The bombers, now a quarter mile away and nearing quickly, were in the sage, righting a plunger box.
“My God, man!” yelled the engineer. “We must stop!”
McParland slapped his hand three times on the outside of the cab. Immediately, automatic gunfire erupted overhead—concussive, deafening metallic cracks rattling the roof, drowning the engine’s roar—hot shell casings raining past Larson’s window. The would-be saboteurs disappeared in a storm of dirt. Then the train thundered over the bundle of dynamite and McParland leaned out to see up over the cab, giving a thumbs-up to the two National Guardsmen up there, both sitting next to the Maxim Machine Gun. Back inside the cab, Larson and the two boilermen were chuckling nervously, stunned at what had just happened. The engineer sat on his raised chair, his face ashen, staring blankly at McParland.
***
Hours later, after switching engines yet again, they passed a border sign for the State of Idaho—the word “State” bearing evidence of an effort to change it to “Republic.” McParland toasted with his men in the Pullman.
“Give me a glass, and I’ll join you,” said Haywood.
McParland turned, eyebrows peaked. “Sporting of you.”
After an extra glass of champagne was brought, Haywood lifted it toward the detective. “To your unexpected success.”
“It required some casualties, from your side,” said McParland.
“Did it?”
“You had your people stir up agitators. A few tried to stop us.”
“I did?” asked Haywood. “I’ve been right here.” He reached for a cigar and received McParland’s reticent nod.
“You’re responsible, all the same.”
“They weren’t the first to die for the worker’s cause.”
“Nor the last,” added McParland.
Haywood squared on the detective. “Your men up there— What was that but an illegal firing squad? You slaughtered them. No trial. In the name of the law? Come now.” He lit his cigar.
“If they’d blown the track, might’ve killed us all. You as well.”
“So, you did as you believed necessary. Like this kidnapping.”
“I’m executing an extradition order and warrant, signed by the chief justice of Colorado,” said McParland, packing his pipe. “I showed it to you last night.” He then lit the bowl.
“What that must have cost.”
“Not as much as you wish it had.”
Haywood flapped his hand. “Maybe not the Colorado one, but the U.S. Supreme Court will send me back.”
“Oh? You have friends on the high court?” parried McParland.
“The law is the law. You’ll see.”
“The law is the law,” repeated McParland, pondering the phrase. “You did what you did. I’m doing what I’m doing. The damn lawyers will do what they will.”
Haywood tilted his glass toward McParland. “Damn lawyers.”
McParland scoffed, glass raised. “At least you have a good one.”
“He’s a potency,” said Haywood. “Have you heard him in court?”
“No, but I’m looking forward to it.” McParland smiled.
Haywood shrugged. “He’s certainly expensive.”
“I wonder if your miners know.”
“Know what?” asked Haywood.
“That their hard-earned dues pay for you to be defended by the most expensive attorney in the nation.”
“Who do you mean?” blurted Haywood. “My men? Men who voluntarily pay those dues? Men whose lives I’ve bettered tenfold? Whose friends and sons I’ve paid to bury? Those men? Yes, they know, Jim, and they want no different. They want me defended by Clarence Darrow.”
McParland sat back in his chair, pleased at Haywood’s defensive response. “Then … bravo, Bill. We’ll just have to see.”
Haywood blew a blue cloud into the space between them, then held two fingers toward the detective. “You need two witnesses.”
“I have one already.”
“Perhaps. If Harry’s alive come trial.”
“Why wouldn’t he be?”
Haywood shrugged. “You tried once already. Maybe you’ll do it again. But next time, maybe your man won’t miss.”
That landed on McParland—the knowledge, the betrayal. “Nothing of the sort,” he said in a quiet monotone that shouted his disdain.
“It was risky, but it worked,” Haywood continued. “Scared the piss out of Harry, obviously.”
“What did you think of his confession?”
“The imaginations of an imbecile,” groused Haywood. “Harry Orchard is nothing. And his made-up theories mean nothing. There’s not a word of truth in him. No jury will ever believe him. You’ve put all your chips on him, the simpleton, meaning you’ve got yourself good and rightly fucked, Detective.”
