by S. L. Stoner
“Yes, got message from cousin. The two men are out on town, going here and there. We could have a visit with them.”
Sage snicked a sidewise glance at his friend, “You mean an underground talk?”
Even in the dark, his companion’s eyes glittered when he answered by flashing his toothy grin of playful anticipation.
Mae listened to the soft sounds the two men made while performing their attic exercise. Once that sound ceased, she hadn’t heard them descend the stairs. That meant they had climbed onto the roof.
She hadn’t stayed at the boarding house. Rachel’s absence made the room there feel dead, cavernous. After hours of twitching around the room like a water drop on a hot cook stove, she’d had enough. Donning her hat and gathering up some of her things she slipped outside.
She saw Herman Eich hunkered down beneath a cedar tree across the street, his cart parked beside him. Even before she’d crossed the street, she set him to stirring. “Poor man, he’s not been getting enough sleep.” Herman had done his best but she’d let him down. She’d left Rachel alone, drawn off the Chinese guard leaving Herman to watch both sides of the boarding house. Of course he couldn’t. All his efforts over the past weeks had been for nothing. Rachel had slipped from safety.
He was standing by the time she reached him. “Good evening Mae, did you come to keep me company?” he said, a smile parting his heavy beard.
She stepped closer to lay her hand alongside his face. “No Herman, dear. It’s just that the empty room is giving me ‘the crawlies,’ as Sage used to say when he was a little fellow. I’m thinking I might as well go home. Once I’m in Mozart’s I’ll be safe as a tick on a stray sheep and you can sleep in your own bed for a change.”
So the two of them, with Herman’s cart in tow, trundled across the bridge toward downtown. In the middle of the span they paused. It had been quiet, with foot, trolley and wagon traffic absent. A nearly full moon, hidden by thin clouds, lent a soft glow to their faces and to their hands clasped together atop the railing. Mae’s eyes stared at the outlines of the North End’s buildings. Nearer, the black spars of anchored sailing ships silently swayed. Only the distant cries of drunken sailors making their way back to their shipboard berths, signaled that other people also roamed the night.
“’Tomorrow may be that day we’ve been hoping for’.” Herman said softly, almost to himself.
“One of those Jewish rabbi sayings?” she asked.
“Paraphrased, if you know what I mean,” he’d answered with a chuckle.
“Rachel is Jewish,” she said.
He gave a soft chuckle but merely said, “You just noticed?”
She used her other hand to lightly jab his shoulder. “Well, no I’ve always known that. I was just thinking about how brave Rachel is and how dedicated she is to making everyone’s lives better.”
“You wondered if our culture might have something to do with it?” he asked.
When she merely nodded, he said, “When Jesus said ‘Love thy neighbor as thyself,” he was quoting Jewish law.”
She looked at him and saw his lips twist ironically, “Of course, Jews are like everyone else: Christian, Buddhist, Jew, Hindu. All religions tell us to aim for the sun. If we’re lucky, a few of us might hit the moon.”
“Have you ever hit the moon, Herman?” she asked.
He turned and laid an arm across her shoulders, “Well, my gal, maybe one or two times I might have risen above the atmosphere. I can’t lay claim to anything more,” He tugged her away from the railing, saying, “Come on, dear gal. You need your rest.”
He delivered her safe and sound to Mozart’s kitchen door before wheeling his cart away, no doubt anticipating the comfort of his single cot inside his little shed.
Here she was, wide awake as a hoot owl. Standing in the alcove between her open windows, a slight cross breeze started up, cooling her brow and bringing her more alert. She stepped closer to the open window and stared down at the empty street three stories below. How many nights she’d stood in this spot, waiting for some sign of Sage, worried that his gallivanting had finally put an end to him? Now it was the thought of Rachel, held by some rascal, terrified over what would happen next, that wouldn’t let her rest. At least, Rachel wasn’t alone. Mae was sure of that. She was with her sister. That could be the only explanation. Someone lured Rachel from safety by promising she’d see her sister.
