by David Fuller
“So he’s a supporter of anarchy.”
“Not our Fidge. He supports nothing. The rosbif was born without a conscience.”
“No wonder you have to pay him. So how does it work, buying explosives?”
“I don’t go to him, I do business with his man. That’s the thing about the rich. They’re so cheap that they force their people to be disloyal. Loney likes thinking he can step up to the good life.”
“So ‘Loney’ sells it out the back door.”
“He wants a little of his own.”
“You know way too much about rich people to be an anarchist.”
“You can’t bait me.”
“No. You’re too true to the cause.”
Prophet lifted his hand, as if toasting with a wineglass. “The cause.”
“Taken to its logical conclusion, how can an anarchist pledge any cause? Don’t you want to tear it all down to random noise?”
“As I always say, ‘Anyone who makes plans for after the revolution is a reactionary.’”
Longbaugh immediately thought of the Paterson woman’s story, realized what Prophet was saying, and went with his educated guess. “You’re quoting Bakunin.”
Prophet was stung. “Oh. Ah.” And he began to cough.
Longbaugh chortled inside, bull’s-eye, then nonchalantly plucked the closest newspaper from a pile and, with Prophet twitching, walked halfway across the room, set it on a different pile, and continued on until he was leaning against the far wall.
He hadn’t seen it until that moment and was now glad he had decided to annoy the man, because otherwise he might not have noticed the olive ribbon hanging from between newspapers in one of the stacks. It was likely that Prophet was unaware of it. Longbaugh left it there, but it was good to find another crumb left on the trail.
“I don’t much like you,” said Prophet, very alert, staring at the out-of-place newspaper.
“I saved your life and didn’t ask for thanks. Why wouldn’t you like me?”
Prophet’s eyes played tennis between the rogue newspaper and its home, one foot tapping as if needing to walk.
“How did you come to the cause?” said Longbaugh.
Prophet tapped himself up to standing. “It was revealed to me.”
Prophet walked around the room, initially away from the misbehaving newspaper, a transparent tactic, until he stopped pretending and ran to it.
“Doesn’t matter who you hurt,” said Longbaugh. “As long as it’s for the cause.”
Prophet took up the newspaper. “How could it possibly matter? We live tiny, meaningless lives. We’re nothing, we’re insects.”
“If we’re insignificant, why not live and let live?”
Prophet carried it away. “If I can send the human race back to the Garden of Eden, I’ve done everyone a favor.” He arrived at its original spot and laid it tenderly on top, aligning the edges with the newspapers below. “I’ll be the serpent.”
“I heard someone say the serpent offered knowledge.” He was more convinced than ever that Prophet was a danger only to his own sanity.
“You’ll thank me when it happens.”
“I saw you with a woman,” said Longbaugh.
“What woman? Eve? We still in the garden?”
“You know the one.”
Prophet’s lips drew together coyly, almost shaping a heart. “And what if I do?”
“Impressive.”
“Smart women are drawn to powerful men.”
Longbaugh looked to see if Prophet was making a joke. He was not. Prophet wanted to be known as a ladies’ man.
“She lived here.”
“Looks to be gone now.”
“I wore her out.”
Longbaugh kept a grip on his thinning patience. “Where could a woman go after experiencing this?”
“Not curious about my plan?”
“She wounded you.”
“You got that backward.”
“The pain must be unbearable.”
“I barely knew her.”
Prophet was getting tricky, changing his story. Time to bring him back. “Oh, I think you knew her very well.”
“I knew she was naïve, but then, aren’t all women? But this one was trainable. Most are so set in their beliefs, they can’t see the truth when it’s right in front of them. But there was hope for Ethel.”
Longbaugh stopped his smile before it showed.
“Women fall in love with their teachers,” said Prophet. “I couldn’t stop her. What I could do was give her a path, change the way she looked at the world, change the way she dressed. This is the key to change, I’ll have you know, alter the outward appearance of a person and you change the way they think.”
“You’ll have me know.”
“Put a uniform on a soldier. Put the hat on a copper.”
“Put rags on a bourgeois.”
“Exactly.”
If she wore rags, it was to blend in with the neighborhood. “So maybe you did know her.”
“I said so, didn’t I?”
“Where did she go next?”
“Don’t you know?”
Longbaugh waited.
“To the rosbif,” said Prophet.
“The rich one? The Brit? Fidgy?” The moment he spoke the name aloud, he remembered where he had heard it before.
Prophet nodded.
“I hear he’s back in England,” said Longbaugh. “She go with him?”
“No.”
He fought to make his voice sound natural. “Then where?”
Prophet was suspicious. This angel had asked one too many questions about her. “Not sure. She hides.”
He made a side step. “Will you see this Fidgy when he’s back?”
“I’ll see his man.”
“When?”
“Fidgy’s a collector. He’ll be back in time for the show.”
“What show?”
“Some bourgeois art thing.”
“Fidgy. You don’t even know his real name.”
“Sydney. Sydney Fedgit-Spense.”