McParland reflexively lifted his forehead’s gray bushes. “You’re worried,” he observed. “As you should be.”
“I assure you, Jim, your days are less than mine,” said Haywood, shaking his head. “You must realize, you’ll never relax, never enjoy your life again, never retire into the comfort of your final years. Not after this. Regardless of what does or doesn’t happen to me in Boise, thousands of good men—truly thousands—are ready to wreak my revenge. You can bet on it.”
McParland snorted a stoic chuckle. “You know, Mr. Haywood, it’s unfortunate I’m not a wagering man. My wife, Mary, fine woman, she has a six-gabled house picked out for us. Six gables, can you believe it?” He took a draw from his pipe and continued, “If I were to wager, it’d be on you hanging. And if I did, then my old girl Mary would get her house—all six gables. My, my, what these women want.” He paused, counting to four before sinking his poisoned knife. “What does your wife want? Winnie, right? Oh, pardon me—Neva is your wife. Neva’s the one who telephoned me. Mailed me a map she drew of your floors there in the Pioneer. Even marked where you post your guards each night. I hadn’t asked for that—seeing how we already knew it—but it was thoughtful of her. I think she hopes to see you dead more than any of the rest of us do. Like I said: My, my … what these women want.”
Haywood tried to bore his dead eye into the detective, but he couldn’t sustain it. Rather, he glanced away, spluttering, looking as if he had been knocked from his feet by a horse.
<><><>
– 40 –
SATURDAY
March 16, 1907
Carla stood in the Boise depot. It was 1:15 a.m., and the night’s drizzle coursed a chill through the station, encircling the people, slipping among them like a whispered premonition, sulking the place in. She was pensive and alert, standing under the electric lamps in an unremarkable coat and lesser hat, hoping to remain unnoticed. The crowd was murmuring, the air draped in anxiety, prickling with anticipation. The train would arrive soon, carrying the enemy/hero of the people. The telegraph office had been deluged with the news, and it seemed half of Boise had awakened to be there, to see the Federation prisoner/torchbearer, Big Bill Haywood, and the venerated/loathed Pinkerton who captured him, Chief Detective James McParland.
She too was juxtaposed—gloomily elated, feeling little but aware of everything, free strands in a tight braid of disheveled hair. She had grown disgusted by Bill Haywood, yet she still found him enigmatic, even mesmerizing. She wished she didn’t, but she did. Now, with Jack’s departure, she had decided to be done with it all—to walk away from the Federation, to refuse any further requests. But then came news of Haywood’s arrest, of his being transported to Boise. He was coming to where she was, to where she had played a conspirator’s part. How small or large, she wasn’t sure. Certainly she had interfered, had helped muddy the investigation of an assassination. And she had recruited at least one agent, so far, to double-cross the Pinkertons. No denial would be worth the admission. She had acted for Haywood—no, for her father and brothe
r. In the shadows of that light, she judged herself—for her deceptions, for giving her body to Wade Farrington, for the lies she told. Even for killing Wade. In an instant, she felt the gun’s grip, the kick, the blood, the crash, the crack—the staggering incessancy of that singular, horrid moment. The crushing liberation of it all.
***
The Capone family arrived at Ellis Island in 1881, after voyaging from Catania, Sicily. During the crossing, Carla’s would-have-been-older sister died. The next year, in a tiny bedroom of a crowded red-brick building in the Mulberry Bend area of lower Manhattan, Carlotta Angelica Capone was born, joining her two older brothers. Hers would be the last birth in the family—primarily because of her father’s struggles to provide. According to her mother, it was due to his Slavic looks that New York’s Italian labor force had not welcomed him. He tried his hand as a fishmonger—only to be run out by the Irish. Then as a carpenter—but was dissuaded by the Orthodox Russians. Eventually he did join his fellow Italians in Brooklyn as a stevedore. Then Carla’s paternal uncle arrived in Brooklyn from Sicily, and soon she and her brothers had cousins to play with, kids with names such as Franky, Vincenzo, Ermina, Umberto, and Alphonse Capone.
