The Daredevils

by Gary Amdahl

  Charles returned the careful, neutral regard of these three men, these three of the eight commissioners of Minnesota Public Safety, lawyers all, hard, practical, profoundly but carefully unprincipled men.

  “A good deal of authority has been invested in us,” said the vain and stately man, still not looking up from his papers. “Mr. Minot, your . . . uncle? Cousin?”

  “My father’s cousin.”

  “Whoever he is has no doubt alluded to our sanction.”

  “Oh, surely you know who—they named a town after him in North Dakota!”

  “You—what? Yes, oh yes, of course, just a—never mind that. You will need to know a little more about us. That is all I meant to say.”

  “But not much more!” the triangular man shouted, laughing in apparent good humor.

  “Mr. Minot is my father’s cousin,” Charles repeated, hoping to draw the vain but shy man’s gaze from his papers. “Not my uncle. He has a town named after him in western North Dakota.”

  And that man did so. He was not shy, but so apparently full of undirected hate that it was distracting him entirely. “Is that so?” he said. “Yes, yes, of course, didn’t I just say . . .?”

  The affable-seeming man said, “We have prepared a report for the edification of our agents, and herewith present it to you.”

  Charles was quite sure this man was the governor of the state. He knew the governor sat on the MCPS board but was surprised to see him here, now.

  “Do you know,” said the triangular man, “we never thought to ask if you can read and write, Slick!”

  “Yes, sir,” Charles said, “I can do all that.”

  “Ladies and gentlemen!” he chuckled. “The next president of the United States!”

  “I can do all that and more besides,” he said, staring first at the triangular man, then at the hateful, vain man, then at the affable-seeming man, the governor.

  “‘Do you know,’” mimicked that man, raising his eyebrows in reproach. “I don’t see where the profit is, John, in making fun of our agents. Particularly—”

  “Well,” said the triangular man, “I do, and that’s enough, isn’t it? Isn’t that what we’ve been saying here, and agreeing to so tiresomely? My guess is Slick understands me. Slick? What say?”

  He had been gesturing at Charles with his head and let one of those nods bring his face fully around to him. Charles took a moment, a stage moment, to smile, feeling it to be a great but necessary expense. “Sure I do,” he said brightly.

  “See?” asked the triangular man mock-plaintively.

  “His father,” said the affable man, “Theodore Roosevelt himself—”

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said the triangular man. “Begging your pardon, Governor, begging your pardon, Mr. Minot, sir.”

  “Not at all,” Charles said. He and the triangular man shared what seemed to be a sincere smile.

  The first man resumed his briefing, regaining his athletic kindness. “Three laws, as you know, were passed in reply to President Wilson’s call for preparedness. The first outlaws syndicalism in all its forms, and in all kinds and degrees of participation. For example, ‘interest in a subversive organization’ is now against the law. So we have a question or two about . . . about your associations in San Francisco.”

  Charles was deep in his character and did not blush. “Which associations particularly? I really have no idea what you think you know about me. Apart, of course, from nearly having been blown to pieces.”

  “The associations that result in the signs being waved about on the street in front of your theater—”

  “Before it was blown up.”

  “—insisting you weren’t an American,” said the triangular man. “Associations with people who threw the bomb at you in the theater. People who threw the bomb at the parade.”

  Charles held up his hand. The triangular man noted the raised hand and waved his own in response. “These may be people you are or were associated with in a friendly, an unfriendly way, a friendly but peripheral way, an unfriendly but peripheral way, people to whom you are antagonistic in one way or another and who find you an antagonist as well, people with whom for all intents and purposes you have no relations whatsoever but who can be associated with you in certain analyses, people with whom you are associated only because you have tried wittingly or unwittingly to destroy each other.”

  Charles kept his hand raised throughout the speech but at its close gently replaced it on the table. “That covers the waterfront,” he said. “A waterfront in which I have absolutely nothing to hide or be in any way ashamed of.”

  “I know that!” chortled the triangular man. “Jeez! You think that means we’re not supposed to ask the questions, for Pete’s sake?”

