Touchstone

by Laurie R. King

  He glanced down at her face, glowing with possibility unleashed, and said nothing. It was a pretty picture, but in his long experience, radicals and revolutionaries were rarely content to nudge events towards an end. Sooner or later, the fancy thinkers got tired of talk, and decided to rush the barricades.

  He put on a thoughtful expression. “I like what you’re saying. I’ll think about it.”

  “Well, here’s the stables—and I’ve really got to scramble and write this letter for Alex to drop in the post when he goes into town at noon. I’ll come find you when I’ve finished. Have fun!”

  Stuyvesant’s eyes followed the jaunty figure retreating up the drive, bright hair reflecting the morning sun, before he turned to the problem of a duke’s faulty engine.

  He found a partial set of tools in the back of the Morris, and a more complete set on a shelf that had originally been designed for tack. The magneto problem was soon resolved, resolving the back-fire and the smoke, but he cocked his head and listened, and decided to adjust the valves as long as he was here.

  Going back to the shelves he found some rags and a coverall nearly large enough for him, if he took care not to bend over.

  Whistling happily, he laid out his tools on the cloth-covered fender, and got to work. He did, in fact, enjoy tinkering with machines. And the smell of the engines seemed to grease his thought process as well.

  He had half the car’s guts on the stable floor when he heard voices. He walked over to the doorway, wiping his hands on one of the rags, to see Grey and Laura Hurleigh coming down the road, both of them resplendent in formal riding gear, from polished boots to riding hats. The Cornish woodcutter had seemed more suited to the shabby garb he wore when Stuyvesant met him than he had to the proper clothes he’d worn since, but now, in this borrowed finery, he was revealed as what, in fact, he was: a gentleman, bred and born. Were it not for his light coloring, he might have been one of the Hurleighs.

  Stuyvesant let loose with a wolf-whistle. “Well, ain’t you the peachy pair?”

  Grey halted, startled. “I can’t say the same for you, I’m afraid.”

  Stuyvesant looked down at the grease-spotted garment straining across his chest and shrugged. “To each according to his abilities,” he said.

  “Mr. Stuyvesant,” Laura said, “are you sure you want to do this? Wouldn’t you rather come for a ride? Gallagher can outfit you.”

  “I like fixing motors, and horses and me, we never really clicked,” he told her. It was not entirely true, but he did not think the benefits of a ride would outweigh either the credit he’d get with the Duke of Hurleigh or compensate for the state of his thighs after a day of horse-straddling in an English saddle. All in all, he thought it better to let Bennett have her on his own. “Besides, if the car’s needed at noon, it doesn’t give me much time to put her together again.”

  “Alex will happily take one of the other motors,” she said. “Especially if you’d lend him yours. He adores new motorcars.”

  “Good to know. You two have a nice time.”

  The one-time lovers continued down the drive towards the stables proper, leaving Stuyvesant to wonder if he was making a mistake, not to glue himself to them. Then he shook his head: If he couldn’t trust Grey, it was best to know it now.

  He returned to his engine, and his thoughts.

  Sometime during this week-end, he’d like to get Laura Hurleigh to himself for a bit, and burrow into her beliefs a little more closely. Nothing better in getting to know a suspect than to pick his girlfriend’s brain.

  And some of Laura Hurleigh’s speechifying over the breakfast table hadn’t been just the usual cant. At times she’d spoken in the rhythm of well-used rhetoric, although some of the phrases were new to Stuyvesant—“rouge to enliven a corpse” had a certain ring to it.

  The thing was, some of the phrases Bunsen’s two women had used struck him as being other than the straight Communist line. Sarah’s “leadership is archaic” and Laura’s “inherited wealth goes hand in hand with inequity” were, to his ear, less Communist than Anarchist.

  Granted, radical theory was as tangled as a packrat nest, and the lines between Socialism and Communism or Marxism and Bolshevism were often drawn with a very fine and meandering pen. Add into it the tendency of isms to splinter, like factions in a large and argumentative family, and you had a state of affairs too damned complicated for someone like him to keep track of.