There it was. Queenie’s lover. Queenie had told Etta about her Englishman. But Etta wasn’t interested in him because of Queenie, there was some other reason. He put it together as bits came from every direction. SFS, the dangling fragment. Spense Co. stamped on the dynamite crates. Lillian Wald knew an arms dealer, Mr. Spense. He had assumed Etta had gone into hiding with the anarchists because Hightower got too close, but maybe there was something else, maybe she had used Prophet to get to Fidgy. Prophet knew Fidgy, Prophet got his dynamite from Fidgy, or at least Fidgy’s man.
Etta, what in the hell have you gotten yourself into?
“What?”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Yes you did, you said, ‘Etta, what the hell you got yourself into?’”
Longbaugh said nothing.
Now Prophet put things together. “You’re talking about Ethel. You’re the reason she’s hiding.”
Longbaugh bit his tongue.
“You’re after her, you want to—no, wait, you’re not Black Hand, you’re another one of her conquests, you’re in love with her. Christ, they’re falling out of the sky. I can’t believe she got to you, too, no, don’t tell me, you can’t be without her, you can’t live until you win her back.”
Prophet smiled from a place deep in the bosom of his victory. He had lucked onto Longbaugh’s soft spot. Like all unloved, bullied men, he lived for the day when he could uncover someone else’s weakness and become the bully himself.
“So you know, then, you know she was an untrustworthy cheat, only out for herself,” said Prophet. “Her plans don’t include folks like us. One look and she went to him, the big fish, not a second thought. Oh, he’ll tire of her, all right, mar
k my words, and then where will she be? Then where will she be?” Prophet paused as if he was lucky to be rid of her, as if he had finally gotten even, as if he had put her far behind him, as if he was over her completely, but he couldn’t keep it up, he couldn’t make it so that he actually believed it, and out of nowhere he burst, he exploded, he shrieked as if every hurt he had ever suffered peaked in this one woman’s betrayal:
“She made promises to me!”
His bellow was trapped and deadened between the piles of newspapers. He looked stung as he realized how completely he had exposed himself. He blinked and breathed through his mouth. But even then, to cover, he rushed to play the bully again.
“But it’s worse for you. She left you to come to me.”
Longbaugh forced a smile.
“Oh, now you have nothing to say. Now you’ve lost your voice.” Prophet sneered. “Come on, broken heart, how does it feel, knowing what happened right here? Aren’t you jealous of me?”
Longbaugh shook his head. “I can’t abide a man without a sense of humor.”
Longbaugh did not believe him, but even so, Prophet’s words cut. Longbaugh was thinking, distracted.
Prophet picked up the folded article on Leon Czolgosz, and moved closer to the door. Then Prophet had his hand on the doorknob and was outside and running, and it was too late to stop him.
Longbaugh moved to the door and saw Prophet run out of sight around the corner. He had not learned anything about Prophet’s plot. But that did not matter.
He went back in the room and took the olive ribbon from between the newspapers and put it in his pocket.
Sydney Fedgit-Spense.
17
Sydney Fedgit-Spense. The dangling initials in the fragment end of her last letter. He unfolded it while on the trolley, reviewing it for clues that might now make better sense, but despite Queenie’s having mentioned her connection to the man, Etta had put very little about SFS in her letters. He guessed that, during that time, she had yet to understand his importance. Whatever had turned her energy to him may have occurred in the last three months.
He had slept poorly the previous night in his old room at Levi and Abigail’s boardinghouse. The adrenaline from the violence in the subway was wearing off. A dull heat tested his eyes. He let them close for the smallest second, for some hope of relief.
His body was heavy, lulled by the creeping trolley rolling lurching rolling over cobblestones, cobblestones that came up, up to meet his forehead, and his subjacent mind took hold and whispered that something was wrong and he had misunderstood everything that had happened since he arrived. He was too late, to find her, to help her, to save her. She was gone, she had chosen to be gone, the trail of crumbs ran to the edge of the abyss and he was left behind, the trolley rolling, lurching. Images curled around him like curious smoke, images real and imagined, concrete and unreliable, untrue and completely, utterly believable. He was a Jonah swallowed by the city whale, aswim in gastric juice, wearing boots and Stetson, gasping for air in an empty fish tank five stories below the streets.
He clawed his way back to awake, hating the dream, touching his forehead, warm from the flat of the trolley window. Cobblestones hurried past and his mind was thick, rolling in fur.
The trolley turned at Greenwich Street, and he stepped off onto a sidewalk that rolled beneath his feet as if he was still moving. He smelled something on the wind, a change in the air. Flies were biting, rain coming. He watched the trolley roll and lurch away and something nagged, tugging his sleeve, but when he looked he saw only thread.
The darkness owned him, it spoiled the sun and held him motionless on the sidewalk. He was still there when the floppy literary editor came upon him on his way in to work. One look at Longbaugh’s eyes and he took his arm and led him indoors.
The editor guided him to an out-of-the-way office and graced him with silence. Longbaugh combed his mind for small talk, a way in to a conversation he was not ready to have. “Did you find out about that person, that, what was her name, Duncan?”
