Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine 09/01/12

by Dell Magazines

  Killy leaned closer to Ella, his eyes just inches from hers. “The wounded lion didn’t die. He waited till the dead of night, then came back. The colonel shot it again. And again, it retreated. Then came back. Shot again. And a third time. And again. And again. Varying intervals between attacks so they’d come as a surprise.”

  Was he warning her not to run? Telling her he’d never stop finding her?

  “In the end,” he said, “it took five enormous bullets—firepower made to bring down charging elephants.”

  “Let me go,” she said. “I’ve told you what I know about Mr. Kingston, which is nothing. He wasn’t there when I was brought back in. I never saw him again.”

  “But the second lion,” Killy continued, “was even worse. For weeks, the colonel tracked him. And all the while, the rail line sat useless without a bridge over the river. Do you understand what I’m saying?”

  She held her breath. She didn’t understand. He seemed to think he was telling her something, but what?

  “The colonel put five bullets into that beast too, one after another. But like the first man-eater, it didn’t fall. It kept charging him, up there in his tree, as if he were throwing pebbles. He pumped in another three, reloading at a speed he prayed would save his life. Even so the lion died ravaging the tree limb just beneath his feet.”

  “Is there a moral?” She could barely get the words out.

  “I don’t know if I’d call it that. But it’s hard to know exactly who’s stalking whom.” He glanced past her again. “It’s a matter of your perspective. Don’t you think so? We talked last time about the Sedition Act. It’s a common belief here, with the unions, that the government uses the law to hunt their members. Along with aliens, Anarchists—”

  “Of course it does! The entire leadership of the I.W.W. is in prison. I can’t count how many people I know myself, put in jail or onto boats. Or beaten with impunity by vigilantes. You don’t deny there are lynchings almost every day. Yet Congress won’t outlaw them. The President praises the Ku Klux Klan. So whatever you’re driving at, with this story of yours? If it’s meant as a parable, you’re the lions.”

  He shook his head. “Have you a notion how many bombs we’ve intercepted? And worse, not intercepted? Packages mailed to judges and senators and bureaucrats . . . as if these men open their own mail. You were a servant once. Would you fancy living without your two hands, your face a mass of scars? Does anyone but a beast place a bomb in an armory or a church, where it might kill anybody unlucky enough to pass by? Where you have a law, yes, the enforcement may be flawed. Its provisions may be too broad. But at least its intent is to offer security. To keep people safe. A bomb, though? It may as well be a man-eater. It comes at a person in that way. Suddenly. Without measure or remorse.”

  “You think that’s not true of lawmen? My mother was killed when a sheriff named McRae deputized anyone he could find, anyone with malice and a gun, to meet a ferry boat of union women and men. Going to parade and sing for the shingle-weavers. Eleven solid minutes they fired into a docked boat. And the strikers at Ludlow? The National Guard shot them while they slept. Torched their tents—wives and children burned alive. Those aren’t the actions of beasts? Why not? Because they had uniforms and not tiger’s stripes? Because they had badges?”

  Around them, the drizzle made passersby seem indistinct. As if they mattered not at all. As if only this mattered, only deciding who was the hunter and who the man-eater.

  The marshal drew a long breath. “You worked at a shirt factory before you went to the Kingstons,” he said. “You had no other references. Why should they choose a factory girl to care for their children?”

  “I—I’d taken care of children before.” This turn of conversation startled her. She tried to gather her wits. Was there a trick inside the question? Certainly Mr. K. hadn’t taken Palmer into his confidence on this. “Children in our tenement.”

  “You should tell me the truth.” Killy’s hands slid down her arms. He took both her hands in his. It shocked her. She had the strange fancy he wasn’t baiting a trap but rather offering a lifeline. When she didn’t reply, he said, “All right, then, how about this. At the Kingstons’, why did you call for the wagon? It was an expense for you, wasn’t it? And you were going anyway. Why not simply walk away?”

  “I couldn’t do that. Abandon little Muriel and John to the mice? And Cook and Maid, who were so kind to me? To think of them with flies— No. I had Cook’s coins. It wouldn’t have been right to leave her there and use them for . . . for myself.”

