite? (Hadn’t the marshal asked if she had baggage? Hadn’t he sent someone to the luggage car?) Conversation with a thief would yield less than a search would. But an “innocent” chat with an Anarchist could lead to information about accomplices.
She wanted to laugh in the marshal’s face. What was it he saw when he looked at her? She’d grown up with harmless dreamers, not bombers. Orphaned at fifteen, she’d gone to work in the shirt factories. For the last two years she’d been a servant, wiping little fingers and changing diapers. The most seditious thing she’d ever done was pine in loneliness for a pacifist. And Nicky didn’t go to Mexico to plot violence, he went there to reject it.
The marshal murmured something about not getting separated in the busy station. He put his hand firmly over hers where it lay on his arm. She felt herself go hot with anxiety. She looked away as if blushing at his touch.
It was crowded in the chill, high-ceilinged terminal. People worried about catching the flu, but not everyone could avoid traveling. Instead, nearly all wore white cotton masks. Ella saw the marshal check over his shoulder, scanning the crowd. He shook his head almost imperceptibly. Telling his men, Not yet?
Weariness threatened to cut the legs out from under her. What was it about tigers that made them keep stalking? How did they decide one moment was better than another to pounce? Why should the beasts, looking out from seamless jungle, choose one spot on the villagers’ path over another?
The marshal clung tightly to her hand on his arm as they passed paperboys waving extras, kiosks stacked with baseball souvenirs and postal cards, fiddlers playing “After You’ve Gone.” Breaks in the crowd showed a luncheonette to their left. When its doors opened, Ella smelled the lemon and grease of fried fish. Occasional words rose above the patrons’ din — “armistice” and “surrender” were like frequent toots of a horn.
The luncheonette was too close. She couldn’t get away between here and there, not with two other marshals behind her. And inside it, the line moved quickly as people chose their courses and slid their trays along a rail. A meal there would delay things only briefly.
She stopped walking, forcing the marshal to stop too. Around them, harried travelers parted and passed like river water around a rock.
“May I ask you something?” Her voice was teary — she couldn’t help it. But though she spoke at a near whisper, she saw he listened for every word. “You’ve been inquiring about Georgetown? Is it because you can tell I’m not...? That I don’t go to college?” She felt herself blush deeply. She hoped he’d believe it was because she regretted the deception.