“Isadora. Truth is, I made all that up about her coming back to America just to spur my lethargic reporters. Turned out to be true.”
Longbaugh looked up. “So who’s Isadora Duncan?”
“And that is the thing, who indeed? We go on about the private lives of public people when there is real work to be done.”
Longbaugh had meant it as an actual question, as prison had left gaps in his knowledge, but, being mistaken for a wit, he let it pass.
“We make choices based on the limited knowledge we have. You never know where your choices will lead. Covering Isadora may draw certain readers but chase away others. Or perhaps we’ll get lucky and all the old solemn readers will ignore our Duncan blasphemy and the new Isadora readers will stay and be converted.”
“You believe that?”
The editor shrugged. “Precisely never.”
“Would you print the Duncan story if you had it?”
“Probably not. Not important enough. Although I shouldn’t judge. Things we believe in today may turn against us tomorrow and prove us completely wrong, all to our spectacular benefit.”
“I imagine that happened to that fellow who shot McKinley. Except for the spectacular benefit.”
“Leon Czolgosz. When our enemies are in their cups, and sometimes when they’re not, progressives are tarred with his brush, the man who traded McKinley’s tariffs for the Big Stick. How he would have hated TR, the direct result of his action. You’re the second person in a week who’s mentioned him.”
Longbaugh knew who had been the first. The editor did not remember Longbaugh had been with him when Prophet was pitching his piece. He noticed his friend’s shirttail hanging outside his trousers. Different shirt, same runaway tail. “I’m here about Sydney Fedgit-Spense.”
The floppy editor was hilariously upbeat. “You mean that filth-spewing, pus-fingered brigand, that oily, diarrheic garden slug? The man’s intestines should be unwound from his abdomen and threaded through his nostrils.”
Longbaugh smiled. “That so?”
“I know, I go too far, after all, he’s a thoroughly charming bloke, the old Brit. Why would you want to know the slightest thing about him?”
“To protect someone.”
“Now that I buy. Old Fidgy-Spense is an ordnance broker who knows his consumer. He would start a war if he could increase his profit, playing one side against the other, and he sees nothing wrong in that. Lie to the Germans that the British are building up their armaments, and you sell them rifles and grenades. Warn the Brits that the Germans just bought rifles and grenades, and sell them howitzers. The cycle doesn’t stop until they’re so incensed by the other’s stockpile that they have to use them. It’s a little bit brilliant, actually.”
“You don’t think politics has something to do with it?”
“Politics has everything to do with it, my simplistic argument is an emotional screed, an unfair overreaction to a man I dislike, but then everyone’s reacting emotionally—Austria-Hungary, France, Germany, England, Russia, the Balkans, Jesus, who am I leaving out, Japan, Belgium—anyway, nothing spices up a political disagreement like having a bomb or two in your pocket.”
“So write about him, expose him.”
“You mean if I happened to have access to a publication that would print the actual words I write? Problem is, we’re already being sued this month. Can’t advocate a new lost cause until September.”
“Then why do what you do?”
“I defy augury.” He watched Longbaugh’s expression. “No? Shakespeare? I have to stop trying to impress people.”
“I’ve been away.”
“No no, it’s me, just a tedious habit.”
“As if your future had been foretold and you would prove it not so.”
He smiled ruefully. “Doesn’t seem nearly as clever when you pu
t it like that.” He thought for a moment. “I’d like to think we’re building toward something. After Triangle, we seem to have the public on our side for the first time, starting to see workers as human beings. Even the politicians see it, with the hearings and new laws. I’d like to think that that tragedy will help make things better. People like Fidgy can never see it that way. He never looks back. I’m not sure he has a conscience.”
“Funny. That’s what Prophet said.”
“Prophet is another one. Anarchy, well . . . men like Prophet, they misunderstand change. They want to tear things down and let the chips fall where they may. I’d like to think we all want things to be better. And despite my very real desire for change, it may be best if things move slowly. Go too fast, and you don’t see the repercussions coming at you. Don’t tell Eastman I said that. Hell, don’t tell my readers.”
“Where is Fidgy now?”
“Out on the ocean coming back from Merry Olde.”
“I’ve heard him called a collector. What does that mean?”
“Art. Money. Homes. Women. It’s said he had important paintings on the Titanic and they all went down without him.”
“I grieve for his loss. I had heard he survived.”
“What does that tell you?”
“He can swim?”
“You have a festive sense of humor, sir. The order was, women and children first. Yet he survived. What does that tell you?”
Longbaugh realized it had been a rhetorical question.
“One last thing,” said Longbaugh. “I hear he’s coming back for a show.”
“The Armory Show. I have people covering it. It’s an art exhibition of new European painters. Our readers and contributors are excited to read about it.”
Longbaugh was grateful for the information, and said so. “I may need to meet him there.”
The editor wrote down the address of the 69th Regiment Armory on Lexington, then grew serious. “You seemed quite beside yourself outside.”
“Yes. It was a bad moment.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It’s better now.”