Two women, missing—held captive somewhere. They hadn’t been taken out of town yet. Mae had to believe that. For sure, no one manhandled them onto a train. Angus Solomon’s men would have seen and reported something like that. And, Fong’s cousins were watching every street in the North End. No one had seen two women being led, carried or otherwise herded through the streets or onto a ship. Nor had anyone sighted a suspicious enclosed wagon or carriage. Fong said his cousins peered into every conveyance leaving the North End. When they couldn’t see who was inside, they’d ran after it until they could.
At the same time, it is certain that whoever held the women planned to make them permanently disappear. After all, he’d kept Rebecca hidden all these weeks. The scoundrel had no way of knowing that so many people were searching for them. So, why hadn’t he just kept Rachel in that room with Rebecca? Why had he moved them? And he must have moved them just hours before she and Sage had found Rebecca’s name scratched into that wall.
Mae let her mind roam down the streets of the North End. Of course, they could have moved the women through the underground but there was no entrance to it from that boarding house because it had no basement. Besides, Fong’s cousins were masters of the underground and he had some of them on the lookout for that very thing.
Mae shuddered. Dark, dirty, with spiders and the skittering of rats and mice, the underground was nearly as bad as she imagined a coal mine to be.
Pulling her thoughts out of the dark, she sent them sailing out over the North End’s streets. She shivered, thinking of the open fields and weedy basements of burned out buildings. Being an older part of town, it had many more wooden structures that made fire a constant threat. Once a building burnt, it took a time for something else to rise in its place.
She shook her head violently. Of course Fong’s cousins and Solomon’s men would have searched all those places for the bodies of the two women. She let that fear go as well. No way those laundry association rascals wanted the scandal of a murdered union leader on their hands. Not when things were already going in their favor.
With a heavy sigh, Mae climbed into bed and closed her eyes though her thoughts continued to rove. She could smell the pee at alley ends, hear seagulls crying as they circled above a river mighty in its power and stinking from its slurry of sewage and trash.
Mae’s eyes flew open and she sat up so fast it made her dizzy. Slinging her legs over the side of the bed, she quickly stood and crossed to her armoire. Shoving her laundry worker and Mozart’s dresses aside, she found what she was looking for. Hurriedly she donned her shabbiest dress, a pair of cracked boots and flung a holey shawl across her shoulders. At the alcove table she scratched out a note to her son. Then she was gone, silently slipping down the stairs.
It was just an idea. She’d first check out her suspicion because she didn’t want to get Sage’s hopes up nor have him tell her it was hopeless. Besides, she admitted ruefully to herself, she didn’t want Sage to steal her thunder if she was right.
Behind her up on the third floor, a gust of air blew in one window and out the other. A small white piece of paper lifted to ride it following her out into the street.
Chapter Twenty Eight
Shifting for better balance atop the wooden packing crate, Paul Sinclair carefully kept a firm grip on the nearly empty whiskey bottle. Tilting it up to take a slug, he noticed that starlight pinpricked the sky. The clouds were gone and so was the moon. It would be another hot day. He swiped a hand across his mouth and wiped it on his trousers. He knew that he looked like he’d slept in his clothes. As if he could sleep.
What the hell am I doing here, he wondered. Chicago was where he belonged, not in this dinky town with tree stumps dotting the pastures across the river. He returned his gaze to the small coastal steamer tugging against its anchor chain about fifty feet out from the wharf’s edge. He imagined a tiny cabin, the two women packed together, maybe tied up. He hoped not tied up. No point in it. The captain’s preparations would keep them secure. The cabin had a sturdy lock and a bolted porthole. He stared at that porthole. Was she staring back at him? He squinted, trying to see, but it didn’t help.
Another swig and he commenced speaking, slurring his words but not caring. She couldn’t hear him after all. “You’ll be all right Miss Rebecca. Especially now that you have your sister with you. She’s a tough one. That was a clever trick, he congratulated himself. She went right for it. She loves you, your sister does,” he assured the invisible Rebecca.