  The third man, the vain and hateful man with big silver moustaches, cleared his throat. “We can, for another instance, shut a newspaper down.”

  Charles appeared to lose his patience: “Yes, yes, yes, you could do that several years ago. A fellow can wonder if the chief of police is a blustering pomaded halfwit—and be packed off to prison for it. What are you crowing about now, you blustering pomaded halfwit?”

  Triangle laughed. Vain blustered. Governor smiled.

  “The second law,” said Governor while Vain dabbed at his lips with a handkerchief, “requires aliens to register with us. This is due, as I am sure you suspect, to the high percentage of aliens in the ranks of the subversive. The third law creates us.”

  “Though of course we were already here,” said Triangle.

  Charles nodded at him and Triangle winked.

  “The whole time,” said Charles in the spirit of the wink. “All along.”

  “It gives us,” continued Vain with forced and comical austerity, “a budget, sole discretion over that budget, and dominion over the first two laws. We can require people to appear before us, as in a court, and, well, just generally, in layman’s terms, do all the kinds of things a court would do to them. We are a public safety commission, and that says it all. We have counterparts in every state of the union. Though it must be said, nowhere with quite the, uh, quite the . . .”

  “Say it!” said Triangle. “Power! I can’t stand this coyness about our authority. We have got what we need and that’s all that need be said about it. To blanch at a word with all we’ve got to accomplish . . .!”

  “He is not blanching at words, John!” shouted Governor. “Look how red and wet his mouth is!”

  “All right now,” said Vain, suddenly tranquil. “I’m sure I do not much care when playboys shout abuse at me. This particular playboy was the target of anarchist bombers so I am willing to ignore most of what he feels compelled to say, for the sake of bringing him on board as we have already decided to do, for many good reasons that have nothing to do with his reckless manner. The main point here and now is that there’s a lot of flexibility in these laws. There’s a lot of vagueness in them, frankly, and that means flexibility for our agents and the administrators who direct them or who report the actions of agents to us—to the commission’s secretaries, rather. Which is where we see you working, Charles.”

  All three men looked at him, and he nodded with a show of interest in his eyes.

  “Theoretically, we can get tripped up any number of ways if something serious comes howling out of the, uh, the traitorous hinterlands, if you will, into the courts, but we are not, Charles, thinking in the long term, if you follow.”

  They all looked at him again. This time he remained impassive. No eye work.

  “We’ve got room for fancy footwork here and there, and by fancy footwork I mean big boots coming down hard. We can take care of business now, and when the war is over, we will have done our best, done our part. The courts can then strike down this, strike down that, water down this provision, reduce the scope of that—be as liberal and half-hearted as they like, but it won’t matter. We will have done the hard part. It’s what we’ve been asked to do, and I am confident we will succeed. I’m sure you understand, Charles.
”

  All three regarded him a third time, and he remained, to his own surprised dismay, impassive. Why not pretend to share the enthusiasm? He could not help but stare at hateful silvery Vain, but did not reflect his hatred back at him.

  “You’re a fart smeller,” said Triangle. “Isn’t that right? I mean, smart feller, sorry.”

  “I’d rather not say,” Charles said, taking recourse in breezy irony.

  Triangle laughed. “So there’s really only one thing I need to know before we stamp this application A-OK. And that is, can a smartass like you mix with stupid people?” He smiled at Vain: “A smartass playboy?”

  “I may,” Charles said warmly but firmly, “have bantered amusingly with the president when I was barely old enough to speak—the colonel loved that kind of repartee especially, as his youngest son Quentin was gifted in that way too—and my father may once upon a time have had very great ambitions for me, and I may be here because influential people think this is an important step for me whatever and wherever the end may be, but I am, honestly, a playboy. I’m a spoiled rich kid and my desire is to produce avant-garde theater and musical compositions. I’d also like to race motorcycles—which should go a long way toward explaining my presence in that shop, you have surely remarked already—maybe invest in a banked board track and fix races for the benefit of myself and select friends. That’s a popular sport, motorcycle racing. Stupid people love it. Dirty and dangerous. And what’s more, to answer your question directly and candidly, I like stupid people.”