  Still, working around radicals as much as he had, you picked up patterns of thought. Anarchists believed devoutly in the innate goodness of the individual and the innate evil of society’s structures—religion, property, or government. Laura had described Hurleigh House as being built on robbery; the other night on the stage, Bunsen had declared, “Capitalism is theft.” The idea of property being robbery was straight out of the French Anarchist, Proudhon. Stir in Sarah’s vision of crumbling social structures, and he thought he could smell Anarchist influence in Richard Bunsen’s thought.

  Not that there was anything wrong with Anarchism per se. In fact, its philosophy of society without government sounded a lot like the early forms of Christianity, all goodness and love. Communists usually went on about economic theory, Socialists explored the middle ground, but Anarchists, now, they were the real dreamers: Utopia or nothing.

  Which wouldn’t matter a whole lot except that in his experience, with Reds at least you knew where you were. Reds spent most of their time bickering, with each other if no one else was handy, and when they struck out, it followed a pretty predictable route. It was the Anarchists who threw away the rules: Once they’d made up their minds that things were beyond fixing, God alone knew where they’d hit out.

  Anarchism was theoretically opposed to violence, but dreamers have always tended to give their all. And when a man looked at his enemy and saw a master of violence, it wasn’t a big step to decide that one had to address the enemy in a language he understood.

  The first self-avowed Anarchist Harris Stuyvesant had met was a vibrant young woman with the well-mannered name of Ivy Sweethome. At the time, he didn’t believe she was really an Anarchist—she was far too bright, too thrilled with ideas, too in love with life to be one of those pale-skinned, cigarette-smoking, back-room revolutionaries the name evoked.

  And really, didn’t all college students go through an Anarchist phase?

  As it turned out, however, Ivy was the real thing: The year after she left college, she killed herself throwing a bomb at a federal judge, in protest against one of his rulings.

  It was called attentat, or propaganda by action, and the idea was to rouse the people’s conscience by a shocking act of self sacrifice. It was nothing new—early Christians called it bearing witness, and went to their martyrdoms singing prayers to God; centuries later, Emma Goldman’s lover embraced trial and brutal imprisonment in order to draw attention to the inequities his industrialist target represented. Voluntary Anarchist sacrifice to make the workingmen think deeply, he’d called it. Of course, the young fool also claimed it was the first terrorist act in America, even though one could argue that the whole country was built upon acts of terror and self sacrifice.

  Harris heard of Ivy’s death during finals in his second, and what would be his last, year of university. He thought about her at odd moments in the years that followed: How had all that passion for life found rightness in death?

  Four years later, when he heard about a job that sounded a lot more exciting than cashing checks behind a teller’s window, he had all but forgotten Ivy’s name. He was hired by the newly formed Bureau of Investigation because of his bank experience, but before long he was fighting Bolsheviks, Communists, and the I.W.W., often literally—sometimes he suspected that his height and his muscles had been a more important job qualification than his bank experience.

  When he came home from the Front in 1919, he was twenty pounds lighter and a decade older than he’d been when he left. He drank too much, twitched at every loud noise, and went back to work a
s a way of saving his sanity.

  Four months later, on June 2, 1919, a series of ten bombs went off, targeted at prominent Americans: judges, legislators, a factory owner, a Catholic priest. The man who committed suicide directly in front of the home of A. Mitchell Palmer, the United States Attorney General, was an Italian Anarchist.

  That was the first time Harris Stuyvesant heard the word attentat. And he’d thought instantly of Ivy Sweethome.

  After that mass bombing, the Bureau’s interest abruptly turned to politics. In 1920, the twenty-four-year-old J. Edgar Hoover headed up the new Radical Division; when Helen died, Harris Stuyvesant joined them, in time for the Bureau to embark on its series of wholesale roundups. Communists and Anarchists alike were shoved on ships and sent back where they came from. The country dusted off its hands, and was happy.