They loved each other, those two gals. And he, damn him to hell, he’d used their love against them. It had been a simple, one-man job to move both women from the whorehouse to the ship. He’d simply moved them one at a time. First Rebecca, telling her she had to dress like a whore and walk beside him acting like his doxy. If she refused, gave warning or tried to run, he told her, the people in the whorehouse would kill Rachel. Rebecca had done as instructed, walking beside him dolled up like a tart, though anyone looking at her closely would have seen it was an act. There was a quality to her than couldn’t be painted over.
Once Rebecca was securely onboard, he’d gone back to fetch Rachel who was definitely the more feisty sister. She too had performed as instructed though his forearm still ached where she’d dug her nails in while smiling sweetly at him.
He had to admire her spunk. She wasn’t as gentle as Rebecca. In fact, she reminded him strongly of his sisters. His sisters. Once his sisters had loved him, too. Their shrieks and games in the summer evenings, their laughter when they’d ganged up on their spoiled baby brother. Still, all three had cried when he’d left for the seminary. But, they’d also been proud of him. His memory roamed across their faces. They were ten years older—probably married, maybe mothers by now.
A seagull squawked overhead, the sound jerking his eyes toward the river, back to the porthole. “I hope you get to be a mother, Rebecca. You’d be a good one. I can tell.” Who was he kidding? Where she was going, Panama, she’d be lucky to survive—he’d seen the numbers. The men digging the canal were dropping like flies from malaria, yellow fever and who knew what else.
Yah, who was he kidding? Even if Rebecca managed to live, the other loathsome diseases would likely end any hope of her ever having children. That was the way of prostitution. That hygiene society had it right. Even if she did bear a child, it would likely be blind. He’d seen it happen. More than once.
Whoa, his damn bottle was empty. “I probably shouldn’t be drinking to excess within your sight, Miss Rebecca. A gentleman doesn’t do that. Hah! You know I’m not a gentleman. Though you’re a lady, no doubt about that.” He lifted the bottle to salute the porthole. “Yup, a real lady,” he repeated forcefully as he threw the bottle into the river.
But he wasn’t done confiding in the imagined Rebecca. “You know, I figured that once you were on your way so to speak, that I’d be on my way as well. I planned on heading back to Chicago, where I belong, leave this experience behind me. But ‘ole Farley says I have to stay on a bit longer. Help Cobb see this god awful business through to the end or thereabouts. He wasn’t exactly clear, our Mister Farley.”
Sinclair leaned forward as if to impart a secret, even though the ship was far outside of hearing range. “I don’t really like Farley. He’s a cold hearted bastard with cold eyes and when you shake his hand, it’s cold too. And it’s not the weather. It’s hot here. Not as muggy as Chicago, though. I don’t miss that. Anyway, about Farley. I never took part in a labor fight before. Can’t say I’ll ever do it again. Don’t like it. I used to think my grandma worked too hard on the farm. But those laundry ladies, they work even harder. It’s a helluva job. Wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy.”
Sinclair lifted his bowler from his head and dropped it on the crate beside him. For a bit, he was quiet, letting the river air cool his face and ruffle his hair. Heaving a sigh, he turned back toward the porthole. “Whiskey’s gone. I’m going to have to. . .”
Wait. Had he heard a step? Holding his breath he looked north. Maybe it had been a rat. But, no. there was definitely a second step, this one closer. No rat then. He slid off the crate and crouched behind it. His eyes strained to see. There! A figure, stood at the corner of the building, not forty feet away.
It was a woman, he could tell because a skirt covered her legs. She stepped closer until she was just twenty feet away, staring out at the ship. He recognized that walk. He knew that profile. He’d been following it for weeks. “What the hell is she doing here?” he muttered, but he scrunched lower and froze in position until her boots moved off leaving the only the sound of wavelets slapping against the timbers beneath his feet.
Fong and Sage, dressed in working man’s garb, slipped out of Mozart’s. Once outside, they strode separately to the North End, keeping each other in sight the entire way. It wouldn’t do to walk together. Many would notice, some might turn threatening.