  “Ah, I like this guy,” said Triangle with a broad beaming smile and cheerful light in his eyes.

  “We are unclear about proceedings against the bombers, and we are told you may enlighten us,” said Vain.

  Charles reached into his coat pocket. “Assuming it didn’t get too wet to read . . . I, yes, here, let me see if any of this is news to you. One year ago, Mr. Thomas Moody, aka Owl, a known motorcyclist and frequenter of the Beveridge shop in San Francisco’s North Beach or Latin Quarter neighborhood—where I too, as you have noted, was seen and heard to engage in spirited discussions—as well as an openly declared Wobbly, cleared the last of three trials revolving around the bombing of a Pacific Gas and Electric tower in the San Bruno hills outside the city. That is to say, briefly, that he was found not guilty due to a lack of evidence. Citing ‘triple jeopardy,’ Moody went to ground. He assumed disguises, gentlemen, and laid low. In the spring of last year, he was arrested in Martinez, California. A skiff he had been sailing inexpertly in the Carquinez Strait had run aground. He said he had been fishing but the skiff was found to hold the following articles: a .30-30 Winchester rifle with a Maxim silencer and one box of cartridges, a .38-caliber automatic Colt revolver and ammunition, a twelve-gauge shotgun with its barrels painted aluminum and a box of shells loaded with buckshot, thirteen dry-cell batteries connected in series and soldered to an alarm clock, a five-hundred-foot spool of wire, fourteen electric exploders or caps, containing fulminate of mercury and attached at regular intervals to the wire, assorted tools, and a pair of gloves. There was, however, no dynamite in the skiff. Neither was there guncotton or nitroglycerin. Without the last three ingredients, if you will, there was no bomb and no case. However! After the bombing of my theater, an investigation commenced that paid most of its attention to those people who frequented the motorcycle shop. My father had been informed of my proximity to that place and these investigations, but chose not to inform me. His motives are frankly unclear to me, but I am always grateful when my father forbears. Two of the people who received special scrutiny in the shop were Warren Farnsworth, a known collaborator of Moody’s, and Vera Kolessina, who operated a press located in the basement of the shop that printed several radical newspapers, including the infamous Blast, edited by the even more infamous Alexander Berkman. Miss Kolessina, for reasons that are as unclear to me as the motives were of my father, was a member of my acting company. It was believed that she was ‘having an affair’ with me. This is not true. It is, however, quite true that I wished to ‘have an affair’ with her. I like Miss Kolessina. I admire in her many qualities that I choose not to elaborate here. I find it hard to believe that she is in truth involved in these bombings in which she is implicated. That she has not been charged, or even arrested, I should point out, attests to her genuine and impregnable innocence. The glaring light of the investigation would surely have revealed a telling detail by now. However! Because I am a true believer, along with my father and my older brothers—not to mention my sister and her husband, who, as you know, advises President Wilson—in progressive reforms, and, most emphatically, a citizen who loathes with every fiber of his being that Russian and German sort of radical militancy, that terrorism that finds its expression in murder, in mass murder, in the violent hatred of violent hatred, in the taking up as a cause the killing of those who have been chosen as the ones who must be hated and killed, who have come to think of the cause as killing rather than any improvement of conditions that provoke hatred and the desire to kill—which is specious at the outset: a desire to kill?—because I am a true believer in American democracy as a philosophical ideal and its institutions as practical realizations of same, and because I hope to continue to play some role in that practice, I have tried and am happy to say succeeded in persuading Miss Kolessina to help me help you to help the president here in Minnesota, to root out disloyalty and sedition and the sources of corruption and terror, by doing what we have learned, in our little histrionic way, to do best: assume disguises and infiltrate the realities of people who do not suspect us for what we are. Specifically the Equity Cooperative Exchange and the Nonpartisan League, and by extension, the Socialists.”

