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:
The room roared with laughter. Someone shouted, “Where are you, Leon?”
“Maybe he’s in one of our kitchens? Twenty-one labor halls ready to serve thirty thousand meals a day. Or maybe Leon’s out collecting donations from bakers and grocers and butchers and dairymen? Maybe he’s loading trucks with chickens and vegetables, or getting ready to deliver milk and diapers, or shining up his car to use as a free taxi tomorrow.”
Ella’s cheer was lost in the din. She’d worn out the soles of her boots going to shops and farms and warehouses and garages to get those commitments. And as long as the general strike lasted, she’d be on her feet, cooking and serving at the union halls. She’d had few moments of perfect happiness in her life. But she knew, as she walked out into a soft wall of drizzle, that this was one of them.
The streets of Pioneer Square were a carnival of covered carts selling hot dogs and roasted chestnuts. Two fiddlers, keeping dry under an awning, played a lively version of “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning.” As she neared the King Street Station, the fiddles warred with a frenetic banjo and a woman’s brassy rendition of “How You Gonna Keep ’em Down on the Farm?” The streetlights were just coming on when Ella wiped the wet glass of a shop window to see a fringed sheath, barely below the knee. Imagining herself in it, she didn’t notice her friend Mario behind her.
“Mannaggia! Antoné!” When she turned, he kissed both her cheeks.
“Am I late?” she asked him. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know which train to meet. I thought probably the next one—”
“Macchè late, no no. I walk around little bit, I come back. No trouble. You good girl, let me stay with you.” More kisses on the cheek, then he held her at arm’s length, grinning.
He wasn’t much taller than Ella, a wiry, bandy-legged man whose hairline had receded farther since she’d last seen him, a few years ago. As a child, she’d adored Mario because he was one of the men who brought Nicky, then eleven, to town. She knew Nicky and Mario parted ways in Mexico. Nicky wrote to her awhile after he got there, to say Mario and others were already going home. A worldwide revolution was starting — they wouldn’t sit on its sidelines. But Nicky said the point and burden of pacifism was to defend peace, not to find a better war.
Well, Mario would sing a different song now. Seattle’s general strike would be the first of dozens, maybe hundreds, across America. It would change everything, and do it without violence. Unions would be too strong to break and too beloved to lie about.
In the glitter of shop lights, she saw nostalgic tears in Mario’s eyes. “Sei fatta più bella, Antoné, sai? You more beautiful.” He was as swarthy and beetle-browed as ever, and the origin of his nickname, Nasone, or Big Nose, was just as clear.
“No one came with you?” She’d been nursing a small hope that Nicky would be on the train.
“Nessuno.” No one. “Troppo da temere. Sai com’ è.”
Other Anarchists were too afraid to come? The government had stepped up deportations and arrests, she knew that. The entire leadership of the I.W.W. was in prison, five to twenty-five years at hard labor. Eugene Debs got ten years, Emma Goldman two.
“But you mayor, he calls in goons to bust open the heads, and I do nothing? No no. Me and Sacco, we been go all over, back East. Organize the strikes, or give a little bit more muscles, eh? You see the magazine say three thousand strike last year? This year, more.” He stopped to look her up and down again. “Ma, Antonella, maybe you marry somebody rich? You looking like a girl on top a wedding cake. Look what a dress.”
“I made it,” she said. “Cheaper than you think.” She knew better than to tell him about the jewels she’d taken. He’d want money for the cause, and she wasn’t sure what he’d do with it. People were so desperate lately, so furious. They needed Seattle to remind them to hope. “Have you seen Nicky? Any of you? Talked to him?”
“Nicolino mio, no. I know somebody sees him, maybe October, maybe
November. In Mexico. Nicky says he’s going right away, Washington, D.C. Looking for you, Antoné.”
“Not October. He wouldn’t have come before Armistice.”
Mario shrugged. “Why not? People, they know is close. Week, two weeks before? What’s a difference?”
A week before Armistice, the marshals had stopped her in Chicago. Ella felt a little sick. Worried again that they’d arrested Nicky at the Kingstons’. That they’d come after her as, to their minds, a fellow Red. “You haven’t heard from him since? Would you know it if he... if he got picked up?”
“You no worry.” Mario patted her cheek. “Nicky, he’s a smart boy. Eleven years old, already he’s work two years in the coal mine. Me and that crazy Wobblie — you remember him, no front teeth and the red hair? — we grab him, dirty like a dog, no parents, gonna get himself shot in the strike. We put him on the soapbox, this town, that town. He tells everybody. Breaker boys, they don’t never see the day, they sitting twelve, fourteen hours pick the rocks from the coal. The chutes, they overflowing, the boys they bury alive. People they no believe me, I tell them. But Nicky, he makes them cry. What a boy, eh? Already then, he’s a man. Don’t forget — Nicky, he good to take care himself. You no worry ’bout Nicky, Antoné.”
“But no one knows where he is?” Her world contracted to Mario’s face while up the block, the banjo player and singer went into “For Me and My Gal.”
“You lonesome, bella mia? Always together, you and Nicolino.” He crossed his fingers to demonstrate. “But now you got a new boyfriend? You no make such a pretty dress for nobody?”
She laughed away the question. “So I’ve got an attic apartment,” she told him, “small but all to myself. I’ll show you where it is. Then you can come and go.”
They pushed through hundreds, maybe thousands of people listening to music, buying street food, speaking in excited bursts about the strike. The Star claimed the populace shivered in terror of being without streetlights and transport, without food and necessities. But people here knew the unions wouldn’t let them suffer. The mood was festive, full of anticipation and optimism.
The streetcars, though, were jammed full. Not just with celebrants. The drivers walked off tomorrow, and people were rushing their errands. A throng waited at the first stop they approached, so they backtracked to an earlier one, and then to a third. Even there, it was awhile before a trolley didn’t fill before she and Mario reached the door.
They were finally just steps from boarding when Ella heard muttering behind her. A man, a lumberjack judging from the slivers in his cap, spat out, “That Teamster.” Someone else said, “Union voted nay — no friend of ours.”
Ella blinked tiny points of moisture from her lashes. She looked through the drizzle till she spotted a young man under a streetlamp. He wore a shabby Navy uniform. It was taking months to get the hundreds of thousands of soldiers back from Europe. Skinny men in dirty blues or khaki flooded the streets of Seattle in December, streamed in steadily in January, and were more than a trickle even now.