by Lia Matera
Ella said, “Everyone’s lost somebody, I think.”
“It’s not easy to survive these days, is it, between the war and the flu,” he said. “And a hard time after, if you do.”
Why didn’t this marshal pounce: search her, interrogate her, take her away? Why did he stalk her with conversation?
To change the subject to something else, anything else, she said, “Why did your friend turn down being Secretary of War?”
“Well, he’s a Quaker. Not fully a pacifist—they call him the Fighting Quaker. He’s in favor of this war because it was thrust upon us. But he feared his faith could complicate initiating another. And the day may come when we have to strike first. So he took a different post.”
She nodded, unsure what to reply.
“I’m a Quaker as well,” he said. “We’re supposed to be Catholics, we Irish. But my mother was a Friend, and she took pity on the besotted fellow who became my dad.”
“Did the draft board assign you to a farm camp? That’s where they send Quakers, isn’t it?”
“On the contrary, most Friends who object are shipped straight to the battlefield. Ordered to carry stretchers if we won’t carry guns. But not all of us object. I didn’t get called, but I’d have gone. I don’t believe in shirking. It only leaves the dirty work to others.”
She thought of Nicky in a hovel in Mexico because he refused to kill poor men like himself to settle rich men’s quarrels.
The marshal watched her carefully. “I believe in this war—the Germans saw to that.”
“What about your Quaker beliefs?”
“Our convictions are individual, not institutional—there’s no high church to tell us what to do. We find our own ways to stay firm in our four tenets, and we leave it at that.” He flushed a little.
“I see.” She made herself smile. While he was talking, she was spared the effort. “What are the tenets?”
He looked surprised by her interest. “Simplicity, equality, tolerance, peace. But again, it’s different when war’s forced on you. When there’s no peace without a fight.”
Nicky had said to her, before he left for Mexico, “It’s not just me who doesn’t understand this war, Ella. There’s no one on Earth who can find the bone under the skin. It’s senseless grudges by men who’ll never win treasure enough to satisfy them. They send their countrymen to spill innocent blood, including their own, and get nothing in return.” He’d been gone almost two years and still the carnage continued, and still no one understood why.
“And any day,” the marshal said, “we’ll learn we’ve done it. Won the war and brought the peace. Armistice any day now, they say. There’s a rumor it might be tonight. But lately, there’s always a rumor.”
“No peace without a fight,” Ella repeated. “Do you Quakers introduce paradox into all four tenets? Your friend is the Fighting Quaker? Do you also have Klansman Quakers?”
“Never that.” He flashed a smile that seemed different from those previous. Because he’d shaken her close to showing her true feelings? “And Mitchell Palmer, well, however a person may judge his views on war, he’s kept to the tenets. Served three terms in Congress, working for an end to child labor, a tariff system to protect the poorest workers. That’s why I helped put him in office. I worked on his first campaign and ran the next two.”
Ella squirmed in her seat. She had the sense this was, for him, turning into a real conversation. Was that to her benefit, or did it merely protract this ordeal?
“I first heard Palmer speak when I was at Penn. Years ago, studying history, like yourself.” His tone softened and so did his smile. If she didn’t know he was a marshal, she’d think he was flirting. “He was a determined young progressive. And I found we spoke the same language. Right down to the rare ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ if we aren’t careful.”
Could it be he really knew Palmer? Was it possible he had seen her walking past? It wouldn’t change the fact that he’d removed his nickel star. Or that he seemed intent on coaxing her to offer … what? An admission she’d lived on R Street? Why not confront her with it, pat her down if he was after Mrs. Kingston’s jewels?
She heard the door at the other end of the car slide open. The marshal twisted toward the aisle to glance over his shoulder.
While his attention was elsewhere, she looked him over. He was an attractive man, square-shouldered and lean at the waist. His profile under the thick ginger hair, clipped short along the sides and combed straight on top, showed a strong brow and firm jaw. She noticed too, though it was silly to do so, that he smelled of bay rum aftershave. When he turned back, his eyes widened from a squint. She looked away, but not before she caught his pleasure at having found himself examined.
“It wasn’t the porter,” he said. “If you’re waiting for one.”
She shook her head to show she wasn’t.
“If you’re thinking of whiling away some time inside the terminal, you ought to walk through the train. Leave it where the platform’s enclosed. Even a mild November night in Chicago is enough to make someone from Washington weep. But perhaps you grew up in a raw climate? Where is it you go home to now?”