  Her confusion twisted deeper. One minute, the marshal seemed to be talking about Nicky. About enforcing the law, as if there were no difference between draft dodgers and bombers. The next, he was asking again about the Kingstons. About money. As if he had Mrs. K.’s jewels in mind.

  If only she knew which crime he suspected. Which pitfalls she should avoid.

  Somewhere close by, she knew, Mario was watching them. What would he make of this? She and a marshal quibbling back and forth like drunks at a speakeasy. And the marshal holding her hands? (What did she herself make of it?) Would Mario suppose she was offering Killy information?

  Her stomach knotted.

  Killy stared down at her as if reading a book in her eyes.

  “You should let me go,” she said. “I’ve hurt no one. I cared for all of them, all who got sick after me. I tried my best to keep them alive. Cook and Maid were my friends. And I loved the children. It’s true I didn’t stop to think how it would be for Mr. K. To come home and find no trace of them, no note. But I . . . I just couldn’t stay longer.”

  “After two years there, you leave without a reference? And no means of support?”

  So it was the jewels, then. Ella stood very still. She felt the danger as if it breathed down her neck. The marshal had Kingston’s word that the gems were missing. She’d left no address or request for wages from the estate. And she’d lied to someone she knew was a lawman. They’d need no more than that to convict her. She’d get years in prison, or at best, deportation to a country she’d left as an infant. A country where she knew no one. Where girls like her starved or sold their bodies on the street.

  She suddenly understood what Killy was trying to draw from her. But did he consider it a defense? Or was he just looking for a reason to feel disgust?

  Justification for what he knew she’d find in prison?

  “You think you’ve guessed it,” she said. “Why I didn’t stay to collect a reference. Well, you’re right. Yes, I was just a factory girl. And no, Mr. K. would never have hired me if I hadn’t . . . Well, he called it an ‘accommodation.’ You’ll say I should have stayed at the factory, I’m sure, to preserve my precious honor. But my lungs were already hot with cotton dust. My honor would have left me begging in an alley, one more coughing girl.”

  She felt hot tears spill down her cold cheeks. It was misty out here, though, and she kept her face still. Maybe he wouldn’t notice.

  “I don’t judge you.”

  “Your Quaker tenets, I suppose?” She saw him wince, as if the words hurt him.

  “To be clear: You left the Kingstons’ that morning . . . to avoid a similar bargain? What he might ask in exchange for a letter and a ticket home?”

  He became a blur to her in the lamplight and mist. She couldn’t pretend she wasn’t crying now.

  “Can’t you let me walk away?” she said. “You weren’t sent to Seattle to find me. You’re here for the strike. You don’t have to say you saw me.”

  Would this sound to him like an admission that she took the jewels? Nothing she’d said before described a crime. But this, begging for mercy, told a different story.

  She tried to steady herself. To remember what was at stake. Mario was watching this display. That wound things more tightly. If she could persuade the marshal, if he let her go, it would save his own scalp. And if Mario suspected betrayal? She might have to find a way to save her own.

  “Many times I’ve thought back
on our conversation in Chicago,” Killy said.

  He gripped her hands more tightly. She sensed something delicate and complicated was going on. If she could only understand it, maybe this would end here, after all.

  “I’d have liked to buy you dinner then,” he continued. “And I’m of two minds what to do now, in all honesty. Given that I’ve wished more than once . . .”

  She stared up at him, stunned. “You’re not . . . ? Are you inviting me—?”

  “I believe I am.”

  She could feel the warmth from his face, he’d bent so close.

  It was absurd and horrible. If she accepted the invitation, walked with him away from the crowd, Mario would be right behind.

  She looked over her shoulder, wishing she could spot him. If only she could shake her head—do something—to keep him back.

  But there was no sign of him in the ebb and flow around the trolley. Except for people bustling to or from it, there was only one man, leaning against a building. He was smoking, his face was turned so he appeared to be looking across the street. But he wasn’t, she could see him watching her in the glow of his cigarette.

  Another lawman. She could spot them a mile away. And so could Killy, no doubt.

  The second lion. If she said no to the marshal, he had only to beckon.