At last they met up in the hallway of Fong’s fraternal organization. There another man waited, no doubt he was one of Fong’s so-called cousins. He spoke quickly in Chinese to Fong, who nodded then responded with a single word that sent the cousin out into the street.
“Come, we go,” Fong said, gesturing to Sage. “Farley’s two men met ten other men at train station and took them to hotel here in North End. Then all went to restaurant for dinner. After that, all men went to saloon. They are still in saloon. We go and try to bag our two.” With that, Fong was out the door and on the street, setting off at a fast pace with Sage trailing behind.
Reaching the Slap Jack saloon, Fong stepped into the dark doorway of a job shark storefront while Sage opened the saloon’s door and stepped inside. There was no mistaking the operatives’ and their ten guests. The party took up an entire corner of the place and were so boisterous they drowned out every other sound in the place. It took Sage but a second to figure out exactly who the newcomers were.
The ten fellows from the train were strikebreakers, rather than management operatives like the original two. There was a difference. The strikebreakers were rougher men, big, with meaty hands. They telegraphed power, violence, and a low level of intelligence, exactly what would intimidate peaceful picketers. In contrast, the operatives exuded sneakiness, a characteristic essential to their function.
Sage cursed quietly as he waited for the beer he’d ordered. Then he picked up the drink and ambled over to an empty table near the rowdy group. Once seated, he made a show of sipping his beer and checking his cheap pocket watch every few minutes, as if he were waiting for someone who was late.
The men in the corner were so arrogantly drunk, they had to be incapable of suspicion. Their loud voices could be heard clearly by anyone in the room. “Woo hoo, sure is gonna be a mighty fine pleasure manhandling a bunch of women for a change,” one chortled. “Any of them lookers?” a particularly ugly cuss asked one of Farley’s operatives.
That fellow shook his head, saying, “Nah, mostly they’re pale and stringy.” Sage felt his blood surge. Any woman would be pale and stringy if she worked sixty hours a week in a steam laundry.
After the strikebreaker’s initial outburst the talk around the table turned to bragging about past victories against union members and the pain they’d inflicted. Without having to feign disgust, Sage abruptly drained his glass, stood and left the saloon as if angry that his friend failed to show. Since he knew who the two operatives were, he wasn’t about to sit there and listen to them crow. He’d rather wait outside with Fong.
An hour later, Farley’s men stumbled out the saloon door and staggered toward their boarding house. Fong and Sage traile
d behind. When the two came abreast of a dark alley opening they charged, moving as silent as twin sharks through water. Neither man put up much resistance because each one had left his coordination and reaction time back in Slap Jacks.
Without saying a word, Fong and Sage twisted the men’s arms up behind their backs and shoved them toward the dead end of the alley. There, Fong held his captive in a one-handed grip while he rapped lightly on a plain door set into the brick building’s wall. The door immediately opened to reveal a Chinese man standing on a stair landing. He silently pointed toward some descending wooden stairs.
Sage and Fong walked the men down the stairs, ignoring their grunts and squeals of pain. At the bottom was a wooden-walled storage room. It had a door opening into the larger basement beneath the building. Once the four of them shuffled across the threshold, they were in Portland’s infamous underground.
As he stepped into the dusty dark, Sage experienced no surge of fear. It had taken some time but it seemed he had left behind his childhood fear of dark, underground spaces that he acquired in the Appalachian coal mine. After spending considerable time in Portland’s underground, he’d managed to conquer his fear. Of course he wasn’t fooling himself. Merely thinking of a cave or mine set him to twitching. .
The four of them shuffled through dust so dry it raised clouds in the air. Following the lantern held aloft by their Chinese guide they quickly reached the cell. It stood in a corner with brick walls on two sides. The two other sides were bounded by closely spaced iron bars, just like those found in the city jail. Days past, crimps used the cell to imprison shanghaied men before sending them on to their doom. Last year Sage wanted to destroy the cell but Fong talked him out of it. He’d promised that his cousins would make sure no shanghaier ever used it again.