  The only problem was, the Red Threat proved to be almost completely empty. Even in the midst of it, when he had time to pause for thought, Stuyvesant wondered where all these highly organized and abundantly funded Communist cells he was searching for had sprung from, practically overnight.

  Soon, the suspicion that ten bombs do not a Communist takeover make had begun to penetrate even the higher reaches of government, and the Bureau began to cast around for evidence to support its massive reaction against the Red Threat. They hit on the Unions, where Communists were indeed thick on the ground, and turned their wrath against labor: timber strikes, railroad strikes, bomb threats—the bloodier the better, since newspapers were always hungry for drama.

  But in the passion for Reds, the country’s great enemy of yester-year was swept under the rug: Anarchists were reduced to a cartoon figure holding a globe with a lit fuse. Anarchists were old-fashioned; worse, they were foreign—look at Sacco and Vanzetti, look at Emma Goldman. We’ve got rid of the foreigners, we solved that problem, let’s move on to the home-grown Bolshevists.

  Except that Stuyvesant did not think that the earlier enemy was eradicated. He couldn’t help wondering if the movement had just gone clever instead, biding their time after the mass arrests. He couldn’t shake off Ivy Sweethome, and how her brilliance and her passion for justice had led her down the path to cold-blooded murder. No, he was not willing to give up his belief in the dangers of international Anarchism.

  So when Lady Laura Hurleigh—and her pretty friend Sarah, who despite her unexpected flashes of depth did not strike him as intellectually sophisticated—recited phrases with a flavor of Anarchism, he took notice.

  Oh, sure, he liked Sarah Grey just fine. And he thought Laura Hurleigh was just the bee’s knees, and he’d probably even find something to like about Richard Bunsen, too, because that’s what happened with the leaders of Causes, they were leaders because they were likable. And Harris Stuyvesant was as susceptible as any man to the pull of charisma; it was a force, like gravity or the tides.

  But he had to say, he wasn’t altogether happy with the direction this case of his was taking. It was one thing to follow a roundabout path to the goal, he was used to that, but this job—here he was, cooling his heels tinkering with a duke’s car because everyone was waiting for a guy who might or might not show up, and because he wanted to make a good impression on the guy’s girl-friend, in case he didn’t show.

  And while Stuyvesant was waiting for his own case to get under way, he could feel a whole other set of problems grappling to get their hooks into him: Bennett Grey’s troubles and Sarah Grey’s involvement and the fact that his confederate Carstairs looked to be a shithouse of the first degree.

  All of which were highly distracting, but not his problems.

  Not. His. Problems.

  It was almost as bad as the time in June of ’22, when he’d started an investigation washing dishes in a dive off Broadway and ended up sleeping with a police chief’s wife (but only sleeping—she was so drunk that anything more would have felt like necrophilia) in order to convince the—

  “I say—”

  The voice came inches from his backside as he lay head-down in the belly of the Morris. He jerked and cracked his head, swore and cut the oath short, and slithered backwards over the fender, a task made no simpler by the snugness of the coveralls. He extricated his upper body and stood upright, hand pressed against skull.

  “Miss Grey,” he said, and hoped like hell that she wasn’t a mind-reader like her brother.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  “I APOLOGIZE,” STUYVESANT SAID. “FOR THE LANGUAGE.”

  “No, it’s my fault. I should have cleared my throat or something. Are you all right?”

  He withdrew his hand, examined it, and saw just grease: no blood. “I’m fine. I wouldn’t come any closer, if I were you. It’s been a while since anyone’s cleaned the insides of this automobile.”

  “So I see,” she replied, trying hard to keep her face straight. He rubbed a hand across his sweaty face, realized he’d just made matters worse, and felt in his back pocket for the rag he’d shoved there. He took one look at it, and shoved it back unused.

  She pulled out a handkerchief and offered it to him, but he looked from the scrap of white lacy stuff to his hands, and went to find a clean rag.

  When he’d located one and worked it around enough to bring his face into visibility, he asked, “Was there something you were looking for?”

