by Troy Soos
That wasn’t a problem at this restaurant, nor for the others that were sprouting up in the area. It was the music that brought people. A new music, called jazz, that was quickly winning converts from those like myself who used to be ragtime fans.
The band, which according to the name painted on the bass drum was King Carter’s Dixieland Jazz Band, consisted of five colored musicians in white dress clothes. They started warming up and I said to Karl, “You’re going to like this. They’re from New Orleans. A lot of musicians have been coming up from New Orleans lately.”
“The Navy closed down Storyville,” he said.
“What’s Storyville?”
“Red light district in New Orleans. Jazz and whorehouses. I heard a lot of sailors complain about it being shut down. And, actually, I like opera.”
“Oh.” I’d never known that about him. The band started to play, with a wailing cornet and a pulsating piano. “Well, then I’m going to like it.”
The waiter came by and our empty plates and coffee cups vanished. The mugs then reappeared just as quickly, freshly filled.
After a couple of tunes, which Landfors seemed to enjoy well enough, I said, “There’s another reason I’m not bothering about Weeghman’s problem. I’m trying to find out who killed Willie Kaiser.”
He smiled wryly. “Why doesn’t that surprise me?”
Through the rest of the band’s set, we talked about Willie’s death. It was just like old times. I told him about the way Willie had died, about Edna and her mother, that I figured the shot had come from across the street, and everything else that I’d found out or suspected.
While we talked, couples started dancing. They were dressed in the latest fashion, which is to say drab. With German dyes no longer available, colors were duller, mostly hues of brown and gray. And there were fewer styles to choose from, so the dresses looked like uniforms. War-time economy had one positive effect on the ladies’ clothes though: skirts were shorter to save cloth and shoes were lower to save leather, thereby leaving a nice expanse of exposed leg all the way from ankle to mid-calf.
“Why don’t you get the autopsy report?” Landfors asked.
“Yeah, why not. And how do I do that?”
He laughed. “Let me see what I can do about it. I need to get back into things anyway. Might take me a while though. I don’t have a lot of contacts in this town. I’ll try to get the police report, too.”
“Thanks Karl.”
“What about this?” he said. “Could your friend getting shot be part of that sabotage you were talking about?”
I shook my head. “No, I thought about that. But it doesn’t fit the pattern. The other stuff was minor—sawing seats, smoke bombs. More like pranks. Big difference between pretzels and murder. It doesn’t fit.”
“Hmm. Makes sense.”
I changed the topic. “What was her name?”
He didn’t have to ask who I meant. “Aileen.”
“How’d you meet her?”
“She worked for the Red Cross.” He then turned the questioning around on me. “So, this Edna, is she your latest?”
“No.”
“You’re trying to find who killed her brother. You sure she isn’t the reason you’re doing that?”
“No. And not to avenge a friend, either,” I confessed. In one long swallow, I downed the rest of my “coffee.” “I’m doing it because whoever killed Willie killed the one thing that was fun about this season. Turning a double play with Willie Kaiser was perfect. The kind of perfect you can’t get by yourself. Like when you know somebody so well, you start a sentence—”
“And the other one finishes it.” Landfors smiled.
Jeez, I was glad to see him again. “That’s it. And when Willie was killed, that little bit of perfection in my life was killed, too.”
Maybe that’s why I’d been feeling so strange about Edna lately. I wasn’t doing this for her or for her mother or for Willie. I was doing it for me.
Edna. Damn. I was supposed to take her to the movies tonight.
Chapter Ten
I didn’t know much about my new job or what exactly was expected of me, but I was pretty sure that setting the place on fire wasn’t the way for me to make a good first impression.
I ran a metal rake through the peach stones in the hope of quenching the flames. They died down briefly, then flickered up again and were soon blazing.