Had he searched her coat pockets and seen her tickets?
“Oh, I don’t mind the cold,” she said. Mrs. Kingston would have raised her brows and pinched her lips to show she found the question impertinent. But Ella’s features weren’t trained to it.
“And so Georgetown’s on break already, then? Earlier than usual, isn’t it?”
“The flu.” She was on comfortable footing here, at least. “The mayor outlawed public meetings, and so the schools have closed.”
“Ah yes, of course,” he said. “But if they keep you longer into the summer to compensate, you may dislike the heat and mosquitoes. Or do you go home to worse?”
“It was wise of them to do it, I think.”
If he was here to find her, he’d know her destination from her ticket. So why did he keep asking where she lived? In case someone came to meet her train and take her on by car?
Beyond the marshal and across the aisle, windows framed a sky shingled with wet clouds. The last traces of daylight were fading over acres of ground covered in curved and crossing tracks. In the distance, a canal was overspread with a rust-streaked railroad bridge. She watched a train flash across it while others moved slowly alongside the narrow waterway. She struggled to say something about it, or to find another innocuous topic, but the words wouldn’t come.
“Your history classes?” The marshal shifted so his knees touched her coat on the seat between them. She saw that his pale blue eyes were made intense by dark rings around the iris. “Have they influenced your view of this war?” His brows were raised attentively, as if he were sincerely interested in her answer.
Ella felt herself go cold. The Sedition Act made criticizing the war a crime punishable by $10,000 and twenty years in prison. Enforcement was literal and draconian. She’d read about a film maker sentenced to ten years at hard labor for a harsh portrayal of the British in his movie about the Revolutionary War. They were our allies now, and it was sedition to defame them (or the President) in any context. It wasn’t possible, these days, to be careful enough.
“I agree with you,” she said. “Sometimes peace has to be won.”
“And your professors concur?”
“Of course. Why wouldn’t they?”
“I understand that some at Georgetown, Harvard and Yale too, draw supposed contrasts between our laws and our constitution.”
“Really?” This turn of conversation seemed very bad to her. Sounding her out about the war and now the Sedition Act?
“They talk of starting a civil liberties league. To challenge the Alien and Sedition Acts, the Anarchist Exclusion Act.” He watched her unblinkingly. “Deportations under the Immigration Act.”
“I didn’t know that.”
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sp; She couldn’t make sense of this. She felt sure he was looking for her in particular—why else would he keep bringing up R Street? She’d supposed it had to do with the stolen jewels. But he’d have no reason to care about the politics of a thief, would he?
She heard the blood roar in her ears. Had she done something to make a marshal suspect her of sedition? Every alien knew someone who’d been dragged onto a boat. If the government bothered with hearings at all, they were closed-door, one immigration officer and no translator.
She was glad the marshal was speaking again. She couldn’t have constructed a coherent sentence.
“Civil liberties,” he said. “I don’t begrudge lawyers and courts their roles. But except in extreme cases, I say leave the law to those who write it.” He paused for her reply. When none came, he added, “And if they overstep, then vote for different men. Better that than putting it in the pockets of appointees with grudges and personal stakes. Or do you take the opposite view?”
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 seatback, 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 travelling 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 15, 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 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 travelling. 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 villager’s path over another?
The marshal clung tightly to her hand on his arm as they passed paper boys 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 quic
kly 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.
“Is that so?” he said.
She angled to face him, though he still kept her fingers clamped to his arm. She put her free hand on his lapel and fancied she could feel the indentations where his badge had pieced the fabric. “I could see you knew it. The way you asked about my professors’ views.”
“No, I was just … interested to hear them.” He looked confused.
“I shouldn’t have lied.” She meant it: A marshal would see lying as running. It would trigger the same impulse in him as in a tiger. She’d been wrong to think a friendly manner was enough. She understood now that only the truth would do. Only the truth would fool this man into thinking she was coming toward him. Or she wouldn’t have one hand pinioned to his arm now. “It’s just that … I wish I were a student,” she said. That was the truth, all right. “I wish it but it’s far above my means. I was a servant to a rich woman. She gave me these clothes before the flu took her. Because she’d burned mine. I was the first in the house to get sick, you see. And in case the disease was on my clothes … None of us wanted the children to catch it.”
“Ah,” he said. “That’s who you lost, then?”