  “No, I’d just got the letter off and thought I’d come and see how you’re getting on. But look, can I give you a hand? I’m quite good with machinery.”

  “That’s fine, it’s sort of a one-man job, and anyway I’m nearly finished. Why don’t you see if you can find a seat that doesn’t leave you with a black skirt, and you can talk to me while I’m putting her back together?”

  He picked up the wrench—the spanner—and stretched out again. It was pleasant, having a pretty girl watch him work.

  A couple minutes later, she broke the silence.

  “Why has he never mentioned you?”

  Grey would have noticed the brief falter of Stuyvesant’s hands; his sister did not. “Who, your brother?”

  “Yes.”

  Stuyvesant twisted his head to peer up at her, then went back to his task. “I wonder. Would he have any reason to keep his friendships to himself?”

  She was silent for a moment. “I don’t know that he has any friends.”

  “Well, there you have it. Anyway, your brother’s a rare bird. I guess that’s one of the things I like about him.”

  The silence that fell might have been uncomfortable, but it was not. After a while, Sarah got up and fetched the car’s traveling-rug, laying it across the other fender so she could lean in and watch his hands. “I took a class last year in elementary engine repair,” she said.

  “Really? I don’t think I’ve ever met a girl mechanic.”

  “Oh, it never got that far, but Laura and I decided that if we were going to be driving at all hours of the day and night, it only made sense to be able to fix simple break-downs ourselves. Laura’s far cleverer than I, but to my surprise, I discovered that I rather like fiddling with machines. What seems to be the problem with this one?”

  So he told her, in basic terms. Then, seeing that she was following what he was saying, he told her in more detail, and she followed that, as well. Before he quite knew how it happened, she had her arm down beside his in the motor; she even managed to manipulate a connection that his large hand couldn’t get at. She had small, neat hands, and although she did her manicure no good, to his surprise, she collected only one small smear on the rolled-up part of her sleeve.

  When they had finished, he had her slide behind the wheel and start the engine. He listened with satisfaction, and latched the hood—no, the bonnet shut, then looked ruefully at his own black and bashed-up extremities.

  “You’re certainly tidier than I am with the thing,” he told her.

  “You had all the hard bits done before I got here. Let’s see, there should be a tin of hand-cleaner here somewhere—yes, here it is.”

  She stretched to pluc
k a squat tin from a crowded shelf, pried off the lid, and dipped a finger inside, smearing the stuff onto her hands and working it into the stains. He followed her example.

  “How’d you know this was here?”

  “A place like Hurleigh, if there was a tin of hand-cleaner in the stables in 1910, there will be a tin of the exact same hand-cleaner in the converted stables in 1926. We used to play all kinds of messy games when we were here, some of which involved machinery. But we found that if we cleaned up sufficiently, no one ever caught on. Come, there’s a tap around the back for the finish work.”

  She led him through a small door in the back of the garage, and if the result was far from drawing-room standards, at least he wouldn’t leave black stains on the walls. He peeled off the coverall, resumed his tie and coat, and gave the fender an affectionate pat.

  “All set to pick up your friend at his train.”

  “My friend—you mean Richard? Oh, Richard never takes the train—almost never. He all but lives in his motor—has it all arranged as a kind of mobile office, spends his travel time writing articles and practicing speeches.”

  “I hope he has a driver?”

  “Oh, yes.” Her answer told him she wasn’t terribly fond of Bunsen’s driver, a fact he tucked into the back of his mind for later consideration. “I say, would you care for a walk before luncheon?”

  “I would indeed.” Clearly, Bunsen wasn’t about to appear at any minute; he might as well enjoy the day and the company. He shut the big front doors, then glanced across the valley, his attention caught by the approach of a pair of banged-up motorcars.

  “This will be the first of the evening’s guests,” Sarah told him.

  “Kind of early, isn’t it?”

  “It’ll be the boys with the music. See the gramophone speaker sticking out of the back? They’ll want to set up and check everything early. Although knowing them, it’s just an excuse to hang on and stuff themselves silly before the evening starts.”