This should have been a simple assignment. So said the supervisor who spent a full two minutes explaining the task before leaving me on my own. All I had to do was shovel the pits into a wire mesh tray, slide the tray into a furnace similar to a pizza oven, and rake through the pits periodically as they slowly burned to charcoal. That was it. Simple enough even for baseball players like Willie Kaiser or Mickey Rawlings to do.
The problem was that the flames kept flaring too intensely. They licked at the open front of the furnace and sent tight coils of black smoke spiraling up to the ceiling. The concrete block building, which had a high roof and a disproportionately small floor area, was of recent construction but poorly ventilated. There was only one door in the place and no windows.
I turned away from the furnace and looked through the smoky haze to see if I could spot the supervisor.
About twenty other employees of the Dearborn Fuel Company were hard at work. They were all dressed in baggy olive-green coveralls, and many wore goggles or masks as protection from the soot and cinders being spit out of their own furnaces and ovens. I couldn’t identify any of them as the supervisor.
This was my first day of work. Night, really—I was on an eight-to-midnight shift. And if I didn’t get the fire under control, it could be my last.
The worker at the station next to mine had his back to me. He was using a cutting torch on an elaborate old piece of boiler equipment that had copper pipes twisting in and out of it. The torch was in one gloved hand; the other held the tin handle of a protective shield that he kept pressed to his face. The face shield, which looked like the device my aunt used for viewing stereoscopic photographs, had dark glass set in it for the man to see through. A striped brakeman’s cap was on his head, with the visor turned backward like a catcher’s.
I didn’t want to tap him on the shoulder—instinct told me that’s not the thing to do to somebody holding a blowtorch. “Excuse me,” I said, quietly enough to avoid drawing attention from the others but hoping it was loud enough for him to hear over the hissing of the torch.
No response.
I glanced back at my oven. The flames were roaring brighter. I yelled louder at the fellow, “Hello!” I followed up with a light tap on his back and quickly stepped away in case he spun around.
He turned a knob on his torch, reducing the flame to the size of a candle’s, then turned and faced me through impenetrable slate gray glass. “What?”
I pointed to the furnace. “I think it’s burning. I don’t know how to stop it.”
The face shield came down. “It’s a fire. It’s supposed to burn.”
I took a closer look at the man. It took a minute for me to realize that it wasn’t the face of a man. This was a woman.
He—she—put her torch and shield on a small workbench and stepped over to my furnace. “Not this hot though.” Her voice was low-pitched and rough. “You got to cut back on the gas.” She turned a valve on the side of the apparatus. “Low heat is what you want. Otherwise you get ash instead of charcoal.” The flames soon retreated from the oven door.
A woman, dressed like a man, working in a factory, doing a man’s work—using a blowtorch of all things.
She tugged off her leather gloves and removed her cap. With a red handkerchief, she wiped her brow. There wasn’t a trace of femininity in her appearance: dark eyes were deeply set above a pug nose; coarse short dark hair twisted in a dozen directions. I was no better at determining women’s ages than I was at deducing anything else about them, and the masculine clothes made it tougher, but I put her age at about thirty.
&nbs
p; “What are you staring at?” she demanded sharply.
“Uh—no—I wasn’t...”
With a snort she went back to her work station. The baggy clothing hid her figure, but I guessed her height to be an inch or two taller than Edna’s and her build a little broader. Before resuming work, she reached into a deep pocket of her coveralls and pulled out a sack of tobacco and a package of cigarette paper. She tugged the drawstring open with her teeth, deftly rolled a cigarette, stuck it between her thick lips, and used her torch to light it.
A woman, dressed like a man, working in a factory, who smokes cigarettes.
After I recovered somewhat from the series of shocks, I stepped over to her. “Thanks for the help,” I said. “I wasn’t sure what to do.”
She sucked hard at the cigarette.
I extended my hand. “My name’s Mickey Rawlings.”
A stream of smoke was exhaled into my face.
My lungs halted in mid-breath, but I didn’t blink.