That was where the story of her immediate family went thin. One day they left New York. That’s all she knew. They boarded a train to St. Louis where they lived for a year, during which time tuberculosis took one of her brothers. They next moved to Denver, then up to Fort Collins for nine months, and then down to the Cripple Creek mining community where her father heard work was plentiful at the Victor Gold Mine. Most mornings, her father and remaining brother would trudge to the mine, with Carla’s mother watching them go. Carla could still hear her mother praying, and calling to them, admonishing them to be safe—and, beneath that, the soft clicking of her mother’s rough hands thumbing a rosary. Twelve hours later, her mother would watch, pray and thumb the rosary again, awaiting their return. Her mother’s daily recitation of the same prayers and admonitions reminded Carla of a sorceress casting a spell of protection on the men. But not a good witch, like Glinda of Oz. No, her mother knew plenty of curses too, including a few special ones she saved for Carla.
After a wage uprising, her father shifted to the nearby Stratton Independence Mine, also a gold mine, and joined the Western Federation of Miners, alongside Irishmen, Russians, Germans, Poles, even blacks, and he told Carla that though the work was grueling, he had never felt so welcome. She loved those stories, seeing him happy. She remembered his praises of the Federation and its rising leader, Big Bill Haywood, the man who fought more than any other for eight-hour work days, against child labor, and who made it possible for her parents to afford a house, food at fair prices, and even a doctor’s services. A particular memory was the afternoon in a market when her mother slapped a woman who had mouthed something derogatory about the Federation. Thankfully a clerk pulled her mother away before any real damage occurred. That night, when Carla told her father about it, he laughed so hard that she worried he might laugh himself ill.
A few years later, after the Federation blew up the Cripple Creek depot in revenge for strike breakers, her father fell silent about Haywood. But Carla never felt he had changed his opinion of the labor union’s leader, only that he wouldn’t talk about him. Then, hearing a fellow named Captain Swain of the Thiel Detective Agency sought miners to become investigative agents, her father quietly moved the family to Spokane, Washington. But that promised work was short-lived for reasons she never understood.
She was in her teens by then, enjoying life, with multiple boyfriends, attending school, and running with an unpredictable girl named Winnie Minor. Then her father announced they were returning to Cripple Creek, Colorado, as he had been offered a foreman position back at the Stratton. Carla refused to go, hoping that might persuade her father to stay. But it didn’t. Instead, he and her brother left, while she and her mother stayed in Spokane. Months passed. Her mother grew remote. Her friend Winnie moved to Denver to live with Winnie’s polio-stricken sister, Neva. Carla turned to smuggled alcohol and sinful boys.
Then came the blackest memory, the blackest day, the blackest telegram: the Stratton lift had collapsed, killing fifteen, including her father and brother. Carla was distraught, flattened, pierced by guilt. Her mother screamed at her: Carla was to blame. Of course she was. Had her mother been there, at the Stratton that morning, she would have seen the pair off with prayers, preventing this tragedy. But they had not been there. Why? Because of Carla’s selfish need to stay in Spokane, that was why. Carla then screamed at her mother—screams that had yet to end. What had her mother done that angered God so much that He wouldn’t answer her mother’s prayers for protection unless her mother was physically there, watching the men go? No, Carla had shouted, the fault was all her mother’s—for being such a hateful witch, hated by God.
They traveled by rail, miserable and numb—a laconic passage to retrieve their men. Upon arrival in Cripple Creek, they learned that the mine’s owners had refused anyone entrance to the Stratton. The corpses were to stay where they had fallen, in the water, over a thousand feet below. In response, a force of thirty-seven armed Federation men rode in, demanding access to the destroyed shaft. If demanding wasn’t sufficient, Haywood had ordered them to use force, to do whatever they must to gain access and recover the bodies. Carla left her mother and joined the crowds, her heart pounding with pride at the union’s strength. But then twenty-one armed Pinkertons, along with a cadre of Colorado National Guard soldiers with three Gatling machine guns, arrived. That was it. No one was getting in. The dead would stay where they lay.