  She caught the scent of Killy’s bay rum, felt the warmth of his fingers laced with hers. She tried to summon a smile. She couldn’t at first.

  Then she said, “I know a place we could go. A cafe on Elliott Bay, near Pike Place Market.”

  The streets were dark and narrow there.

  3.

  Marshals were a common sight on trains now. At each transfer, Ella saw a pair board and walk through the cars. Sometimes they ordered porters to load mail or even luggage onto government trucks. Occasionally, they asked passengers for identification. (Ella had false papers, but wasn’t asked to show them.) Passengers sighed patiently, knowing it was no use objecting to delays. There was no mystery about the cause. In the eight months since Ella’s last trip, there had been wave after wave of bombings, including one in her old neighborhood. A. Mitchell Palmer was Wilson’s Attorney General now, and he’d been targeted twice. In April, a package bomb was intercepted before reaching him. In June—just seven weeks ago—a hand-carried parcel of dynamite blew the façade from his fine rowhouse. Newspapers blamed Anarchists, of course. Ella didn’t know if she believed it. She didn’t trust a word she read, especially after Seattle.

  When Mario picked her up at the last stop in Virginia, not ten miles from Union Station, Seattle was the first thing they discussed. He was in a 1914 Oakland, a roomy if battered car. Even before he bragged about it—only five years old, a bargain for someone like him who could fix anything—he said, “Be’, Antonella, che bellezza, Seattle. Everybody still happy, eh, from the strike? È vero?”

  “Happy during the strike—you saw that.” He’d seen more than Ella, in fact—she’d been too afraid of running into Marshal Killy again. But no one, not even a shut-in, could have missed the crowds singing, strangers hugging, people calling each other brother and sister. “Not after. You saw the papers?”

  “Giornali—lying all a time. Wilson, he shuts down the giornali who don’t lie.”

  “We laughed about it at first.” Headlines crowed that workers broke like spoiled children under Mayor Hanson’s rod. They went slinking back to their jobs after just a few days, defying union bosses who’d steal food from their tables. “Why would people believe propaganda instead of their own eyes?”

  But the papers kept insisting it was so, and Ole Hanson lectured all across the country, bragging that he’d broken labor’s back. The elation in Seattle soon faded, replaced by a sense of futility. There had been no more general strikes, not anywhere.

  Ella couldn’t stand to think about it anymore.

  She changed the subject. “Why can’t Nicky meet us at your new place?”

  “I don’t have this house when I talk to Nicolino, bella. For you, we find. Close to where Nicolino says to go. We stay just for now, leave it after.”

  “You did all this for me?”

  “Antoné, we happy to do. Little break for us. Someplace police, they no come all a time, ‘What you know about this, what you know about that?’”

  On the phone, Mario said he’d found an abandoned farmhouse. It belonged to a soldier who didn’t make it back from the war. It was private, at the end of a dirt lane half overgrown with hedges. But its old-fashioned gaslights still worked, and it had furniture. “Little dirty, not so bad. Maybe a few mouse.” Some of the old faces would be there, he’d promised, glad to lie low after weeks of roustings over the bombs. The Saccos got questioned in Stroughton, Coacci in Cohasset, Salsedo in Brooklyn.

  “Do I have to go to the Westfields’, though, to see Nicky?” she asked. Mario couldn’t fob her off now, claiming a faulty phone connection. “Why would he be going there? He can’t have an invitation to their party. I’ve seen their Dupont Circle house—it’s five stories tall. Imagine what their country house is like.”

  “I don’t know, Antonelluccia mia.” Mario’s voice, as ever, was kind, gentle. But Ella felt wary—she knew after Seattle that there was another side to him. “Nicky, he no calls again. I know only what I say you already. He tells me, ‘You see my Antonella, you send her this party. I want to see my Antonella again.’”

  “He didn’t know I’d left D.C.?”

  “He says, ‘I gonna be at this party. Want to see my bella.’ More than this, ’Nellucia, I don’t know.”

  “But this farmhouse you found? You said it’s only fifteen miles from the party? Maybe we could get him to come there.”