  Vera and Charles sat in a windowless room about as big as a sleeping berth in a railcar, stood on its end (for the ceiling was very high); what little space there was to move around in was taken up by filing cabinets and boxes, from which paper spilled like water. If you bumped into something, paper sloshed about you. A stack of newspapers had risen perilously close to the gas lamp on the wall. Charles guessed it was mildew that he smelled. The man on the other side of the tiny desk—on which he had cleared something like a tunnel through which he might address them—was a representative of the Nonpartisan League, an organization founded in North Dakota, where they’d had spectacular success, winning control of the state legislature, but were now running afoul of businessmen seizing the opportunity of the war to assert “preparedness” and holler “sedition.” He was outlining their grievances, which Vera jotted down on an IWW notepad.

  Charles brought her wherever he went as a supervisor for the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety, claiming she was his secretary, for no other reason than he wanted to see what would happen if anybody someday happened to identify her as the Vera Kolessina who had been implicated in the Preparedness Day bombing in San Francisco and other assorted murders. He was ready to say he had “turned” her, that she was no longer “an anarchist” and wanted only to help the state save the lives of innocent people. She was in fact “known,” by persons such as this man from the NPL, to be representing the Chicago Wobblies, and this made some interviewees uneasy: he, for instance, had been dealing with Detroit Wobblies, but Detroit Wobblies, Vera assured him, had sticks up their asses. “They say you Chicago people are grandstanders,” said the NPL man. “The Detroit people say that,” said Vera, “precisely because they have those sticks up their asses. If you want to play chess, go to Detroit. If you want to get out of the mess you’re in, talk to me.”

  The man looked nervously at Charles. He was there, they told him—and “believed it” themselves as well—as a secret agent. He wasn’t really there. He was really and truly working for the Minnesota Commission of Public Safety and the Chicago IWW, who really and truly had no quarrel with each other, at least while the war was on. He would be inside, privy to any plans regarding the NPL—which was just more evidence that Chicago wasn’t fooling around while Detroit was complaining that their coffe
e was always served lukewarm. He was an extraordinarily influential person, despite his youth. There was a town named after him in North Dakota, and he knew Teddy Roosevelt. He might someday be president of the United States! Crazier things had happened. And his sympathies were with working people. He was doing real work, field work, because it was believed it was time, just as it had been time for Henry V, to be awakened and despise his former dreams. There was hope in certain quarters that the United States might be presided over by—he mock-stumbled here, over how to characterize his sham self—by someone like, like, say, Marcus Aurelius.

  The NPL man sat back in his chair and blew his cheeks out. He looked back and forth at Vera and Charles for a while—not with incredulity or suspicion or irritation, but as if it were all just then becoming too much to bear. Then he seemed to give up, or to come to terms with it.

  “Why is it,” he asked, drawing his great thick eyebrows together, “that a single company can control line elevators, terminal elevators, commission houses and mills, have tidy arrangements with the railroads and tell a farmer how much he will get for his produce?”

  He was the kind of salesman who seemed to want answers to rhetorical questions, so Charles said he didn’t know, at least in specific terms, and neither did Vera, who nodded.

  “Tell me,” he continued, “where else a consumer tells a producer what the price of the product will be! Tell me why a farmer can’t tell the railroads how much he’ll pay to get his wheat to Minneapolis. Tell me why there are no terminal elevators in the entire state of North Dakota. Tell me why it is—” he waved off Charles’s reply, “—why it is that of all the farms in North Dakota in the year 1890—” he consulted his figures, “—6.9 percent of them were operated by tenant farmers, in 1900 8.5 percent, and in 1910 nearly double that. Tell me why every newspaper in the country will run stories with huge headlines of how ‘European’ orders for two million bushels of wheat have suddenly and mysteriously been cancelled, driving the market into a crash, and not a one of them will run the story that states unequivocally that the first story was a goddamn hoax! Tell me why the price of a bushel of wheat always drops at harvest time and rises once the millers own it. Tell me why we are supposed to believe that ‘our leading citizens’ would never ‘stoop so low as to use false weights’ at their elevators, while farmers will lie, slander, cheat, steal—even murder, I suppose!—to continue their profligate lifestyles, anything to continue to live like the corrupt prairie barons they are denounced as. Can you? Tell me?”