Carla and her mother returned to Spokane, empty. A week later they learned that political pressure had forced the owners to allow the Federation men to enter. Infuriated with the owners’ callousness, Haywood had ordered that only the bodies of union men should be recovered and buried. If the owners wished to get the non-union men out, they could. But Haywood knew they wouldn’t. The non-union men would remain deep in the wreckage of their master’s doing.
Upon learning what had occurred, that the bodies had been buried, Carla’s mother imploded. Yet again, she had not been there, had not prayed over the bodies of her husband and son. And she never would. But this time the blame was not cast upon Carla, but rather upon everyone, everything, all creation. And this time, for the first time, Carla cared. But it was too late. Her mother exiled herself from the world, refusing to speak. Then, two weeks later, Carla came home to find her mother gone. She later learned (from a Spokane ticket agent) that her mother had left for good. She had gone back to New York. No letter. No explanation. No goodbye. Carla was alone.
Next came the rage and guilt, and Carla reached for the salves she knew: sex, spirits, and self-pity—usually all at once. But nothing worked for long. Nothing was enough. She wallowed and then sank, spun stories and drank, and found herself spiraling downward.
She knew she needed traction—something her father had told her: When you’re slipping Squirrel, find traction. If you can’t find it, make it. After a few months, she did. She steeled her mind, gritted her teeth, and required herself to stand. She would fight back. She would join the army of the labor union. She would revenge her father and brother. She would forget her mother.
So she moved to Denver where Winnie introduced her to Haywood—leading to her pledging herself to the Federation. Then she worked for the Federation’s attorney, Clarence Darrow—a man she greatly admired—the man who had fought for her father and brother in court. Then came her reassignment to Boise, which eventually led to this moment at this depot on this night, awaiting what would come next.
***
She held her small hands in tight fists as the train’s whistle screeched, bell clanging, steam blowing from its cylinders as the engine rolled past and stopped. Four soldiers disembarked, taking positions along the edge of the wet platform, facing the crowd, rifles angling across their chests in both hands. Then came
a few men from the front car, and then a few more. And that was all. The truth set in: Haywood and McParland were not on board. She turned and hurried out, stepping into the dark drizzle.
***
In fact, the McParland Special had stopped at the last of the Cassidy stations, located five miles east of Boise. There, McParland, Haywood, and many of the men disembarked in the rain to waiting horse-drawn coaches. The purpose of this remote transfer was to confound any vigilante rescue attempt that may be lying in wait at the Boise depot, and to facilitate a safe, uneventful transfer of the prisoner to his new home. Fifteen minutes later, as the train was screeching to a stop in front of Carla, muddy hooves and wheels were slowing at the main gate of the Idaho State Penitentiary. McParland stepped down from one of the coaches, followed by Haywood—wrists shackled, ankles hobble-chained.
<><><>
– 41 –
SUNDAY
March 17, 1907
Jack and Iain were on horseback, riding with a guide into the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range. They were following an idea based one quarter on tip, three quarters on guess. Stan Polk had left California a week prior, taking his brother’s body home to Cleveland. McParland had wired, instructing the two vanguard Pinkertons (the two who had arrived in San Francisco ahead of Jack, Iain, and the Polk brothers) to keep watch at the bay’s depots and docks until they received word that Adams had been caught. That left Jack and Iain in the wilderness, pursuing a phantom.
The tip they were following originated from a dusky, uncombed woman who had spent two tanked-up nights with Adams in the Sacramento whorehouse where Jack and Iain had tracked him (after chasing a series of aggravatingly vaporous sightings). Apparently, Adams had prattled on to the prostitute about how he was the only sombitch still standing who knew the whereabouts of a thousand dollars of gold buried in the gut of a dead Chinaman. Though she thought Adams cracked—another empty man repeating an empty story about never-to-be-found treasure—she had given him a couple of free goes on the chance he might be the one person who spoke true. But all she got were more crabs to make merry with her others, and something about the gut-rich coolie dying in a blue tent. When she had laughed at Adams, saying “who’d ever heard of no blue tent,” he had struck her. That’s all she knew.
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