  “He calls again, we tell him. Just two minutes we talking, me and Nicolí. Cost too much, the long distance. Operator she wants more money, he no has it, I no have. But is okay, you no want to go. He’s calling again, someday. We got your new address now, we tell him, eh?” He cast her a reproachful look.

  She’d moved from her attic apartment after seeing the marshal in Seattle. She hadn’t told her friends in common with Mario. It had disgusted her, what he did to Killy that night. It was her own fault, she’d asked him to help. And maybe he’d saved her, she wasn’t sure. But for weeks she couldn’t get it out of her thoughts. Even now it cost her sleepless nights.

  Then last week she ran into someone who told her Mario was urgently asking for her. She shuddered to think that her half-hour with Killy might have cost her this chance to see Nicky again.

  “I just don’t know, Mario. How can this possibly work? Me sneaking in? People know who their servants are, I won’t fool them.”

  “Antoné, you nervous, you no do it. But you wanna do, we got Assunta Valdinoci with us. Remember, the dressmaker? Carlo sister? She makes you the maid suit, the apron. You gonna look just right. They got lots extra servants, no? Big party like that?”

  “But why would Nicky be there?”

  “Sacco says maybe he delivers the booze.”

  “We could watch for him on the road then, couldn’t we? Where it meets the driveway?” She ran her fingers through her chin-length tangles, damp from humidity and dirty from travel.

  “You want to take a chance, I wait with you. Wait together, eh?” He picked up speed on the dirt and gravel of the country lane. “But if already he’s inside, Antoné? Maybe ’nother servant? From the road, you no gonna see him.”

  “I’m supposed to walk in . . . just walk in?”

  “Sacco, he used to be a baker. Him and his wife, Rosina, they make for you the dolci. We find you nice tray, like the rich people using. You carry inside, you gonna look fine. You English, perfetto. You know how the servants they act, how they talk. Maybe that’s why Nicky says this. Send Antonella. Only she can do such a thing, eh?” He patted her knee. “You see Nicky there, you bring to us. We want to see again our Nicolino. ’Nother reason we do this, see Nicky. Then we have a party too. Not so fancy like the rich people.” He smiled. “But could be a we
dding, eh, bella?”

  Ella couldn’t shake the feeling, though, that there was something Mario wasn’t mentioning.

  Whatever it was, it still nagged at her in the morning, as she climbed into the ill-fitting maid’s outfit Assunta Valdinoci made for her. Assunta seemed very upset, and everyone tiptoed around her. No one offered to tell Ella why. They’d been marvelously kind to her last night. Sensing her frayed nerves? They’d kept Assunta away from her, and just as well. She had enough on her mind.

  She couldn’t seem to pull air from the wet heat as she walked the long driveway to the Westfields’ pillared porch. She carried a metal tray, as big as an occasional table, with a huge domed top to keep the gnats off Rosina’s pastries. A voice in her head kept screaming Turn around, go back. She visualized Mario’s car, beside the road in the shade of a giant willow.

  She made it up the steps, past pillars worthy of a temple. She wasn’t sure which way to turn on the wraparound porch. The two front doors, at least fifteen feet tall, were open. She knew she shouldn’t go in this way, but she heard someone coming toward her, an imperious voice saying, “Fetch more ice.” And so Ella slipped into an entryway as grand as a cathedral, with windows rising three stories. Her heart hammered in her ears as she skirted a few men in summer suits. She was thankful their eyes slid off her when they saw the uniform. She entered a room whose floor was polished to a brilliance that nearly left her snow-blind. A vast mirror reflected more men, standing near marble tables or sitting on striped silk chairs. It angled to frame a ceiling quadratura of gold rays through clouds in a turquoise sky. At the far end, three sets of French doors opened onto a broad circle of screened veranda.

  She heard the tinkle of cutlery and teacups outside, and threaded through more men in seersucker and light worsted. One of them was saying, “Hell’s bells, we could probably write the platform for the next ten conventions right here and now. One, our soldiers are heroes. Two, we can’t afford to become isolationist. Three, we support . . . what’s the phrase . . . ‘honest labor and progressive industry’? And put in something about lowering taxes in case voters realize they have to pay for roads if they want them. The platform’s a waste of time. What we need to do is to stop these strikes and race riots.”