After pulling her cap back on, she finally said, “Agnes O’Doul,” and gripped my hand in a firm shake.
“Nice to meet you Miss O’Doul.”
Agnes O’Doul looked taken aback. After another drag on the cigarette, she removed it from her lips and blew the smoke to the side. “Call me Aggie.”
“they! It ain’t break time!” The belligerent voice came from a man with the size and bearing of a bantam rooster. He was dressed the same as us, except for a leather aviator’s helmet pulled tight on his skull. He also had a nightstick that he waved at us with the same enthusiasm as Mike the Cop chasing kids from Wolfram Street. “Get back to work,” he ordered.
Agnes flicked her half-smoked cigarette on the concrete floor. She ground it out with her heel while she stared angrily at him. I had no doubt she was pretending the butt was his face.
The man had bulging eyes, a beak of a nose, and an upturned chin. The tip of his nose and the point of his chin looked like pincers struggling to meet in front of his small mouth. His head looked more like that of an insect than a human being.
He poked me on the chest with his stick. “If you think you get some kind of special privileges just ’cause you’re of one Harrington’s Cubbies, you got another think coming.”
I grabbed the end of his stick and yanked it down. “I don’t expect nothing.”
He pulled the club from my grip and wound back to swing. Then he held up and a smile crept over his face. A smiling wasp. “Good,” he said, apparently having decided to declare victory instead of fight. “Get back to work.”
Agnes donned her gloves and picked up her torch.
I picked up my rake and stirred the peach stones in the oven. They glowed dull red now, without burning.
With a satisfied look, Waspface turned and walked away, twirling his billy club by its leather thong.
I put down the rake. As Agnes was about to open up the flame on her torch, I asked her, “He the foreman or something?” He wasn’t the same supervisor I’d met earlier.
“Something,” she grunted. “He’s Curly Neeman. A rat turd.” With that explanation, she twisted the knob on her torch until the flame burned blue and went back to work.
I returned to my job also and soon got the hang of it. I even started to feel I was doing something important: helping to keep doughboys’ lungs from being seared by chlorine gas.
My task was but one in a long process. It started with thousands of housewives all over the country who’d saved tens of thousands of peach pits and brought them to government collection sites. In another building of the Dearborn Fuel Company, the pits were cracked open to remove the kernels inside, and the shells were dumped in the bin next to my oven. After I’d cooked the peach stones into charcoal—the usual result no matter what I attempted to cook—the charred shells were brought to yet another building, where they were crushed and put into filter cans. The cans would then be shipped to France, where they would be attached to gas masks and distributed to the soldiers.
I liked the idea that what I was doing was helping prevent people from getting hurt. I didn’t know you could contribute to a war effort that way.
At ten o’clock, a whistle blew to signal break time.
Curly Neeman, the wasp-faced rat turd, passed by twirling his club. He opened his pincers enough to say, “Now you two can do your sweet talking.”
Agnes pulled away her face shield and shot him a lethal glare as he walked off.
“What’s he do here?” I asked. So far, it looked like his job was even easier than shoveling peach pits.
“Security,” she said derisively.
“A cop?”
“Something like that. But unofficial. Spying is more like it. He’ll report anybody who doesn’t work hard enough as a German agent. Neeman checks for smuggling, sabotage, things like that. Harrington has guys like him all over the place.”
This wasn’t the building where the real munitions were made or stored. “Big problem with smuggling out peach pits?” I joked.
Agnes let out a belly laugh. “Not that I know of. But that doesn’t stop Neeman from playing Sherlock Holmes.” She rolled and lit another cigarette.
The Dearborn Fuel Company was a massive complex on Western Avenue between Twenty-Second Street and the South Branch of the Chicago River, near the McCormick Reaper Plant. There were clusters of small buildings; one of these clusters was designated the Chemical Plant. It was cheerfully explained to me when I arrived that the small buildings were to help limit the damage in the event of an explosion. One of the things that surprised me about the plant was that security seemed lax. I’d expected armed military personnel, but none were visible. The use of “unofficial guards” explained the lack of uniformed ones.
Agnes grabbed a couple of tin buckets from near her workbench and upturned them on the floor for us to sit on.
“Neeman called you a Cubbie,” she said.
I shifted my bottom, trying without success to get comfortable on the low pail. “Yeah, I play for the Cubs. Second base.” It reminded me why I was here: to find out about the Cub who used to play shortstop. “You work here long?” I asked.
“Just over a year.”
“Did you know the fellow who had this job before me?”
“About as well as I know you. Just some guy working at the station next to me.”
“How did he get along with the others here?”
Agnes shrugged. “He stood there, did his shoveling and raking, didn’t talk much to anyone.” She took a final deep drag on her cigarette, then ground it out. “Why you ask?”
“He was my teammate. Friend.”
“Huh.”
“His name was Willie Kaiser,” I said.
“I know. Neeman wouldn’t let the poor kid forget it.”
From what I saw of Curly Neeman, that didn’t surprise me. I stood up from the cramped sitting position and flexed my knees.
“So what was he really like?” Agnes asked in a strained voice. She hastened to add, “I was just wondering. All I ever saw was the back of his clothes. That kid shoveled and raked like it was gonna win the war. I’m kind of curious what he was like.”
The whistle blew again before I could answer. Break over.
Curly Neeman came by to check that we were back on the job and we were.
I worked two more hours, steadily and in silence. Agnes did the same at her station.
Neeman didn’t appear again until midnight, when my shift ended. Agnes, since she wasn’t on a baseball player’s schedule, had four more hours to go.
“They tell me your name’s Rawlings,” he said.
“They’re right.”
“Good American name,” Neeman said approvingly. “That’s what we need here is more good American white men. All we got now is foreigners and coloreds and women.”
I glanced around the room. In their coveralls and masks, everyone looked the same to me, each working as hard as the next.
Neeman pointed at Agnes and added, “If you can call that on
e a woman.”
Her back stiffened and I knew she heard.
I was determined to be on good behavior until I learned everything I could about Willie. But I was pretty sure that someday I would end up punching Curly Neeman right in the pincers.
“You know, we got an organization for patriotic Americans,” Neeman said. “You might want to join. It’s called the Patriotic Knights of Liberty. Maybe you’ve heard of us.”
Fortunately, with age, I’d developed the ability to refrain from always blurting out whatever went through my head. I still did it too often, but not this time. “Go to hell,” was the impulsive answer that ran through my head. Fast on its heels, though, was the memory that Willie had warned Hans Fohl about the Knights getting revenge for the smoke bombs. How would Willie know what the Knights were planning? “Sure,” I said in my most agreeable voice. “I’d love to join a patriotic group.”
Agnes’s back twitched again.
“Good!” Neeman tapped me on the shoulder with his stick. “We got a meeting Wednesday night. Eight o’clock.”
“I’m supposed to be working Wednesday night.”
“Don’t worry about it. Somebody will fill in your time card. Same as being here, except you don’t have to work.”
“Hey, that’s great,” I said. “Special privileges.”
Neeman looked blank.
An audible snort came from behind Agnes’s face shield.
Chapter Eleven
Today’s topic: “What You Can Do to Enforce the Sedition Act.”
One of President Wilson’s Four-Minute Men, a gawky boy with an earnest face, stood alone on the stage of the Crystal Theatre. The crimson drapes behind him cloaked the movie screen. Before the evening show could start, the audience would have to listen to his spiel.
The Four-Minute Men were a homefront army who delivered patriotic messages composed by the Committee on Public Information. To encourage the maximum number of appearances for these speakers, the government guaranteed that their talks would last no longer than four minutes each. Though brief, the messages were numerous. Every picture show, play, concert—almost every public event with a captive audience—was preceded by such a speech.
